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.......................................... A country of great beauty; a people
with When the Northern Alliance took Kabul it didn't take long for the first kite to appear, fluttering above Kabul's flat mud rooftops. The Taliban had banned kite flying and music and it seems that they have uprooted and destroyed other things that once made Afghanistan a magical country. The vines that produced the delicious grapes are uprooted and burned. The little irrigation canals that watered melon fields and fruit orchards are choked and trampled. The farms that huddled in the shelter of green, poplar-shaded valleys beneath the red rock walls are destroyed.
I hadn't wanted to go to Afghanistan when my husband was posted there by Save the Children Fund. I thought I knew what it would be like, just as we think we know what it is like now. I expected to be stranded in a barbaric, male-dominated society where women, veiled, like so many walking parrot cages, were less than the dust. It wasn't like that at all. Afghans, I found, had a self possession, a sense of individual and national independence and pride, that I'd found nowhere else in the world. Whether it was because of their rugged terrain, whether it was because they had never been colonized, whether it was because of their extraordinary history, shrugging off invaders and marauders century after century, I don't know, but my spirits lifted after that first solo walk through the streets of Kabul, realizing that here was a poor country with people who had the pride and self-respect of any conquering empire.
If I am less hopeful of this now it is because the ensuing weeks have revealed the extent of the destruction which, in the last 23 years, the Afghans have inflicted upon themselves. It is physical but it is also emotional. The refugee camps are filled with traumatized and displaced people. The armies are filled with damaged and wholly militarized men. A Unicef worker in the camps said that there was no hope for Afghanistan until the minds of the children were healed. A generation in the history of Afghanistan is a mere second. If we have the will to help the Afghans break the cycle the vines and the children can return.
Lesley Garner has written for national newspapers all her life as a feature writer and commentator on current affairs, and is currently a columnist for the Evening Standard.
© Caduceus, 2002.
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In
the weeks since September 11th I have been transfixed by the drama being
played out in a country which was once home to myself, my husband and
my baby daughter. I had arrived early in 1978, at the height of the
kite-flying season. From the window at the back of our house on the
edge of Kabul I loved to watch the hundreds of little kites bobbing
and swooping over the rooftops. The mountains round the city were topped
with snow but the skies were deep blue. The cries of the many different
muezzins of Kabul punctuated the day and down in the little fields beyond
our garden, the shepherds who walked the little herds played their flutes.
And
they looked wonderful. The whole of Afghanistan looked wonderful. During
the worst of the bombing I held these images in my heart and mind: the
deep blue lakes of Band-i-Amir beneath the gold and terracotta cliffs
and mesas, the translucent jade waters of the Hari Rud river etched
with silver trout, the magical bazaars of Kabul which sold everything
from carpets and silver, kettles and cradles, caged birds and stale
rice. I remembered the Buddhist stupas in the clear mountain air above
the orchards of apricot and mulberry, the tea houses spread with carpets
where men in turbans and striped, padded chapans sipped green tea above
mountain rivers, the tiny figures of nomads with their camels dwarfed
by wave upon wave of mountains. And I remembered the game of buzkashi
on the edge of the steppes to the north, with the hordes of wild horsemen,
whips gripped between their teeth, galloping their horses at full tilt
towards a scattering crowd. I remembered the Minaret of Jam, a single,
slender, intricately carved 12th century minaret, last remnant of a
lost city, pointing skywards at the confluence of two rivers at the
heart of the Hindu Kush and I wonder if it is still standing. 
What
comfort I have had in the weeks of bombing has come from the one overwhelming
impression I formed in my year in Afghanistan. The Afghans, adapted
to their multicoloured, impassable mountain fortress of a country know
how to endure.They stand on the ruins of other peoples' civilizations.
In the north, on the edge of the infinite steppes which stretch into
the heart of the former Soviet Union, lies an ancient city called Balkh.
A huge plain of rubble lies between crumbling walls softened by centuries.
You feel that if you dug you would dig your way down through the Moghuls,
the Mongols, the city of Alexander to prehistory. You feel that you
could still be digging, sweeping, classifying as the whole island of
Manhattan subsides into the sea. Maybe this present drama can be survived
by the Afghans too. 
