In the Danger Zone (2 page)

POPULATION:
27 million

PERCENTAGE LIVING ON LESS THAN
$2
A DAY
:
53%

UNDP HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX:
not available

CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX POSITION:
117 out of 159

GDP (NOMINAL) PER CAPITA:
$335 (164/179)

FOOD AID RECIPIENTS:
WFP aims to provide food aid to 6.6 million Afghans between Jan 2006 and Dec 2008 at a cost of $372 million

MALNUTRITION:
54% of children under five are stunted

I'm nursing a deep-rooted, fear-related nausea, as I toy with my flak jacket, which weighs a ton. I wonder whether I'll be able to walk in it, let alone run from flying bullets if the situation arises. The flight into Kabul is a peculiar, disconcerting affair. I'm on a UN jet complete with air stewardesses, South African pilot and dark blue leather seats with ample legroom. It's plain and unadorned yet discreetly luxurious. I've hitched a lift using the UN's journalist's arrangement: I pay the full market cost of the flight, and could get bumped up at any time. I sit with my arse muscles tightly clenched, as they will continue to be for the next two weeks, wondering why on earth I didn't get around to writing a will. I glance over at Marc, my producer on this trip, but he's already fast asleep. Bastard.

There's tension in the air, even up here at 35,000 feet. I ponder morbidly on ground-to-air missiles and adventure-versus-idiocy ratios. My misery only increases as we start to descend over Kabul.

I look at some photos of my daughters to distract me, but just then the plane makes a violent lurch and pulls a 90-degree turn. What the hell was that for? My heart pumps like the clappers and I grip the armrests. Suddenly we flatten out just as violently, and I see the runway hurtling towards us. Without pausing to pitch, roll and tickle, or whatever it is those nice cosy BA pilots do, the plane dumps itself with a crash onto a strip of lumpy concrete. My teeth are clamped so tightly together that my gums are about to bleed. I look over at Marc again. He yawns and wakes up before giving me a friendly grin. I'm going to have to work on this relationship.

During my high-risk training I was told that airports are extremely dangerous – I'll be a great kidnap target and I'll be disorientated so I should take the utmost precaution. It's pitch black when I step onto the tarmac at Kabul International airport, and as the other passengers amble off the plane, I stand there trying to wriggle into my flak jacket and helmet. Everyone stares at me. Marc quietly suggests I put the flak jacket away – I'm only going to draw attention from potential kidnappers. Oh God, I'm so confused. I want to go home!

The airport isn't a great advert for Afghanistan. It's crumbling, chaotic, bewildering, filthy and full of angry-looking shouty blokes, closed offices, and people with guns but no obvious affiliation.

We struggle into the car park and throw all our gear into the back of a 4×4. Our driver hoons at breakneck pace through the dark streets – I suppose we're being treated like VIPs, with a special dispensation to flout traffic rules and speed limits in order to avoid kidnappers and Improvised Explosive Devices. Our security is more important than the safety of other road users – we are from the BBC after all. But I soon realize that he just always drives like this, and when I'm finally brave enough to look out of the window I realize that everyone else drives like this too.

There are three places to stay in Kabul. One is the Intercontinental – a vast corporate number to the west of the city, built by the British in 1969, and now in a state of creeping decrepitude. It's perched on a big hill and has a wonderful view across Kabul. And here lies the problem: it sticks out like a fluorescent crucifix on an imam. You couldn't create a better target for missiles in a lawless city if you wrote 'Contents: valuable journalists, diplomats and government ministers' on its side. During the war, all the journalists gathered here to enjoy its bar, pool (women not allowed) and room service, and it remains popular. Every now and then someone bombs it, or casually takes a pot-shot at it with a shoulder-held missile launcher: the last rocket attack was only two weeks before we arrived. A forlorn sign at the entrance says 'No Weapons'. You takes your chances.

The second place is the recently opened, absurdly luxurious Serena. There's nothing wrong with this place, as long as you can get your pretty little head to sleep on those goose-down pillows when outside 6.6 million Afghans go hungry on a daily basis. (I don't mean to sound preachy, but the contrast is a lot to bear.) The Serena has a small army of security guards at the door, bristling with modern weaponry, and inside the prawn cocktail is safe to munch, and the loo roll is of perfect pile. All of which puts it firmly out of the BBC's hotel budget.

I'm booked into the third option: the Gandamack Lodge, a legendary Kabul institution also known as Peter Jouvenal's Place, and the favoured drinking hole of the international press. It used to be the home of Bin Laden's fourth wife and family, but now it's become a small, nicely down-at-heel hotel (although in Kabul terms, it's high luxury) with a colonial feel designed to please grouchy British war correspondents, who enjoy its collection of military souvenirs and antiques.

There are machine gun-toting guards at the low-key entrance, which is both comforting and horrific, but I don't really care any more. I'm exhausted from The Fear, and I'd quite like it to stop.

Marc and I sit down to a bottle of Woolf Blass cabernet sauvignon (didn't expect to see one of those in Kabul) and my first taste of Afghan food: mantu (ravioli-type pasta filled with meat and served in a tomato sauce) and pakaura (deep-fried battered potatoes). It's all bland, but fine – presumably watered down for Western hacks. Marc plumps for chicken breast in a creamy sauce with chips. We chat for the first time, and I begin to warm to him, mainly because he's been to a zillion war zones and I get the feeling he's keen to get me home in one piece.

I'm still nervous, though, so we sink a second bottle of Woolfey and a couple of whiskies before finally going to bed, I'm ashamed to say, thoroughly pissed. It's one way to deal with The Fear. It feels like I've been through a lot already, and we haven't even started.

Good Morning Kabul

A shaft of light pierces my hangover and I drag myself to the window. Ah, yes. Afghanistan. One of the unhappiest, poorest, most heavily-armed and dangerous places on the planet, and a Category A security risk to boot. Added to that, there's no pork, no chicken (bird flu), no fish (no sea), no ovens and no visible women. Why on earth would a food writer want to come here? And what am I doing in a Muslim country with a
hangover?

• • • • •

Let's get to grips with Aghanistan. It's a confusing country, so a quick, pub-friendly, 60-second rundown of the major rucks might be useful before we begin.

The Persians started it all back in 500 BC with the Achaemenid Empire, followed by Alexander the Great, and all manner of other imperialists and rogues, including ourselves as far back as 1838, with the First Anglo-Afghan War. We mucked about here with varying degrees of success until finally leaving in 1921. There was a relatively peaceful period from 1933 until it all went to pot again in 1973, when the Russians invaded with terrible consequences.

In 1979 they sent 150,000 soldiers to fight a disastrous ten-year war against the US-funded Mujahideen and gave up only after 15,000 of their soldiers had been killed, and 5 million Afghans had become refugees. As soon as the Russians left, the USA lost interest too, but instead of peace, the country descended into chaos and corruption under the faction-decimated Mujahideen. The Taliban were a politico-religious reaction to the misery, and seized most of the country by 2000, curbing freedoms and violating human rights, especially those of women, but they also imposed order and initially eradicated the opium trade.

Soon after 9/11, however, the USA took umbrage at the Taliban's fondness for terrorists and, alongside the Afghan Northern Alliance, swept through the country with astonishing speed. Since then, cash has poured into Afghanistan from the West, but daily life for most people is still miserable, impoverished and insecure.

I always wondered why people wanted to muck about with Afghanistan. This is one of the poorest countries in the world – it produces little except opium and carpets, it has no substantial resources other than gas, it's a sod of a climate to live in, lurching from arid to freezing with not a lot in between, and it has a feudal system that is almost impossible to crack. So why does everyone want to conquer it? The answer is that it's a
buffer.
Britain invaded because it was on the border with its precious India; Russia because it's a troublesome neighbour; the USA because Russia wanted it, plus it was near the oil-rich Persian Gulf; and Alexander the Great because . . . well, he just liked collecting stuff. Trouble is, no one – that's
no one –
has ever managed to control this place without a flagrant disregard for human rights.

There you go – you don't get stuff like this in many food books, do you? Now let's crack on.

• • • • •

I drive for hours through a thick stew of traffic to find Kabul's central food market. At first glance it appears pretty civilized, with decent stalls and people pottering around, but on closer inspection I can see that it floats on a sea of mud and excrement that smells so bad I want to vomit. I visit a friendly butcher whose lamb carcass displays a vast fatty growth and I get very excited. This is Afghanistan's legendary fat-tailed sheep (it doesn't have a fat tail; the fat actually sits above its bottom), and although I've read about them, I doubted that they really existed. The fat is delicate, light and fluffy, an extraordinary cross between sheepskin and washed tripe. The butcher says it's an aphrodisiac 'worth a thousand Viagra'. It also sports a single, enormous veiny testicle (the other one's already been sold). I wonder if I'll get to eat one of those.

I buy boulani (a kind of vegetable-filled pancake) at a market stall next to an open sewer (all the stalls are next to open sewers), and I shouldn't really eat them on health and sanitation grounds (both the driver and the translator refuse to touch them), but there's no point coming to Afghanistan to find out about food if I'm not prepared to eat it, so I dive in and hope for the best. The boulanis taste great – good thick crêpes covered in searing hot chilli sauce. It's always possible that The Fear has got a grip on my tastebuds and clouded my judgement, but I think I'm going to like Afghan food.

Masr-i-Sharif

Now the adventure really begins. I want to discover how ordinary people suvive day-to-day in extraordinary situations like those here in Afghanistan. Tomorrow is the Afghan New Year, the biggest event in the Afghan calendar, and the biggest celebrations are held in the northern city of Masr-i-Sharif, which is overlooked by the Hindu Kush.

The city was the site of a series of gruesome massacres by both the Taliban and their enemies in 1997-8, and was also the first city to fall to the Afghan Northern Alliance during the most recent of the many Afghan wars. The rout began on 7 October 2001 and ended with John Simpson taking Kabul single-handedly just 37 days later. It is the stronghold of a powerful warlord called Dostum, and it's now relatively safe compared to the insurgency-minded south.

All seats on all flights have been booked out for months, so I've chartered a small plane to fly me to the north. When I call to confirm it the company says that they've decided not to fly – dodgy weather over the Hindu Kush. But if I don't get there today, I'll miss the country's biggest party, so I drive back to the airport to try to blag my way onto another plane. After haggling, wheedling, pestering and whining, I find that there are actually two seats left on a commercial flight to Masr, but I have to wait to see if the last two customers turn up. I pray that they've had an accident. (Not a bad one, you understand, just a stubbed foot or a lost set of house keys, something like that.)

Finally, the booking clerk accepts my bribe. I make a dash for the plane and claim one of the last two seats at the back. Yeehee. The one advantage of a country being this chaotic is that it works both ways – you can get picked up just as easily as you're let down.

On the plane, Marc and I have our first row. I wanted to learn how to slaughter a sheep to discover about halal tradition but according to our research, local custom requires me to have been baptized to be able to do it. I haven't been. The upside is that I've looked into baptism and, apparently, in emergencies, anyone can baptize me, even Marc. I'm not entirely sure that I want my baps tized by Marc, but beggars can't be choosers. Marc, however, finds the whole baptism thing distastefully touchy-feely and not a little weird. He's right, of course.

When we arrive, it's a warm, sunny afternoon. The air is clean and the mountains are beautiful. At last I'm beginning to feel calmer. I'm met by Aleem Agha, my guide for the trip. If you ever go to Afghanistan (and I hope you do), you'll need Aleem. He's like Sallah in
Piaiders of the Lost Ark –
a big man with a huge personality, fingers in lots of pies, busting with honour and trustworthiness, and with access to pretty much anyone in the country at the stab of a mobile phone.

We set off, and the driver Basir swiftly finds the biggest traffic jam in the world, en route to the fortified safe house of the World Food Programme (WFP), where I have kindly been offered a bed for the night. Looking out of the car, I get my first real daytime glimpse of the country and it's quite a shock. There's pretty much no infrastructure – there are no proper roads and most buildings are either half-built or on the verge of collapse. The fact that the country functions at all is little short of a miracle, as the government has little or no control outside Kabul, mainly because it has little or no cash. (This is one of the poorest places on the planet, so it's not surprising that no one pays taxes.)