A year to the day after the fall of Kabul, I stood on the ruined ramparts of the ancient Balla Hissar fortress, a landmark of destruction above Afghanistan's wrecked capital city. The fort was once the palace of the Afghan kings: the British shelled it in revenge for the Second Afghan War; the Soviet forces used it to dominate the city after they invaded Afghanistan; the Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum set up his artillery here, to flail his rivals across the valley during the civil war that followed Soviet withdrawal; and the Taleban, in turn, parked their tanks here to cow the inhabitants below.
On November 13, 2001, when the Taleban ran away under a hail of US bombs, the hill was occupied by Northern Alliance troops, backed by coalition forces, who remain there today. President Bush declared that Afghanistan would be rebuilt “in the best traditions of George Marshall” and made “a better place to live”.
When one surveys the devastation that is Kabul, it is hard to imagine a worse place to live. Great swaths of the city are still rubble, the roads mere alleys of pot-holed mud. The electricity alternates between intermittent and non-existent, the water supply is rank and chronic food shortages have been worsened by summer drought. Even high above the city, one can still smell the open sewers.
Only three countries in the world are poorer, and civil war is still just a bullet or a mountain pass away. The provincial warlords feud unremittingly, and the interim Government of Hamid Karzai remains desperately fragile: one assassination attempt was narrowly foiled by the President’s American bodyguards, two government ministers have been killed already, and girls’ schools have been bombed by angry fundamentalists out for vengeance. Western diplomats are bleakly realistic: if Karzai goes, anarchy follows.
Last December the rich countries of the world agreed to donate $4.5 billion to Afghanistan. Kosovo suffered 13 weeks of conflict, and got approximately $250 per head annually to aid recovery. Afghanistan, after 23 years of civil war, got just $75 per person per year. Barely $600 million has arrived so far.
Yet for proof that the West did the right thing in ousting the Taleban, look no further than the girls going to school for the first time, the women walking without burkas and without fear, the road being rebuilt between Kabul and Kandahar, reopening the great trade route that once made Afghanistan a cultural and commercial hub.
In Kabul’s hotels (using that term broadly) you can still find those mysterious figures that turn up on the margins of every Third World fight, over-exercised men called “Steve” who say vaguely that they work “in security” and just happen to speak fluent Pashto into the latest satellite telephone. But alongside them now are chirpy capitalist-humanitarians, doing well by doing good. “I am going to reopen the only sugar factory in the north of Afghanistan, but first I have to get rid of the mines,” a German at the bar observed matter-of-factly, as if discussing local bureaucracy rather than bombs.
The resilience and optimism of the Afghans is breathtaking. On the road from the airport, workers in turbans painstakingly fill rocket craters to re-lay paving stones, and men shout and wave as they pull great barrels by medieval man-cart through the mud. The only word of complaint I heard was from the guard at the gate of my hotel. “My leg very bad,” he said. When I asked if he needed a doctor, he laughed uproariously and detached the offending limb. The original, he explained, had been blown off by a mine and the replacement was warping. “Maybe America give me new plastic leg,” he grinned. I could find no Afghan prepared to criticise the US bombing campaign. “Taleban very bad people,” said the one-legged doorman, and spat vehemently.
And yet there is a fear in Kabul, not that the religious fundamentalists will return, but that the West will leave, as it always has before. “We are not going to walk away again,” said Tony Blair, but with Osama bin Laden still uncaught and conflict with Iraq looming, educated Afghans know that interest in their plight is waning fast. America says there are no immediate plans for reducing troop numbers, while making it clear that a pullout is only “a year or two” away. Fewer and fewer MPs turn up to hear Clare Short insist on maintaining our commitment to Afghanistan.
That is worth remembering as Washington and London prepare to take on Iraq. Like the removal of the Taleban, the planned assault on Saddam Hussein has been couched in humanitarian terms, as a moral imperative to remove a regime that brutalises its own people, while Mr Bush has pledged to “rebuild their economy and create the institutions of liberty in a unified Iraq”.
Jack Straw observed this week that Britain owes a particular debt to Afghanistan, “where we played a less than glorious role over a century and a half”. The dowdy, dreary job of reconstructing a shattered nation is usually far from glorious, but without it, the new catch-phrase of “liberal imperialism” begins to sound like old-fashioned geopolitical self- interest with an added sprinkling of rhetoric.
When looking down from the old Kabul fortress, the eye is caught by flashes of colour, kites fluttering against the muddy, pitted cityscape below. During the civil war the shelling was often so intense that kite-flying was impossible, and under the Taleban kites were banned, in accordance with the strange Islamic Puritanism that associated so many innocent pleasures with sin.
Exactly one year ago the kites returned to the skies above the capital. The test of the new liberal imperialism, and the moral basis for humanitarian military intervention in Iraq and beyond, will be whether they continue to fly, not next year or the year after, but always.
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