Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...exhilarating flying back to Kabul after being gone for three years. The plane came in low from the east, in the coppery light of dawn, and I could make out the canyons of the Kabul Gorge where, in 1842, a retreating British army of 4,500 soldiers, accompanied by 12,000 family members and servants, vanished into the gorge and only one man, a surgeon's assistant on horseback, made it out alive. The rest were massacred or died in the snow...
Afghanistan is replete with grim reminders for those who would wish to rule it. The British were having a marvelous time in Kabul back in 1841: horse races, picnics, amateur theatrics (something British expats indulge in wherever they go) and lot of good grog and food. Meanwhile, the Afghans were seething over these madcap Victorians. (See pictures of election day in Afghanistan...
...fact, it reminds me a lot of how Kabul was when I was last here. The foreigners - diplomats, aid workers, journalists, assorted mercenaries and adventurers - disported themselves quite oblivious to the fact that this was a conservative Muslim country just emerging from the Taliban's medieval totalitarianism. You could find booze in shops. On weekends, you could go picnicking and horseback riding in the country. Many embassies moved into gaudy narco-mansions rented out by warlords loyal to President Hamid Karzai. For dining, you had a choice of Mexican, Balkan, Lebanese, Indian, Thai, American and Chinese restaurants. The Chinese places...
Three years on, Kabul has become a more sober, watchful city. The walls around embassies, aid offices and foreigners' guest houses have sprouted to around 15 feet high, and are often crowned with razor wire. After a few foreigners were kidnapped and shot by drive-by gunmen last year, it is now considered foolhardy to walk around the streets of Kabul. Booze is no longer sold openly. Many, but not all, of the brothels were shut down and the girls rounded up and flown back to China...
...often forced to pay-off militants not to attack them in the districts they now control or contest. More ominously, police in the area say that among the militant ranks are groups of foreign fighters - mostly from Uzbekistan - seeking to open another front against the coalition and the Kabul government, drawing forces away from fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan...