Day of Rage

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.”