Before Taliban

Introduction / 11
Thomas had encountered fifty years earlier. For one thing, where there once
had been few foreigners to speak of in the country, there were now swarms,
some tourists of the accustomed sort, but even more hippies or, as they
called themselves, world travelers—WTs. The center of activity for the WTs
was Shahr-i Nau, the New City, and the hotels and restaurants catering to
them on and near Chicken Street, named for the area’s poultry market,
which had been displaced by the foreign invasion. WTs manifested little discernible
interest in Afghanistan or Afghans. Foremost in most of their
minds was hashish (which was plentiful in Kabul), inexpensive ratatouilles
and omelets to assuage their drug-fueled appetites, and the pleasure of their
own spaced-out, casually licentious company.
With the exception of those who served and benefited from the WT
economy, most Kabulis with whom I came in contact ignored the young
Westerners, not so much it seemed because they were shocked by them but
rather because they were involved in their own intense love affair with
modernity. The American Center, where I worked, was the largest of a
number of English-language schools in the New City, and all were packed
with students. Everyone from shopkeepers to businessmen to schoolgirls
wanted to perfect their English, and they all crammed together in our classrooms—the
girls sitting in clusters and the older men keeping to themselves,
but otherwise all joined together in the shared communion of getting
ahead. Most of my students also came to class in Western clothes,
which they bought at the second-hand clothes bazaar. In and around the
school, I rarely saw a turban or the all-enveloping burqa veil that traditional
Afghan women wore. To the contrary, my nearest exposure to the
exotic Afghanistan of my imagining anywhere close to the school was in
neighboring antique shops, which sold rusting scimitars, helmets, flintlocks,
and the like—most of which, one would assume, had been pieces of
someone’s patrimony, cherished artifacts of past battles before they’d been
sold off for cash.
At the time, I had little grasp of what any of this meant or where it was
headed, but a hint was given to me in the form of an ethnographic documentary
that was previewed in the auditorium of the cultural center shortly
after my arrival in Afghanistan. The film was titled Naim and Jabar, and it
was the account of two boys who lived in the village of Aq Kupruk in northern
Afghanistan. The older of the two boys was back in his village for summer
vacation. His lifelong friend was a year younger and hoped to follow in
his footsteps by gaining admission to the provincial high school. To that end,
the two boys traveled to Mazar-i Sharif so that the younger boy could meet
with school officials and complete the entrance exam. The documentary fol-