Ageless Afghanistan

With satellite dishes snipped from tin cans, Afghans can sit back in the Middle Ages and keep tabs on the 21st century. Their bad luck is that this optical miracle only works one way.\n"I'm afraid the world just doesn't understand us," Shahla Paryan lamented, pouring the inevitable tea for a visitor sitting on a rich red carpet inside old mud walls.\n"It is wrong to believe that we were the same as those horrible people who brought terrorism to America," she said. "It is very wrong."\nWhen projected to outsiders, this capital evokes mixed images of 'One Thousand and One Nights' placed in an old 'Tombstone' movie set. But cameras can't show the dazzling complexities of societies as old as time.\nShahla and her sister Nilofar, for instance, view five years of Taliban rule as a nightmare forced upon them against which they had no defense but to wait behind closed curtains for deliverance.\nBoth are university graduates who specialize in combating illiteracy, and they are as much a part of the picture as the more familiar women in body-bag burqas who symbolize most Westerners' idea of Afghanistan.\nFor them, Osama bin Laden was a plague no more welcome than locusts or cholera. They see the Arab fighters around him as bullying strangers with no respect for the Afghans' ancient sense of right and wrong.\nA good look at Kabul reveals the danger of generalizing about a fiercely independent yet loosely knit nation of 21 million: Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara, Turkmen, Sikhs, and Hindus.\nStreaks of cruelty and fanaticism are marbled into far more common national ingredients: hospitality, respect for elders and traditions, self-reliance and the ability to resist incredible hardship on two cups of tea a day.\n"We don't want to see each other as ethnic groups but rather as individual Afghans who must solve problems in common," said Mubarak Ahmed Yar, soft-spoken and gray at 57.\nAs Afghanistan's director of forestry, Yar knows political infighting wastes the scant time the country has left to avert ecological as well as economic disaster. After 25 years of war, infrastructure lies in shambles.\nBut as headman of a neighborhood of worried Pashtuns at the edge of Kabul, he also knows that the "broad-based government" now under discussion is all that can save yet another generation from war.\nIf Pashtuns are a minority in Kabul, they are the most numerous group in Afghanistan. Most Taliban are Pashtun, creating a sort of guilt by association that Yar deplores. Like many of his tribe, he hates the Taliban.\n"Those mullahs reduced us to nothing," he said. "Their rule destroyed what little we had left, technology, industries, schools, agriculture, roads. They were like horses with blinders pulling us in one direction."\nCommunal tension has flared periodically in Kabul's history, now deep into its third millennium, but its multicultural inhabitants have built a rich and textured society that is more often ethnically seamless.\nThis city of something over a million lies on a plain ringed by dramatic mountains, snowy in winter and achingly beautiful in all seasons.\nIts old mud heart was pounded to pieces during shelling and firefights among the warlords who together drove out Russian troops in 1989, then turned on each other. Yet much remains to evoke the ancient flavor of a capital unlike any other.\nAlong the noxious trickle of the Kabul River, market life seems little changed from the ancient days.\nStalls offer luscious pomegranates, gigantic turnips, dates and grains of every sort. Meat hangs on hooks outdoors. Open-air barbers still shape long beards and now also shave chins clean.\nTwo brown-earth forts loom over Kabul, the older dating centuries back to Moghul days. Both are in partial ruin, but each was aptly suited for its modern purpose: a base from which to shell the hapless city below.\nHigh on a hill sits a giant white hotel, built in a more hopeful time for the Inter-Continental chain. Now, locally owned, it languished until foreign journalists took it over in recent weeks.\nThe Taliban banned music, movies, television, beardlessness and anything else they regarded as un-Islamic.\nIn post-Taliban euphoria, shopkeepers have hauled secret stocks out of hiding. Racy Indian actress pinups decorate shops that blare once-banned music into traffic-choked streets. A few Western fashions are on display.\nA gaily painted beauty parlor has opened on a main street, with glamorous photos of hair styles.\nElectronics shops are booming, literally and figuratively. Music blares from mega-bass speakers. Merchants sell TV sets by the hundreds, as fast as smugglers can get them over the mountains from Pakistan.\nBuyers can spend $200 for a fancy satellite dish or half that much for an ingenious homemade version of flattened cans soldered together.\nLeonardo DiCaprio portraits adorn every shop. "Titanic" videocassettes are a best seller, perhaps because Afghans can identify with a spectacularly sinking ship.\nIn the bustle of the electronics market, 12-year Ahmed Siar tried out a new word in his meager English vocabulary: "Excellent."\nBy the river, laughing kids kick around soccer balls with amazing energy considering their jobless fathers can barely afford a single daily meal. Five dollars a month is a good wage.\nOne riverbank neighborhood resembles an archaeological site, bombed to near oblivion with only bits of jagged wall and the odd half-roof left to shelter displaced families who cannot afford to live anywhere better.\nForeign embassies and aid missions are preparing to reopen. The new resources their governments bring should allow families to repair their collapsing walls. Stability should lure back overseas Afghans with their savings.\nAs always, the most reliable economic indicator is the gold market. When times are bad, people convert plummeting Afghani notes into hard currency. At the promise of better times ahead, they are buying gold jewelry.\nJeweler Hamid Aga Jan, 20, is giving some of his own merchandise to the bride he'll marry after Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. Two-thirds of his relatives are in Pakistan, Russia or Germany, 600 in all, but they are returning for the wedding.\nIn the old days, the family will rent the Najib Aziz Hotel and a jazz band, for a proper Afghan wedding.\n"My family is coming home," Jan said. "They've just been waiting for an optimistic time, and this is it."\nSo far, for 2,000 years or so, that has been Kabul's pattern: ruin and return. With adobe walls and painted woodwork, new construction looks centuries old a week after it is done.\nHarder to repair is the human damage. Since the Soviets invaded in 1979, 1.5 million Afghans have died. Some refugees have come home, but 3.5 million remain scattered across the globe.\nMillions of land mines still claim lives and limbs. Health statistics put Afghanistan among the world's bottom three nations in child mortality.\nMore than half of all Afghans have no access to even rudimentary medicine. Few hospitals in cities have medicines. In some, overworked staffs have not been paid for months.\n"It is a terrible situation," said Kate Rowlands, who runs Emergency Hospital. "Most of us are worried about AIDS, and they're still struggling with diarrhea."\nStill, the overall mood is upbeat.\nShahla Paryan, with her shutters open, wearing an embroidered blue dress and no scarf over her black hair, is grateful to Americans for the change. Her only fear, she said, is that Americans will forget about Afghanistan, as they did after the Soviets were driven out.\n"This is our great opportunity," she concluded. "We cannot miss it"