“I have no idea!”Ī few spooks, certainly. He leaned up from signing books and grinned. “Who are these people?” I asked Dominic, gesturing across the roof. The two British authors, Dominic Medley and Jude Barrand, both NGO aid workers, were selling it through a network of street children, who took it on a $5 commission and hoped to sell it for $15, keeping the spread. The Survival Guide to Kabul, a kind of underground tip sheet for expats, had been circulating in a 16-page photocopy edition for a year, but tonight it was coming out as Kabul, a 178-page paperback crash course on first-aid kits, bad hotels, and who really makes those rugs. The roof looked like a cross between a kegger and a siege. This moths-to-the-flame aid tribe moves from global trouble spot to Third World crisis, Africa to Asia, Bogotá to Beirut. military personnel in all of Afghanistan, and twice the 4,800-person NATO-commanded International Security Assistance Force that keeps the peace in the city. By some estimates, there are 10,000 or more foreign civilians in Kabulabout the same number as there are U.S. Spread out on the roof was the full cast from the theater of charity: UN staff, humanitarians from the 1,800 aid groups registered in Kabul, suit-wearing security ninjas, and ubiquitous consultants. Now that the hotel was off-limits, everyone was here. Many NGOsnongovernmental organizationshad banned their staff from frequenting the Mustafa after the owner’s son went on a window-smashing rampage during a particularly violent business feud. A Turkish de-mining technician sat typing homebound messages at a terminal while a Brit, a white South African, and a black Kenyan sat on stools, nursing beers and ignoring one another. The ground floor of the Mustafa holds a dank cybercafé that doubles as a bar, the only public place in Kabul to get draft beer.
I could hear Shakira playing faintly from above. I threaded my way through a cluster of acronyms: UN, UNESCO, UNDP, UNHCR, FAO, UNICEF, UNICA, UNAMA, UNOPS, UNEP, MSF, ACF, MAP, MACA, IRC, WFP, IOM, IMC. Late-model 4x4s filled the avenue and circled the block, churning up dust as the chauffeurs maneuvered for parking. This caravan of chariots was triple-parked outside the Mustafa Hotel in downtown Kabul on a Saturday night. LEAP OF FAITH: crossing the Harirud river from the Minaret of Jam
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