If there had been grumbling before about the deafening intrusion of low-flying US helicopters in the Afghan capital, the discontent has surely multiplied along with the number of flights: packs of them now, coming two, four, six at a time, starting around 7 am, then again at midday and at dusk.
Why so many? “The American Embassy’s not allowed to move by road anymore,” a senior Western official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to brief the news media. “If you’re at the airport and you have work at the embassy or at RS,” he said, referring to the international coalition’s mission, known as Resolute Support, “they fly you over in the morning and back at night.”
After 14 years of war, of training the Afghan army and the police, it has become too dangerous to drive the mile and a half from the airport to the embassy.
Maybe that is just the Americans’ “force protection” mentality. The Americans always present an obvious target with their Humvees and heavily armoured SUVs. But if everyone now has to move in helicopters, then nobody can get out of the embassy to meet Afghans or go to dinner even with the Westerners in town — no one else has a compound with a landing pad.
But the helicopter transport was just one measure of how things have changed in the Afghan capital since 2014, and the end of the huge NATO combat mission. Restaurants and cafes have closed or have hardly any customers, news organisations have packed up, and the few Western-style hotels are nearly empty.
Just a few years ago, Kabul was having a boom like no other. After 2009, US troop
numbers surged, and US money washed over the country in even greater measure than before. A total of about $715 billion has been spent since 2001, and much of that was in the past six years.
Kabul had a vibrant night life until recently: The many single 20-somethings, aid workers and security contractors, embassy staff members and journalists, had their pick of places to go, drink illicit alcohol, flirt and attend showings of documentaries. There were French-, Italian- and Thai-style restaurants, a steakhouse, a couple of Indian places and even a Japanese one — no raw fish, but lots of avocado and sushi rice.
Then, last year, an attack at one of those restaurants, Taverna du Liban, killed 21 people, 13 of them foreigners. Now, Kabul feels like a beach resort during off-season, when the rides shut down; only a handful of shops are still open, and those have few customers.
The signs are everywhere. The music has stopped. Well, not all the music, but most
music funded by foreign donors. The last performance sponsored by the French Cultural
Institute, in the past the main centre for concerts of classical Afghan music, was attacked by a suicide bomber. The detonation occurred in the middle of a musical and theatrical performance in December, killing one person and wounding more than a dozen.
Among the wounded was the head of the Afghan National Institute of Music, Ahmad Sarmast, whose music school has offered hope for poor but musically talented Afghan youths. He lost much of his hearing in the attack.
The money has trailed off, and the number of expatriates has plummeted. The aid workers and security contractors packed up, the diplomats dwindled and the journalists moved on — to the Syrian border, to the refugee crisis in Europe or back to home.
One favoured spot over the years was the Design Cafe, a place with what might be called Kabul chic: sconces on the walls and low Afghan-style seats with cushions indoors and rattan furniture in its leafy outside courtyard. The cafe made an amazing mint lemonade in the summers, with icy, barely sweet, shredded mint whipped in until the drink turned a frothy green.
Now, on a hot day in August, the corrugated metal door was locked, and no amount of banging on it brought an answer. Through the small square grate, all that was visible was a dusty courtyard, a couple of plastic bags blowing across it in the late afternoon wind.
The cafe had a second outpost in a more secure neighbourhood, and that one appeared to be open — at least someone answered the door. But walking inside was like entering an attic. The upholstered chairs were covered in dust, and a couple of them no longer had cushions, as if this were the last lot for sale at an auction, when all that was left was the furniture nobody bid on.
Was it possible to get a coffee? The two guards conferred. Then one said, “Yes.” He would go look for the cook, he said doubtfully, then appeared relieved when he was told not to worry about it. It was not just the expats leaving; the Afghans were going, too, and in droves.
One police station on the far west side of the city doubles as the Interior Ministry’s Office of Statistics and Registration. It used to be a sleepy outpost, with much of the traffic coming from foreign visitors officially registering their arrival or logging their departure, their paperwork checked and stamped by a few desultory workers.
Fleeing the country
Now the police station’s scruffy courtyard was crowded with Afghans lining up at the windows, waving small pieces of paper and pushing so hard it was difficult to keep a place in line even at the obligatory body search at the entrance.
Almost all of them were there to get their national identification card certified, a prerequisite for acquiring or extending a passport, something many Afghans had not worried about much before but were acutely aware of now as they considered leaving the country.
At the passport office itself, in another part of town, the lines started forming at 2 am:
men and women, shivering in the predawn chill, huddling under blankets, waiting as long as 10 hours outside to start the six- to eight-week process of getting the government’s new passports.
The crowds at the passport office are one more sign of the worsening times, said Hasina Safi, the director of the Afghan Women’s Network, a nonprofit group that works on an array of human rights and gender issues.
Her relatives who are outside Afghanistan have been urging her to join them in the West. “But it will be very difficult if all the educated people leave,” she said. “These are the people we need in this country; otherwise, who will help the ordinary people?”
And even efforts to avoid the dangers in Kabul still come at a terrible cost — both for foreigners and Afghans. Three weeks ago, there was an accident with one of those helicopters. Trying to land, the pilot clipped the tether anchoring the surveillance blimp that scans for infiltrators in central Kabul as it hovers over the Resolute Support base.
The helicopter crashed, killing five coalition members, including two Americans, and wounding five others. The severed blimp, with its million-dollars-plus worth of surveillance cameras and communications equipment, drifted off. The police said it later crashed into an Afghan house, leaving wreckage behind.