When I visited, modern midlevel high-rises and wedding halls as gaudy as anything in Vegas rose above the traditional mud houses. SUVs in white, a rich man’s clean-city color, had ascended to prominence as the power-status symbol of choice. Shiny grocery stores were stocked with vitamin supplements and condoms and The Economist. But the presence of Westerners didn’t mean any part of the city met Western standards, not by a long shot. People delighted in reminding me of the percentage of fecal matter in the air—10 percent, 16 percent, 30 percent—which bothered me far less than the prospect of tripping into one of the drains that lined the roads. Some of the roads were indeed so rocky and cratered that driving on them recalled off-roading in Colorado. To my driver, Arif, and many other Afghans, I expressed surprise that “we” hadn’t even bothered to fix the roads of our imperial city in nine years, but they blamed Karzai instead.
Afghans were also terribly poor, and far away from the dynamism of the city center, some lived a bleached existence, relying entirely on the one family member who managed to land a job with the “dog washers,” the Afghans who returned from abroad, or with the “Michaels,” as foreigners were sometimes called. One young man who worked for Global, the security company that ran the Kabul airport, supported eight families on seventy dollars a day, and that was a fortune. The Afghan elite lived in enormous “poppy palaces,” the Central Asian disco version of a McMansion, homes so unbearably ugly and ostentatious, they seemed to be engaged in satire. In some sections, the city felt warm and pleasant. Huge acacia trees canopied the Kabul streets, fat roses grew tall as fences, women wore outfits other than the cinematic blue burka. Kabul’s buildings were low-slung like in New Orleans, many of the streets hummed with urban normalcy: Small-time entrepreneurs taught their sons the family trade—ice cream churning, kebab spinning, deli owning. Small girls in black pantsuits and white head scarves carried parasols and walked to school in cheerful groups. Indian music consumed the traffic. Shakira’s World Cup theme song was popular. The rest of the country, I was told to remember, was nothing like Kabul.
The main Western neighborhood was called Wazir Akbar Khan, once Kabul’s wealthiest enclave. As in many Muslim cities, walls ringed the yards of the homes, so everywhere there were gates. Where there were a lot of foreigners, there were also blast walls: big, flat upright slabs of concrete, Hesco crates filled with sandbags and topped with barbed wire. A local could tell you what’s beyond all those walls: “To the right is Special Forces, ahead of you is the American embassy, to the left is the International Security Assistance Force [ISAF], then the Spanish embassy and the Italian embassy, and beyond that the CIA and Camp Eggers, and then the British embassy, the Pakistani embassy, a Karzai relative’s house, the Canadians.” Walls obscured everything, so the streets felt like hallways—like a massive, mazelike skateboarding ramp, or a mental institution. You saw only the walls and the checkpoints and the sky. I had wondered whether Kabul would feel like an occupation, but it felt as though, rather than occupying the city of Kabul, the international community was occupying itself.
An Afghan woman would eventually warn me of the differences between Afghans and Americans. Often, she explained, Afghans politely lied to their Western patrons about their true opinions, refraining from leveling criticism out of courtesy. Americans took everything at face value. Communication broke down for cultural reasons. I was told this, yet for my first days in Kabul, part of me still believed one thing the Afghans said—that despite our many failings, they hoped the West wouldn’t leave. I couldn’t help it; they all said the same thing.
*
I WENT TO the Gandamack Lodge to meet its owner, Hassina Syed, one Thursday night in June. Since the Muslim day of rest falls on Friday, Westerners let off steam on Thursday nights, and that evening they filled up nearly every seat in the Gandamack’s resplendent garden. The lodge, a two-story house with a wraparound porch, was hidden behind two gates and several guards with machine guns. Syed, only thirty years old and full of energy, wore a beautiful peach pantsuit and patterned scarf around her neck, which fluttered behind her as she made her rounds. Lanterns on tables lit up the smiling faces of the customers, their pale skin hanging in the night like many moons.
The daughter of a mujahideen father and an illiterate mother, Syed had founded a women’s organization and was experimenting with new farming technologies. She had a lot to say about what was happening in Kabul. To her, Afghanistan—its apples rotting on the ground, its factories rusting, and its lapis lazuli mines inactive—was a kingdom of untapped wealth that hadn’t become much improved with the influx of aid projects. If Afghans in the countryside complained about bombs, Afghans in Kabul complained about USAID.
General Stanley McChrystal’s surge (and Obama’s) had meant billions of more dollars for USAID, which built schools, “implemented farming initiatives,” and set up weaving looms for poor women, generally serving as the kinder face of America in the world. But USAID, too, was in a state of decline. In the past, USAID had undertaken ambitious and expensive modernization projects in Afghanistan. In the 1960s, “Little America” in Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province was a manufactured utopia with irrigation projects and schools; Afghans and Americans lived together and never, goes the story, locked their doors. Little America grew out of America’s faith in modernization theory. But many of Little America’s programs failed, and the community was finally destroyed by Afghanistan’s many wars.
In the post-9/11 years, the United States spent $67 billion on civilian-aid programs in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Afghans like Syed knew that much of this money went to America’s own companies. After September 11, USAID was flooded with funds, but not with employees; the staff couldn’t manage such large sums. Aid organizations that have too much money rushed to spend it, and the easiest way to do that was to quickly give the projects to someone else. So if USAID officials decided to build a medical clinic, instead of erecting it themselves, they hired Louis Berger Group to do so. Louis Berger Group was then free to hire a whole slew of private subcontractors, and ultimate accountability vanished into the recursive transactions. When the windows in the clinic didn’t close in winter, was it the responsibility of USAID or of some corporation they outsourced to?
The Afghans had trouble winning these bids entirely. “The contracts always say you have to have ‘past performance’—who in Afghanistan has that?” Syed said. “Afghan women don’t have ‘past performance.’ How can we compete with retirees from the U.S. Army? Please don’t invite foreigners to compete with ordinary Afghans. The money should stay like concrete, in Afghanistan.” She ground her spoon into her bowl. “The soldiers and USAID people don’t bring their families here. They will leave. We need sustainable projects.”
Syed told me that she had been invited to ISAF to listen to a talk about a much-vaunted USAID program that encouraged the foreign occupying forces to buy local Afghan products. After the presentation, Syed stood up and inquired why the three types of bottled water being consumed at the conference were from Spain, Pakistan, and Dubai.