Walking on the streets of Kabul, before the Taliban took over Afghanistan

The legend of Kabul begins with a bridge, a road appearing on the water. In the story of the city as an island on a magical lake, a king builds a bridge leading to it from the shore. The same bridge is the path to departing from the island. Returning to Kabul and leaving it are not endings but states of movement, of travel.

On the flight I took from Delhi to Kabul in 2013, my fellow passengers were mostly Afghans returning home, after medical treatment or a holiday. It seemed like a reversal of the journey I had made in 2006, when the flight was full of international workers and consultants. I was travelling at the end of the narrative arc that had started in 2001, with the US-led invasion.

Within a few months, by the end of 2014, ISAF would formally end combat operations in Afghanistan, after thirteen years of war. Foreign troops were pulling out, and the reduced number that would remain would focus on providing training and advice to the Afghan security forces, who were now responsible for keeping the peace. The international reconstruction effort was also scaling down, with a negative economic impact on the entire country.

The changes these departures implied cast a long shadow of uncertainty over Kabul. The fragile and partial gains made over the years faced the possibility of being eroded once the international establishment left. Elections scheduled for 2014 faced threats of violence from the insurgents. Questions and fears hung over the city that spring like the haze, clouding the future. It was a very different season from the one I had first arrived in, seven years before.

I did not know it then, but this would be my last return to Kabul.

I drove from the airport with Abdullah to a different home, shared with Doctor Sahab and Khalid, in Taimani. It was just a few minutes’ walk from our previous place at Qala-e-Fatahullah, but it marked another shift in the tenor of our lives. The house was a smaller version of the mansions of Sherpur. It had marble floors and a terrace none of us ever ventured on to, that overlooked the street.

My friends had ended up living in a place that represented much of what they had disparaged about new Kabuli homes. Since Khalid was spending less time in the city now, he had picked a place that needed less looking after. There was no garden here for him to turn his erratic attention to. Instead, there was a covered garage and a small porch at the front of the house.

Here, Doctor Sahab had built a cage where he kept two white doves. The birds were beautiful and almost always silent. He was attached to these fragile creatures in a way I had never seen before. Each morning, he fed them before he left for work, walking down the still-potholed street to his office. Each evening, on his return, he would go and check on them before entering the house. They were the quietest birds in Kabul. I never even saw them flutter around in their cage.

Some things remained the same. In the evenings, Khalid’s friends came and took over the living room, propping their guns by the sofas, topping story with story, filling the house with their voices and laughter. I drove through the streets in Abdullah’s yellow-and-white taxi. The colours were a legacy of Hafizullah Amin, who had headed the Communist PDPA government for around three months in 1979. Amin had studied at Columbia University in New York. I learned that he had ordered the Kabuli taxis to be changed from black and white to yellow to echo the cabs he had seen as a student.

My walks were fewer, taken with direction and purpose. There had been a kidnapping not far from our street, I heard. I walked down the road that led past our first guest house in Kolola Pushta, and between the sandbags and the security barriers, and the new apartment blocks on the street, I was lost in minutes. The once familiar road had disappeared.

Wandering in this city that had turned unfamiliar called up a memory from my childhood, of how home changes and roads vanish.

On a foggy morning towards the end of 1989, I had set out to school at an earlier hour than usual. Aligarh was under a curfew, but I was lost to the implications of this fact, chasing some extra-curricular activity that I assumed would still be on.

The entire region of northern India was torn by communal riots that winter. It was a time of bloodshed and fear. Despite all this, somehow on that morning, all I cared about was getting to school. I had walked out into the winter chill. The house was asleep. School was just a five-minute walk away. I remember fog and morning mist obscuring the view; my route appearing and vanishing. Perhaps that is why I was more than halfway down the street before I registered how empty it was.

As a breeze lifted the curtain of mist, I saw a police van parked by the gate of my school. I remember a spasm of fear, the realisation of my folly in being out. I turned and walked rapidly away. Nothing had happened. But the road back was not the road I had walked on minutes earlier. Somewhere in between the two journeys, I had lost the feeling that home would always be a sanctuary. That it would always be a place where I belonged. That I could always find it, at the familiar bend of the road.

I had forgotten all about that walk until it was called forth by stories of Kabulis leaving home, seeking refuge in different ways. In all their departures, I found an echo of that misty morning. You turn around, and the road to home has disappeared.

I took stock of the changes. Shahr-e-Nau market was crowded with malls and restaurants.

Places that had been glamorous in 2006 now seemed old and dated. The cafes where expats met were more tightly sealed, now accessed through two sets of steel doors and a weapons check. These were less popular than earlier too, after a number of attacks. There were fewer cybercafes and more supermarkets.

The real estate slump had added half-constructed buildings to the city’s ruins. And the sprawl of homes and offices, private universities and massive mosques reached all the way to Darulaman. Only the skeleton of the ruined palace remained the same, silhouetted in the perennial dust. This was the city, shifting shape.

And then there were my own landmarks, also changing. I went to visit Nazira, who had moved from Microrayan to Shahrak-e-Aria, an upmarket gated community near the airport. Its apartment blocks, topped with eye-catching red roofs, offered modern, secure accommodation for affluent Afghans (much like Microrayan had in an earlier era). There was a security check at the gate, and lawns and parking areas, a mosque and a shopping centre, all connected by neat pathways.

The shahrak (“small city”) was like an island, separated from the city by the broad road leading to the international airport. Cars zipped past at high speed, making it difficult to cross on foot. It was this very distance from the city that made the colony attractive for many of its residents.

As we walked around the grounds, Nazira said her family was happier here than in their old neighbourhood. Her mother and sister could go outdoors freely. They felt safe within these walls. I also planned to visit Ismail Sahab at his home, but a mutual friend told me that his family too had moved to an apartment on the edge of the city. The house in Kolola Pushta had been sold.

I thought about his garden that had survived the cycle from peace to war, back to peace again. The rows of nastaran that had lined the hedges, the empty rocket shells filled with earth and leaves. I asked my friend how Ismail Sahab had taken the loss of his realm. He couldn’t really look after his garden any longer, he said, which was one of the reasons why they had moved.

These empty spots on my personal map of Kabul corresponded with the vanishings I saw across the city.

With the NATO troops, many of the trappings that had accompanied their presence were also retreating. This meant the restaurants and the guest houses, the contracts and the constructions, the aid budgets and profits.

According to the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth in Afghanistan fell from 14.4 per cent in 2012 to 2 per cent in 2013 – indicating the dependence of the economy on the international military presence and aid. The foreign armies were on their way out, along with the bubble of aid and reconstruction. But the war remained, multiplying and shifting shape.

Since 2001, the Taliban had gained strength, partly by waiting out the international forces. By 2013, they were part of a larger, more complex security problem that included powerful regional commanders and local militias (some armed by the US as a bulwark against the insurgency), corruption among Afghan security forces and “green on blue” attacks, the term referring to ISAF soldiers killed by Afghan allies.

According to a UN report, close to 3000 civilians were killed and over 5000 injured in the country in 2013.5 This included a higher proportion of women and children than earlier. These numbers were imprinted with the scale and the omnipresent spread of the war – the conflict reaching ordinary Afghans while they went about their everyday lives. In this backdrop, if the international withdrawal was not quite an exit, it was certainly a scaling back.

The reduced number of expatriates who did remain found ways of removing themselves from the city. The spike in suicide bombings and attacks on Kabul meant that most of the city was practically off-limits for those who came to work there from abroad. In the security measures implemented for aid workers and consultants in 2013, I found the progression of the same advice I was given seven years ago, when I was told not to walk.

One afternoon, I drove with Abdullah to visit a friend in the compound of an aid organisation. We went along a highway that had been surrounded by an empty, arid landscape in 2006. It was now flanked by long stretches of concrete walls, and large tankers stood by the roadside.

The compound itself was fortified, sealed off with multiple checkpoints. My taxi was not allowed inside. The men at the sentry post checked my papers and conferred first with each other and then on their radio sets. I stood by the boom barrier for several minutes, watching other vehicles make their way in and out.

These were mostly armoured cars, large SUVs with tinted windows and emblazoned logos. After a few minutes, the guards waved me in. In a few steps, the sky shrank and the city vanished completely behind the blast walls – the kind that had taken over Kabul’s streets. These were topped with razor wires.

With my friend, I walked through the roads of this fortressed township, with living quarters made out of large shipping containers, between which were neat flower beds, or pocket-sized greenery. Dinner was in a restaurant also fashioned out of a container, with a small sit-out at the back. I recalled reading somewhere about how NATO’s war in Afghanistan is also called the “container war”. With the luxury of distance, some Afghans grouse that the Soviets had at least built infrastructure for their country. The Americans, they quip, just left behind containers.

Excerpted with permission from Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul, Taran N Khan, Penguin India.