*
IN MAY 2013, over ten years into the war in Afghanistan, an Afghan writer named Qais Akbar Omar penned an op-ed for The New York Times titled “Where’s My Ghost Money?” Omar had heard that the CIA was secretly paying Hamid Karzai in cash in suitcases and plastic shopping bags, and wanted to tell Americans that if they would secretly give him money, he would “do the things we thought the Americans were going to help us do when they came to Afghanistan nearly 12 years ago.” These things included digging wells in villages and building modern water systems in the cities; constructing sewers to replace the “open drains in the streets,” because “Afghans, like Americans, use toilets every day”; and repairing broken hydroelectric dams to bring electricity to the two-thirds of the country that still didn’t have it. Instead, he observed, the Americans had spent billions of dollars building cobblestone streets “our donkeys cannot walk on,” and teaching farmers to “grow hot red peppers that Afghans do not like to eat.” I could see Americans snapping, “But you should be grateful. Eat the peppers.” The Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, which was established in Saddam’s old palace, served meals laden with pork products in a Muslim country. I can imagine that Americans—who cannot live without their hot peppers or pork products—did not consider that perhaps there were foods that Iraqis and Afghans also cannot live without.
I finally went to Kabul because I had heard from a friend, in passing, that the roads in Kabul were not paved. This didn’t make any sense to me. The image contradicted my romantic image of a country that prized its own fine roads, and even once built roads for the nation of Turkey. When you rebuild a country, don’t the roads go down first? Were we rebuilding the country? Of Afghanistan, I had imagined military compounds and broken buildings and Westerners huddled in armored vehicles, but I assumed, if only for our own ease of transport, or to signal progress to the world, that we had repaired the Afghans’ roads. These were the twilight years of our time in Afghanistan. If we hadn’t done that, what had we done?
In the checkin line at Dubai International Airport, where I transferred planes for Kabul, everyone going to Afghanistan was white. I met one stocky American guy with a jockish voice (that sounds as if a cave lies at the back of the throat) and a muscular body. I asked him whether he was in the military. “Nope. I’m a contractor. Just like everyone else in this line.” I watched nearby as a large white man with electric-white teeth, his plain white T-shirt tucked tight into khaki pants, laughed with wild panic as he crashed into another middle-aged guy, his skin bronze as a penny. “Hey, man, how ya doin’! Ha-ha!” The Dubai waiting area for the flight to Kabul was as exotic as Columbus, Ohio. The whole room was littered with people who made money off the war, which, I couldn’t help but acknowledge—as I smiled widely back at them in some automatic species-response signal—included me as well. We were all contractors now.
Like the unpaved roads, contractors hadn’t played a big role in my imagination of the occupation; they were too new. My imagined American occupier—who of course, to me, was never called an occupier—was still a fit and dignified soldier in uniform, even after all the satirical war movies I had seen: Three Kings, Jarhead. The men in this room reminded me of Wall Street guys at a strip club, hedge funders launching into a round of steaks. Some of the American men looked positively deranged: tanned and wiry, wound up like teenagers on steroids, their horse-saddle skin betraying abuse of tobacco, alcohol, sun, and near-death experiences. This was who we were attracting to Afghanistan; it felt like a massive illegal operation as shot by a Hollywood director.
We boarded the plane, and finally cut loose from strange Dubai, where the sky and the water melt into an aluminum-hued oblivion. Dubai had recently become the world’s most disreputable construction site. Now it served as the Kabul elite’s vacation spot. Western war profiteers cooled off in Dubai hotel pools and the Afghan criminal elite bought houses on a man-made island shaped like a palm. They were buying up the waterfront property, one resident told me, in anticipation of the day Kabul collapsed.
*
KABUL, FOR THE TIME BEING, was the boomtown. President Obama had in recent years launched a “surge” of troops to finally win the decade-long war. In Kabul, that meant a surge in wartime entrepreneurship. A strange ecosystem of soldiers, aid workers, businessmen, journalists, and other civilians flourished in the base of the bowl-like city. Kabul, landlocked, ringed with improbably steep mountains, felt like a defiant fortress with its inhabitants peering out into the wild. A fragile, jagged peace saturated the everyday life, as if the manic effort to house, feed, and protect the executors of the war mostly amounted to staving off the chaos outside. Someday, America in Kabul would vanish. It was impossible to imagine what the city would look like when it did.