On White City
UN Compound, Kabul
Stories from Kabul No. 4 — There’s yoga at the UN three times a week. Once at OCHA, once at ALPHA, and once at UNAMA. You get used to the acronyms, and they all stand for the same thing anyway: failed Afghan development. But the yoga is good, or as good as yoga can be for me. I’m not sure I’ll ever find solace on the mat, twisting myself into odd positions per the instruction of a cooing yogi, but sometimes I feel revived after a session, and if not, the sanctimoniousness of the regulars never fails to entertain. Last week, while in tadasana – which as far as I can tell is just standing up straight – I closed my eyes in an effort to “hear my breathing.” When I opened them again, a German guy in sweatpants and a knit beanie was glaring at me because they had already moved on to the chaturanga, upward-facing dog, downward-facing dog sequence. Shortly thereafter, I found myself accidentally face-to-face with a cadre of UN and NGO girls, arms outstretched in warrior two. “Lengthen your bodies to the sky. You are as powerful as you think you are. Feel the energy of this room.” I can enjoy the reverent silence and the woo-woo philosophizing, though, even if it does make me want to blast profanity-laced hip hop and recite lines of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.
It’s fighting season, I’ve been told, and this year is particularly bad because it’s the first season after the NATO drawdown and the Taliban is ready to prove a point. Their message is simple: We own this country and all foreigners should get lost. Last week, all yoga sessions were cancelled. “We’re on White City,” the email said, which stands for the highest danger level when everything across the UN apparatus is locked down. No one from the outside is allowed in and no one from inside is allowed out. It continued, “As of late October, militants were planning a complex attack involving both suicide vehicular improvised explosive devices (SVIEDS) and attackers armed with assault rifles against a compound in Kabul City, Kabul Province, Afghanistan.” Seasoned Kabulians shrug off such messages as mere annoyances; they make plans around the restrictions so life can go on. “White City again? What a pain. Can someone teach yoga at their house instead?” I think everyone can feel the rising anxiety, though. It’s always just below the surface.
I read once that combat soldiers perceive the world in orange. One soldier described it as such: “You don’t see or hear like you used to. Your brain chemistry changes. You take in every piece of the environment, everything. I could spot a dime in the street twenty yards away. I had antennae out that stretched down the block. It’s hard to even remember exactly what that felt like. I think you take in too much information to store so you just forget, free up brain space to take in everything about the next moment that might keep you alive. And then you forget that moment, too, and focus on the next. And the next. And the next.” That’s from marine veteran Phil Klay’s book Redeployment. Most people’s alertness level is at white, he says. They don’t walk through a city looking around at the alleyways, counting the windows and doors, thinking about the million places you could be killed from. They have no idea where Fallujah is or how dangerous it is in Kandahar; they spend their whole lives at white.
To be honest, I don’t see the world in orange, but here in Kabul, I don’t live at white either. Combat soldiers approach public spaces methodically – marine on point down the side of the road checking ahead and scanning the roofs across from him, marine behind checking windows at the top level of the buildings, marine behind him getting the windows a little lower, and so on – but for me, in a place that’s not exactly an open combat zone, it’s about being constantly alert. When I’m in the car, for example, I’m conscious of the vehicles in the vicinity and what kind of people are riding in them. The Toyota pickup trucks with the seats built into the flatbed are the worst, because they’re usually carrying five or six men, heads wrapped in shemaghs, and armed with machine guns. The old buses filled with young men in dirty shalwar kameez are also disconcerting, as are the white armored SUVs with UN printed in large, blue letters across the sides. UN vehicles, unlike military convoys, have traditionally been allowed to roam freely throughout the city, but as tensions rise, they too may be fair targets.
It’s the same process in shops and public spaces. I survey the room, making note of exits and places where I might be able to hide. Since reading about the murder of Farkhunda, I’m terrified of crowds, so if I’m walking down a street – which happens only rarely – I look for groups of people and menacing stares. I bought a chadri and I have a bug-out bag in my room, and even though both are kept in the back of my closet where they are not likely to be of much use, I know they are there and that provides some comfort. Having security plans in place, however facile and ineffective, means we’re all acknowledging the dangers and our impotence against them. Hardly anyone here is living unawares. After the last lockdown I actually wondered if some UN diplomat at a desk was trying to be ironic when he came up with the security classifications. “We’re on White City,” I can hear him declaring from within the bosom of the Green Zone. In a way that makes sense because he’s living at white. He doesn't know that on the outside, Kabul City is always tinged with orange.
But I don’t covet a life on the inside. Last week, I went to NATO with my entrepreneurial housemate who owns a yogurt and coffee shop on the base. Ministry of Yogurt, it is cleverly called. We sat outside the container-cum-trendy hangout, smoking shisha and drinking cappuccinos and eavesdropping on conversations nearby. “Come on man you know Bob Evans. They have a buffet for $25 a person with everything you want. I’m a regular, and man I miss that place.” A chinook hovered overhead preparing to land at an airstrip nearby, and I stared up at its underbelly as my unattended coffee cup flew away. “Put your head down! You’re going to get a chair to the face,” yelled a U.S. colonel with a southern drawl. The Bob Evans crew was still talking about the buffet long after the chinook had passed.
There are some perks to base life. The Ministry’s famous carrot cake is delicious, and the coconut soup and noodles from the Thai restaurant in the Green Zone are surprisingly authentic. We ordered enough to feed a family of fifteen and said our goodbyes. As we drove out through the maze of international city in a beat up jeep, past the American Embassy then the British and then the Germans, we mouthed the words to Straight Outta Compton, windows down, lyrics into the night. Often, I wish I could simply exist in these strange but pleasant moments, feeling at ease and thinking about nothing at all. But here, the enormity of life always creeps in, and I start thinking about how surreal it is to be a civilian driving through a massive logistics-heavy military complex in the center of Kabul City, a place built by the West and utilized in America’s longest war, all in one of the poorest and most dangerous countries on earth. It feels so normal now, but it is utterly absurd. As we approached the front entrance we rolled up the windows, locked the doors, and turned off the music. I wrapped my headscarf tightly around my head and tilted my seat back so as to be only half visible through the passenger door window. There’s a moment right before you leave the comfort of the blast walls when you pause, take a deep breath, and steel yourself against the onslaught of the unknown. Out into the roundabout, past the checkpoint, down the main street. Without traffic, it’s seven minutes home.
As winter approaches, the conversations in the expat community have turned to the adequacy of house generators and hot water heaters, and whether the wood or sawdust bukharis are preferable. I’ve heard the story about how all of Kabul lost power last winter for five straight weeks and everyone smelled and no one ate properly. I’ve heard predictions that the fighting might just continue through the winter this year because of the strong Taliban offensive and the disarray of Afghan National Police (ANP) in the provinces. All of these war stories are meant to convey a certain toughness of the initiated, I suppose, and are delivered as a kind of challenge: try to make it through the winter, Princess.
It’s the beginning of my third month in Afghanistan and I’ve become accustomed to the strange nuances of life here. Like the time my housemates planned a Magic Mike II movie night on the day the Taliban took Kunduz. Our friend from the INSO safety organization kept pausing the movie to give us bloody updates from his people on the ground. There was also a day last month when a friend was sent home from work early because the Taliban had designated everyone working for her communications firm a “legitimate military target.” There are more mundane oddities, too, like the Mecca Channel, which broadcasts the Hajj. One afternoon we were mesmerized by the live streaming rituals: hundreds of thousands of people walking counterclockwise seven times around the Ka’aba, then running, then kissing the Black Stone.
The porch on my room faces west, and some evenings I lie in the big hammock at sunset trying to decipher the sounds of the city beneath the muezzin’s call to prayer. Bombs or thunder? Construction noise or gunshots? Earthquake? There’s this term in German – vergangenheitsbewältigung – that means normalization or coming to terms with the past. I've thought about that concept a lot lately. Last night, as the pink sky turned to dusk and dusk turned to darkness, I thought, “There are terrorists on the ground and there is chaos all around me, but I can lie here peacefully in this moment and look at the stars and feel in awe of the world.” But the moments of wonderment are fleeting. We’re on White City but living somewhere near orange, staring out into the black of the night. There is no looking back, no reckoning, no normalization. In Afghanistan, no one has time for that.
