“We have water!” she said to me. “We have bottled water. Why weren’t they buying our Afghan water?”
Syed got up and socialized with her guests. I recognized a stocky British woman curled up in the corner, smoking, who earlier that week I had seen at the popular lunch spot the Flower Street Café. While discussing some internal politics, I assumed, at the British embassy, she had said, “Oh, no, but you can’t say that! Whatever you say—we’re not leaving. This is not Basra!” So many foreigners in Kabul had worked in Iraq, too. They always hastened to declare Baghdad far worse than Kabul. This woman laughed loudly, but I detected a gentle panic trailing in the wake of these Western conversations. There was a sense that we were there to get things done very quickly, what James Baldwin had called America’s “funny sense of time,” as if “with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place.” You could see that alarm in the USAID workers’ frantic smiles as they showed off the latest farm project.
When I went to the bathroom, I saw a Brit gripping the end of an artificial leg as if playing with it. “See, I told you!” he said, laughing to his friend and pointing. I followed his finger’s direction until I saw an elderly man selling Afghan souvenirs in the foyer: lapis lazuli bowls, jangly chain belts, silver jewelry. He rested his stump on a chair. The drunk was outside waving the old man’s prosthetic leg around like a lightsaber.
I returned to Syed. She reminded me that Americans’ taxpayer dollars were turning to dust. I wasn’t sure how to explain to her that most Americans didn’t know whether or not their taxes had been raised to fund this war; that in America there was no draft; that in America we had an army staffed by farm kids and ghetto boys; that in America wars were waged because in America wars were easy to wage.
“Go to this event with Ambassador Eikenberry tomorrow,” Syed said, handing me an invitation. “You’ll see.”
*
THE DAY OF the Afghan Chamber of Commerce meeting with Ambassador Karl Eikenberry at the five-star Serena Hotel—the only five-star hotel in Kabul—three or four Afghan guards stood dressed in full body armor and holding AK-47s, in front of two gates so high they resembled a drawbridge. Gunmen had attacked the Serena a few years earlier; at a party, I met an Afghan-American who had hidden in the basement while the militants shot up the gym. At both ends of the street, more guards stood upon little round stages, checking cars before they could pass in front of the hotel. A long row of Land Cruisers, Pajeros, and 4Runners, mostly in white, lined up to wait for their masters. Guards and drivers, representatives of Kabul’s security economy, draped their thin bodies over the hoods, smoking and staring.
When I stepped into the conference room of the beautiful hotel, Eikenberry stood at a lectern, speaking to a large audience. USAID women, their heads uncovered, sat in front. One hundred Afghan men, some in Western suits, some in traditional shalwar kameez, sat motionlessly, listening. No cell phones rang, though one man taped the speech with his camera phone. The event had the formal air of a midwestern business conference, but with much more luxurious surroundings.
Eikenberry had brought up the same aid problem that Syed had: foreigners were not buying Afghan products. To rectify this, the American embassy had recently launched a new program called Afghan First.
“We are purchasing as much local procurement as possible,” Eikenberry said. “Especially from local woodworkers … I’m very proud that if you go into our video teleconferencing room, our emblem of the United States was made here in Kabul. So every time the president sees me, he’s looking at an emblem made here in Kabul … The USAID economic growth program will increase and improve capacity building…”
Everybody in Kabul loved the phrase “capacity building.” Everyone talked about capacity building, building capacity, getting capacity up, improving, growing, and discovering capacity in the Afghans. I heard it so much that I wondered how it translated, whether bureaucratic jargon was actually translatable. Eikenberry said he was very proud to announce that “the new Afghan First website will be available in Dari and Pashto,” the native languages of Afghanistan.
He didn’t seem embarrassed to make this announcement nine years after the invasion, as if it were an important accomplishment rather than the most basic act of international friendship. Eikenberry was by all accounts a sincere man who cared deeply about Afghanistan, someone who tried his best. But I felt a crushing kind of pain in that room, to see an American leader behave in his faux jovial press-conference American way, seeming to believe his kindness was all that truly mattered. As he spoke, I was again reminded of the way Baldwin and Camus and so many others had described Americans, as people with no sense of tragedy.
Eikenberry offered the Afghans a chance to ask questions.
“An American contractor took money from me and fled,” said one.
“Why are cars being bought from Russian companies? I sell cars.”
“We have seen millions of dollars spent every year to help the private sector,” said a software developer, dressed in a Western suit. “But the same service we want to provide is also being provided by an NGO that gets funding from the EU. How can we compete with them?”
Eikenberry, an amiable, big man, fumbled a bit and deferred to the USAID staff. A woman stood up. She talked about China.
“That’s not just an Afghan problem but a global one…” She was grasping. “But, you know, it hasn’t been a problem for Bill Gates.”
I leaned over to the Afghan man sitting next to me. “Did she just say Bill Gates?”
He waved me away. Americans rarely took the blend-in-with-society approach to nation-building. I remembered the USAID woman I’d met on the plane, who had been transfixed by Sudoku pads and had gorgeous long, golden hair. When I’d asked her whether I should put on my head scarf before disembarking, she had just shrugged and said she never wore one. I was all ready to get angry at a fellow American for her cultural insensitivity, but I realized that the reason she never had to wear a head scarf was that she probably never left her compound at all.
Eikenberry stood up again and joked that he wished he could distract everybody with the promise of the great food waiting for them in the reception area so he didn’t “have to answer such hard questions.”