Daily Afghan Election Diary

John Sifton, HRW’s Afghanistan researcher, and Sam Zia-Zarifi, the associate director of HRW’s Asia Division, are in Afghanistan conducting research and advocacy around Afghanistan’s first direct presidential elections. They are keeping a diary while they are there and will respond to selected questions sent in by e-mail. To pose questions, please write to feedback@hrw.org.

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Sam here: It’s Friday, and the town is unusually quiet. It has been that way for a few days now. Last night was probably the quietest night in Kabul since the fall of the Taliban—or so our driver suggested. Checkpoints outside the city at night have been blocking most traffic, and the threat of an attack on the eve of elections in Kabul has kept most people at home. In fact, there was a rocket attack on Kabul last night, but it appears to have been an isolated, desperate incident. International security forces, by and large, have told us that they are pleasantly surprised by how few “security incidents” they have faced. There are rumors of a Tet Offensive-style attack by the Taliban on election day, and although the Taliban have not been able to pull off attacks on this scale since 2001, everyone here is a little anxious. There is a lot of knocking-on-wood and exclamations of enshallah, or “God willing.”  
 
We spent the morning on some more last-minute discussions with election officials and press interviews. John and I both talked to reporters in the InterContinental Hotel, a Kabul landmark. We are not sure if the hotel is officially a member of the InterContinental chain, but it certainly looks nice. It had been nearly deserted for a decade before the Taliban, and when I saw it immediately after the fall of the Taliban it was a sad shell of its former self, despite its spectacular hilltop views of downtown Kabul and the western suburbs.  
 
The view today betrays Kabul as a city primarily of dust. The dominant color is khaki, the Persian word for dust (and used by the British to describe the color of uniform they needed to avoid looking dusty all the time). Most of the city is built of mud brick. The post-Taliban building boom has mended the city’s apocalyptic facade, but it has also increased the amount of dust hanging in the air. A lot of the dust is the result of years of drought and environmental degradation, but there is a persistent rumor that U.S. scientists analyzing the dust have found 20 percent of it to be fecal matter. As one aid official put it, if they could export dust, Afghans would be very rich people.  
 
Looking over Kabul today always sets off a case of cognitive dissonance. It’s hard to reconcile the sight of a dusty city surrounded by denuded stony mountains with the history-book descriptions of a city of gardens, rivers, and verdant hills. The Mughal emperors famously beautified this ancient city, and until fairly recently Kabul was a mountain valley oasis. The city’s elevation is roughly that of Denver or Geneva. It could be an alpine resort. John believes it might make a great site for a Winter Olympics one day.  
 
In the afternoon we joined Zalmai, a successful Swiss-Afghan photographer, and went up the mountains to the west of the city. Usually this area would be thronged with Friday picnickers, so we thought it would be a good place to visit polling stations and to speak with people in a relaxed atmosphere.  
 
To our surprise, the area was mostly deserted, probably because of security concerns. We drove on into the hills toward the Qarga Dam, where there was once a large reservoir that was a popular weekend retreat. The mountains have not regained the trees they had lost over the past few years, and the reservoir was mostly a pond. The former boardwalk and lakeside buildings now stand hundreds of feet above the waterline, indecently exposed. A nearby military base once occupied by the Taliban still showed evidence of a bombing attack by U.S. forces in 2001.  
 
Again, there were competing emotions: sadness about the ravages inflicted on this city and hope that it will once again become the beautiful, mountain oasis history books describe.