The dangers are, of course, quite real. Tilo and I were emerging from the Canadian Embassy in Wazir Akbar Khan one afternoon when we were accosted by Colonel McLean. He shot me that familiar mad dad look and insisted we follow him back into the bowels of the embassy for a security briefing. McLean and his security manager unrolled a map of Kabul decorated with red stars. Each one, he said, represented a bomb attack in the previous year. Some explosives were remote controlled. Some were packed into cars. Some were delivered by bicycle. While I furtively toyed with a microphone in my satchel, Tilo counted stars and became increasingly agitated. “Thirty, fifty, more than a hundred,” he said, his voice climbing an octave. McLean hurriedly rolled up the map before Tilo could finish.
Up in his office, McLean showed us pictures from the day last November when he was woken up — lifted off his bed, in fact — by a blast on the street behind the embassy. The bomb shattered nearly every window in the complex and blew a bathtub-sized crater in the street. Body parts littered the roof. Now the back wall of the embassy was dwarfed by a three storey stack of Hesco, piled up like a mountain of marshmallows. “You get it now?” he asked. “You have to ask yourself why we have all these Hesco barriers, why there are Kalashnikovs everywhere. It’s not for fun.”
In the past week, three homemade bombs had been discovered along the airport road. Seven explosives were detonated in nearby provinces. Four Afghan National Police were kidnapped and killed in nearby Wardak. A rocket landed inside the fence at the international airport — this in a city the folks back home had been led to believe was the stable heart of the country. It was enough to make anyone want to build a higher wall. “Back to the guest house,” Tilo said gravely. “I need the pool now.”
“How do you like Kabul?” I asked her when she hauled herself back onto the lawn.”
“Kabul?” she replied in a heavy German accent. “How should I know? I haven’t been to Kabul.” As an adviser to the European Union Police Mission to Afghanistan, she was under close protection, which meant that her world consisted of her residential compound, her office, and the interior of an SUV. She needed advance permission to swim for the afternoon, and oh, dammit, her day trip ended at five. She hurried off before I could get her card.
Foreigners were segregated, isolated from the city by fear, insurance risk, and institutional fiat. The UN Minimum Operating Security Standards, for example, forbid staffers from wandering more than 150 metres away from UN vehicles, and ban visits to all but eight approved, walled, guarded, double-gated restaurants — all off limits to most Afghan nationals, since they serve alcohol. A security contractor told me that the insurance risk was so great his road engineers couldn’t drive during rush hour. A few times each day, our cellphones buzzed with shrill text messages from the Afghanistan NGO Security Office. My favourite: “Threat of suicide and assault team attack on high profile target over next 48 hours. Avoid anywhere high profile tonight. Call for advice if needed. More info tomorrow.” The attacks never materialized, but the fear found its way into everyone’s steps. Unlike the early days after the invasion, foreigners were a rare sight on the streets. Flights to and from Dubai were packed with weekending aid workers.
Shravan Kashyap, a long-time UN hand, told me over an English breakfast in the rose garden that he was working on a project, funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, to improve refugee settlements near Kandahar. CIDA was doing fantastic work, he said.
“So what are those settlements like?” I asked as he munched on his toast.
