afghan scene magazine january/february 2011

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Buzkashi’s backCan Afghanistan’s most famous sport go global?Afghanistan over a cup of tea: a librarian’s labour of loveTV satire sets alarm bells ringingAfghanistan’s lepersJoão Silva appeal

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www.afghanscene.com Afghan Scene January-February 2011

Afghan Scene January-February 2011

Afghan Scene January-February 2011www.afghanscene.com


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14The riddle of Scene’s missing pages

16Why let truth get in the way of good news

20Afghanistan’s most ubiquitous sport could be about to go global if its organisers have their way

28Buy photos by wounded photographer João Silva to help fund his recovery

39One librarian’s labour of love revealed

52How billions in foreign aid have failed to eradicate a medieval disease

60The television show making Afghans laugh

68 All you need to know about where to go in Kabul

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Publisher: Afghan Scene Ltd, Wazir Akbar Khan, Kabul, AfghanistanManager & Editor: Afghan Scene Ltd, Kabul, AfghanistanDesign: Kaboora ProductionAdvertising: [email protected]: Emirates Printing Press, DubaiContact: [email protected] / www.afghanscene.comAfghan Scene welcomes the contribution of articles and / or pictures from its readers. Editorial rights reserved. Cover photo: Jeremy Kelly

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Afghan Scene Jan-Feb 2011

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Just think, a mere 8 years ago we werevirtual prisoners under the Taliban....





Winter announces itself with a thundering of hooves in Afghanistan, the snap of whips and a silent rush of adrenalin

as men on horses clatter across badly defined fields in a colourful battle for a dead goat. But the spoils from a game of buzkashi are more lucrative than that. Whether you catch sight of a game at Marshal Fahim’s stadium in Kabul or witness close on a thousand horsemen convening for the end of season match on Nowroz in Mazar, you’ll see hundreds, even thousands of dollars changing hands. And now the sport’s governing body wants to go bigger—much bigger. As Haji Abdul Rashid explains in this edition’s cover feature: “We want the people of Europe and America to see our game and learn to play it.” Think Genghis Khan playing polo in the Yankee stadium.Someone who has long tried to preserve, document and fan enthusiam for Afghanistan’s culture is Nancy Dupree. The veteran Afghanistan hand has been in the country for decades, brilliantly evoking a sense of the country’s golden age in her ubiquitous guidebook when she describes Kabul as “a fast-growing city where tall modern buildings

nuzzle against bustling bazaars and wide avenues fill with brilliant floeing turbans, gaily striped chapans, mini-skirted schoolgirls, a multitude of handsome faces and streams of whizzing faces.” Jon Boone reports on what she’s been doing since.Please spare a though for João Silva and his family. The Bang Bang club photographer made his name documenting the end of apartheid in South Africa. In October he stepped on an IED in Kandahar and lost both his legs. João’s friends have set up a website to sell prints and raise funds for him: http://joaosilva.photoshelter.com/. All funds collected will go towards supporting him and his family as he recovers and reinvents his career. For a taster of what’s on sale flick to page 28.This edition also reveals the mystery of the missing pages in the previous edition; makes a dig at some of the more redundant Isaf press releases cluttering up inboxes; and highlights the plight of lepers whose easily preventable disease is still rife in some parts of the country despite billions in foreign aid.. !

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Afghan Scene Magazine is proud to showcase work from the best photographers in Afghanistan

Almost all of the photographs and cartoons featured in Afghan Scene are available for sale direct from the artists. Most of them are available for commissions, here and elsewhere. If you would like to contribute to

Afghan Scene, or if you can’t get hold of a contributor, please contact [email protected].

Aussie Adam Ferguson hails from New South Wales, Australia and studied photographer at Griffith University. After working in Cambodia and Paris he moved

to New Delhi to work as an independent snapper covering India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. His work has been appeared in Time Magazine, The New York Times,

Vanity Fair, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Stern, The Chicago Tribune, The Financial Times Magazine and The Sydney Morning Herald. adamfergusonphoto.com

Jon Boone chose to move to Kabul in 2007 because he thought the city would be a convenient place from which to make regular trips to Dubai. Unfortunately

his work for the Financial Times and, more recently, The Guardian led to him becoming stuck in Afghanistan, sometimes for periods of up to three weeks

at a time. He is an outspoken advocate on genital integrity issues.

Julius Cavendish has reported for The Independent, the Christian Science Monitor, the National on Saturday, the Evening Standard, The Times, the Sunday Herald, The

Daily Telegraph, The First Post, The Scotsman, CBC, CBS and BFBS among others. He covers war, politics, sport, women’s rights, military absurdities and Kabul’s

ex-pat social scene.

Jeremy Kelly is an Australian journalist and photographer who first visited Afghanistan under Taliban rule in 1998. He has lived here since 2005.

His preferred method of transport is a motorbike.

Dion Nissenbaum covers south Asia with a focus on Afghanistan as bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers.

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The bouncing Czech: freeloading hitch-hiker SilvestreCome as you are: glamour pusses Tara, Sarah-Jean and Rimaat the song party

Smile!: Lianne and Alim show off their pealy whitesDangerous liaisons: ISI favorite Matt and Kabul stalwarts Caitlin, Nick and Heidi

Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’: film-maker Sam with starlets Rima and Sarah-Jean

Newshounds: beeb producer Rachel with Tintin-lookalike Quentin Pulitzer the other one: Boston Globe’s Farah entertains Paddy

Be sceneShare your event or party pics with Aghan Scene. email [email protected]

This year i’ll be wishing for...: Viani and Ashley clap Khusbu on





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Afghan Scene October-November 2011www.afghanscene.comwww.afghanscene.com Afghan Scene October-November 2011

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Chukpalu you: Viani strikes a pose at Rahim’s new cafeUruzgan dreams: Paul can’t wait to get back to the south Smucker up: Philip collects beard maintenance tips from Gemma

Starlet express: whirlwind tourist Amrita takes on kabul by motorbike

By the pricking of my thumbs - Lianne and Gemma looking wicked Lady and the tramp - Rima and Warren b at Paul and Jenny’s leaving bash

Ambassador and owner - the two Sherards

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The JG’s campaign slogan, emblazoned on the poster, was simple: Vote for me. I’ve done jihad. And I’m rich.

JG’s face was blacked out by a box and the words: Your favorite jihadi face here. JG wears a black turban, suit and a gold plated handgun hanging around his neck from a large g old plated chain.

The backdrop was filled with dollar signs and AK-47s.

The campaign poster and Jihadi Gangster persona are unique artistic critiques of the corrosive culture of corruption in Afghanistan.

But the message wasn’t very funny to Afghan government censors.

“This is an insult to all society,” said Abdul Raquib Jahid, an Education Ministry official who serves on the 14-member commission that scrutinizes publications coming into Afghanistan. “The media in America might draw an unflattering picture of President Obama, but not in Afghanistan.”

By law, Afghan Scene must be vetted by government censors.

The Jihadi Gangster has been censored in Afghanistan.

Afghan government censors have branded the unrepentant Kabul Gangsta Godfather as an offense to the nation’s traditional values and directed Afghan Scene, Kabul’s largest English-language magazine, to excise an article about the Afghan-American artist.

A story on the Jihadi Gangster, aka Aman Mojadidi, was slated to appear in the last issue of Afghan Scene, a glossy English-language monthly geared towards the expat community in Kabul.

When the latest issue was flown in from the Dubai printer, government censors were not too happy with what they found.

The article (a reprint a Checkpoint Kabul blog post) featured photographs that Afghan government censors said were offensive to the country’s mujaheddin anti-Soviet fighters.

One of the photos showed the Jihadi Gangster’s faux campaign posters stuck up around town during last fall’s parliamentary race.

Scene officials agreed to have the article cut out of the printed magazine and even had to go back to distributors to collect some issues before they were sent out to cafes, restaurants and bookstores.

The current issue around Kabul touts the “Jihadi Gangster” story on the cover and in the index. But when readers go looking for it, the article isn’t there.

“We tried hard but they said no and threatened us with legal action (referring the case to the Attorney General),” Mohseni said in an e-mail. “Their action is nothing unusual (given our neighbourhood and people sensitivities to certain issues). It is an expat magazine and as such it is not going to impact freedom of expression at a national level.”

Moby and Mohseni are known for pushing free speech boundaries in Afghanistan.

Moby is the parent company of Tolo TV, which airs ‘Danger Bell,” a biting political satire show that has been compared to “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and frequently airs pieces that are as caustic as the Jihadi Gangster campaign posters and photographs.

Perhaps because he has larger battles to fight, Mohseni said he chose not to challenge the demand that Afghan Scene cut out the article.

“We win some and lose some,” said Mohseni. !

Before it was printed, in an apparent move to stave off possible objections from the censors, Afghan Scene removed a photograph of the Jihadi Gangster sitting on a couch, channel surfing while a scantily clad, pistol toting woman with a burqa covering her face fawns over the nonplussed gangsta.

Even so, when government regulators saw the piece, they threatened to take legal action, said Saad Mohseni, the head of Moby Group, Afghanistan’s pioneering media company and publisher of Afghan Scene magazine.

Even though the magazine, with a print run of about 9,000 copies, is geared towards the expat crowd, Jahid said it was possible that prominent Afghan leaders could also see the piece.

In defending the decision to prevent the article from being distributed in Afghanistan, Jahid cited Afghan law that allows the government to ban anything that could increase tensions.

“If the magazine found its way into the hands of [Afghan Vice President] Marshal Fahim he would hold the commission responsible,” Jahid said.

Jahid said he found no offense with a photograph depicting the imminent execution of a kneeling, gagged, blond Westerner by masked men -- aside from the black oval over the face of one of the would-be executioners with the phrase: “Your favorite jihadi face here.”

Faced with threats of legal action, Afghan


Afghan Scene January-February 2011www.afghanscene.comwww.afghanscene.com Afghan Scene January-February 2011

Afghan Scene January-February 2011scene

Late last year Afghan censors threatened to refer Afghan Scene to the attorney general if a six-page feature profiling a spoof parliamentary election campaign remained in the magazine. The offence? To suggest some candidates were self-interested warlords, less concerned in serving their country than dragging it into the mire—a view that’s often heard in Afghanistan’s towns and villages. McClatchy bureau chief Dion Nissenbaum reports on the people afraid of the truth

Read more: http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/kabul/2011/01/jihadi-gangster-censored-in-afghanistan.html#ixzz1BCPe266j





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When they aren’t killing bad guys, the folks over at ISAF are straining under the weight of good news stories emanating from a war that to everyone else looks long on collateral but short on victories. That dogged persistence in telling our masters we’ve been winning ever since we got here is almost admirable. Here Scene tries to imagine

what these morale-boosting stories would look like in a newspaper (let’s call it The Daily Victory)…

Afghan Scene January 2011www.afghanscene.com

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Sailors bring mail, morale to Gardez

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see our game and learn to play it,” he said. “So we are looking for a company to help us show our game.”

Any impresario willing to underwrite a match would make a handsome return, Mr Rashid says. Ticket sales, corporate sponsorship and TV rights could generate enormous sums of money.

Although there are, at present, no obvious takers for the offer, Mr Rashid’s enthusiasm is nonetheless undimmed. “In other parts of the world they have rugby, they have bullfights,” he said. “Buzkashi is the same – another dangerous game – so I believe people will like it. When you’re riding the horse,

A sport best described as “mounted goat rugby from hell” could soon be transported from northern

Afghanistan’s dusty plains to the green turf of Twickenham, or even New York’s Yankee Stadium, if enthusiasts have their way. Buzkashi, a game supposedly devised by Genghis Khan, pits men and horses against each other in a ferocious struggle for possession of a headless goat. Now the director of buzkashi at Afghanistan’s Olympic committee thinks it is time to unleash this spectacle on the world.

Haji Abdul Rashid is looking for a Western partner to promote the sport overseas. “We want the people of Europe and America to

As buzkashi season gets underway, Julius Cavendish reveals how impressarios want to take Genghis Khan’s favourite sport global

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Two chapandazan tussle for the buz | Julius Cavendish





drawing a crowd of thousands, including the provincial governor and government ministers. “It’s always been a show of power,” said Gulam Yalaqi, a horse owner competing in the game. “The horse should be powerful and the guy should be powerful.”

The glamour has made heroes of the best riders, who can earn hundreds of dollars for each goal scored, tucking the notes dispensed by watching dignitaries into their tunics before charging back into the fray. The day’s top prize money goes on the last round of play, with savvy chapandazan saving their energy for a final flourish.

Perhaps because the competition is fierce and colourful, buzkashi has often laboured as a metaphor for Afghanistan. For hundreds of years local khans (lords) bred horses and trained their riders. As the only members of society wealthy enough to maintain stables the sport became a demonstration of their status. “Horses start at $5,000 and go up to $80,000,” said Mr Yalaqi. “It’s like having another six members in your family.”

During the 1980s the Soviet-backed government tried to increase regulation in the hope that some of its popularity would brush off. In his masterful study of buzkashi, anthropologist Whitney Azoy recorded the story of Habib, a legendary chapandaz whose skill on the field won him esteem far exceeding his lowly background. Pressured by communists to denounce the anti-Soviet resistance, Habib later tried to atone by smuggling food to the rebels. He was almost killed in an air strike, the story

struggling for the goat, and even after you’ve grabbed it, every moment is suspense. I love this. People love this.”

Depending on which format is being played, competition is between teams or individuals or both. Riders, known as “chapandazan”, must pick up the goat carcass and either break free of the melee still carrying it, or drop it in a white circle marked on the pitch. Both versions take considerable strength, skill and courage.

The few rules forbid chapandazan from hitting one another with their whips, cutting their opponents’ saddle straps or gouging the eyes of their horses. That hasn’t stopped some participants from devising ways to cheat. One ruse is to hide a length of rope inside the sleeves of the rider’s corduroy tunic, before looping it over one leg of the carcass as he tries to seize it from an opponent or lift it off the ground. Wedging the hock of the goat’s leg behind the pommel of the saddle is another variation on the theme, and is similarly frowned upon.

Mostly, though, the sport is too unpredictable for much successful cheating. “It’s not like soccer,” Mr Rashid told Scene. “Buzkashi is faster. And in soccer you’re in control. In buzkashi, the horse is in charge.”

The popularity of the sport shows no sign of abating in northern Afghanistan, even though terrified spectators frequently have to scatter as horses clatter into them. At a game in Mazar-e-Sharif on Nowroz, the Afghan new year, hundreds of chapandazan turned out to play,

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A Nowroz game of buzkashi | Julius Cavendish




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and drug money awash in Afghanistan, have also emerged as buzkashi patrons.

The sport is not exclusively Afghan. It is played across Central Asia and the region has already seen an international tournament, won by the host nation Kyrgyzstan. Mr Rashid insists that the result did not cast any doubt on Afghan mastery of the sport: his team had to ride Kyrgyz horses instead of their usual mounts.

How easy it will be to export buzkashi to countries with vocal animal rights lobbies is something Mr Rashid is grudgingly aware off. A previous experiment to stage a match in the US foundered when his American partners began introducing changes to make the game more palatable.

According to Mr Rashid, the Americans training as chapandazan said: “We should not have a real goat, we need a false one.” They said there should be no whips because that was cruel. The problem was “then it was not the real game”, Mr Rashid sighed. “Imagine playing soccer with your hands. Where would the fun be?”

Others are less traditional in their outlook. “Changes should be brought to the game and that’s only possible if it’s staged in other countries,” said Mr Yalaqi, the rider in the Nowroz game. “It could stop being semi-barbaric and start being civilised. In Afghanistan the sport isn’t properly governed. If it could be turned into an international sport and standardised so it’s acceptable to everyone, it could be as good as polo.” !

goes, but his horse, mortally wounded, carried him to shelter before dying.

The account is typical of the tales that have grown up around buzkashi. The sport is a vestige of the times when everyone between the Black Sea and China lived on horseback. Hollywood has romanticised it on more than one occasion, most famously in Rambo III, when mujahideen fighters invite John Rambo to play with them before Soviet gunships break up the game. A seven-minute sequence from the 1971 movie The Horsemen, starring Jack Palance and Omar Sharif, does a better job of documenting what the sport actually entails.

Under Taliban rule, buzkashi survived despite the Islamists’ draconian bans on entertainment. Northern Afghanistan, where the sport is most predominant, never fell entirely under the movement’s sway. In those areas they did control, the Taliban forbade the use of a goat’s carcass, insisting players used an animal skin stuffed with straw on the grounds that wasting meat was sinful. Their piety was lost on chapandazan and spectators, who complained that the skins fell apart too quickly.

Since the game’s revival in 2001, the most notable patron of buzkashi has been the country’s vice-president Marshal Qasim Fahim, whose team plays regularly on the Shomali Plain outside Kabul. His generous sponsorship of the game wasn’t lost on aficionados, who Mr Rashid, the buzkashi director, says delivered their votes to Hamid Karzai during last year’s presidential election. A new class of businessmen, who have capitalised on the aid

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Buzkashi pits men and horses against each other in a ferocious struggle for a dead goat | Jeremy Kelly





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week visiting João. He writes: “Spending time with João, Viv and the staff at the hospital, it dawned on me how close to death he has been. Besides losing his lower legs, he suffered a myriad of other injuries, many of them extremely serious.

He has spent three weeks now in intensive care, and were it not for remarkable health professionals - and the quick action of the soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan - he would not be with us.

We hope that most dangers are now behind him, and he can slowly start the road to recovery, but he is still extremely weak and exhausted by the series of operations he has had to endure. He has a few more and should be able to look forward to moving out of intensive care in a week or so.

Joao’s friends have set up a website to sell prints and raise funds for him: http://joaosilva.photoshelter.com/.

All funds collected will go towards supporting him and his family as he recovers and reinvents his career. !

João Silva, 44, a South African photographer on contract with The New York Times, stepped on a mine while

accompanying American soldiers patrolling an area near the town of Arghandab in southern Afghanistan on October 23rd, 2010. Despite immediate help from medics, both his legs were lost below the knees.

João Silva made his name while covering the violent birth pangs of a democratic South Africa. He was a member of the Bang-Bang Club, a group of photographers who documented the Hostel War during the last days of Apartheid. Since he has covered the major conflicts of our time and won numerous awards.

João stumbled upon his career when he accompanied a friend on a photo shoot in the 1980s and was instantly hooked. A contract photographer for The Times since 2000, he is also an avid motorcyclist, a husband to Viv and a father to two young children, Isabel and Gabriel.

November 15th 2010 Joao’s close friend photographer Greg Marinovich is in DC this


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Tora Bora, Afghanistan, Dec. 12, 2001- An Eastern Alliance warrior watched as an American B-52 bomber circled above the Tora Bora mountains | João Silva




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ANC Self Defence Unit members carry a wounded comrade, Bafana Baloyi, spouting blood from a bullet wound in his side during an attack on the Inkatha dominated

Mshay’zafe Hostel, Thokoza. April 19 1994 | João Silva







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Iraq- Baghdad- March 4, 2010- Iraqi soldiers lined up on Thursday in Baghdad to cast their ballots ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary elections | João Silva







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Iraq- Kurmashia Marsh- February 18, 2004- A Marsh Arab poles his canoe through Kirmashiya Marsh in southern Iraq. | João Silva





Jon Boone reports on a librarian’s labour of love for Afghanistan




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The librarian in her archive | David Gill





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life: a spectacular landscape, rich in the ruins of civilisations from Zoroaster to Alexander the Great, and her late husband Louis, an American paratrooper-turned-archaeologist and the greatest western expert on Afghanistan of his generation.

But there is no denying how far Afghanistan is from any sort of return to the “good old days”. Ziggy Garewal, the country director of Acted, puts her head round the door of the lounge to check whether her famous house guest needs a cup of tea. Overhearing Dupree’s remarks, she politely demurs. “We do travel,” she says, “except it’s more expensive now because we have to fly everywhere, rather than going by road.”

“Do you?” Dupree says, in a tone of surprise bordering on wonderment.

“Since the IRC incident – no expats by road,” says Garewal, referring to the murder in August 2008 of three foreign women working for the International Rescue Committee, a US charity, who were travelling by road close to the capital. “We can’t fly to Pul-i-Khumri, so we just don’t do it. Taloqan we can fly to, because there’s an airstrip. It’s fine for one or two of us to go, but not for 20 of us to go up and down.”

In the summer months, insurgents twice launched roadside bomb attacks on NGO vehicles in the mountainous central province of Bamyan, a destination that was regarded until then as an oasis of calm and a good place for foreigners, cooped up most of the time in their embassies and compounds, to take weekend

how far and tragically the country has fallen. Most of An Historical Guide to Afghanistan is entirely irrelevant to the handful of modern travellers increasingly confined to the largely safe districts of the capital. Only the clinically insane would contemplate following her recommendation of a “leisurely walking tour of the bazaars” of Kandahar, the southern city whose prison used to hold hundreds of Taliban insurgents, until they were freed in a spectacular jail break two and a half years ago. Even Kabul is barely recognisable from her descriptions.

Not even the two giant Buddhas of Bamyan have escaped the ravages. Dupree first visited the magical mountain valley and the monumental statues soon after her arrival in the country with her first husband, a US diplomat. It was the sight of the buddhas – built in the sixth century AD, and blown to smithereens by the Taliban in March 2001 – that transformed her from diplomatic wife into one of the world’s foremost scholars on Afghanistan. It also led to what she calls the “great scandal” of her divorce and remarriage to Louis Dupree.

She knew something of the dramatic valley from a handful of classes she had taken at Columbia University as part of a Chinese degree. She was enlisted as “trip historian” for the US ambassador’s first visit to the Bamyan valley in the early 1960s. At a diplomatic cocktail party shortly after her return to Kabul, she berated the head of the Afghan Tourist Organisation for the lack of any guides to one of the wonders of the world. He replied that

In the 1960s, when the historian and writer Nancy Hatch Dupree first travelled from the US to Afghanistan during the country’s brief

flowering of social liberalism, Kabul was known as the Paris of the East and visitors could travel freely. Girls in miniskirts made their way to school, people left the city at the weekend to stay at ski lodges, and the equestrian set amused themselves with dressage competitions. Some 40 years later, Dupree and I meet on a gloomy autumn evening in a once-grand manse in central Kabul. The neighbourhood is smart, in spite of the broken roads and dilapidated buildings beginning to give way to a rash of garish concrete mansions, built on the spoils of the opium trade. The manse serves as a guesthouse for the young people who work for Acted, a French aid agency. Dupree, who at 82 is stooped but sprightly, says she spends time among the young aid workers because they remind her of how things used to be.

“Everyone says you can’t move, you can’t travel, it’s too dangerous,” she says. “But here it’s like the old days. Acted people pop in and out and say, ‘Well, I’m off to Pul-i-Khumri, see you in a few days.’” Despite the tense, watchful security guard at the front door, who double-checks my credentials when I knock, and despite the high walls and the razor wire that hem in Kabul’s expats, there is at least a semblance of normality in the guesthouse. The sound of a drinks party and barbecue is just audible from the garden.

The party outside offers a faint, receding echo of the place Dupree found on her arrival, and where she discovered the two great loves of her

breaks. “They’re coming after us, we’re a soft target,” continues Garewal. “We have 700 staff out in the field – the sheer number of people at risk, with so many moving around all the time.”

Dupree looks momentarily crestfallen. But then she perks up, dismissing the present jitters as only someone who has seen Afghanistan in its very darkest days can. “This is new and it probably won’t last,” she declares.

. . .

The street children in Kabul still hawk original, 1970 editions of Dupree’s most famous book, An Historical Guide to Afghanistan, which she wrote for the Afghan Tourist Organisation. In his 2001 play Homebody/Kabul, US playwright Tony Kushner uses great chunks of Dupree’s prose from an earlier work, An Historical Guide to Kabul, for the monologues of his main character, a woman dreaming of Afghanistan.“Alexander the Great summoned to the Kabul valley a mighty army comprising tens of thousands of soldiers … ” Dupree writes and Kushner quotes “ … from Egypt, Persia and Central Asia and went on to conquer India. When Alexander’s own troops grew weary of battle, in 325BC, they forced their commander to desist from further conflict. Alexander died in 323BC, just as he was planning a return to the Hindu Kush to oversee the Grecianisation of this most remarkable land.”

Although Dupree never got to see a live production of the play, on a cold winter’s day in Kabul, she wears a Homebody T-shirt under her clothes. Her books all highlight





married on a winter’s day in 1966 in a shrine on the western outskirts of the city (which both had lobbied to save from demolition) with a top Islamic scholar officiating – “a maulana”, she explains, “much higher up than a mullah”.

. . .

For almost 20 years, Afghanistan became the Duprees’ adopted country, and they lived through all the successive tragedies that befell it: Soviet occupation, civil war and the brutal Taliban regime that would eventually declare war on the pre-Islamic antiquities of Afghanistan that the couple loved. Most recently, Dupree has watched at close quarters the spectacular failure of the post-2001 international effort to put Afghanistan back on its feet, with billions of dollars that she believes have been wasted on “massive projects with no follow-up”.

Her unrivalled knowledge of Afghanistan has been sought by everyone from the United Nations, which commissioned her to investigate the cultural damage inflicted on the country, to Osama bin Laden, who once approached her for help in acquiring import certificates to bring heavy digging equipment from Pakistan. He was “very shy and polite”, she recalls, but she was puzzled why he thought she could help with such “outlandish requests”.

Louis’s failing health eventually prompted the couple to return to the US, where Louis “had the bad grace to die” in March 1989. But after a few months as a lecturer at Duke University, where Dupree had taken over her husband’s

she should write a guide herself. A French diplomat who overheard the challenge taunted Dupree, saying she had better take the project on “unless you enjoy playing bridge and ladies’ coffee mornings”.

Already fearful of being underemployed in Kabul, her work on the book led to her first meeting with Louis, whom she approached for information about Bamyan’s prehistory. But when she submitted her manuscript to “the great professor”, his initial, scribbled verdict was that her work was “adequate but nothing original”.

It was an unpromising start to what would turn into the great intellectual companionship they would ultimately share, which Louis would describe as his attempt to “understand Afghanistan one cell up, from prehistoric to modern”. He was well placed to do that, running archaeological digs in the countryside for part of the year and spending the rest of the time writing reports on anything he chose, including contemporary politics, for the American Field Service.

Two years after that first meeting, Nancy Hatch divorced her diplomat husband who, in turn, went on to remarry Louis’s first wife. Aware that this could cause embarrassment in the small world of Kabul expat society, she wrote to the US ambassador to inform him of their plans.

“His solution was to throw a huge party for us when we returned so that we could get it all out in the open,” she says. Nancy and Louis




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Nancy Dupree | Adam Ferguson for VII Network





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which she says was a bit “fringe” compared to where the rest of the foreign community lived – became the centre of Kabul’s social life. Its doors were permanently open to top Afghans and foreign diplomats for what became known as “the five o’clock follies” – a daily bar to which all were invited. But disaster was looming. Fifty years of stable monarchy, during which Afghanistan had prospered by successfully navigating a path between rival cold war blocs, came to an end in 1973 when the king’s brother-in-law seized power and declared himself president. The socialist government of Mohammed Daoud Khan pursued modernisation policies, including a push for women’s rights, threatening the traditional lifestyle of the religiously conservative countryside. Meanwhile, Kabul University student politics laid the seeds for future disaster with clashes between communists and Islamists, who would later emerge as the mujahideen. Another coup in 1978 brought in a more hardline, communist regime and interference in Afghanistan’s affairs by Moscow and Washington only increased.

Dupree recalls how modern ideas had seeped into Afghanistan, largely from a fast-rising and dissatisfied middle class that had been sent overseas to acquire the skills needed for the government’s modernisation programmes, but had also picked up ideas about democracy.

“Sure, in the 1960s and 1970s we had a great time here and we loved it and we thought that this was the Paris of the East,” says Dupree. “But Louis wasn’t connected with any official office here, so he was quite independent in

Pakistani government asked Louis to keep a low profile during his exile in their country, he made several forays with the mujahideen into Afghanistan. His wife never accompanied him, worried that she would slow the resistance fighters and endanger them – “just so I could say, ‘When I was with the mujahideen ... ’”

They continued their work among the world’s largest refugee population. It was here that Louis had the idea of establishing a resource centre for all the different aid workers and Afghan experts who could no longer travel freely in Afghanistan, and creating an archive of their work. Louis died just after the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in 1989.

“Louis was in the hospital and he died soon after that and I said to him – he was still composed then – ‘Well, you’ve always said the Soviets would leave and people made fun of you, but now they’re gone and you should be pleased.’ He looked at me and said, ‘The trouble is just beginning.’” He was right; for Dupree, by far the bleakest period was after 1992, when the government of communist placeman Mohammad Najibullah finally fell and rival mujahideen factions fought for control of Kabul.

“Actually the Soviets didn’t destroy this city very much,” she says sadly. “The Afghans did it themselves, and that hurt.”

. . .

As the struggle against the Soviet army turned into a war between rival Afghan factions, the

courses, she felt the pull of Afghanistan once again. “For the rest of the school year I was so busy preparing lectures that it wasn’t until the classes finished that I realised what had happened. I went into a big depression. But then, Acbar [an NGO umbrella group, then based in Peshawar in Pakistan] called and said, ‘We bought Louis’s big idea but it’s not working, so you come here and put yourself where his big mouth is.’ ”

Louis’s “big idea” was to preserve the knowledge accumulated by the many anthropologists, aid workers and experts who have been coming to Afghanistan since the 1960s, generating huge numbers of surveys, reports and project proposals. The vast collection not only chronicles 40 years of development efforts, but also stands as a memorial to Louis, the former soldier who took advantage of America’s GI Bill to go to Harvard and turned himself into an expert in the prehistoric archaeology of central Asia.

For years, the Duprees housed their archive in Peshawar, which straddles one of the main routes into Afghanistan from the east. The couple had retreated there temporarily in 1978, when they were thrown out of Afghanistan after Louis was accused of spying. It’s a charge Dupree totally denies, but following Louis’s death, US Senator Gordon Humphrey is reported to have confirmed that Louis had indeed consulted for the CIA.

The Duprees’ exile marked the end of a halcyon period during which the couple’s home in Quola Pushta – a central Kabul neighbourhood

making his acquaintances and he knew that [while] it was all beautiful on the surface, there was this terrible spy network underneath. When he was arrested they interrogated him all night and all day in three different languages, trying to trip him up. It was obvious that they had had a mole in those five o’clock follies.”

The couple were finally kicked out of the country after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979, and sought sanctuary in Peshawar. Millions of Afghans were to follow suit, as their country descended into nearly three decades of war. Louis semi-seriously claimed “refugee status”, and the couple took up residence in Dean’s Hotel – the hang-out of spies and journalists during the city’s cold war heyday. The colonial-era building has now been pulled down to make way for the sort of concrete-and-glass monstrosities popular on both sides of the border.

Before it was demolished, Peter Jouvenal, a legendary freelance cameraman who now runs a hotel in Kabul, rescued the bronze plaque on room 22 that marked it out as the “Dupree Suite”. He says he liked spending time with the Duprees in the days of jihad because they were among the few people who cared about Afghanistan, rather than about “beating the Soviets without worrying what would happen afterwards”.

“They were very peaceful people,” recalls Jouvenal. “Louis was not interested in getting involved in mujahideen groups, despite being a former paratrooper.” But although the





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She hopes her collection will do something to prevent the hordes of aid workers and development experts who descended on Afghanistan after 2001 repeating old mistakes and perpetually drawing up the same tired strategies. But in the past nine years there has been a flood of reports written on Afghanistan and, she concedes, “they just write the same thing over and over again – just regurgitating it. That’s why their strategies are so humdrum. They are based on work that doesn’t have much basis in fact, or in the realities of Afghan culture, because the people don’t go out and talk to Afghans.”

And then it becomes clear that there is more to Dupree’s disappointment with today’s travel restrictions for foreigners than a simple nostalgia for those prewar, halcyon days. “I saw with my own eyes a piece of paper from one of the embassies that said, ‘If you must go out and do shopping you go in your armoured car, with your escort, with your radio. You go in the shop and you pick out what you want. Don’t talk to the shopkeeper’ – it actually said that.

“So they don’t interact with the Afghans and they sit there staring into their computers dreaming up fantasy strategies.” Too often, she says, foreigners compound this mistake by believing they can fix Afghanistan’s problems with cash. “For the US particularly, money is the remedy to everything. Throw money at it and have instant implementation of massive projects and then turn away and don’t pay any attention to the follow-up. That is not sustainable and it won’t work. But they are doing it in Pakistan now, in the Fata [Federally

country’s cultural heritage sustained huge damage. Historic sites were pillaged and most of the collection in Kabul’s museum (for which Dupree had written a guide) was stolen and sold on the black market. Dupree managed to buy back a tiny fraction under the auspices of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage, which she founded.

With so much lost and destroyed, Dupree’s archive is not just a precious store of historical knowledge but also a personal memorial to the loves of her life. Tellingly, she refers to the collection of some 40,000 documents as part of herself, and says that it was this that kept her in Peshawar after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 evicted the Taliban regime, prompting many exiles to return. “There was this big exodus from Pakistan – all the NGOs, UN, everybody came to Kabul,” she says. “But I didn’t because I wasn’t sure it was secure and I’m very vulnerable – it’s all paper. At that point I had no scanning, no back-up. It would have only taken one daisy cutter from an American, or a match from a mullah, and I’d be finished.”

Fearing Pakistani bureaucrats would find some way to keep her precious collection in Peshawar, the archive was finally moved piecemeal in 2003, smuggled out by Dupree’s devoted staff in hidden sacks of documents amid the cargoes trundling through the Khyber Pass. A new $2m library is being built on Kabul University’s leafy campus to house it, with the money and land provided by powerful friends, some of them dating back to the 1960s and the five o’clock follies.Map of Kabul from the original 1977 An Historical Guide to Afghanistan





Likewise Dupree. She says there is nothing to draw her back to the US, and every few weeks she visits Kabul from Peshawar, despite the fact that the frontier city is now extraordinarily dangerous. The Tribal Areas are in what looks like full-scale revolt against efforts by unmanned US drone aircraft and the Pakistani military to stem the rising tide of the Taliban. When I met Dupree again, amid the freezing book stacks of Kabul University, where staff were laboriously digitising part of the collection, she was not quite as cheerily optimistic about the region’s future as she had been the previous autumn, noting how the Taliban had infested some of the provinces to the south of Kabul.

At 82, she had recently had to move from the house in Peshawar where she had lived with a large collection of cats for the past 15 years, after her landlady pushed up her rent. She rarely ventured out from her new abode after a rash of kidnappings and killings of foreigners in Peshawar, including an attempt to shoot the top US diplomat in the city. Absurdly, it would be safer for her to live full-time in Kabul, but she said Peshawar is the only place where she is left alone for long enough to “get on with my writing”.

But for all the difficulties and dangers, she isn’t leaving. “I think there’s a future for these people and I think maybe I can help. That’s why I stay here. A lot of people call it the Afghan virus. You get it and it’s like malaria: you think you are free of it and you go away, and suddenly you’re back.” !

Administered Tribal Areas on the frontier where the Taliban and al-Qaeda leaderships are based] – and what are they doing? They are creating friction because everyone is trying to get hold of their money. But it’s hard to dissuade these people.”

. . .

Dupree has great confidence in the power of books to bring about change in Afghanistan, not just through her collection of documents, but also a village library scheme she has set up to help bolster literacy rates in a country where, like so much else, basic skills have been destroyed by three decades of war.

“I used to argue with the young men that they should finish school before they went off to fight, but they said, ‘Oh no, I’m going to the jihad!’ So now these young men, who should be at the peak of their productive abilities, don’t have the mental skills or the emotional skills to deal with ordinary, day-to-day life.”

However, she remains optimistic because of the attitude of young Afghans, who she says are determined to make something of their lives and their country: “I find their honesty very appealing. I don’t like what’s happening in the politics here, but the young people give me hope. They don’t have much money because there aren’t many jobs, but they will spend what little they have to go take an IT course, or go take a business course, or do something. They haven’t given up.”

www.afghanscene.com Afghan Scene January 2011


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The original 1977 An Historical Guide to Afghanistan





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the eyes, hands and feet. They are disfigured for all their life.”

Leprosy is a disease that conjures up visions of medieval dirt, destitution and extreme disfigurement, of people confined to colonies while parts of their body - fingers, toes, nose - rot and fall off, and where they eventually die.

While today’s reality is a long way from that apocryphal picture, that the disease still exists in Afghanistan is a commentary on how little development has come since the Taliban were overthrown in a US-led invasion. Despite tens of billions of dollars in aid money flowing into the country since 2001, living conditions for millions of Afghans have changed little from those of centuries ago.

The Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai has complained that it lacks control over much of the aid money - more than 40 billion dollars in less than a decade - and that oversight by donors is so poor cash is easily diverted or embezzled. Officials have estimated that about a third of the money has gone

Mossa lives on the top of an Afghan mountain four hours’ walk from the nearest road in one of the poorest

parts of the world and cannot remember the last time he washed.

A creeping pattern that looks like a fossilised fern decorates his right forearm - the tell-tale sign that he has leprosy. His body has gone into shock as it reacts to the infection, said Dr Ali Moral, who points to the 17-year-old’s swollen red face, arms and legs.

“The first sign of the disease is the skin lesions with no sensation - no burning, irritation, itching or pain, just no sensation at all,” Moral said, prodding Mossa’s arm to prove its numbness. “The nerves become enlarged and thick. Then the eyebrows fall out - that is another major tell-tale sign. Then the eyelids become perforated and paralysed, the patient cannot close the eyes so they can’t blink, the eyes become dry and eventually they go blind. “The hands become clubbed,” he said, illustrating the effect by tightening his fingers into claws. “The nerves pull the fingers inwards. It destroys

The word leprosy conjures up visions of dirt, destitution and disfigurement but Lynne O’Donnell reports how billions in Afghan aid has failed to beat a medieval disease

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and, under the Taliban’s 1996-2001 regime, massacred.

Life unchanged for hundreds of years

Squatting beside Mossa’s foam-mattress bed on the floor of a cold concrete room he is sharing with an elderly tuberculosis sufferer, Moral said the only way to find lepers was to look for them. He found Mossa while on a regular mobile-clinic tour of four Afghan provinces, looking for people suffering from leprosy or tuberculosis.

Moral has this year found nine leprosy sufferers in the provinces he tours - three in Bamiyan, the others in surrounding Daikundi, Ghor and Sar-E-Pul, he said, adding: “That’s half the number I had last year.” The UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO) puts the number of confirmed new leprosy cases detected by late 2010 at 26, about half the number in 2009.

Afghanistan has 10 leprosy clinics across the country, where WHO provides the drugs and funding for treatment, said Mohammad Reza Aloudal, WHO’s national coordinator for tuberculosis and leprosy.

Moral said the main obstacle to finding lepers is that the disease incubates for between five and 20 years, and so is difficult to detect before the lesions start appearing.

While it is not as contagious as myth would have it, leprosy can be passed on if contact is prolonged and close - as it is among large

directly to the firms that win the development contracts from donors such as USAID.

Many billions are believed to have disappeared into Afghanistan’s maw of official corruption, or been wasted on misguided or short-sighted projects. A US government audit last month found that around 18 billion dollars was unaccounted for, snagged in a “labyrinth” of contract bureaucracy. Last year, Afghanistan’s Western backers agreed to give the government greater control of aid money - up to 50 percent from 20 percent - and to improve their own oversight of development funds. What provincial officials say they need is the basics - roads, power, hospitals and schools - to drag their regions into the current century.

Moral’s tiny clinic - three minutes by motorbike from the house he was born in - is testimony to unfulfilled need. For the past decade he has run the clinic for German charity Lepco in Yakawlang, a district of about 65,000 people almost 3,000 metres (9,000 feet) up in the mountains of Bamiyan province, in Afghanistan’s central highlands.

The region is famous for the huge Buddhas that were blown up by the Taliban in early 2001, for the azure Band-i-Amir lakes, for breathtaking landscape, and as one of the few areas to escape the worst of the war. The people here are mostly Hazaras, believed to be descended from Ghengis Khan’s 13th century hordes who rampaged across Central Asia. As Shiite Muslims in a Sunni-dominated country they are at the bottom of most demographic ladders - impoverished, uneducated, marginalised



Living conditions have changed little in hundreds of years | Lynne O’Donnell






“Last night I gave him medicine to bring down the inflammation, decrease the swelling. He has been like this for a week. If he was like this for longer, he would be disabled for the rest of his life,” he said.

Moral said he had found Mossa in time to treat the disease with a cocktail of drugs, with hopes of a full recovery - eight months to deal with the reaction, and a year to cure the leprosy.

Mossa certainly caught the disease from his brother, Moral said, adding that 80 percent of people worldwide have natural immunity.“Mossa’s brother also had a reaction. It was during the winter so they couldn’t get treatment. His hands are now clubbed, his arms are paralysed, his eyelids are paralysed. He must be cared for by his family. Marriage will be difficult.”

Mossa’s father Ishmael, 60, sits worrying at the foot of his son’s bed.

Neighbours in his village of 30 families are good to them, he said, but they don’t know that the boys have leprosy. If they did, the stigma is such that no one would ever come near them again, he said. The family are so poor that they look after other people’s livestock. They are illiterate, the nearest school four hours’ walk away.As Moral examined the lesion on Mossa’s forearm, he said the boy had probably been developing signs of leprosy for about two years.

“We have to keep him here for observation, to prevent disability setting in, so he will be here for the next eight months at least,” he said. !

Afghan families such as Mossa’s, with 12 siblings living in a small mud house.

“I’ve been doing this for 10 years,” Moral said. “I spend half my time on the road. “When I first started doing this, we found more leprosy patients more often, but it has decreased in these past 10 years.

“Now we only find them in the remote areas, in the valleys where people have no access to clinics, they don’t have enough food, hygiene is very poor, life conditions are very poor and haven’t really changed for hundreds of years.”

Of course, he said, he dishes out advice on hygiene, on not having livestock living in the house, on washing body and clothes at least now and then. “But it is not possible in the remote areas. They live on the mountain, they don’t have running water or electricity,” he said. “Hygiene definitely plays a role in getting leprosy.”

Moral said he thought to drop in on Mossa’s family as he was passing by Dari Chost, 100 kilometres west of Yakawlang, at the end of his October tour last week.

“There is no road, the village is on a mountaintop, I walked four hours to get there,” he said. “I found his brother some years ago, and yesterday I found him,” he said of Mossa.

“His body is reacting to the multi-bacterial infection. He is swollen in the face, arms, legs. He can’t walk. The reaction is feverish, body and muscle pains, extreme weakness.

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Leprosy can be passed on if contact is prolonged, as it is in large families | Lynne O’Donnell





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brawling in the studio. Mr Hangam, who is surprisingly demure off-screen despite his hip-hop swagger and noisy dress sense, glows. “The greatest thing is I made something out of nothing,” he says.

His feelings might pass as comment on Afghanistan’s TV industry as a whole which, despite being banned for five years under the Taliban, now has about 20 stations operating in the capital Kabul. The latest addition is 1 TV, which has a mission to “uplift the nation” and hit the airwaves at the end of 2008. Its British production director, Siobhan Berry, 34, says the station’s edge will come from its superior programming, which will include cartoons, game shows, impartial news reporting and imports from India, Turkey and the West. Despite widespread Afghan enthusiasm, this is a grand goal in a country where know-how is still limited and ambition outstrips ability painfully often.

Afghanistan’s most successful media outlet is the Moby Group, which broadcasts Zang-e-Khatar via the country’s most popular channel, Tolo television (Afghan Scene is also owned by Moby). It has courted controversy, not just with its satirical offering but by continuing to run wildly popular Indian soap operas (in which sex and romance are dealt with more overtly than some Afghans are comfortable with) after a backlash by conservative clerics led most stations to cancel them. It is also the home of Afghan Star, an American Idol-style programme that gained international recognition when filmmaker Havana Marking’s documentary of the same name was featured

In a tiny studio tucked away in Kabul’s most upmarket enclave is a man whose job is lampooning warlords. Not that Hanif

Hangam, the host of Afghanistan’s top satirical TV show, stops there. Taliban rebels, UN diplomats and pilgrims to Mecca are all subject to his caustic wit. Want to know what’s really happening in the presidential palace? “Let’s cut to video!” Mr Hangam crows, cueing up a shot of the president, Hamid Karzai who, you notice, is none other than your derisive host cloaked in drag. It’s scurrilous and unsubtle but this is political satire, Afghan-style.

Zang-e-Khatar (Alarm Bell) has been thriving on Afghanistan’s recent political tribulations, with the presidential and parliamentary election debacles, corruption charges and now the ambitious Taliban reconciliation and reintegration programme outlined last year in London providing ample material. The show receives prime-time billing at 9pm every Wednesday and almost everyone, it seems, has seen an episode. “It’s good entertainment,” said Ahmad Fawad, a shopkeeper. “It’s our custom to watch it every week.” His friend chimed in: “It’s funny and it’s informative. Our government is weak and Zang-e-Khatar tells people what’s going on.”

In recent episodes Mr Hangam and his panellists have targeted idle politicians who, they assert, prefer sex tourism in Tajikistan to inconvenient affairs of state. The international community’s overtures for talks with the Taliban have been held up to scorn. And there is a running joke in which spokesmen from Nato, the government and the rebels end up

Political sensitivities notwithstanding, Afghanistan’s media sector is booming—and nowhere more than TV satire. Julius Cavendish reports on the comedians lambasting the rich to entertain the poor

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caused enough of a stir that the politicians they lambast have begun to change their ways. MPs apparently stopped throwing bottles at each other during heated debates after one of the programmes called for bottling companies to start making MP-friendly receptacles. On another occasion, the Kabul municipality began repairing potholes after an episode pilloried its failure to fulfil this most rudimentary of duties. !

at the Sundance Festival 2009. In the last series a female contender was forced into hiding after the Taliban, mullahs and even her relatives threatened to kill her for violating taboos by taking part.

Moby Group claims its success - it says it has 56 per cent of the market - is down to its impartial stance, still something of a rarity. Aside from government-owned stations, which frequently come in for allegations of bias towards Mr Karzai’s government, there is the Tamadon channel, which concentrates on providing its owner, a leading Shiite cleric, with a platform from which he preaches, lobbies for Islamic laws and criticises the West. Meanwhile, the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum uses his Aiina channel to promote his battlefield exploits and broadcast footage of him galloping after Taliban fighters on horseback.

For Afghanistan’s fledgling presenters the progress has sometimes come at a cost. Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said in 2008 that two TV presenters had been arrested, one for allegedly offending Afghan clerics and another for interviewing a Taliban spokesman. Mr Hangam himself says he has received death threats and been beaten up for some of his less-than-complimentary skits. The show’s impact can be measured in other ways, too. Zang-e-Khatar has several imitators despite the reluctance of authorities to tolerate dissent (see Censored in Afghanistan, p14). Khandahaye Geryadar (Laugh Until You Cry) and Talaq (The Trap) are two of the more popular spin-offs and, like Zang-e-Khatar, have

;7

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U S E D C A R S

C L A S S I F I E D S

New “Breathable” Kevlar body

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F O R S A L E

Lost CatTubby-white.Last seen at the Kabul Gun Club shooting range.

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Personals

Embassy girl WLTM MLO and his

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:.Afghan Scene October 2009 www.afghanscene.com

P E R S O N A L S

Expatriate family based in Kabul with two young children looking for a female childcare provider (nanny) with some ability to understand and/or communicate in English. Previous experience desirable. Direct responses welcome; referrals from expatriates to potential candidates also much appreciated. Contact 0799285426

Expatriate family establishing a private residence in Kabul and looking for good used furniture, appliances and household items such as couches, dressers, washing machine, and kitchenware and appliances. Contact 0799285426

Six bed house Wazir Akbar khan Ref 3174 Three bathrooms, kitchen, saloon, dining room, sub basement, 4 rooms, out buildings: 2 rooms 1 bathroom, garden with swimming pool Car parking for up to three cars. $10,999 a month, o n o. Call 0700334455

100 beds building Sher pur Ref 4082 Sixty bathrooms, thirty kitchens, saloon, dining room, sub basement, 4 rooms, out buildings: 2 rooms 1 bathroom, garden with swimming poolCar parking for up to three cars.Price: (TBC). Call 0700334455

Nineteen bed house Wazir Akbar Khan Ref 3166Nineteen bathrooms, kitchen, basement: 70 sq m saloon, 40 sq m bar, split air conditions, central heating, refrigerators, TVs, carpets, beds, internet network and etc, parking for up to three cars. $14,999 a month, Call 0700334455

Seven bed house Taimani Ref 5017 Three bathrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, out buildings: five rooms, three bathrooms, kitchen and sub basement, garden, Car parking for up to ten cars. $7,999 a month, Call 0700334455

Ten bed house Shar-e-Now Ref 2190 Twelve bathrooms, two kitchens, saloon and dining room two sub basements Out buildings: room and one bathroom Car parking for up to twenty cars.$11,999 a month, o n o. Call 0798 500 500

Ten bed house Shar-e-Now Ref 2093 Seven bathrooms, two kitchens, saloon and dining room, mature garden Car parking for up to ten cars. $7,999 a month, o n o. Call 0700334455

Twelve bed house Shar-e-Now Ref 2045 Eight bathrooms, two kitchens, two saloons, two sub basements Car parking for up to ten cars, refurbished to a high specification Out buildings: reception, kitchen, bathroom, laundry and guard room$16,999 a month, o n o. Call 0700334455

W A N T E D U s e d F u r n i t u r e

S e e k i n g N a n n y

T O L ET





Afghan Hotels and Guesthouses

Kabul Serena HotelFroshgah Streetwww.serenahotels.comTel: 0799 654 000

Safi Landmark Hotel & SuitesCharahi Ansariwww.safilandmarkhotelsuites.comTel: 0202 203 131

The Inter Continental HotelBaghe Bala Roadwww.intercontinentalkabul.comTel: 0202 201 321

Gandamack Lodge HotelSherpur [email protected]: 0700 276 937, 0798 511 111

Mustafa HotelCharahi Sadaratwww.mustafahotel.comTel: 070 276 021

Heetal Plaza HotelStreet 14, Wazir Akbar Khanwww.heetal.comTel: 0799 167 824, 0799 159 697

Sanpo Guesthouse(formally Unica Guesthouse)Royal Mattress Haji Yaqoob Square

The International ClubHaji Yaqoob Square, Street 3, Shar-e Naw. Tel: 0774 763 858

Golden Star HotelCharrhay Haji Yaqoob,Shar-e Naw. www.kabulgolden-starhotel.comTel: 0799 333 088, 0799 557 281

Roshan HotelCharaye Turabaz Khan,Shar-e Naw.Tel: 0799 335 424

Restaurants

DeliveryEasyfoodDelivers from any restaurant to your homewww.easyfood.afTel: 0796 555 000, 0796 555 001

AfghanJirga RestaurantStreet 10, left Lane 1, House 255. Tel: 077 730 0090

RumiQala-e Fatullah Main Rd, between Streets 5 & 6Tel: 0799 557 021

SufiStreet 1, Qala-e Fatullahwww.sufi.com.af Tel: 0774 212 256, 0700 210 651

Herat RestaurantShar-e Naw, main road,Diagonally opposite Cinema Park

Khosha RestaurantAbove the Golden Star Hotel. Tel: 0799 888 999

Mixed/WesternFat Man/What-a-Burger CafeWazir Akbar Khan, main road, On the bend near Masoud Circle Tel: 0700 298 301, 0777 151 510

Le Dizan (formerly L’Atmosphere)Street 4, TaimaniTel: 0798 224 982, 0798 413 872

Flower Street CaféStreet 2, Qala-e Fatullah.Tel: 0700 293 124, 0799 356 319

Habibi’s SteakhouseStreet 15, right Lane 2, Wazir Akbar Khan Tel: 079 336 3725

Kabul Coffeehouse & CaféStreet 6, on the left, Qale-e Fat-ullah Tel: 0752 005 275

Le BistroOne street up from Chicken Street, Behind the MOI,Shar-e Naw Tel: 0799-598852

Red Hot Sizzlin’ SteakhouseDistrict 16, Macroyan 1, Nader Hill Area Tel: 0799 733 468

Le Pelican Cafe du KabulDarulaman Road, almostopposite the Russian Embassy.Bright orange guard box.

Tex MexLa CantinaThird left off Butcher St,Shar-e NawTel: 0798 271 915

LebaneseTaverne du LibanStreet 15, Lane 3, Wazir Akbar Khan Tel: 0799 828 376

The GrillStreet 15, Wazir Akbar Khan.Tel: 0799 818 283,0799 792 879

Cedar HouseBehind Kabul City Centre, Shar-e Naw Tel: 0799-121412

TurkishIstanbulMain road, on the left, between Massoud Circle Jalalabad Road Roundabout. Tel: 0799-407818

IranianShandizPakistan Embassy Street, off Street 14 Wazir Akbar KhanTel: 0799-342928

Italian/PizzaEverest PizzaMain Road, near Street 12Wazir Akbar Khanwww.everestpizza.comTel: 0700 263 636, 0799 317 979

Bella ItaliaStreet 14, Wazir Akbar KhanTel: 0799 600 666

Springfield Pizza Take AwayDutch Embassy Street, Shar-e Naw Tel: 0799 001 520

IndianNamasteStreet 15, left Lane 4, (last house on right side) Wazir Akbar Khan Tel: 0772 011 120

Delhi DarbarShar-e Naw, close to UK Sports Tel: 0799 324 899

Anar RestaurantLane 3, Street 14,Wazir Akbar Khan Tel: 0799 567 291

ChineseGolden Key Seafood RestaurantLane 4, Street 13, Wazir Akbar Khan. Tel: 0799 002 800, 0799 343 319

ThaiMai ThaiHouse 38, Lane 2, Street 15, Wazir Akbar Khan Tel:0796 423 040

KoreanNew WorldBetween Charayi Haji Yacub and Charayi Ansari, on the right. Shar-e Naw. Tel: 0799 199 509

Want to get on the Afghan Essentials list of places to eat and sleep? Contact [email protected]

Supermarkets, Grocers & Butchers

A-OneBottom of Shar-e Naw Park

ChelseaShar-e Naw main road, opposite Kabul Bank

SpinneysWazir Akbar Khan, opposite British Embassy

FinestWazir Akbar Khan Roundabout

Fat Man ForestWazir Akbar Khan, main road.

Enyat Modern ButcherQala-e Fatullah main road,Near street four

ATMsKabul City Centre, Shar-e Naw (AIB

AIB Main Office, Opposite Camp Egg-ers (AIB)

AIB Shar-e Naw Branch, next to Chelsea Supermarket (AIB)

HQ ISAF, Outside Cianos Pizzeria, US Embassy Street (AIB)

KAIA Military Airbase, Outside Cianos Pizzeria, Airport (AIB)

Finest Supermarket, Wazir Akbar Khan (AIB)

World Bank Guard Hut, Street 15 Wazir Akbar Khan (Standard Chartered)

Standard Chartered Branch, Street 10, Wazir Akbar Khan (Standard Chartered)

Hairdresser (Men & Women)

Call Mustafa on 079 888 4403 Salon in Sanpo Guesthouse

scene

;; Afghan Scene January 2011

Hitthe

message!target

Have you considered advertising in Afghanistan's leading magazine aimed at the expat communityand key business decision makers?

With over 8,000 copies distributed free of charge, Afghan Scene keeps those working in Afghanistan and new comers to the country informed on recent developments with articles and reviewsfrom leading writers.

For full details [email protected]

with your





Kaboora is Afghanistan’s leading Television production company:

Kaboora Ltd is the TV production division of the award-winning Moby Group (MG) - Afghanistan’sleading privately owned and integrated media company. Kaboora is delivering daily 50 hours of content for TV Tolo, TV Lemar and Tolo News. We are currently recruiting for positions within our production company for senior TV professionals. You should be comfortable working in a challenging

environment. Your working location will be Kabul.

We are looking for freelancers as well as permanent employees. Technical Director (Television)

Director (Drama & Show)Lighting Director

Director of PhotographyLighting Cameramen

Cameramen (ENG, Studio & Drama)Sound supervisor

Commercial ProducerProducer (Drama & Show development)

Series Producer

ScriptwriterStoryboard artistsSet DesignerVideo Editor (Final Cut Pro)Make-up artist (also SFX)Stunt coordinatorController (TV)Showhosts (Dari or Pashto speaking)Vocal coach (Dari or Pashto speaking)Actors (Dari or Pashto speaking)

Kaboora is a Moby Group Company – “engaging, educating and entertaining Afghanistan since 2002”

Interested applicants please forward your CV and covering letter to [email protected]

afghan scene magazine january/february 2011

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