Ein neues Afghanistan wird geboren

Die junge Generation rüstet sich zur Macht – Sie lehnt politische Gewalt und die Talibans ab und glaubt an Demokratie als ihr Schicksal

 

Westliche Medien konzentrieren sich in ihren  Berichten über Afghanistan meist auf blutige Konflikte, den Drohnenkrieg, Korruption und  radikalen Islamismus, der den Frauen die Burka aufzwingt und sie in die Häuser verbannt. Die pakistanische Zeitung „International – THE NEWS“ veröffentlichte eine Reportage ihres Journalisten Adnan Rehmat aus dem Kabul von heute, in dem der Autor den weithin verbreiteten Stereotypten über dieses kriegsgequälte Land radikal entgegentritt. An der Seite der Armut entwickelt sich in der Hauptstadt ein ermutigender Wohlstand der rasch anwachsenden Mittelschicht, vor allem aber eine  für den Westen offene Jugend, die von der Vergangenheit nichts mehr hören und von Krieg nichts mehr wissen will. Der Beitrag liefert ein eindrucksvolles Bild einer Stadt, in der die Hoffnung nach Jahrzehnten unsagbaren Leidens neu geboren wurde. Wir legen ihn unseren Lesern ans Herz.

http://jang.com.pk/thenews/Apr2013-weekly/nos-07-04-2013/foo.htm

 

 

Kabul younger, effeminate, sprightlier

 

The Kabul in Afghanistan is not the Kabul of Pakistani media that still largely depicts images from the late 1980s and early 1990s of bombed out buildings and donkey-driven transport
By Adnan Rehmat

 

“You couldn’t trust anyone in Kabul any more — for a fee or under threat, people told on each other, neighbour on neighbour, child on parent, brother on brother, servant on master, friend on friend. The rafiqs, the comrades, were everywhere and they’d split Kabul into two groups: those who eavesdropped and those who didn’t. The tricky part was that no one knew who belonged to which. A casual remark to the tailor while getting fitted for a suit might land you in the dungeons of Pul-e-Charkhi. Complain about the curfew to the butcher and next thing you knew, you were behind bars staring at the muzzle end of a Kalashnikov. Even at the dinner table, in the privacy of their home, people had to speak in a calculated manner — the rafiqs were in the classrooms too; they’d taught children to spy on their parents, what to listen for, whom to tell.”

That’s novelist Khaled Hosseini from his blockbuster work The Kite Runner.

Of course, it’s a book of fiction but few have been able to make out where facts end and fiction begins when  it comes to Afghanistan. And this is not an attempt to add to the stereotypes about Pakistan’s ruggedly beautiful and lush western neighbour but rather to seek to understand it. And opportunity for this presented itself in my visit last month to Kabul — the fourth time in 10 years and the second in two.

This has given me a fresher personal perspective on both Kabul and Afghanistan and that’s what strikes you almost immediately if you are a Pakistani and you’re in Afghanistan – that how different it is from the prism of the reportage of Pakistani media, focusing on the morbid and conflict.

This impression was reinforced repeatedly over the course of three days packed with interactions with media and civil society, as well as with some key actors that are shaping tomorrow’s Afghanistan today.

So what’s changed from Hosseini’s description of Soviet-era occupation of Kabul? The answer to this would require more than the mere length of the question and it would be foolish to attempt one in a travelogue-of-sorts, of course, for so much more has changed than remains the same. The allusion in the first paragraph to the absence of trust, for one.

Here’s how. Both Cyril Almeida and I were out of our hotel shortly after our check-in to help get mini-SIMS installed in our smartphones. Within minutes we were stranded in search of a mobile phone service shop. As we stood failing to communicate to the first person we could get hold of in search for directions, a Pashtun by ethnicity, language being a barrier, a girl of about 16, going about with her mother — both Tajiks — stopped and said in immaculate, albeit accented, English: “Can I help you, are you lost?”

After knowing what we were searching for, she led us about 100 yards to a crossing and pointed us in the right direction, giving instructions. We were gob smacked.

Girls speaking in English, with their mothers in tow, seeing foreigners — our Pakistani origin was instantly recognised everywhere we went, by even strangers — in need, stopping and offering help? Certainly flies in the face of stereotypes prevalent in Pakistan about Afghanistan. This type of help from women won’t be forthcoming in most of Pakistan — not because women are not capable of doing so but because of the training to be wary of strangers, especially males in a hypocritical world.

Afghanistan now boasts 3G internet (unlike Pakistan), Kabul shops sell iPhones, iPads — indeed youngsters obsessing about and possessing smartphones and tablets are the rule, not the exception (not unlike Pakistan). Cyril and I stumbled on to an authorised Apple dealer showcasing all the latest models, including the mini iPad. The entrepreneur learnt his business ropes in Quetta, he told us, so was a tad disappointed we were not from Balochistan.

The Kabul in Afghanistan is not the Kabul of Pakistani media that still largely depicts images from the late 1980s and early 1990s of bombed out buildings and donkey-driven transport. Or dirty streets and crowded shanties. Sure, Kabul is not exactly the best bits of Islamabad and Lahore but its roads are mostly paved and wide, its traffic not disorderly, its shopping districts neater and buzzing with entrepreneurship. I even saw a guitar shop!

There was not a single shop selling guns, though, tellingly, as Hassan Khan observed. 

Kabul of today is not dominantly pockmarked — albeit when it rains it can conjure up gloom and mud from thin air as if by magic. In the city tall buildings have gone up everywhere, many over 10 storeys high. There are more tall buildings in Kabul than in Islamabad, Peshawar and Quetta put together. And – and I joke not – there are more checkpoints and pickets in Islamabad (I live here) than there are in Kabul (I was there). Albeit there’s more elaborate security for government installations and homes of key politicians per unit than in Pakistan. Getting in and out can be a pain as the frisking and pat-downs are thorough, even for women, unlike in Pakistan.

Where Kabul matches Pakistani cities – like your Karachis, Lahores, Islamabads and Peshawars – Kabul now also boasts a speedily growing middle class, poverty and plenty cohabiting, with large bodies of non-native populations.

Moving round Kabul it strikes you how young the population is, the youth crowd the city — most in western attire, many working in offices. The staff of Dr Ashraf Ghani (the head of the Afghan Transition Council, former finance minister, presidential candidate and one of Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers) and Masoom Stanakzai (the deputy chief of the Afghan High Peace Council, former communications minister) whom we met were as young as in their twenties!

These are not isolated characteristics – both Ahmed Zia Massoud (the brother of the iconic Ahmed Shah Massoud) and Dr Abdullah Abdullah (former foreign minister, former presidential candidate and a key opposition leader) told us in meetings that today’s Afghanistan is young, as will tomorrow’s Afghanistan be as well.

In their own words (we met them separately and none of them knew who else we were meeting) they were unanimous on two things: “we [the older generation] are redeeming ourselves by helping position Afghanistan to be led by the young, for our time is over” and “The Taliban, as the world knows them and what Pakistan thinks of them are gone – they are merely one of many players now and not terribly hankered after by Afghans; they can never come back unless they re-invent themselves as a political party ready to play by the same set of rules as the rest.”

You visit media organisations — TV channels, newspaper offices and radio stations — some of which I visited, echo the same sentiments. Everyone we talked to at these establishments and a large number of youth leading civil society organisations or working in managerial positions pooh-poohed the idea of Taliban either having the capacity of storming Kabul or being supplemented with the kind of resigned support that they came riding on in the early 1990s. A whole generation — that now constitutes a big majority of the Afghan population — has come of age, weary of war and wary of the past, which is not going to defy logic of self-rule by surrendering their vastly improved and still improving lives to the ideology of violence espoused by the Taliban.

The Kabul of today physically and psychologically reflects this determination — the women and youth, the non-Pashtuns and Pashtuns (oh how Pakistani state still thinks of Afghans as practically a Pashtun state only — so far removed from reality), schools and colleges that dot the city everywhere. All this is in stark defiance of all that the Taliban stand for.

In contrast to my previous visits to Kabul, there were women and girls everywhere in the city — the spring in their steps a sight to behold and a fierce manifestation of their determination to make themselves count. Only a grand total of two women did I see donning the blue burqas that most Pakistanis think Afghan women inhabit. All others did not sport any burqa — indeed there are more burqa-clad women in Peshawar and Quetta than they are in Kabul.

“We are a new Afghanistan,” Ashraf Ghani insisted, in our meeting. “Unlike in the past, we no longer kill our previous rulers or would-be-kings, or exile them. We have a dozen people who contested or wanted to contest presidential elections who are alive today living in the same city and working towards rebuilding Afghanistan despite their disparate ideologies. This state respects and protects its leaders now. And we will be contesting elections again, without any urge to kill our opponents. Democracy is now our constitution, even if it’s a work in progress. That’s our destiny.”

As he said this, I couldn’t help thinking we in Pakistan usually end up either killing or exiling our rulers — the first prime minister was assassinated, the first elected premier was hung, two were exiled, and another gunned down only 5 years ago. Most of our big leaders today live under the shadow of death.

Babur, the Mongol prince who conquered Kabul in 1504, before invading the subcontinent to found the Mughal dynasty, in his memoirs, writes the following couplet of a poem: “Dine and drink wine merry in Kabul citadel, cup after cup / You have city here pretty and country, you have mountain here and river”.

Doubts and fears — imagined or real — notwithstanding, he could be talking about the Kabul of today.