City Wall Hike

A few days ago I went on a great hike up to the top of one of the highest mountains within the city limits. The mountain's called Sher Darwaza, the ridge goes roughly east-west along the southern edge of downtown. I had been excited to check it out not only for the views from the top, but also because the ridge has the only remaining parts of the original city walls. These city walls, more than ten to fifteen feet thick in parts, were built during at least the 5th century, and maybe even before. I enlisted a couple of friends here to come with me, and also got the director of the institute, Omar, to come along as our all-knowing guide. Omar has an encyclopedic knowledge of Kabul city history, having lived here all his life. He's told stories about having watched events like the 1996 invasion of the city by the Taliban, as well as the first bombings of Operation Enduring Freedom (in October-November 2001), from the very mountain top we were about to hike.

Here's the link to some more pictures of it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattve/sets/72157605780035380/

We started at an old historical site called the Bala Hissar, where the British built a humongous fort called the Citadel back in the mid-1800s. The British had three wars with the Afghans during their colonial times, when the Brits tried to expand west and north from India, and there is strong pride around here for having beaten them back soundly each time. There's even greater pride for having 'defeated' the Soviets by 1988, after almost ten years of occupation. While there's no such thing as an ethnically 'Afghan' person, it's military successes like these that have tied the Afghan people together in a collective sense of nationhood. And while some of that feeling broke down during the ethnically-charged civil war of the early 90s, which deeply ingrained the faultlines between Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and the many other ethnicities that make up the Afghan people, I think a big part of the resiliency I see around the city today has to do with people here having gotten back a real sense of identity as an Afghan nation. It seems to tie into a psychological strength that comes from everybody going through all the hard times together, as life slowly rebuilds here.

Back to the hike. We walked from the Citadel up to the ridge where the wall begins, passing the ubiquitous mud-brick mountain homes that crawl up the hillsides. We passed little children carrying huge sacks of grain, lavishly decorated cemeteries, and shepherds guiding their sheep along the road. As we left the residential areas and walked towards the top of the mountain, Omar pointed out two important landmarks: red flags and red-painted rocks. Wherever one of these are, that's where there are mines, as determined by a couple of NGOs here who specialize in this stuff. We saw a few of these going up the trail, way off to the sides, but we saw many more white-painted rocks--where mines have been decommissioned and/or removed. Either way, best not to trail-blaze around here.

We got to the start of the massively thick wall, and walked along its side as we made our way to the peak of Sher Darwaza. The view from the top was just as amazing as I had hoped: the entire city was laid out almost 360 degrees around us, and the view was crystal clear and smog-free because we'd gone early in the morning. Omar pointed out landmark after landmark, many of which (like the presidential palace) we didn't recognize; given the security situation here, there's high walls and razor wire all around almost every major landmark as one drives around town, making it impossible to see on the ground what building is actually behind these walls. The most interesting part for me came as Omar pointed out the divisions between city sections that had existed during the height of the civil war here. The entire city had been cut up like a pie between Ahmad Shah Massoud's Tajik militias, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Pashtuns militias, and Rashid Dostom's Uzbek militias as they each maneuvered their forces, switched alliances, and collectively shelled the city and its people into a pulp.

Seeing the geographical divisions of the city during the civil war made me realize how fresh the wounds are around here. For instance, last summer me and my brother Todd visited about ten American Civil War sites around the mid-Atlantic while I was interning at the State Department. We'd hear tour guides talk about military strategy, battle tactics, and the personalities of different generals, all of it kind of sepia-toned because our Civil War took place almost 150 years ago. For Afghanistan, their Civil War was fifteen years ago. Wow. All of these battles that decimated Kabul just happened, and they just happened in the context of other devastating wars over the past generation. It's perspective like this that also made me realize how the processes of rebuilding and forgiveness are really going to take time, as they did for the United States.