‘Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!’ As morning alarms go, this one leaves a lot to be desired. Normally I wake up to the long, trippy build-up of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’, which I used to love in the searing heat of Mogadishu. But this is Kabul and the occasional grating siren is part and parcel of life in the Green Zone. It turns out to be a false alarm, but not before I have thrown myself to the floor in my duvet and buggered my back. Talking of bed linen, Al-Shabaab suicide bombers once attacked the Somali capital’s presidential compound where I lived. They missed the president but killed my best friend Mohamud, the prime minister’s chief of staff. Seven corpses of brainwashed young men were piled up outside my bedroom. My John Lewis mattress topper was completely ruined.
It’s a sign of the strange times we inhabit that, 18 years after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the American president and the Taleban find they both want the same thing: Americans out. The mood music is all set: peace talks ongoing in Doha, the Taleban worn out by endless fighting and an isolationist president in Washington. Oh, and last week Afghanistan celebrated its 100th anniversary of independence. Don’t be surprised if peace breaks out any time soon, though opinion is sharply divided on what any deal will really mean. ‘The Taleban are very hierarchical. They’ll follow whatever the leadership decides,’ says my friend Arif. His colleague Jamshid shakes his head. ‘The diehards will never accept it. They’ll keep fighting.’ Afghans do love a fight. ‘These are a powerful and violent people and the greater part of them highway robbers,’ wrote Ibn Battuta, the great Moroccan traveller, on arriving in Kabul — in 1332.
Afghans will soon be celebrating the centenary of Amanullah Khan, the Afghan king whose elegant portrait is spray-painted on Kabul’s blast walls (another popular one is the optimistic ‘Kabul the Peace City’).
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