Postcard From Kabul
We are pulling in our traditional baggy trousers, while for Taliban leaders these are the days that are fat
September 2, 2022 (Private Eye) — The doomsters who said no good could come from the Taliban must be chuckling smugly into their weak green tea. The American missile that killed the elderly leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as he relaxed on the balcony of his ugly Kabul villa, has shown us who our portly leaders count as their real friends. Our blighted land is home to the worst the world has to offer.
But who are Afghans to complain? One year after the Taliban’s return, they tell us to count our blessings, and so we must. Consider the calm that has replaced the diesel-fuelled stench that once marked our gridlocked streets. We are now an oasis of urban serenity. This, however, is less a product of innovative environmental planning than of the confiscation of thousands of privately owned vehicles (or, as people here more quietly call it, theft). Even if you do still have a car, shortages and huge hikes in fuel prices keep our roads quiet.
It’s a similar story with food. Afghans don’t just live on bread; we live for bread. It is an artform almost worthy of worship. On every street corner is a bakery, a tiny hut with a sliding glass window and bright lights and a loyal local clientele. The bakers proudly display their wares in all their variety of shapes and sizes – huge round discs, elongated triangular monsters, serrated for easy ripping, with oil, without oil. Thick for soaking up mutton fat. A bit thinner for scooping up pilau. It’s all delicious.
A year ago, before the Taliban came to power, one huge piece of bread cost 10 afghanis (about 10p). The price is the same today, but the size of the loaf has shrunk to a fraction of its former size. Women and children camp on pavements outside bakeries, or sit under trees to take shade from the sun while they wait in the hope that they might beg from a better-heeled customer or collect cast-offs from the baker.
Afghanistan is poor and hungry. Charities at home and abroad say half of us now don’t have enough to eat. As the Himalayan winter approaches and drought bites deep into the harvest, and the Ukraine war pushes up the price of wheat and pushes down its availability, we will get hungrier. Children will die.
Some are more fortunate. On television and social media, our leaders cut an elegant crew in their bright white tunics, deftly tied turbans and blankets thrown with casual precision over their shoulders.
Sirajuddin Haqqani, the acting interior minister (who we believe to have been al-Zawahiri’s host as it was in his home the terrorist-in-chief was enjoying his retirement), needs the most flowing of robes to mask his massive girth, perhaps sharpened by comfort eating in the face of a US$10m bounty offered by the FBI. Mullah Yaqoob, acting defence minister and son of Taliban founder Mullah Omar, is a similar heavyweight character, as is the substantial figure of Mullah Baradar. All three remain on the US most wanted list as terrorists.
The private jets, international conferences and handsome buffets patronised by our apparently pious leaders and recorded on their smartphones are a world away from the reality most in Afghanistan face. As the Taliban relax the drawstrings on their increasingly well-filled traditional baggy trousers, the rest of us must be grateful just to have the cloth to pull ours in.
I did not think you were living in country. Thought you had been expelled, but this is you writing from inside Afghanistan?