Letter from Kabul

The British encampment at Kabul under seige in December 1879. Photographed by Burke

Perhaps it’s the wrong time for cautionary tales. But this one recounts the inspiration for a famous painting, interestingly by a female artist, about Kabul. The pity is that she is not there right now. Through her, too, Tate Britain has a connection with Kabul. At the Tate this remarkable history painting by Lady Elizabeth Butler is kept, entitled ‘The Remnants of an Army’. This painting shows an exhausted horseman dragging his mount on the last approaches to Jalalabad. The rider was Dr William Brydon, a Scottish surgeon, who had just survived the elimination at Kabul of the British army almost to a man, of which Brydon was virtually the last survivor.

The 29-year-old military surgeon was later subject to considerable recrimination as to why in fact he had survived rather than went down with the rest. This was 13 January 1842, and the closing period of what the British history recalls as the first Afghan War. Over 12,000 British lives were lost. In September of the same year, the British recovered Kabul with a new force, and then proceeded to blow up the four historic bazaar squares. Like the Soviets in the l980s, it seemed that power was asserted through demolition of buildings of significance. But this aspect was of little interest to Lady Elizabeth, whose primary concern was heroic survival against overwhelming odds, and its dramatic depiction. <

The city of Kabul was described by the British administrator Alexander Burnes earlier, as the epitome of the garden city. ‘The gardens are well kept and laid out: the fruit trees are planted at regular distances. The ground was covered with fallen blossom, which had drifted into the corners like so much snow. The Nawab and myself seated ourselves under a pear tree of Samarcand and admired the prospect. There were peaches, plums, apricots, pears, apples, quinces, cherries, walnuts, mulberries, pomegranates, and vines all growing in one garden. There were also nightingales, blackbirds, thrushes and doves, to raise their notes, and chattering magpies. Rhubarb, mulberry and apricot abounded.’ The bazaar the British blew up was famous the continent over. The city was lit up every night by the installation in front of every shop of a lamp. Kabul had been a trading city for thousands of years, where the pleasures of several cultures mingled together. The bazaars held fruit shops, dried fruit purveyors, game and poultry sellers, cobblers, booksellers, stationers replete with innumerable coloured notepapers from Russia or Constantinople. Kabul was a centre of great Moslem learning, a civilisation at ease with itself, without serious crime, landlocked yet a crossroads of the world. Within the walled city were villas with atrium courtyards, planted with trees and shrubs, colourful with roses. Trade and scholarship mingled. Here is a city which once new greatness, sophistication, and joy. And excellent eating was frequently possible, even in1842. After Dr Brydon’s recovery, even the British could still make the most of what Afghanistan could offer. A Captain William Riddell wrote two month’s after the Brydon episode, to his girlfriend:

‘We sat down 52 to as nice a dinner as you would have wished to see, he first course consisted of soups, Roast and boiled mutton, Boiled Beef, salted ham, roast and boiled fowls. Pigeon pies, collared beef cutlets and all sorts of homemade dishes. The second course a most delicious plum pudding gooseberry and currant tarts, mince pies, fine large plum cake, a seed cake and small cakes and moist biscuits of all sorts and descriptions.’ There were quinces, apricots, and dried fruits, as well as of course the usual spirits. One wonders if he also enjoyed, in such regimental abundance, the great Afghan delicacies, such as falodeh, a favourite dessert, consisting of a whitish jelly, strained from wheat, and taken with sherbet or even snow.

But as for Kabul, the garden city was first actually reduced by the British, triggering a sequential decline to rubble and ashes. Yet around the impromptu fires, in the cooling winter nights, with the oncoming of famine, there still linger collective memories of a richness and diversity destroyed equally by the Taliban and their oppressors, in the name of justice.

Alvar Aalto. Viipuri library, 1934

Other cities exist on memory, large and small. Alexandria is one, a Queen of the Mediterranean and a great entry point to the African continent. To the north, on the borders of Russia and Finland, is the small maritime city of Vyborg, Viipuri as known in Finnish. Here is another: this was an early twentieth century cosmopolis, scene for an optimistic early modernism, where masterworks in architecture, as Finland’s second city demanded, abounded. There too in the latter years, winter fires would burn elegantly designed roof timbers, simply for survival of the inhabitants. Today new possibilities emerge. Alexandria opened the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, under the directorship of the outstanding Islamic scholar Ismail Serageldin, this year, to become a library for the digital age. This superb new building, designed by Snohetta architects, from Norway, is an appropriate successor to Alexandria’s Hellenic Great Library, with its remarkable roof carried on a columnated grid. Serageldin aims to use the library to bridge the difference in wealth between an economically and culturally impoverished sector of society and the better off, as a cultural crossroads. Viipuri in the Baltic, on the European Union border with Russia, can benefit through architectural and musical cultural programmes (which include rebuilding) in order to re-establish its trading centrality on yet another crossroads.

Great Library, Alexandria, Egypt. North-south long section

For Kabul, a similar prospect can arise from the pulverised ashes. This task is one the United Nations, through its UNESCO organisation, can readily take on, if global priorities can for a moment be detached from purely conflict studies.

A massive reconstruction programme is possible now that the Taliban have been removed, with their distortion of Islamic values, and a more intelligent cultural exchange be encouraged, Kabul could be the city where the education and promotion of women can be accelerated, dispelling the psychopathy of repression to which Martin Amis recently referred in a discussion on the post-September 11 situation. If the United Nations cannot meet this new challenge, it surely has no mission to continue.

Kabul today is opening for business. For $35 one can buy a bottle of Chinese wine of moderate quality: a bottle of whiskey or Russian vodka may cost more than $100. Ramadan fasts are being broken, kebabs are cooking and music (most likely from India) is playing from the many stalls in the Jamuriat market. Beggars run around, hands outstretched before any foreigners. Burkas continue to be worn, often out of fear of strangers, for the habit of centuries, and even for convenience. There appear to be no women’s ‘ leaders ready to speak out for all: even though the United Nations is encouraging such representatives to the negotiating table, such as take responsibility are often affluent exiles with little immediate experience of the Taliban years. Local aristocracies are in power, and have other priorities, including the acquisition of property or at least the recovery of what has been their fiefdom.

Tribal memories run back to the time of Alexander the Great. There is no prospect of momentous change and the modernisation of society could take two, even three generations now. The airwaves have begun to hum again, but information technology appears to be restricted to military use, if it exists. Television sets are beginning to emerge from the shadows and cellars. The intellectual classes have all left long ago. They may never return, so establishing a void of decades. The last experience even approaching modern times was Soviet, and has itself left a seemingly permanent disillusion and a lingering corruption, which ironically was significantly eliminated by the Taliban. The museum has been pillaged, and the university is a travesty of the name. Scholarship as a tradition survives at least, but only in the religious sphere. The idea of ‘comparative religion’ is non-existent.

Meanwhile, the British experience of Afghanistan should not be ignored by the Pentagon planners. First in, first out is a useful slogan. Those who linger in Afghanistan raise old Antagonisms. Planning for a new Afghan future as a democratic nation of ancient cultural diversity can surely now be rapidly implemented on the ground. And some kind of Asian Marshall Plan is needed to enable an economy to emerge that is not dependent upon opium. Perhaps Lady Elizabeth Butler’s painting conjures up too readily, the shared British and Japanese conception of the nobility of failure. This time, once and for all, the United Nations cannot afford failure, however high-principled. UNESCO could find a long-term fulfilment if the organisation’s principals can recognise that ultimate success could be their own salvation. The aftermath of the first (twenty-first century) Afghan War could be UNESCO’s own salvation, as well as that of the Afghan community. At present, the whole cultural potential of Kabul is once again, as in the l840s, utterly ignored. This time, both the bazaars and the university and museum should simultaneously be rebuilt, not as at present, bulldozed. The twin Buddhas were destroyed by the same perpetrators of violence as those who destroyed the twin towers, and in the same year. The world now faces a common task. In Kabul the war is over, The peace has just begun.