There is progress in Afghanistan, but the danger is increasing

On Dec. 5, a sunny Friday morning in Kabul, three SUVs pulled up to a bustling street corner near the north bank of the Kabul River. A dozen people tumbled out onto the sidewalk, including Ron Hoffman, Canada’s ambassador to Afghanistan, his scowling and vigilant bodyguards, and a handful of visitors from home, including me.

We stepped briskly away from the main street along a back lane split down the middle by a shallow V-shaped drainage ditch. Merchants’ stalls lined the lane: a man selling hand-hammered axe blades, another popping formidable quantities of popcorn on an open fire. Our destination, a few dozen metres off the thoroughfare, was the Turquoise Mountain redevelopment site, an ambitious attempt to reclaim one of Kabul’s oldest districts as a haven for traditional arts, crafts and architecture.

Only three years ago the whole area was buried in layers of accumulated trash to a depth of several metres, Sayed Majidi, a handsome German-born Afghan architect, told us. That’s when former British diplomat Rory Stewart wrangled funding from the Aga Khan Foundation and Prince Charles to restore the neighbourhood, known as Murad Khane, to its 18th-century glory. The land was cleared, crumbling buildings rebuilt. Elder craftsmen and a new generation of their students set to work carving intricate woodwork doors and window frames. Ceramic wall fixtures were rebuilt with local clays mixed with a plant fibre called gul-e loch. Students started flocking to Turquoise Mountain from across Afghanistan to relearn the ancient techniques.

Last year the Canadian International Development Agency gave a grant of $3 million to continue Turquoise Mountain’s work as an architectural site, school for the arts, and high-end craft export business. These will seem like lofty concerns in Afghanistan, a war zone and one of the world’s poorest countries. But there is something magical about these elegant buildings tucked away from the clamouring streetscape. No society can get by for long on survival and subsistence alone. Every community needs craft and lore, some living link to the higher aspirations of the mind and heart. “Of course this is good for all of Kabul,” Hedayatullah Ahmadzai, Turquoise Mountain’s head of engineering, told me. “Afghan people don’t know their history. They need to see it. This place is the father and mother of all Kabul. Of all Afghanistan.”

While the engineer spoke, Hoffman, a superbly well-connected diplomat with a lopsided grin and a fly-away shock of greying blond hair, stepped away to take a call on his cellphone. The ambassador listened more than he spoke and ended the call with a quiet, “Well, thanks for letting me know.”

That night, after the next of kin had been properly notified back home, we learned that the call had been to inform Hoffman about the roadside bomb west of Kandahar that killed the 98th, 99th and 100th Canadian soldiers to die in Afghanistan.

The work of life and hope continues in Afghanistan. So does the work of unimaginable savagery. Each task has drawn practitioners of uncommon dedication. Even today, seven years into this mess, it is not clear who is winning. If victory has any decent meaning, we are nowhere close to being able to claim it. And a very dangerous year lies just ahead. Afghans will elect a new government in 2009. The Taliban and other insurgents will try to stop the voting. Drug lords will try to corrupt it. And a massive influx of American troops, perhaps 20,000 by 2010, will mark the arrival of a new American president determined to tip the balance of a stalemated war.

Even soldiers who eagerly await the arrival of U.S. reinforcements worry about what will happen when they arrive. Many—though certainly not all—believe the level of violence will skyrocket in the short term and that the heart of the carnage will be the country’s south, including Kandahar, where most of the soldiers in the Canadian deployment are already stationed. It may be salutary violence; perhaps this war needs to get worse before it gets better. But one U.S. general put it this way.