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National Geographic Today sent producer Max Block, photographer Charles Walter and soundman/video editor Charles MacDonald to Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, to create a portrait of this city, plagued by continuous conflict for almost a quarter century. Their challenge was to understand how a city in a country, so isolated and unknown could, in the span of one week in September, suddenly occupy the world's center stage. What happened there? Why Afghanistan? And why now?
I have never felt so far from home as I did the first morning I awoke in Kabul. I suppose I had been farther away, at least in a geographical sense. But this was a different measure of distance. This was miles measured in smells and tastes, in the sounds of a stranger in sandals walking past my hotel room door, the feel of the air which was hot and stale that morning, the rough texture of the hotel blanket that I'd pulled up to my chin.
In one of those useless, early morning fits of thought, I wonder who else might have slept in this bed. I run through a list of possible characters—journalists, foreign aid workers, spies, Chechens or Pakistanis who had come to fight alongside the Taliban. I search for another distraction and it becomes the flies that have moved into the room overnight—big, fat healthy flies that come to a rest on your toes, on your water bottle, on the food that you eat.
These are the very first thoughts running through my head that first morning. Chechens and flies and sandals and spooks. And I know that it is nothing more than a procrastination; the only way I know to delay pulling back the sheets, getting dressed, and walking out the door and into a city that I know next to nothing about.
There are three of us in Kabul—myself, Charles MacDonald, our soundman who will also edit the hour and Charles Walter, our photographer.
We've come here to shoot a documentary about the city, which is roughly similar to barging into a stranger's apartment just as they're stumbling out of bed after a horrible night's sleep, snapping a picture and then bandying the photograph about as if it were a fair portrayal, mussed hair and all.
Afghanistan is only now emerging from twenty-three years of almost uninterrupted war and it would hardly be fair to write home about the horrid state of affairs and leave it at that. The trick would be explaining how Afghanistan had arrived at this point.
We spent virtually all of our time with Afghans, listening to their stories, watching them at work and at play, hearing their concerns about what was to come and their regrets about what had passed.
Until the late 1970s, Kabul was doing just fine. There were universities, hospitals and libraries, electrical grids, scheduled garbage pick-ups and treated water. Men wore slacks and women wore silk dresses. There were summer homes, picnics, music festivals, record stores and fashion boutiques.
But then something happened. Afghanistan found itself caught up in a chronology of horrible behavior, from within and without.
First came the atrocities of the Soviets, who held the country, however tenuously, through the '80s; then the atrocities committed by the warlords, who lobbed shells at one another for the better part of the 1990s during a brutal civil war; and finally the atrocities committed by the Taliban, whose penchant for beating, amputating, imprisoning and otherwise humiliating is now solidly part of the public record.
The destruction of the country was deliberate and methodical. And above all, it was cooperative. Afghans were involved. Russians played a huge role. Pakistanis bear some responsibility, as do Iranians, Americans, Italians, Indians and Turks.
Today, all of Afghanistan's recent troubles are on display. The noonday sun bakes the rusting carcasses of tanks that line the roads leading into and out of the city. The torn remnants of Soviet fighter jets and helicopter gunships sit in an abandoned lot. The most noticeable feature of the soccer field in the middle of town is a bomb crater at mid-field.
And the city is one big knot of inconsistencies. Kabul is one of the highest capital cities in the world, sitting 6,000 feet above sea level, so you would expect at least a degree of fresh air moving off the mountains and through the city. Instead, the air here is rotten and, by midday, clogged by dust and diesel fumes.
It is a poor city, but our hotel rooms ran $150 a night. A beer—wretched, almost undrinkable Russian concoction that's smuggled across the border from Pakistan—runs $10 a bottle. This is a war-time economy. There are journalists here from some of the richest newspapers and networks in the world, and the Afghans know that. Two decades of uninterrupted war haven't numbed common sense.
This was the city that we walked into and each day it became increasingly clear that in order to tell our story, we would need to go back to the beginning—to a winter night in 1979—and work our way forward from there. Only then did we stand a chance of explaining how a country that had once held such promise could reach a point of such chaos. |
