After planes began flying from Moscow to Kabul on a direct flight, we were apparently the first to go to Afghanistan not on an official assignment, but simply out of curiosity. And if not for the persistence of the editor-in-chief, I would not have written this article. For reporters in Afghanistan, there has been nothing to do for the second year now: after twenty years of war, news of rare explosions and skirmishes surprises no one anymore. First and foremost, the Afghans themselves.
While we were traveling to Mazar-i-Sharif, a suicide taxi driver in Kabul blew up a bus with German peacekeepers. In Afghanistan, this is not even a topic of conversation. Despite the exceptional sociability of everyone we met, we learned about the attack by chance on the radio two days later. The only noticeable consequence was a traffic jam at the entrance to Kabul, formed at a police checkpoint. Mujahideen with machine guns walked between the cars and looked into each one - diligently, but somehow without much interest. The inspection of our Toyota minibus, packed with people and belongings, took a few seconds.
In the absence of news, journalists manage as best they can. All articles about the 'only Russian woman in Kabul' are written about Galina Margoeva, an Ossetian born in Dushanbe. She married an Afghan and spent half her life in Afghanistan.
'We will, of course, give you Gali's address, but even Uchitelskaya Gazeta has already written about her. You didn't have to come to Kabul for that,' they honestly warned at the Russian embassy.
We didn't take the address, but it would be wrong not to write that Galina Margoeva urgently needs to obtain Russian citizenship, to which she has a legal right as a citizen of the USSR who did not become a citizen of any other country after its collapse. Despite the attention of the Russian and foreign press, due to some formalities, the only Russian woman in Kabul does not have a Russian passport to this day.
Even permanent correspondents of news agencies have been withdrawn from Kabul. They visit Afghanistan occasionally, and this happens less and less often.
'Haven't you realized yet that it's impossible to live here? There's no sewer system. They brought a power auger to drill a well for water here and told me the water is only industrial. I arrived only two months ago, and that's the only reason I'm kind enough to invite you to my home,' one diplomat from the embassy told us.
'Then why did you come to work in Afghanistan? Couldn't you refuse?'
'For that, I would have had to study a different language at the institute.'
That's true about the language. The Afghans themselves admit that this man speaks Farsi better than any of them.
Our embassy in Afghanistan has seen better days. After the socialist revolution of 1978, it took a place of honor in the government district not far from Amin's palace, which had been stormed, and expanded to an entire block. Pre-war maps of the city are still sold in Kabul, where the USSR embassy is listed first in the legend. Now, only ancient Volgas, Moskvichs, and Pobedas driving around the city remind us of those times. Despite the prevalence of identical right-hand-drive Toyota Corolla station wagons, about 30 percent of Soviet cars remain in Kabul, even though it is a very busy city in terms of traffic. In the past, Soviet diplomats and intelligence officers drove all these cars, and with the advent of the Taliban, the entire embassy fleet was sold off to Kabul residents.
This government district was bombed in several successive wars. The ruins of Amin's palace are still mined, and only walls remain of the four-story buildings where Soviet attachés lived. It is completely incomprehensible how they survived - everything around them has turned into a large wasteland. Now Amin's palace and the former embassy are located far beyond the city limits - several kilometers from present-day Kabul.
Currently, the Russian embassy rents several villas in a quiet district on the other side of the city. But that is temporary - in April, new construction began on the old site. About twenty people flew in from Moscow, whose salaries will be piling up back home - from about $1,500 to $3,000 per month, depending on the position. They hire more or less competent Afghans for the main work at $3 a day, and those Afghans hire other Afghans for $1.5. Our builders have their own doctor, free food, rented villas, a UAZ vehicle to go shopping for provisions, and diplomatic passes to American military bases, where they can buy vodka, which is forbidden by the Quran, at $7 a bottle in supermarkets. Only in Afghanistan could it happen that Russians go to American military bases for vodka.
In our hotel, we came across a film crew from Iran, which was deciding over green tea whether it was worth going to Mazar-i-Sharif to finish a promotional film. The Iranian journalists had a hard time: they needed to film Afghanistan in such a way that a potential investor would want to give their client $6 million. Advertising Mazar-i-Sharif is much easier than Kabul. It is a fully intact city built around the famous Blue Mosque with the tomb of Caliph Ali.
True, according to another version, Ali is buried in An-Najaf in Iraq, but on the facade of the mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif it is philosophically noted that no one knows the exact place anyway. Women are not allowed inside. Usually Afghans carry their wives in the trunks of old Toyotas, but here they wander around the shrine like ghosts in snow-white chadors.
About the road that the Iranians had to travel four hundred kilometers to Mazar-i-Sharif, a man with six million dollars would be better off not knowing at all. The Salang Pass had been bombed, blown up, and mined so many times that after years of war almost nothing was left of it. The last time Russian sappers cleared the three-kilometer tunnel through the Hindu Kush was last year, and they removed bombs that the Taliban had left behind, even from the ceiling. Now the Salang is being repaired by Turks, so the tunnel is open only at night. Among the Iranian journalists, the cameraman was the one who least wanted to go to Mazar-i-Sharif. He told the others that in this country there was no way to please an investor anyway, and on the road the mujahideen might take away his expensive camera.
Theoretically, one could also fly to Mazar by plane. Since we were going there as well, our acquaintance Naim called a friend in the Afghan Ministry of Defense to ask whether the military was flying to Mazar-i-Sharif. In response, he heard that, unfortunately, one of their planes had long been sitting somewhere in Iran, and another had just flown to the border Uzbek city of Termez. That was the entire aviation of the Afghan army.
As a result, the Iranians decided to stay in Kabul, and we bought tickets for 200 afghanis ($4) each for a bus that went to Mazar-i-Sharif. The road took 14 hours. Along the road, which crosses several former front lines, we constantly came across rusty remains of tanks and armored personnel carriers. Most of the armored scrap metal was useful to Afghans in their households. They make dugouts, stands for road signs, and supports for bridges out of tanks. Although Afghanistan has no traffic rules, and we counted only three working traffic lights in all of Kabul, cars brake in front of speed bumps at the entrance to every village. These are tracks from old tanks, of which there was no shortage. The mountain road winds around abandoned armored vehicles, and in the raging river, rusty tank hatches peek out from under the water. They say that once a year everything is transformed here when fields of opium poppies bloom on both sides of the highway. The Iranian cameraman was right. A very specific investment climate.
We returned from Mazar-i-Sharif alive, which our embassy seemed a little surprised by. On the last day of our stay in Afghanistan, my friends finally made up their minds to tickle the nerves of the Sheremetyevo-2 security and amuse those meeting them by getting off the plane dressed from head to toe in national Afghan clothing.
It turned out that to walk around Kabul in a respectable, by local standards, form, two Russian minimum wages are enough. The most important item of clothing for an ordinary mujahid is called 'peranu tumban' in Farsi and means a long shirt and baggy trousers. Together this costs about 700-800 afghanis, although they will also take dollars (about $15). Although Afghan trousers are so wide that they seem sewn for a sumo wrestler, in some amazing way they do not get stuck in bicycle chains - the main means of transportation for those mujahideen who do not have a Toyota Corolla. To prevent the trousers from falling down, you definitely need a special cord, which costs mere pennies.
Felt hats 'pakoli', like those of Ahmad Shah Massoud, sell for 200 afghanis, and scarves 'dasmal', better known as keffiyehs, for 100 or 150 depending on size. With women's clothing it is even simpler: the only thing in sight is a burqa costing about $10. In Kabul they wear blue chadors, in Mazar-i-Sharif white ones, in Kandahar the fashion is bright orange and red.
To our surprise, the Sheremetyevo customs treated the appearance of two mujahideen with Russian faces at passport control with complete indifference. Probably, having met the Moscow-Kabul flight, they had seen stranger things.
Here, for example, a former Taliban member Haji-Mohammad from Kandahar will soon also board a plane and go to Moscow to do business. He lived in the next room, snored every night behind the wall, and when he woke up, he came over to wish us good morning and let us call home for free on his phone. In general, Afghanistan's mobile communications are a big mystery, because no foreign telephone company's roaming works there, yet Afghans themselves can call all over the world.
With kind eyes and a long beard, Haji-Mohammad resembled an elderly bluesman, but in fact he had previously been a general. He asked for advice on where it would be best to invest $200 thousand in Moscow. Haji-Mohammad's money was right in the pocket of his white robe. Once he got tangled in the folds of his peranu tumban and accidentally pulled out dollars bound in a thick wad, although he wanted to get a business card. The Americans had been buying off Taliban members, so the war brought them far more such wads than the winners from the Northern Alliance, who had been invited to serve in the police a few months ago but have not been paid a single salary to this day.
Many mujahideen remained in the mountains repairing old Soviet tanks and waiting for a new war. Recently, American soldiers in a Jeep wanted to drive into the Panjshir Valley, where near his native village lies buried Ahmad Shah Massoud, killed by terrorists, who had fought against the Taliban and before that against the limited contingent of Soviet troops. The Americans reached the checkpoint, which is still run by a local field commander, and handed over their automatic rifles to him: after all, Massoud did not want foreigners with weapons to walk on his land. If it were up to the field commander, he would have driven the armed Americans not only out of the Panjshir Valley. We saw that he has dozens of old but fully operational tanks standing in the mountains for that purpose. But the field commander and his mujahideen understand that tanks alone are not enough, and say they will start a war as soon as the Americans do something bad to them.
And in Mazar-i-Sharif, before our eyes, one already adult female resident had her picture taken for the first time in her life. Until now, from her entire family, only her husband had tried doing this, when some foreigners took his picture and then sent the photograph. Seeing a camera in my hands, the woman was delighted, from under her chador explained that she really wanted to have her picture taken, and began to pose without revealing her face.
The photograph is ready, only it's unclear how the woman will understand whether she turned out well. The main thing is that letters reach the address "Mazar-i-Sharif, Rastai Angari Nadirshah, M. Shafe".