KABUL, Afghanistan — Scattered across
a neighborhood in central Kabul are the ruins of another empire come and gone
from Afghanistan.
اضافة اعلان
Tattered sandbags and piles of discarded
barbed wire. Metal hulls of tank traps sitting unused on the side of the road.
Red-and-white metal barriers, once lowered to stop vehicles at checkpoints
manned 24/7, permanently pointing toward the sky.
Not that long ago, this neighborhood —
known as the Green Zone — was a diplomatic enclave, buzzing with the soundtrack
of a multibillion-dollar war effort in Afghanistan. Armored vehicles rumbled
down the streets, shuttling Western diplomats and high-ranking Afghan
officials, while the thud-thud-thud of US helicopters echoed across the sky above.
The new Green ZoneBut these days, there is another kind of
buzzing in the neighborhood: the Taliban moving in and making it their own.
Like their US-supplied rifles and Humvees and military fatigues, the Green Zone
is becoming the latest vestige of the Western war effort that the Taliban have
repurposed as they build up their own military and government.
Well-to-do officials with the Taliban
administration and their families have settled into the dwellings abandoned by
Western officials since the collapse of the former government in August 2021
and the flight of most of the Green Zone’s residents. Inside what was a
compound of the British Embassy, young men dressed in gray-and-black turbans
and traditional brown shawls gather each afternoon for classes in a new
madrassa, a school for Islamic instruction. Security forces with the new
government zip in and out of NATO’s former headquarters.
The neighborhood, and its nearly indestructible blast walls, have become a testament to the enduring legacy of occupation
The neighborhood, and its nearly
indestructible blast walls, have become a testament to the enduring legacy of
occupation, a reminder that even when foreign forces depart, the physical
imprint they leave on a country’s landscape — and national psyche — often live
on, indefinitely.
“These walls will never be torn down,” said
Akbar Rahimi, a shopkeeper inside the Green Zone, summing up the seeming
permanence of the infrastructure around him.
One recent afternoon, Rahimi sat behind the
wooden counter of his corner store, absent-mindedly watching a Bollywood movie
on the TV mounted to the wall. On the street outside, a forest green
maintenance vehicle with a poster of a young Mullah Omar — the founder of the
Taliban movement — plastered on the windshield raced past.
Rahimi perked up as three young men, former
Taliban fighters turned security guards, entered the shop and rummaged through
a pile of small, dirt-encrusted lemons by the front door. They handed the
lemons to Rahimi, who weighed them on a rusty scale and tied them into a
plastic bag in a single, masterful flip of the wrist.
“We’re buying lemons because some of our
friends are fat — they need lemons to get thin and be better prepared for
security,” one of the men joked. His friends burst out laughing. Rahimi,
unamused, handed them the lemons and took a tattered bank note in return.
The old Green ZoneRahimi, 45, remembers the old Green Zone
and its former residents with a sense of nostalgia. Outside the neighborhood,
the city was regularly torn apart by suicide blasts and targeted assassinations
during the US-led war. But within its roughly 1.6-km radius, there was an
intoxicating sense of lawfulness.
White-collar Afghan employees in government
offices and foreign embassies used to pour down the street outside his shop at
8am each morning as they arrived for work and again at 4pm when they headed
home. For him, that reliable daily rhythm seemed to offer a sense of control, a
predictability that had eluded Afghanistan for decades.
There was “order and discipline”, he said,
wistfully.
For most of the two-decade war, the Green
Zone occupied a unique place in Kabul’s collective consciousness. Once an
upper-middle class neighborhood with tree-lined streets, elegant villas, and a
grand boulevard, the area transformed into a dull gray fortress of 5-meter-tall
concrete barriers.
To some Afghans who could not enter it, the
impenetrable void that sprawled across central Kabul was a source of deep
resentment — an alien presence disrupting daily life.
To others, it was a harbinger of the
eventual loss of the war, a place where despite Western generals’ assurances
about battlefield victories and milestones reached, the steady build-up of
blast walls and barricades offered a more honest assessment of the West’s
failures to curb the Taliban’s reach.
When the Taliban took over Kabul, they
initially eyed this concrete slab of the city with suspicion. For months,
agents with the intelligence wing of the nascent Taliban administration went
building to building, digging through the remains of an enemy whose inner
workings had been shrouded in mystery for 20 years. Every home was presumed to
have hidden weapons or trip wires. Every surveillance camera was a sign of
espionage.
The significant presence of security guards here — much like the blast walls that remain in place — reflects the insecurity that threatens the country’s fragile peace since the US-led war ended.
From forest to fortFaizullah Masoom, a 26-year-old former
Taliban fighter from Ghazni province, felt awe-struck when he first saw the
Green Zone. Then, a feeling of pride washed over him.
“I said to myself that our enemy with such
defenses — blast walls and security cameras, barricaded areas and fortified
buildings — were finally defeated by us,” he said. “We were always in the
mountains, forests, and fields. We only had one gun and a motorcycle.”
Now, Masoom rarely leaves the Green Zone.
Soon after the Taliban seized power, he
assumed a new post as a security guard at a checkpoint outside an office
building. One recent afternoon, he sat on a concrete barrier with three other
guards at their post near the former Italian Embassy.
The men passed around a bag of chewing
tobacco as pickup trucks and armored cars carrying officials with the Taliban
administration pulled up to the metal barrier. They beckoned for the drivers to
lower their blackened windows, looked around the inside of the vehicles and
ushered them through the gate.
As I turned to leave, Masoom asked where I
was from. When he heard “America”, his eyes grew wide and mouth dropped.
“She’s from America?” he asked a New York
Times colleague who was with me, almost in disbelief. For 20 years, Americans
were a faceless enemy. Now one was standing two feet in front of him.
He and his friends looked at each other
bewildered for a few seconds — a sense of uncertainty hanging in the air. Then
they burst out laughing.
“We have no conflict, war or enmity with
anyone anymore,” he said smiling, as if to reassure me.
But the significant presence of security
guards here — much like the blast walls that remain in place — reflects the
insecurity that threatens the country’s fragile peace since the US-led war
ended. While the days of constant airstrikes and night raids are over, suicide
attacks from terrorist groups continue to plague the city — even as the guardians
charged with keeping them at bay have changed.
Murals of changeDown the road from their post, the words
“Long Live the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” — the official name the Taliban
have given their government — is inscribed on a blast wall in white paint, one
of a number of cosmetic changes the new government has instituted as it remakes
the area in its own image.
The most striking example is painted on a
wall that buttresses the former US Embassy. The wall bears a mural depicting a
vertical American flag, with columns of red stripes holding up white-on-blue
stars. Beside the flag, a dozen hands are pushing down the red columns as if
toppling a series of dominoes. “Our nation defeated America with the help of
God” is scrawled next to it in blue paint.
The embassy itself remains empty and
untouched — or mostly untouched.
Affixed to the towering metal and barbed
wire gates is a metal plaque painted with the emblem of the US: A bald eagle,
wings outstretched, an olive branch in one talon and 13 arrows in the other.
Over two dozen bullet holes have chipped the paint.
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