Chaos in Kabul Read Online Free PDF

possible.”
    They drove over to the terminal, and Doolittle dropped Malko off at an empty garden opposite the building.
    “Give me your baggage claim tickets and your passport, and wait here, please.”
    Doolittle’s SUV had the permits required to park next to the terminal. The unwashed masses, on the other hand, were kept at a distance behind the first checkpoint, more than five hundred yards away. The terminal entrance was protected by coils of razor wire and guarded by soldiers, fingers on their AK-47 triggers.
    The fear: car bombs.
    Slumped on a park bench, Malko huddled in his cashmere overcoat. He had dozed on the flight from Dubai to Kabul and still felt bleary-eyed from the long trip.
    Around him, the landscape of snow-covered mountains looked like the Alps.
    A fairyland.
    Once his Boeing 737 had crossed the crest of the mountains, it had descended to the plain on which Kabul stood at an altitude of fifty-nine hundred feet. Close up, it looked like less of a fairyland: around downtown the city spread like a cancer over the barren hills in vast shantytowns without water or electricity. The slums looked like the
morros
of Rio de Janeiro, minus the sea and the sun.
    It was thought that Kabul had three million inhabitants, but nobody was really sure. The number could be higher. The last census had been taken forty years earlier.
    What struck Malko was the silence. The last time he was in Kabul, coalition planes were constantly landing and taking off amid a hum of activity. Today there were no Americans left—they had pulled back to Bagram Air Base, forty miles from Kabul—and the only planes on the runway were C-130 Hercules turboprops in Afghan colors. A French contingent was stationed at the airport tooversee the return home of its last units, but it was nowhere to be seen.
    As Doolittle drove out of the airport, Malko noticed that the controls weren’t very strict. But the car still had to stop at the first checkpoint, then at a second, on a roundabout dominated by an old MiG-21 that looked ready to take off. As they swung onto Airport Road, the arrow-straight route downtown, Malko turned to Doolittle and asked:
    “What’s the mood in Kabul these days?”
    “It’s cool,” said the American. “The ANA and the police run the city. There aren’t many shootouts or kidnappings, just a car bomb from time to time.”
    Traffic was relatively light. A green Afghan police pickup with a dozen men in back roared past them. As before, the dusty avenue was lined with fruit and vegetable sellers.
    You didn’t feel you were in danger.
    Ten minutes later, they reached the Massoud monument. The roundabout was dominated by a column with a big ball on top and hung with two enormous pictures of Ahmad Shah Massoud, hero of the Panjshir Valley and the Northern Alliance. Al-Qaeda agents had assassinated Massoud in his headquarters in September 2001.
    Doolittle was soon forced to slow down. Downtown, the traffic was terrible. They made their way between rows of concrete walls twenty feet high topped by coils of razor wire. Punctilious checkpoints slowed the traffic further.
    The only cars on the road were Toyotas, of every year and model, with both right- and left-hand drives.
    “Seems like a lot of Toyotas,” Malko remarked.
    “About three-quarters of a million, sir. They come from the four corners of the earth.”
    Malko noticed many more flat Tajik
pakol
hats than he had on his last visit. One would think that the Tajiks controlled Kabul, which must get under the skin of the Pashtun majority.
    Every thirty yards or so, they saw a man armed with an AK-47, in or out of some sort of uniform, guarding something or other. It made Kabul look like a city under siege.
    “Are you still operating out of the Ariana?” Malko asked.
    “Affirmative, sir.”
    The Ariana was a former hotel near the American embassy. It stood at the end of an avenue interrupted by roadblocks where the French embassy was located; it had once served as the