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02/17/2004: "Kandahar Chronicles #71 - 15/02/2004"

I’m sitting on a dusty window ledge looking through a warped windowpane with a notebook on my lap. Behind me, a policeman fills in paperwork that will extend my Afghan visa for another thirty days. Below me, the hustle of Sheydan Chowk, the main roundabout in central Kandahar. Martyrs Circle is dominated by a white and blue structure covered with Pashtu script. Surrounding it is four green cannons left by the British a hundred and fifty years ago. Cannons and martyrs, the imperialist powers legacy to Afghanistan since the invention of gunpowder. Construction continues on the central arch structure and probably will until those who wish to subjugate these people realize the futility of their enterprise. From Alexander to the Persian Shahs, the Sultans of Merv, Bohkra, Samarakand, the British Raj and the Red Army, Afghans have fought and died. Their cities have been occupied but the people never vanquished.

Around the circle, life moves in a counter clockwise flow to a symphony of horns. A moneychanger stands on a wooden box cooling himself with a fan of multi-coloured notes. A cobbler hammers one shoe will sitting on another to set the glue. An overladen donkey cart pushes through the traffic carrying bottles of Fanta. Children surround a man selling balloons promoting Cuban tourism. A woman shuffles under her burka counting money to buy a plastic tiger for her toddler. Motorists ignore a policeman directing traffic, he gives up and joins six other men gathered around sheep marked with pink paint. A bus bumps a boy selling bananas. A UN Toyota stops in the circle with a flat tire. Cleaners atop bamboo scaffolding polish the arch. A fruit seller helps a motor rickshaw driver install a seat, a camel eats an apple off his cart. A donated German police car leads four US Hum vees down a one-way street. A herd of goats panic and run through after them. A butcher slices a leg off a fly covered carcass. A bus with a spider webbed windscreen honks impatiently behind a convoy of men pushing wheelbarrows full of potatoes. Cats run across roof tops. A painted Rambo stares back from a rickshaw, a Koran in one hand and a machine gun in the other.

My visa is finished. I leave the window and return to the car past grinning policemen. Two moustachioed police looking like South American dictators want to examine my passport. I give them a wink and climb into the land cruiser. They’re not happy but let me past. There are men who smile and men who glare as I leave the compound. I wonder if I am seen as an ally in a battle against poverty or just another unwelcome foreigner. Suspicions run high amongst a people that have fought so long against foreigners. I ignore the angry looks and wave to a child holding a Cuban balloon. We enter the roundabout to a protest of car horns and return to base.