Word: kabul
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...anyone who has read the best-selling novel The Kite Runner knows, springtime in Kabul is heralded by flocks of dipping, looping and diving kites. But these aren't the kites of lazy weekend picnics. They are finely tuned flying machines sensitive to the slightest tug of a master's hand. The Afghan penchant for competition and (though few will admit it) gambling means that almost anything offers opportunity for a fight and a punt, from dogs to cocks, quail, sheep, boiled eggs and, yes, even kites. The object of this cruel ballet is to slice your opponents' string with...
...banning of music and the requirement that all men grow beards, was a total prohibition of kite flying. In the first heady days after the fall of the Taliban in December 2001, men shaved, music blasted on car stereos and kites took to the air. For Noor Agha, Kabul's best kite maker, business has been soaring ever since...
...that you would know it looking at his house. Agha lives in a graveyard. Land is at such a premium in Kabul these days that the dead compete with the living for space. A massive influx of refugees returning from exile following the Taliban's retreat has forced the near deserted neighborhoods fringing an old cemetery to squeeze between its graves. Agha's factory is his living room, where he has put his two wives and 11 children to work, cutting, shaping and gluing the intricate tissue-paper mosaics that make his kites stand out for their beauty and superior...
...razor-sharp wire from China. The escalating threat of mutually assured destruction, according to Agha, widely recognized as the best kite fighter around, has taken the artistry out of the game. "Now it's like children fighting," he complains. "No skill, no technique." So Agha leaves the hilltops of Kabul to a younger generation, who will find new ways to win. These days he heads north on Fridays--kite day--to the Shomali Plains, where he gathers with other old-school flyers in intense matches in which the victor is the last kite flying. In most cases it's Agha...
...Bagh Ali Mardan, a 27-year-old addict from Bamiyan, has tried to quit several times. Now he has given up. Waving a couple of curious children away from the ruins of a bombed house in Kabul where junkies congregate, he says it's better to stop the next generation from getting the habit. "This is a big problem for Afghanistan, much worse than terrorism or the Taliban. In war, if the enemy kills you, you die once. But addiction kills the future...