Rock and Hard Places by Andrew Mueller

maybe Massoud’s rocket batteries have lost interest in the airport and are trying out a new target. Or that Abdul really does have friends in high places.
    “Oh,” says Akbar. “I think it’s an earthquake.”
    I will later learn that a few hundred kilometres north, 5000 people have just been buried alive. Funny, in a country so forsaken by God—scenery aside—that people should be so keen on Him.
     
    WONDERING IF AN older head might prove more reasonable, I drop in on the mayor. Mullah Abdul Majid, even by Afghan standards, is an imposing figure. He has one severely mangled hand and one missing leg, legacies of his time as a Mujahedin commander—a common CV among senior Taliban figures. He begins by welcoming me to his city “in the name of Allah, the compassionate and merciful,” and pours me the first decent coffee I’ve had in two weeks. An elderly secretary beside him writes down every detail of our conversation, so that it may be broadcast to an enthralled nation on Radio Shariat (I listen to the
daily English-language bulletin that night, hoping to hear that “His Excellency the Mayor today briefly tolerated some scruffy hack from The Face ,” but I can’t make out a word through the static).
    “It is our religious duty to implement the basics of Islam,” he explains. “No other country has shed so much blood. We must ensure that we have a result for the price people paid.”
    He deflects questions about women (“The burqa is not new to Afghanistan, just to the outside world”) and drugs (shrugs). He only gets excited when I raise foreign reaction to the Taliban—nobody but Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates has recognised the Taliban as a legitimate government.
    “Five years ago,” he glowers, “the world was wondering how to bring peace to Afghanistan. The Taliban did, and world still recognises robbers like Massoud.”
    Laughing Boy at Estekhbarat had said the same, and it’s a hard point to argue with. It’s not like the world doesn’t do business with human rights black holes like China, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Maybe the Taliban are suffering for being too honest or too artless or too thick to dress up their regime as anything other than mediaeval barbarism. But maybe if they moderated their approach, the embassies might start reopening.
    “You cannot,” says Majid, “moderate the will of God.”
     
    THE ONLY MODERATING influences on the Taliban are Kabul’s aid agencies, or non-governmental organisations (NGOs). They are doing what they can to drag this hopelessly poor nation into the current century. Afghanistan’s poverty is best illustrated not by per capita wages as percentages of gross domestic product, or anything like that, but by a uniformed policeman who accosts me one afternoon in Kabul’s market.
    “You are very rich,” says the cop. “I am very poor. Give me some money, please, so I may spend it.”
    You’re supposed to arrest me first, I tell him.
    This destitution exists despite Afghanistan’s situation astride one of the most lucrative trade routes on earth—unfortunately, the kind of merchants who’ll shift crates of Pepsi across places this politically unpredictable and riddled with landmines are not the kind who pay import duties. It also seems incompatible with Afghanistan’s glorious
natural beauty, which, given a few years of peace, tourists would happily pay enormous sums to see. The only ones I meet are a pair of dour French passport stamp-collectors, in Afghanistan only because it’s the fifth-last country they haven’t been to. They ask me if I know anything about getting visas for North Korea, and if the Taliban will hassle them much.
    The few hundred other foreigners in Kabul all do far more useful things than checking off place names in their atlases, or asking nonplussed secret policemen who’s going to win the World Cup, and the Taliban hassle them a lot. The NGOs do the things governments are supposed to