Afghanistan Travel Guide
By Paul Clammer
Lonely Planet
“A simple equation that encapsulates this chapter is risk = threat × vulnerablity.” (p. 68)
In 2004, riding the general wave of optimism about the country, Lonely Planet commissioned its first-ever guide to Afghanistan. But by late 2007, when the book was finished, things had gotten so bad that the US, Great Britain and Australia were all advising their citizens against non-essential travel here. Thus, Lonely Planet ended up printing a guidebook to a place no normal tourist would ever visit.
In theory, the book could still be useful to the roughly 7,000 abnormal tourists—the aid workers, anthropologists, diplomats, and consultants—who already live here, but unfortunately most of these people aren’t allowed to stray very far from their compounds. In Afghanistan, one’s freedom of movement is tied to the kidnap insurance paid by one’s employer: The more you’re worth, the less you wander.
Pretty much everybody here is worth more than I am. As a freelance journalist, I have no insurance whatsoever and can therefore go anywhere I want. So I felt like I was the perfect audience for this book. Finding a copy, however, proved difficult. No bookstore in Afghanistan carried it, and the two copies mailed to me by the publisher both mysteriously disappeared into the Afghan postal system. I had to make an alternate arrangement.
So it’s a sunny Saturday afternoon, and I find myself standing outside my friend’s armed guest house, having made a deal: M—we’ll call her that, so she can keep her job at the UN—will let me borrow her copy of the Guide, so long as I help her break her employer’s strict security guidelines. And she has to call the rules out as we break them, I add. “Rule number one,” she whispers, as we stroll out the gate past her curious guards onto the street, stepping carefully around the sidewalk’s crumbled rock piles and open sewers. “No walking.”
A tattooed former punk rocker who stripped her way through college, M is now draped and shapeless, her curls tightly clamped under a black headscarf. Worse, she’s dating some British antinarcotics agent.
“Well, he’s got a car,” she explains. (Afghanistan is like high school: Mobility is the big problem, so a guy with a car is automatically hot.)
“Plus, he’s got a beard,” she adds.
“I have a beard,” I say.
“That’s true,” she says.
We spend the next hour browsing the jewelry and textile shops on the famous, and Lonely Planet-recommended, Chicken Street. “UN Rule number two,” she says, modeling a rough-hewn silver ring from Turkmenistan, “No Chicken Street.”
—
“Speaking some of the local lingo helps and never more so than when it’s time for a meal.” (p.62)
I had pork ribs for dinner last night. In a strictly Muslim country, that’s no mean feat. It was my friend Lyn who discovered the illegal butchery in the basement of a South African security firm. In a windowless den plastered with beer posters and calendar girls, just alongside the pool table, stood a grill with a massive exhaust pipe that went all the way to the roof. “Indoor grilling at its finest,” said Lyn. Convenience was king: A person could reach into the refrigerator, pull out some bloody contraband, and toss it onto the coals without taking more than three steps. “All of Kabul could be on lockdown for three months,” she said, “and these guys wouldn’t have a clue.”
It had taken Lyn three years of living in Kabul to find just such a place, so she bought all the ribs she could carry and shuttled them back to her compound—the one I wandered the darkening streets for a half hour trying to find. Streets are not named in Kabul, so even the taxi drivers get lost. “Wait,” she’d said when I called her back for more directions, “don’t you see the three story house with the green balconies?” I did not. “All I see is a naan shop,” I whispered, so as to not call too much attention to my English. “And a blue sign with an arrow that says ‘Marco Polo Inn.’”
Like the intrepid Venetian, I did finally arrive, and as I settled into the wicker sofa on Lyn’s back deck with a full plate of ribs and slaw on my lap, I sipped a Foster’s and reflected on my little journey. The unmarked streets force everyone to use landmarks when getting and giving directions, but the landmarks used by expatriates and locals are usually completely different, so, often as not, you need a fellow expat to guide you. A Kabul native who has stared for years through the plexiglass of a little wooden guard hut on the sidewalk might have no idea that there is a German restaurant just one block over, with tablecloths and wine and waiters in white shirts serving schnitzel for $16.50 a pop.
If the locals and the maps are of only partial help, there isn’t much room for the restless-dog approach, either. Danger cramps the wanderer. One cannot—as I often do in new cities—just take a jog and randomly discover places. Even if you could jog here (and I hear there’s a crowd of bold early risers who run at dawn, before the sun wakes up the dust and the gangsters), you wouldn’t see much but locked gates and barbed wire. So, the bar was set pretty low for the Afghanistan Travel Guide. Just the fact that it had a decent city map felt vaguely insurrectionary. I’d lived in Kabul almost a year already, and this was the first real map I’d seen.
“Anyone staying in the city for any length of time is liable to pick up the ‘Kabul cough.’” (p. 87)
By noon, M and I are sweaty, asthmatic, and lost. Everywhere we go, we are the object of curiosity and also scrupulously ignored. The dust of the city sticks in our throats. M sighs as we double back once again past the same row of teashops, next to a river flowing with garbage. Goats munch the trash, and boys pick for tin and other saleable junk. A gray-haired woman in a burqa stoops to glean the least rotten of the moldy fruits. Beggars post themselves at speed bumps like toll collectors.
Seeking help, we follow the Lonely Planet map to the Afghan Tourism Office, which turns out to be a sort of two-room corrugated tin shack perched on the roof of a government building. Inside, we find five men arranged among dented metal office furniture. The men smile at us, slightly alarmed. “Salaam Aleikhum,” I say, shaking each of their hands in turn. “Do you have any pamphlets?” The smell of cooking rice wafts in through the window.
Pamphlet-less, we head back downstairs and down the block to the National Gallery, where all the paintings I read about in the Guide have been taken down, though no one can tell us why. Then the Sultani Museum next door charges us a princely $4 each to walk through a few rooms of old Korans and other antiques, inventively labeled. A coin with a loose-limbed lion stamped on it is described as “Golden coin that absurdist is stand on its surface and appears in a confidential condition. Related to 2-3 Christian.”
I turn to our book for guidance. “Poor labeling lets the exhibition down,” affirms Lonely Planet. “It’s frustrating, but an oddly appropriate metaphor for the troubled state of Afghanistan’s heritage.” Indeed, the Guide’s tone is starting to annoy me.
We hail a cab to the Kabul Museum. (“Rules number three and four! No riding in non-UN cars. No public taxis.”) Our driver is a mournful-looking guy with stubble on his chin and a brown cardigan a size too small. He’s eating grapes and offers us both a handful. He seems friendly, and on impulse I offer him a little extra to wait for us while we visit the museum.
After being frisked at the entrance—M in a special women’s shack where they go straight for her boobs—we enter what the Guide says was once one of the greatest art collections in the world. “That a museum still stands is little short of a marvel,” it says, so we weren’t exactly optimistic about the collection itself.
But the quality of the museum is at first a moot point, as my aesthetic experience is interrupted by a momentary—but familiar—panic: I suddenly recall a story from the security training course I took before coming here, a scenario which involved an unknown driver using his cell phone to call in his friends to kidnap you. Which is plausible, I guess, and, after all, I’ve left our taxi driver alone with his grapes and his cell phone and an hour of time to kill. Kill! I stare at 12th-century pottery rescued from Taliban looters and try to puzzle out a solution to the present crisis. Finally I confide our predicament to M, who simply shrugs and whisks upstairs, leaving me alone to head outside and tell the guy to leave. I mumble an excuse and give him forty cents. He nods sadly and drives off.
Returning to the collection, I find M upstairs in a gallery of deities and ancestor figures. Tall and fat, the sculptures seem surprised to see us. They were carved, I learn, by a fiercely independent tribe called the Nuristanis who live on the country’s eastern border. Not that I’ll be able to visit them any time soon. “The failures of postconflict reconstruction,” observes the Guide, “have allowed an Islamist insurgency to smoulder among the peaks and valleys that dominate this part of the country.” So put away the hiking boots, because the “beautiful woods and slopes of Nuristan…remain as distant a goal as ever.” Like much of the book, the passage attempts to be cheerful about Afghanistan without being cheerful about its future. But I’m starting to find the Guide’s candidly self-absorbed tourist aesthetic refreshing. After reading so much Afghanistan analysis that’s either scary, depressing, or just plain dumb, I guess I can appreciate a book with a more modest agenda.
“Behavior such as … continued support of Chinese restaurants, most of which are fronts for brothels, make it hard to insist that Western culture is not having a negative effect on the country.” (p. 74)
One understands a city from its opening lines, the first things strangers ask you at a party. In New York it’s “What do you do?” and “Where do you live?” In Kabul it’s “How long have you been here?” and “When are you leaving?”
Out the other evening with some fellow inmates—unshaven capacity advisors straight from Harvard Law, Dutch war correspondents back from the front, a well-coiffed Scottish PR man burnishing the ministerial marble, and a delicate English boy counting civilian casualties—we polished off bratwurst and beer at the German restaurant (yeah, the $16.50-a-schnitzel one) and then headed out to hear what was rumored to be “the first Afghan-American punk band” but what turned out to be a couple of indie kids from LA who hired Afghan musicians to play on their new psychedelic folk album. We sat in plastic chairs on a perfect lawn in a highwalled compound in the most expensive part of town watching a pixie-haired 22-year-old whisper-sing lyrics to songs like “Be Gone Taliban,” while her father sat in the front row with some other Afghan men in suits. Waiters bowed under enormous platters of mango and watermelon.
Punk rock it wasn’t. And yet this show was all about street cred.
“It’s a gimmick,” the guitarist, Max, told me afterwards. But because their singer is Afghan, “It’s an organic gimmick.”
“So, you came all the way to Afghanistan to say you came to Afghanistan?” I asked.
“It’s like when Bob Dylan went electric,” Max said, gesturing at the barbed wire. “Rock and roll has always been about taking risks.”
In a way, Max is right: Risk is the social currency of expatriate Afghanistan. Apparently, it’s no longer necessary to even leave one’s walled compound. Just plop down on a guarded lawn somewhere in Kabul and you’ve earned the right to say you’ve arrived.
—
“…these gardens are the loveliest spot in Kabul.” (p. 87)
It is after four o’clock when we finally make the long taxi ride out to our last destination, the first on Lonely Planet’s to do list. Babur’s Gardens, recently restored by donors, is just on the edge of the city. “Rule number five,” says M, her voice sleepy with late afternoon. “Out of zone.” Her headscarf slips a bit, and our driver adjusts his rear view.
The Gardens are encased in a peach-colored fortress with a door shaped like a keyhole. Inside feels like another world. There are trees here, first of all—walnut, quince, and apricot—and the garden is carefully landscaped, with a series of quartered rising terraces split by a central watercourse. Among the picnickers I even spot two women. They stroll along in matching dresses, stiletto heels sinking into the grass.
“What’s that smell?” M sniffs.
“I think it’s fresh air,” I say happily.
I’ve shifted her back to talking about her new narc boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s future ex-wife. (There is something about war zones and break-ups; either one will follow the other.) “Living here is like a permanent adolescence,” M says. “You can reinvent yourself daily, you can play with guns, and when bombs are falling it’s easy not to notice your life is falling apart.” I ask her where she’ll go after she leaves Afghanistan. “Sudan,” she says. “I just applied.”
Around us on three sides rise the mountains of Kabul, sprinkled with illegal squatter dwellings that cling to the steep slope, as if a tsunami lifted the little houses then turned to stone just before breaking. The shacks are as brown as the rocks. Looking closer, one can find a tableau of Kabul life: A woman in a purple burqa carrying a pot on her head, two girls in bright orange blocking a narrow lane like miniature traffic cops, a man arriving home in a Japanese 4×4.
The sun slips behind the mountain and there is a chill. I notice people packing up their blankets. The park is closing soon.
“Maybe we should go,” I say.
“Just another minute,” M says, relaxing her shoulders.
I follow her gaze out to the city where we just spent our day. The low sun makes gold of mud roofs. Dust hovers like fog. Already there is snow on the mountains. I feel grateful for the book that brought us here. The bit of bravery required to be a tourist may not be noble, but it feels useful in some way. We’re not quite voyageurs, but at least we’re not hiding. I think of the thousands of expats behind barbed wire fences and I want to tell them: Friends, come out. Our distance from the Afghans is growing; our security rules spread fear and distrust. I wonder if next year we will be able to come here. I turn to say some of this to M, but her eyes are closed. And just then the quiet is pierced by an angry amplified voice. It is the guard and he is screaming into his megaphone leave leave leave the park leave the park leave the park the night is coming is coming night is coming.
(from Paper Monument Issue Two)