A view of Kabul

As seen from a rooftop at the Embassy, Kabul looks pretty green and verdant. It isn't really, though the city mayor with support from the U.S. Embassy and other donors is trying to restore the urban forest, badly neglected and much damaged during the civil war. The mountains in the background surround the city, which is already at 6000 feet.

Real estate boom in Kabul - buy now!

From the Daily Telegraph:

Kabul gold rush: western billions bear fruit in luxury property boom for Afghan capital
Kabul is witnessing an unlikely boom in luxury properties as the
billions spent in Afghanistan by the West begin to bear unexpected fruit.

I saw some of this, with new subdivisions with plots of land selling for tens of thousands of dollars and shiny new buildings. Can this really be sustained?

Read the article at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/8543718/Kabul-gold-rush-western-billions-bear-fruit-in-luxury-property-boom-for-Afghan-capital.html

In the Embassy

Attending the U.S. Embassy Awards Ceremony, in the new Chancery building. The Embassy atrium features an Afghan tapestry based on the Jasper Johns painting of the American flag that you can see here. Thanks to Brian for my photo.

Why this all matters

I've been reading Fulbright applications this week. Nearly 1000 Afghans have applied for grants to sponsor their master's degree studies in the United States. Probably about fifty will eventually win scholarships, in fields from architecture and urban planning to financial accounting to filmmaking. These candidates are, by and large, pretty talented. They mostly come from the top of their classes at universities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or India; they mostly have responsible positions in government, NGOs, and foreign embassies and international organizations; their English is good (often excellent) and they speak Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Hindi, French, German, Arabic, Turkish and who knows what else besides.

Yet it's not their academic qualifications that are so compelling or even their oft-repeated promises of service to their homeland. It's their personal stories. This generation spent its school age years in the Afghan civil war and under Taliban rule, or as refugees in Pakistan (mostly) or Iran. Their stories are of girls who studied secretly; of fathers who were shot by the Taliban for educating their daughters; of refugee families building their own houses out of mud in Pakistan. Twelve year old boys who sold fruit from carts while doing their homework, so their families could pay rent and school fees, in asylum countries that didn't allow Afghan refugees access to public schools. Mothers who spent half their tiny salaries on books and pens. Their personal statements weigh you down with sheer repetition of hardship and of courage.

What we do here matters. The modest contribution of the Fulbright student program in Afghanistan, which probably costs in all less than a couple of companies of American soldiers, is a bridge to a better future. Young Afghans know what religious despotism and terrorism are; they want no more of it. They ask for our help now, but don't expect it forever.

I for one am glad to stand with the teenager whose volleyball game was attacked as un-Islamic by Taliban thugs with rifles and who now is a journalist, with the 17 year old who was brave enough to interpret for American troops in 2002 and now helps lead an international organization's local office in his home town, and with the girl whose school was conducted in secret, but who will not give up until she is the governor of her province. What we do to support them, what we do to help them succeed: it matters.

Senator Kerry meets the press

A lot of Congressional delegations, or CODELs, come to Kabul. But when Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and best known here for criticizing Karzai for the corruption in Afghanistan, comes to town, the press turns out. The photo (by U.S. Embassy photographer Sheila Vemmer) shows Kerry with a journalist from Radio Azadi, the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty service for Afghanistan. He went on to a press conference with all the international press - some 25 people. Kerry is a pro at this: he's got his message and sticks to it.

Public diplomacy a la francaise

The other day I went by Malalay High School, a public high school for girls in Kabul supported by the French Government. It turns out that Malalay was a young woman hero of the Anglo-Afghan Wars who, according to a website on the war, saved the day against the British Army at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880.

Malalai was there to help tend to the wounded and provide water and spare weapons. Eventually there came a point in the battle where the Afghan army, despite their superior numbers, started to lose morale and the tide seemed to be turning in favour of the British. Seeing this, Malalai took off her veil and shouted out:

"Young love! If you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand, By God, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame!"

This gave many of the Afghan fighters and ghazis a new resolve and they redoubled their efforts. At that moment one of the leading flag-bearers fell from a British bullet, and Malalai went forward and held up the flag (some versions say she made a flag out of her veil), singing a landai:

"With a drop of my sweetheart's blood, Shed in defense of the Motherland, Will I put a beauty spot on my forehead, Such as would put to shame the rose in the garden,"

Malalai was, I guess, the Barbara Fritchie of Afghanistan.

But what a perfect choice of school for the French to support! Not only does Marianne associate herself with an authentic woman hero, but she also gets to knock the British... ever so gently. Vive les droits de la femme! Vive la France!

Our interpreter

110508-S-1034V-471, a photo by U.S Embassy Kabul Afghanistan on Flickr.

Normally interpreters are pretty reserved folks, letting other people's words speak. But here at our roundtable for U.S. and Afghan writers, our interpreter Farhad got into the moment.

More about Buzkashi

Cowboy Visit, April 23-May 2, 2011, a photo by U.S Embassy Kabul Afghanistan on Flickr.

Here's a photo from my friend Brian of the buzkashi match at the Marshal Fahim Garden in Kabul on May 1.

Bus(kashi)boys and poets

I'm not sure what happened to my good intentions to write every day, but I see it's been a couple of weeks since I touched fingers to keyboard. So the question is... do I start where I left off and maybe catch up... or should I just jump up to the present? Here's my solution, yet another of my favorite kind of choice that involves not making a decision: Busboys and Poets.

If you know Washington, you know that the hip cafe/bookstore/poetry reading place is Busboys and Poets. Now it's a chain of three, though obviously the original on U Street is the hip one, and neither of the others is here in Kabul. But Busboys and Poets, as I will explain, are the bookends of the past days.

Sure, it should be Bus(kashi)boys. Buzkashi is (as I noted recently when editing a post that hasn't yet appeared on Dipnote) an exciting sport played throughout Central Asia that involves horsemen fighting over a goat carcass, which they try to bring to a goal area at one end of a field. (Stay tuned for a photo.) And I recently spent a Sunday at the buzkashi field with a group from the Wyoming-based organization Vista 360 watching a buzkashi match. Vista 360 is an NGO that promotes exchanges among rural people and mountain people in different countries and assists in economic development projects, especially marketing of traditional handicrafts. They've worked extensively in Kyrgyzstan so Afghanistan is a logical next point. So we had Gail the cowboy-poet and Linda the horse-trekker-musician meeting with Afghan chapandaz (horsemen) and traditional culture organizers and the like.

And poets: I've spent the last several days with my old friend Chris Merrill, director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and a group of writers from the program. We've traveled all over Kabul doing writing workshops for students at Kabul University and other educational institutions and readings with Afghan poets. The enthusiasm for their visit was palpable. As one young Afghan writer said, "After ten years of soldiers, it's about time you brought us poets."