I had wanted to ride the escalator since I arrived in Afghanistan last weekend. The Kabul City Center, a huge new shopping and hotel complex, is a symbol of sorts of the country’s rebirth and development after decades of civil war. It also houses the nation’s first and only escalator. But when I finally got the chance to visit the mall yesterday, it wasn’t to take a ride-it was to save my life.
I fled there to seek refuge from anti-American rioters that had taken to the streets after a rush-hour traffic accident involving a runaway U.S. military truck. The crash killed five, but it also knocked the lid off a pot boiling with the frustrations of a country that remains poor, bombed out, insecure, and with an uncertain future. By the end of the day, between eight and 12 were dead and scores injured in the worst violence since the fall of the Islamist Taliban at the end of 2001.
Few things in life are scarier than a mob. One of them is a mob that’s being incited by agitators, as the roaming gangs of rioters yesterday clearly were. After the accident, rumors spread that U.S. soldiers had deliberately hit the motorists and then opened fire on the irate crowds that gathered afterwards. Faster than Kabul’s inundated mobile phone network could ever hope to operate, word spread through the streets about the alleged American transgression. (A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition confirmed there was gunfire but said coalition personnel in one military vehicle had fired over the crowd, not into it.)
Unfortunately, I was also on the streets at this time, walking outside the headquarters of the coalition forces. They were on a security lockdown in response to the accident and the nervous, heavily armed American soldiers on guard refused to let me in. As my driver Walid and I drove back to my hotel, shop after shop began shuttering their doors and people scurried in all directions to find cover. I could feel the tension in the air multiply, and time, as it does in moments of chaos, suddenly sped up.
Amid the blur, our car turned a corner and ran smack into a mob of young men armed with clubs, stones and who knows what else, smashing windows, chanting anti-American slogans and looking in cars for foreigners to beat up. They surrounded our car and began pointing at me, but before they could reach for the doors, Walid gunned the engine and we sped off. The last thing I saw was an Afghan policeman, with an expression on his face that undoubtedly said, “Get out of here, stupid,” directing us down an empty side street. We had made our getaway.
The next phase of “Operation Survival” was more complicated. There was utter chaos on the streets, and my driver and I both knew that if I were spotted, there was a possibility I could be hauled out of the car and beaten to death. As we roared through the streets, we agreed to drive to Walid’s home, which he said was in a safe area. But on the way we passed the Kabul City Center, which despite being an obvious target for the mobs, is big, safe and had armed guards.
The first thing I saw when I ran inside was the escalator. It was idle, as the shopping mall managers shut down the entire place and cut most of the power. Not that I was complaining. That mall and the adjoining hotel would be my home for the next three hours, as hundreds of armed men outside attempted to break in and loot the place, and perhaps look for people like me. From the safety of the rooftop restaurant, I ate the $12 buffet lunch and watched fires burning across the city. An Afghan-American man, who was also seeking refuge, approached me at the salad bar and said, “I just got back here yesterday for the first time in 30 years.” Before I could stop myself, I replied deadpan: “Welcome home.”
While television images of the riots looked shocking, they should be kept in perspective. Less than 1,000 of Kabul’s 4 million residents joined in the madness, many of them street thugs or unemployed youths with nothing better to do. While Afghans get understandably angry when local residents are killed during U.S. military operations or during car accidents involving troops, the majority still seems to want them protecting the capital and forcing the Taliban to hide in the mountains. Far from being a condemnation of Afghanistan’s alliance with the West and renunciation of terrorism, the riots were largely an expression of frustration with seeing rich Western aid workers driving around in Range Rovers while the services their democratically-elected government promised them—electricity, roads, security—are lacking.
It’s a reality that the country’s stakeholders would do well to remember as Kabul heads into the hot, dusty summer. Within the first 48 hours of arriving, I had diplomats, U.S. army officers and fellow journalists individually tell me that this summer was going to be the most pivotal time for Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. Their pronouncements disturbed me. How could the country, four years into reconstruction, be at a crossroads between success and failure? What was behind this looming “summer of discontent?”
Even under the best circumstances, Afghanistan is a massive undertaking in nation building. It’s landlocked, surrounded by potentially hostile neighbors, has limited natural resources and has been ravaged by decades of war. The international community remains completely engaged and committed here—it has little choice given the questionable performance of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government. “There is a frustration at the lack of progress, there is a frustration that the government is not reaching out to all areas of the country,” Adrian Edwards, spokesman of the U.N. mission here, told me today. “We need to deliver quickly here. Reconstruction is slow and people don’t see the dividend of peace.”
Kabul may be Afghanistan’s pre-eminent city, but more than 75 percent of the population lives in the provinces. They are subject to harassment, extortion, even execution by Taliban militants as well as criminal elements. Girls’ schools are burned, car bombs explode in markets, aid workers are murdered-just today three Afghan women were slain in a drive-by shooting by four suspected rebels on motorbikes in the northern province of Jawzjan. Insecurity prevents reconstruction, as well as provincial and local governments providing services to the population.
This hasn’t been lost on the U.S.-led coalition. In the coming weeks, NATO will take over peacekeeping and security duties across the country, doubling the troop strength of the current international force. The stakes are huge. “I see it as a summer of high stakes and dramatic consequences,” U.S. Major Luke Knittig, spokesman for the outgoing International Security Assistance Forces, told me the other day. “[NATO] is here to give space for governance.”
But what happens if the government can’t govern? Analysts rightly noted that the mobs were also shouting anti-Karzai slogans yesterday. And there’s no shortage of criticism from foreign diplomats about Afghanistan’s leaders. “We’re putting a lot of money into the country, but … it can only be sustainable if you have an Afghan administration that knows where it’s going,” one diplomat told me. Another issue is that the rural population doesn’t trust the central government in Kabul, the diplomat added, because they feel things haven’t changed much for the better.
That’s a little harsh. Afghanistan has made across-the-board improvements ranging from education to health care. But the improvements have fallen short of what Western donors had expected four-plus years later. Many here hope that a larger, robust security force will allow both the national and local governments to score some successes even as they attempt to complete the ultimate aid worker catch phrase: Capacity building. It won’t be easy, but it’s certainly not hopeless. I plan on going back to the shopping mall this week and finally ride that escalator. It may the first one in Afghan history, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.