PREMIUM SEARCH Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts
Editor's Note: This is Part 2 of a Reporter's Notebook from BusinessWeek's Bombay bureau chief on her recent trip to Afghanistan. Part 1 was published on Sept. 12.
I need to get to an Internet café to call my editors in New York and let them know I'm O.K., now that I've reached the city of Kandahar. Alas, the cellular company that offers international roaming service in Afghanistan -- Afghan Wireless -- says it can't help. Actually, the wireless frequency here is so limited that it's constantly used up in a mish mash of cellular, microwave, and satellite services.
The Indian consul general in Kandahar, Om Prakash Bhola, a polite, soft-spoken foreign-service officer whose last posting was sun-soaked Zanzibar, comes to my rescue. He invites me to send an e-mail from his office –- and I do. Would I also like to dine at the consulate that evening and, before that, attend the evening services at the local Sikh temple? Yes, of course.
I get my first and last view of Kandahar at night. The city isn't under curfew, but only the foolish would venture out in the lampless streets. At 7:30 p.m., merchants are still plying their trade, selling fruits and vegetables, mostly the sweet, seven-kilogram melons that Afghanistan is famous for and the nectar-like Kandahari grapes.
"GIVE US THE ROOTS." Dry fruits used to be one of Afghanistan's top exports until a few years ago, when lack of rain and irrigation facilities made much farming impossible. People took to producing opium instead, and the crop is expected to be much larger this year than last year's 3,400 tons, according to officials' estimates.
Some Afghans accuse Pakistan of beggaring their farmers. "The Pakistan merchants come from Quetta across the [Afghan-Pakistani] border and tell these poor farmers, 'If you have no grapes to give us, then give us the roots of your pistacho and almond trees. We can pay you more money for them,'" says one Kandahari resident.
Once fairly common in in the city, only 25 Sikh families are left now. Many fled to India during Taliban rule, but now some are starting to return. This is, after all, their home, and even with all its problems perhaps a better place to live than the squalid refugee camps in India.
SQUEALING CHILDREN. The Sikhs here certainly look like Afghans and speak the local language. Typically, they're small shopkeepers. Their local temple looks like any Sikh temple in India. The holy book, the Granth, is beautifully festooned with brocade cloth and flowers. The hymns and devotionals are the same, and the parsad, or offering of cooked flour with clarified butter and sugar, tastes the same as that offered at my temple in Bombay.
But this temple is crowded -- most in India are peaceful places of repose. Lots of children squeal through the ceremony. The elders later explain that Sikh children have no schools here. They used to go to local schools and were exempted from Koranic studies. Under the Taliban, they had to study the Koran, and then no school was allowed at all.
Now, Kandahar is back to forced Koranic studies, so the Sikhs prefer to keep their children at home. They've asked Sikh organizations in India for help, and Consul General Bhola hopes to oblige them. The evening at the temple fills me with compassion and, strangely, with the joy of being able to freely worship a non-Islamic faith in an Islamic country.
"TRANSIT ECONOMY." This is the way Afghanistan used to be in the old days –- a confluence of cultures, the crossroads of Asia. Kandahar was once a center of learning, where pacifist Buddhism and trade flourished. Nigel Allen, a geographer and expert on the cultures of the Hindukush region at University of California at Davis who has visited the region several times in the last few years, thinks Afghanistan can again succeed as a "transit economy," like Dubai.
Afghanistan is a land of mountain passes, he notes, and trade is vital. Afghans have always made money moving goods and products through the rugged terrain. A thriving smuggling business continues from the northern borders across Pakistan and China. That can be legitimized now.
Still, Allen figures that subsidies will be necessary for the land-locked country, with its remote mountain culture. That has been the case for almost a century. Only in 1919 and 1928, when under the rule of Ramanullah, has Afghanistan declined outside help. "Afghans ask me: 'When are the Americans leaving?' And I tell them, '50 years,'" says Allen. "The U.S., the U.K, and the U.N., they are the new colonial mandarins, and they'll be making the decisions."
Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Printer-Friendly Version
