Pay No Attention to the Taliban Behind the Curtain

In the vein of promoting the idea that there are good things coming out of Afghanistan, which, there are, Forbes has an excellent article on the nature of business in Kabul, a brief profile of a businessman who often travels here.  Best quote?  “Kabul is not Afghanistan.”  I suspected as much.

What makes events like the attack on the UN guesthouse so disturbing for those living in Kabul is because those sorts of incidents are so rare here.  If you’re in Kabul, you’re not “really” in Afghanistan. 

Side note:  “Afghani” is currency, “Afghan” is a person.  Key distinction.  Put that in your Trivial Pursuit vaults, kids.

I’ve been here for a little over 2 weeks now.  6 days out of the week, I get up, walk down the street to my office, work for 4 hours, walk back to my guesthouse for an hour lunch, then walk back to my office for another 4 hours, then back to the guesthouse.  Dinner at 6, putter on the computer, maybe get a chance to talk to my wife, and then sleep.  And then repeat.  Friday is a day off, so that’s not so much with the walking.

In other words, my contact with the Afghans is limited to either a) wrong numbers on my company cellphone, which is prompting me to learn “I’m sorry, you have the wrong number,” in Dari, or b) conversations with support personnel that involve a lot of pointing and rewriting of things because neither of us is highly fluent in the other’s language.  It’s interesting to have an HR question for someone who doesn’t speak your language that well.  Still, it’s better than my Dari.  Or Pashto.   

If the pulse of this country is taken by a visit to Kabul, then the impression one gets of the country as a whole would be about as accurate as Dorothy’s first glimpse of the Wizard’s great city.  That really wasn’t made of emeralds, and this country really is a mess.

I’ve spent more time in meetings talking about how we’re redoing what we’ve done already because we didn’t do it right the first time.  I’m about to bring an Etch-a-Sketch to the next planning meeting of whatever variety just to illustrate the point of the futility we deal with here.  And I’ve been here…2 weeks.  Here in Kabul things appear to be on the move…lots of reconstruction, rebuilding going on left and right. 

Outside of Kabul?  I think if we’d let the flying monkeys loose and put the Scarecrow in charge of them we’d have had just about as much success.  Here’s hoping I find that I’m wrong about that.  That it’s not a mess left by flying monkeys, but a concerted, positive effort towards a long-term reconstruction and normalization solution.  Otherwise I’ll just have to start clicking my heels.  A lot.