© Michael Obert

A guest in Absurdistan: In the fith and final part of “Camping in Kabul” travel journalist Michael Obert learns three things: First, aid organizations are like cows drinking their own milk. Second, Afghans are the world’s best golfer. And third, having a German passport you even get served a Pepsi from a guy carrying a kalashnikov.

Establishments like the Latmo count among the many refined venues for the absurd, with actors who play their own audiences: employees of the countless registered aid organizations in Kabul, consultants with daily fees of a thousand dollars, bodyguards and other trigger happy security ninjas with perfect six packs. There are supposedly as many as 15.000 foreign civilians currently in Kabul, more than the US Army has stationed in the whole of Afghanistan, and three times as many as the 4800 Nato led troops, who are supposed to provide order and security in the capital.

Sitting by the pool, I get to talking to Rahraw. He is half Afghani with an Italian passport and works in radio. He says it’s a sad fact that most of the foreigners who live and work in Kabul don’t come any closer to the city than armored limousines, security services, and barbed wire allow. “But how are you going to help someone you never meet?” Rahraw asks, frowning. “How are you going to do something for someone you don’t know – or when you don’t know anything about the way they live or what they think or how they feel. Someone whose fears and joys are foreign to you?” Since the fall of the Taliban, Afghanis´ expectations of the international community have been high. But many fail to find visible results. They characterize the aid organizations as “cows that drink their own milk.”

© Michael Obert

Also the lifestyle of many foreigners in Kabul arouses the anger of the people: freely available alcohol, brothels disguised as Chinese restaurants, parties. Later that evening, Rahraw invites me to such a celebration. The music is loud – house, techno – the bar has a wide selection: South African Shiraz, French Bordeaux, cans of beer cooled in a barrel of ice water. And Johnny Walker Red Label, the same bottles that the merchants in the bazaar will later fill with cooking oil.

Forty, maybe fifty people dance on the well-lit terrace, as devout Muslims in the surrounding houses try to sleep. Their neighborhood is pitch-black. Only the spire of a minaret floats in the night sky – a luminous eye, admonishing. Somehow threatening. “Not safe here,” says Rahraw and points to the wall around the garden that’s barely three meters high. “For a rocket, no problem.” He’s right. The dance floor is an easy target for terrorists. It’s probably the most dangerous spot in all of Afghanistan.

But nobody thinks about it. We’re the international community, the world as guest in Absurdistan. We work for the United Nations, for governments, for editors, for aid organizations. We come from Europe and America as well as from Ethiopia, Columbia, India, and Turkey. We drink. We dance. We laugh. Should we be sad instead?

© Michael Obert

“We’re happy about everyone who comes to help us,” an Afghani art professor tells me a few days later. “But everyone should behave according to the customs in our land.” Integration. We attach a great deal of importance to it in Europe.

When the beer is empty, I leave. I wheeze the entire night. The Kabul-cough. I have to get out. Out of the city. Breathe. See a little nature: trees, water. The next morning, I take a taxi to a place that one would hardly expect to exist beyond the ravaged edges of this city: the Kabul Golf Club. “We get golfers from absolutely every country,” explains Afzal Abdul, my golf instructor, in traditional Afghani garb. “Just none from China, Russia, Pakistan. No French, or Greeks, or Koreans. We also don’t get any…”

Who are the best? “We Afghanis,” Abdul says in all earnestness.

The golf course belongs to a former warlord. It’s the only one in Afghanistan. The landmines were removed, three soviet tanks and a rocket launcher taken away. The only thing missing now is grass. The nine holes are barely distinguishable from the surrounding, dusty, sunburned hills; the greens are not green but black, designed with a mixture of sand and motor oil. The highlight has to be the bombed-out army bunker after the first hole. Two rounds cost ten dollars. One year’s membership, sixty. I leave it – much to the amusement of my instructor – at a couple of amateurish hits and wander up to Qargha Lake.

© Michael Obert

On the shores of this immense reservoir, a surprisingly idyllic landscape awaits. Afghani families have made themselves at home on platforms in the water. Protected from the wind by billowing curtains, they sit on rugs and smoke water pipes. Pakistani music drifts out of loudspeakers. Colorful paddleboats lie on the shore.

There comes a point when I can’t accept every invitation to have tea anymore, so I walk a little further along the shore and sit down on a lonely bench. I enjoy the clear lake air. Breathe. Without this scratching in my throat and lungs. Off in the distance, a motorboat draws a line of spray across the silver gray surface of the lake. Behind it rises the jagged ridge of the Hindu Kush. Its silhouette dissolves into a reddish haze. Moments of peace, of beauty. For the first time on this journey, I have the feeling that I’ve arrived, that I want to stay. Ah, Afghanistan!

I only notice the men after they’ve crowded around the bench I’m sitting on: six long bearded Pashtuns with AK-47s. They wear traditional Afghani garb and are scowling at me. Are they bandits? Some warlord’s soldiers? Taliban? “Passport! Passport!” barks their spokesman, a giant with a scar slashed across his right eye. I give him what he wants. The Pashtuns crowd around my passport to study it. Almost 200 countries produce passports. My life now seems to depend on whether I have one of the right ones.

All at once, the Pashtun slaps the passport shut, calls to a man walking along the shore with a vendor’s tray and orders Pepsi. A can for everybody. Even for me. He gives me my passport back and says, “Germany good! Germany very, very good!” They take me over to the street and insist on calling me a taxi. Because there are bandits here. Finally, a car comes. The Pashtuns stroke their guns and shake my hand. I get in and the taxi takes off – back to Kabul.

Camping in Kabul, Part IV: Osama bin Laden of the Bird Bazaar
Camping in Kabul, Part III: „Watch out, dude!“
Camping in Kabul, Part II: „Every hippie loved my super Payan Camping“
Camping in Kabul, Part I: Afghanistan – hot off the presses from Lonely Planet

Michael Obert, born in 1966, is a German book author and journalist who writes for Geo, Stern and other periodicals in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, as well for Courrier International (Paris), The Journal (New York) and Himal Southasian (Katmandu). He reports mainly from Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia, and has written books on the Islamic world. Obert currently lives in Berlin. „Camping in Kabul” was also published in his book „Die Ränder der Welt“.