Technically speaking, Kabul is the capital city of a war zone and has been for over 40 years now. All the visible signs are there, of course: heavily fortified foreign embassies and Afghan government buildings, armoured personnel carriers, manned by troops of many nations, crawl the streets that, especially those on which sensitive buildings and barracks are located, are second home to the heavily armed soldiers and police commandoes whose duty it is to safeguard security measures inside a city already crouched inside what is known as the ‘Ring of Steel’. Houses and new apartment blocks, more so, those in what are considered to be ‘up-market’ locations such as Wazir Akbar Khan, Qari Fatiullah and Sherpur, cower behind towering protective walls topped with lethal spikes interwoven with razor wire, ‘posh’ restaurants are heavily disguised behind bunkers and sand-bagged barricades and where shopping centres and supermarkets are primarily faceless, windowless, high security, high risk places in which not everyone dares to tread. And, moreover, a city in which tension is permanently etched in the dust-laden air.Kabul should be a grim place, indeed, and, admittedly, in many respects it is. But, as with other besieged cities around this increasingly un-peaceful world, life not only goes on, it is also brim full of wonderful surprises be this in the small city centre flower market up a side street across from the ‘Emergency Hospital for War Victims’ on buzzing Shahr-e-Naw or in the Aladdin’s caves of tiny shops stocked with dazzling, jewel hued, silk and embroidered traditional Afghan dresses, gorgeous carpets and kilims where business goes on as it has done down though the ages and through way too many changes, all violent, to mention here.The biggest surprise of all though just has to be the women who have it as good, in some ways even better, than their Pakistani counterparts and who have excellent reason for, amongst other things, being totally unafraid to venture out and hail a cab to take them wherever it is they want to go. The simple act of taking a cab is something that many women in Pakistan are, for some strange reason, afraid to do and which, if alone, they avoid at any cost. Yet, here in Kabul, women of all ages do not worry absolutely about standing by the roadside to hail a passing cab of which, in the incredibly chaotic traffic, there are many with not all of them being, to the inexperienced, identifiable at first glance. Yellow and white cabs are easy to spot, as are green ones. But, in the absence of buses and rickshaws, it also appears that everyone with a car turns taxi driver when the mood takes them although, with laws here being far more strictly applied than in Pakistan, this must be a mistaken impression. Women, the younger generation fashionably dressed in skin tight jeans, high heels, long tops and loose headscarves in a myriad of colours, are not afraid of travelling alone in a cab and often do but, for those harbouring any reservations, there is a plentiful alternative - cabs driven by men in which a number of women travel at the same time, even though they may all have completely different destinations.It works like this: a cab may be waved down by one woman who, before getting it will have negotiated the fare to her destination and off she goes. On the way, another woman, as long as she is heading in the same general direction, may be picked up too and so on until the cab is full, women may be dropped off and others picked up en route with individual fares far lower than if a woman chooses, as she can, to travel alone. Operating this way, the cabs are actually a miniature, far more personalised and definitely safer, hassle-free, mode of public transport than any public bus service can possibly be in this part of the world and the exact same system operates for men too: cheap, secure, convenient, door-to-door travel at a fraction of the price of hiring a cab for one person and a system which, in the writers opinion, would be just great in Pakistani cities too.The popular opinion that women in Afghanistan lead terribly restricted, and locked away lives, is certainly not applicable in the Kabul of today. Although, this must be made clear, it is very different for some, not all, rural women and also for an unknown percentage of illiterate women from disadvantaged or grindingly poor backgrounds for whom life is still a very sorry tale, indeed! The once ubiquitous blue burqa is still in evidence in Kabul, but is mostly worn only by women from illiterate backgrounds and by the sad ranks of extremely unfortunate widows, who have, despite the laudable work of some NGO’s, no other option than to resort to begging in the streets for their and their children’s survival.
The writer is author of The Gun Tree: One Woman’s War (Oxford University Press, 2001) and lives in Bhurban.Email: zahrahnasir@hotmail.com