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THE INFAMOUS INTERCONTINENTAL was where most foreign correspondents met their dreaded fate: isolation and scrutiny by loitering and watchful Talibs who gathered in front of the hotel. High on a hill overlooking the city, the Intercontinental was the one hotel still functioning in the city, and the Foreign Ministry racked up large sums of money from the few foreigners, many of them journalists, who passed through Kabul and were sent there.
The lights flickered and the lobby remained dark most of the time. The elevator did not run during the day. A chipped enamel plaque announced the directions to the pool and the spa—a harsh joke for those who remembered a time when visitors could actually wear bathing suits. Stores sat eternally locked in the lobby, their interiors lined with dust. Half the hotel had been destroyed by repeated rocket attacks during fighting between mujahideen factions, leaving one side partially collapsed, though no one paid attention to the rubble. Only the bookstore and a restaurant stayed open to serve the few guests. There wasn’t a single other guest while I was there.
I browsed the bookstore and found a tattered 1970s edition of Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, George Orwell’s Penguin Classics, inaccurate histories of Afghanistan, and glowing chronicles of the Taliban movement. There were a couple of discarded books from departing guests in German, French, Italian, and Russian, along with a few English-Urdu and “Learn Dari in a Day” handbooks for ambitious journalists who thought they might actually get that much access to local Afghans without a guide. Later the same bookseller grew confident with me and offered up an entire selection of books banned by the Taliban—his secret stash.
I returned to my room, disheartened by the prospect of reading as my sole option to pass the time until I fell sleep. Everything was silent. I took off my clothes and stood naked on the balcony of my lonely room, under the stars. A woman. Naked. Outside. Under the Taliban. Definitely grounds for a public execution at the soccer stadium on a Friday. But I couldn’t resist. The air was chilly. We were hours deep into the public curfew across the city, and people were at home, asleep, dreaming of or dreading sunrise.
I crawled into bed and stared at my meager collection of books.
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OVER THE NEXT WEEK I managed to visit a women’s hospital and a neighborhood bombed out by the Soviets and widows begging for money on the street. I shot fully clothed women in labor hitched up on rusting old-fashioned gynecological chairs, and Afghans traipsing through the postwar rubble. When I stopped the car where begging widows crouched all day, they got up and swarmed the window, thinking I had money. Dirt and poverty had faded their brilliant blue burqas into a sad powdery gray.
Afghan women shield their faces at the women’s hospital in Kabul, May 2000.
On one of my last days there, I visited with a Sudanese woman named Anisa, who ran the main UNHCR office in Kabul and had been living in Afghanistan for several years. I was relieved to see her, sitting behind a grand desk in a bare-bones office. I had been craving the presence of a female with whom I shared at least a few cultural references.
Anisa took me to a middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Kabul. Four women greeted us at the door. The front of their blue burqas had been slung back over their heads, revealing angular features, fair skin, and striking blue eyes. They all wore floral skirts. Their white patent-leather pumps were lined up at the door. It still surprised me to see an actual living being under the tomblike burqa. They smiled warmly and excitedly ushered us inside their modest clay home, wicker baskets and pink-and-green-embroidered sheets hanging on the walls, lacy curtains fluttering by windows covered in wax paper.
The UN had secretly hired the women to teach vocational skills—knitting, sewing, weaving—to widows and poor mothers in their neighborhood. They sat on the floor and, over the requisite tea and biscuits, began to talk. They were nothing like the women of the countryside; they were educated and had held jobs in government ministries before the Taliban came into power. They were frustrated with the restrictions on their freedoms, which, among other things, prohibited them from working outside the home.
“Before, our capital was destroyed,” one of the women explained. “The Taliban has rebuilt our capital. In each house in Afghanistan, though, the women are the poorest of the family. The only thing they think of is how to feed their children. Now the men are also facing problems like the women. They are beaten in the streets if their beards are not long enough, thrown in prison for not praying. It is not only the women who suffer,” she said.
“Wearing a burqa is not a problem,” another said. “It is not being able to work that is the problem.”