Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Like most obsessive golfers, Paul McNeill occasionally ponders the game's standard frustrations--the blown putts, the sliced drives into the rough--and questions his devotion to such a maddening pursuit. But as a regular at Kabul's only golf course, McNeill puts up with some extra hazards that would test the mettle of Tiger Woods. The grassless fairways of rock and stubble are cratered by rocket shells. The greens are in fact brown, a mix of oil and dirt with the consistency of quicksand. Approach shots are complicated by the possibility that insurgents have planted land mines...
Despite these inconveniences, golf Afghan-style is witnessing a boomlet. The nine-hole Kabul Golf Club boasts some 60 members, drawn mostly from the armies of aid workers and expatriate businessmen who have flooded the capital since the fall of the Taliban. The club's revival reflects Kabul's transformation, from a dusty no-man's-land to a bustling hub of commerce. Earlier this month the city opened its first five-star hotel; rooms start at $250 a night...
That said, vacationing golfers shouldn't expect Pebble Beach. The Kabul club was built in 1967, when Afghanistan was a relaxed kingdom with movie theaters, women wearing short skirts and plenty of Western tourists. After the U.S.S.R. invaded, its army dug in near the seventh hole, and the course became a battlefield, with mujahedin fighters attacking from the hills above. The Soviets arrested the local pro, Mohammed Afzal Abdul, for being a U.S. spy; his interrogators said it was because golf was such a capitalist, bourgeois sport. After fleeing to Pakistan, Afzal returned to Kabul shortly before the Taliban seized...
...running a golf club in Kabul is not easy. The club advises golfers to bring their own plastic mats and play shots off them. Artificial turf is something of a rarity in Afghanistan. So are tees and golf balls. The pro shop has a few sets of rental clubs that look as if they were donated by Fred Flintstone...
...TIME that the CIA has had covert detention centers in Thailand and Guantánamo Bay, which are no longer operating, and that the agency continues to run similar facilities in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe. In Afghanistan, the agency's prison was once located in an old brick factory near Kabul's airport, nicknamed the Salt Pit by the CIA and the Darkness Prison by inmates. Detainees who have escaped or been released from the prison claim they were kept in cold, dark cells underground, fed once every three days and sometimes chained wet and naked to the wall overnight...