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Afghan Fragments

Afghan Fragments: "Afghan Fragments

'The needs are very big in Afghanistan,' Taniwal observed. 'When I want to build something, I'm not able to do it.'

The hardscrabble town of Gardez, located near the site of Operation Anaconda, the largest battle of the U.S. war, remains a primitive collection of rundown buildings and crude market stalls. Yet just outside of town, the Americans have helped build a new Afghan army base and a police training facility with modular buildings. The Afghan soldiers who were still wearing plastic sandals and traditional shalwar kameez outfits -- knee-length shirts and baggy pants -- when I left in 2002 are now outfitted in professional uniforms and boots. And dozens of new two- and three-story buildings are being put up by Afghan businessmen north of town, a cluster being called New Gardez.

A day spent driving around Kabul about 80 miles to the north offers a similar clash of impressions. Thecapital seems more sprawling than ever, teeming with millions of Afghans who have returned home from abroad. The number of cars has multiplied so much that the streets are jammed with traffic all day long. A city that once offered little more to eat than lamb kebabs, rice pilau and mantu dumplings now boasts Chinese, Thai, Italian, Indian and French restaurants.

Construction litters the landscape. Both the Americans and the Iranians are building university campuses. Most stunning, perhaps, is the handful of gleaming new glass buildings. Putting up a structure made of glass amounts to a mind-boggling act of optimism in a city where not long ago nearly every windowpane was shattered by years of rocket attacks.

When I arrived in Kabul for the first time in late 2001, I stayed at the old Intercontinental Hotel, a shell of its former self, pockmarked by war. I slept in a room with sporadic power, no heat, no running water, no showers, no working toilets, no telephones, no Internet and certainly no room service. Just two weeks before I returned to Kabul last month, the nine-story-tall Safi Landmark Hotel and Suites opened its sliding glass doors; it features every modern convenience, including a health club, satellite television and minibars.

Attached to the hotel is a snazzy new shopping mall, the Kabul City Centre,complete with escalators and glass elevators. I watched as a woman in a burqa figuring out the concept of an escalator approached a normal staircase and waited as if expecting it to move up and down as well. The atrium offers a coffee bar. The first floor is packed with stores selling mobile telephones in a city that a few years ago had practically no working land lines. The next floor up has all the jewelry stores. The whole mall seems so out of place in Kabul that locals wryly call it 'Dubai' after the oil-rich emirate that is a shopping paradise for rich Afghans."

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