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Outside Magazine December 2003

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The Kabul Express (cont.)


	Ajnabi Gul ("Strange Flower"), a young camel herder, outside Herat (photograph by Seamus Murphy)

IT DOESN'T TAKE LONG to fall off the map here. Just 60 minutes outside the capital, I was teetering on the edge of a half-blown bridge with a wildly grinning Pashtun man. "This is most far from Kabul I have been," he shouted, "in 23 years!"

We were waiting out a massive traffic snarl—three lines of cars, trucks, donkeys, pedestrians, fruit vendors, and vans from two directions trying to fit over a single surviving lane of bridge. (In perfect symmetry, the U.S. Air Force had blown up both lanes, and the U.S. Army had rebuilt one of them.) There was wreck and destruction to the far horizon. Scores of burned-out Soviet tanks and ruins of mud villages were everywhere. The green flags of martyrdom snapped over graves. The air was unfiltered tailpipe.

I was beginning to realize that Afghanistan is a 1 percent country. The 99 bad things are what makes the one remaining thing so indescribably good.

But it was mango season. The mangoes were cheap. They were cool, and sloppy with a sweet, spicy juice. To a throat rubbed raw by dust, by heat, by the choking soot of traffic, they were perfect. I was slowly beginning to realize that Afghanistan is a 1 percent country. The 99 bad things are what make the one remaining thing so indescribably good.

The Afghans know how to find that 1 percent. Just outside Kabul, in the ancient hilltop retreat of Istalif, a place burned by the Taliban in 1999 and bombed by the Americans in 2001, I'd found scores of families spread out beneath the mulberry trees, training for the day when picnicking becomes an Olympic sport. Boys were throwing water balloons, men were playing volleyball, women in burqas were eating pilaf, and everyone was complaining about the lack of parking. I was invited to join the largest picnic, a group of 36 men and boys arrayed along a tablecloth spread beneath the broad canopy of a plane tree. The turbaned man on my right, Sher Ahmed Barak, had run a fried-chicken restaurant in the Bronx for ten years. "The Bronx is very dangerous," he said, shaking his head. "People are getting murdered all the time." Now he lives in Kandahar.

We were served skateboard-size pieces of flatbread; salted yogurt with herbs; salads of peppers, tomatoes, and radishes; a pilaf with carrots and raisins; bowls of cherries; and huge joints of mutton in onion gravy. Everyone got a can of Pepsi.

The man at the head of the tablecloth was a security official who claimed to be a secret agent for the FBI and therefore wouldn't tell me his name. Despite the unsettled conditions in Afghanistan, he said, tribal and ethnic divisions no longer matter. He addressed the 35 men and boys in Dari, and they called out their tribal affiliations: "Tajik!" "Pashtun!" "Hazara!" "Uzbek!" As the day wore on, little boys climbed into the trees and shook windfalls of mulberries loose. They couldn't do enough to welcome a foreigner.

Right across the Shomali Plain, past a few hundred thousand land mines, we could make out the vast Bagram air base, where GIs waiting for anti-Taliban missions are confined in tent camps, fed imported food, and entertained by flown-in Washington Redskins cheerleaders.

It was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. After 16 hours of daylight, the Afghans quit the groves, rolled up their small carpets, loaded nine people into each TownAce van, and with the indifference of survivors, piloted their runty, overloaded vehicles back toward Kabul. They crossed the wide plain three abreast, surging forward in both lanes like a cavalry charge before being stopped dead in gridlock at each checkpoint, turnoff, or, in our case, blown bridge. Then, unleashed after a minute or an hour, the Afghans raced forward again, optimists in spite of it all, until they abruptly ground to a halt before the next obstacle of misery.

That's Afghanistan. You eat a mango in a minefield. Things that are easy have no flavor.

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