The Violence is on Outside

The violence is on outside and although I am in the city where it is taking place I am also not. I am as removed from the heightened tension as if I were in my living room at home. Perhaps it either happens to you or it doesn’t; violence that is, you are either a part of it or you are not.

University protestors flood past our building. The cause of their outrage is the alleged burning of a Quran by U.S. solidiers. But there are two versions to this story and the one outside the window is the Pakistani one. The other version is that a house which happened to go on fire during combat also contained a Quran. The truth is always restless here.

Anyway I watch the outrage of these young people, blunt and untempered from my window. I am also watching it on the television in front of me. If the wave were to change direction I could be on the television also. One of the banners reads ‘We want Islam, not democracy’ which alarms a friend of mine who has been here for over a year. She exclaims that if the most educated people in the country are carrying these banners what hope do they/we have! Although I do not respond I disagree.

In our office the expats that have been here a year or more feel it harder, they are closer to their mortality than I am. I do not know how I feel. I have been ill for a few days with my annual winter cold, chesty cough thing. But something is different, I can feel my lungs now in a way I never could before, the soft tissue keeping the oxygen travelling to my heart feels stretched. Is it the further thinning of the air in winter mixed with the flood of burning wood from the Bukharis or am I anxious. Are the images being scanned by my eyes sending warning signals into the depths of my brain, I am not sure.

A few days later I am looking at the image of an expat being carried out of a guesthouse on the back of an Afghan guard. I am reminded of the meat that hangs in the bazaars covered in flys. We do not eat this meat; our cooks know this would kill us so they protect us with special meat. The Afghans are the hard shell on the outside, we are the soft core.

If a bomb explodes here the $100’000 armed jeep usually saves it’s contents while the poor souls on the outside die or are maimed in their dozens and when it gets just that bit too hairy the contents of those jeeps get on planes and leave en masse.

For now though we are still here.

‘My friend we are in Afghanistan…’

View of Kabul from Toop Tapa or Cannon Hill; so called because of the two cannons which sit on top of it.

I receive a light tap on the shoulder followed by the words “my friend, we should do this quick, we are in Afghanistan and people are watching”. I do not need to look around to see whose voice the advice is coming from. We are getting nowhere with the shot anyway. Trying to get an Afghan woman close to a strange man even when you are paying them is some effort. I could not have imagined how difficult this would be. Earlier on in the morning our 2^nd A.D. asked me if we could do this shot at our offices. I don’t think I even answered him as I did not understand why we would do the shot at our offices when we went to the trouble of bringing our crew to this location for the sequence.

When I glance around I see what my friend is referring to. Mobile phones are recording us as we film, I do not look at the faces. The girl in the shot whose job it is to record one of our musician’s with her mobile phone is thoroughly embarrassed by the large crowd which now surrounds her. In retrospect it is to our 2^nd A.D’s credit that he managed to get her to the location without someone from her family to act as chaperone.

It is not the first time during this shoot that I will have someone watching out for me. Two days later at a location near Bagram base as U.S. fighter jets rush towards the sound barrier I find out that an on looker was trying to figure out if I was an American or not with a view to beating me up with his gun and robbing me. He was dissuaded from doing this unbeknownst to me by the crew who said that ‘I was one of them’. Apparently he would not have shot me as this would have been a waste of expensive bullets which could be put to better use shooting ducks on the lake where we were filming.  ‘The cloak of Irishness’ as Adam Clayton once put it is of no use here as I am the same colour as all of the other invaders. No good pulling out the Irish passport and claiming to be from a neutral country which would be bullshit anyway and even I did manage to get the thing out on time no one would know where the country was anyhow.

Fighter jets and hulking cargo planes constantly fly over this beautiful location. Kids sell tiny sachets of shampoo along it's banks. For landlocked Afghans this is their beach.

In my first week I put my faith in the people I was travelling with to view these locations and thankfully my instinct for my new work colleagues was correct. This despite being told rather alarmingly by another colleague in the first week that ‘Afghans were a jealous people and not to be trusted”. I put this down to good old fashioned tribal distrust and ignored it; I could not live like that anyway, not for a year.

A trip down the river at Sayaad

I don’t believe for all of the invasions and wars this country has endured that Afghans have ever been defeated by anyone except themselves. The distrust which sometimes rears its head among Afghans can take a person back. All of these cultural differences between the main groups and the hundreds of others smaller ones have served no purpose whatsoever accept to destroy this country from the inside out. Of course there is the argument that as a country it is the abused child that grows up itself to be an abuser.

On the last day of Eid I take a trip to a place called Paghman with some friends. The discipline of Muslims during Ramadan; the month of fasting is extraordinary. They get up before the sun rises to eat at around 4:30am and they do not eat again til Sun down. Eid which is the holiday period after Ramadan is determined by the alignment of the moon towards the end of the month. I have asked how they know the correct time to call it but I think the ordinary Afghans that I know seem happy enough to just leave it to the Mullahs to sort it out.

As we leave Kabul for Paghman the kites over the city are a sight to behold. My friends recall as children collecting broken glass and melting it down into a fine wire which they would then use for kite fighting, the object of which is to cut the other kite fighters wire with yours. They both bemoan the fact that the string is now simply imported from Pakistan and cutting the other guys string can take hours now. Looking at the kites though it’s hard not to see them as a metaphor for escape. This country has imprisoned itself, religious obedience, the separation of men from women everywhere whether it is in work canteens or wedding halls and so on. Although I am slow to be critical of a culture I have known for such a short time the traditions of the country seem to be odds with the will of the people or least the ones I have met. Young men bemoan the stringent conditions for marriage and I have seen people hide their mouths as they ate  tiny bits of bread during Ramadan not to mention the ones who’s health suffer also.

As we venture further into Paghman the mountains on either side of us become steeper. We finally reach our destination which is a series of seating areas held up on posts over lots of little streams. I am told that this is one of the most dangerous parts of Kabul, one which is actually run by a warlord. I look up at the mountains on either side of us which are getting dark. My friend recalls being a child refugee coming back through this very area from Iran and how terrified he was of the pitch black of this place. We stay and have some green tea which is prepared by a man near the river.

As we head back towards Kabul my companion jokes that if anyone stops us they will kill him first confusing him for my bodyguard.

Looking out at the silhouette of the mountains on the way back I imagine all of the men who have hidden in them throughout the years and all of the men who still hide in them in the south and in other places. Some of these mountains have roads leading to the summits and can be seen from the air on the approach to Kabul. One thing which stands out as we approach the city is how there is no sodium vapour glow which one associates with even small western cities. Instead the tiny lights of the houses peppered into the mountains twinkle like fairy lights on a Christmas tree. The road before us is lit only by our car headlights and those of the oncoming traffic, no street lamps, no cat’s eyes, no black spots or warning signs; bizarrely it feels safer than any road I’ve ever been on. Perhaps this is down to the fact that driving over fifty is really going to play havoc with the suspension.

As we drive in silence I still have to pinch myself, I am in Afghanistan.