## Ben Hammersley

# In which we go shopping

The children are flying kites today. It is Friday, and so the day of rest: most shops are shut, the streets are quiet, and the only thing that isn’t taking it easy is the sun. It’s hot and dusty, and the road side rubbish heaps continue to fester. This place has that familiar smell of developing countries, of sweat and dust and diesel fumes. My skin and fingernails wash black in the evening - although with a five year drought and little electricity to pump the water, washing is a miserable thirty second affair of mariner’s showering: wet down, soap up, rinse off. The town sighs for rain, but none has come for two months now.

I just visited Chicken Street, where a collection of antique and curio shops have been since the tourist days of the Seventies. Ten steps into it, I was picked up by one of the street kids, who declared himself my bodyguard, pledged to get me good prices, repel all beggers and generally organise my life for the next hour. Eleven years old, with good English and a swagger that suggested he knew precisely what he was doing, Salim took me from shop to shop, introducing the shopkeepers and sending the younger kids on errands?.Did I want a coke? Burger? Map-of-the-city? A quiet negotiation and my trainee gangster had sent one of his young charges to procure a cold drink.

“Here you are, Mister Ben. I gave him 5 Afghanis service charge ok?”

One store we visited tried to sell me a bullwhip. Ah, cool, I thought. Indiana Jones. No, says the shopkeeper, from the Taliban time. For women, he says, and looks away.

The local’s view of the Taliban is complex. Sure, they say, they were very strict, but at least there was no crime. When the Mujahedeen came, much of the city was razed in the effort to liberate it. One street, just up from Chicken Street, saw hundreds of local civilians killed by rocket fire. In the area between the centre of town and the Intercontinental, the Azari people found themselves between one warlord and his objective: hundreds were rounded up and placed inside storage containers, which were then flooded and electrified. The local journalists say that the next bombing in Kabul will come, not from Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but from Marshall Fahim, nominally the defence minister, but also head of the local mafia and military controller of the Kabul forces. If reforms go too quickly, a couple explosions will be a signal to Karzai and the Americans to back off. Karzai himself cannot trust anyone: even his bodyguards are American mercenaries, privately provided by a company called DynCorp.

But still, it is not yet two years since the Taliban left Kabul, and new situation will take a while to sink in. Oriol and I went to the football stadium two days ago, to see the place the Taliban executed their prisoners. This time, however, there was a football match going on. When we got back to the house, we told the landlord where we had been:

“How many people were killed?” he asked.

No, no, it was football, we said.

“They play football there?”