The two faces of Afghanistan
In the stark brilliance of winter in Kabul at almost 6,000 feet, two utterly different faces of this remarkable city were our destinations today. One joyous, outward, noisy, open and on a hill-top with panoramas forty miles north into the white walls of the Hindu Kush. The other rather secret, almost hidden – a place of death, memory, commemoration and some might say, a secret garden of lost causes.
For generations before The Kite Runner was filmed, much less written, Tapa Naderkhan Hill has dominated the centre of Kabul with its tabletop, levelled improptu playground for Kabulis. And after prayers, no day is a play day, like Friday.
Even in the stiff wind howling in from frozen Tajikistan way to the north, they were out there today: the kite men and boys – and yes, even the odd girl or three. Reeling out the wire for their favoured gaudy-coloured square of fabric to dip, swoop and dance upon that killing wind.
But that’s not the half of it. The wire you see is designed to cut – to cut the line of any rival kite coming close. Grown men stand, lips pursed in concentration, woolly hats jammed down to eye-level against the ice- wind.
Once they sever the line of a rival, up goes the shout and the kite-runners – aka small boys – scream off down the hillside in the snow and ice, for he who catches the falling kite, owns it.
Buskashi: ‘beyond health and safety’
But in amongst all of this, a completely different spectacle unfolds. Some buskashi horsemen have turned up, hoping to turn a quick Afghani or ten by letting people have rides on their semi-wild horses. They rear up, then suddenly career off across the deep snow sending up clouds of white dust.
The old adage comes to me that back home football might be a game for gentlemen played by hooligans and rugby the game for hooligans played by gentlemen. Well true or not – what is buskashi? I sense it’s a game for homicidal maniacs played by the homicidally maniacal. Someone once said it is a bit like polo with all the rules stripped out. I say buskashi is to polo what the Pamplona Bull run is to croquet.
There is no ball. You use a dead kid. (In the interests of clarity I do mean a young goat here, not a deceased child.) And that’s about it for rules. The rest is wide open and there are none of those namby-pamby stick things either. You sort of wrestle with each other – and the kid – whilst on a semi-domesticated horse. Large crowds are said to gather for a match – I’ll bet they do.
Yet this is still not enough. Oh no. Also competing on the same turf, some young Kabulis in their motors performing handbrake turns on the compacted ice and snow. Good conditions for extra spin you understand. And no, they don’t do seatbelts any more than the buskashi lads would consider a helmet. You’re in the land beyond health and safety when Kabulis let off steam after prayers.
The British cemetery 
And yet, not a mile or two distant, another quite different face of this ancient city lies behind two vast wooden medieval looking doors. Beside them, the simple sign saying ‘British Cemetery’. Inside, the deep snow is hardly disturbed by a human print.
All around a wild variety of graves belonging to Victorian and Edwardian missionaries, adventurers and engineers and architects. Upon one wall a long litany to British soldiers killed here during the nineteenth century’s failed adventure in this land. Young men who fell into the dirt, dust and ice of this country remembered, like Capt John Cook VC, killed in Kabul in 1879 in a bayonet charge defending a British position.
And yet this place, so long undisturbed and unchanged across the hippy years of peaceful invasion, into the Communist war then the brutal mujahadeen pounding of Kabul – until this century. Now, alongside the poignant memorials to journalists and aid workers killed here in recent years, the steadily growing list of British soldiers, climbing so nearly to the 400 mark now.
The pain of it all surely made worse by testimony like that etched out to commemorate Canada’s young men killed around Kandahar, far to the south. The wall plaque reads:
“Qui ont donne leur vies aux service de la pais.”
Yet as any Afghan will readily lament – there is no “paix” – not in a decade. Not in America’s longest-ever war.
“Blessed are the peacemakers” says another careful inscription. But the Gospel of Matthew hardly applies here, surely? There is, again, no peace to make, only war to endure.
A world away from the free-rolling screaming fun of Kabuli wintersports taking place close by. But a pain and a dignity here that so many Afghans feel and so many show, when it’s finally time to come down off that hill at sunset, when the playing is over.
