COOL UNDER FIRE

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In Afghanistan not even the museum pieces are safe. Rory Stewart, writer, explorer and politician, returns to Kabul to capture the perilous existence—and enduring power—of its treasures ...

From INTELLGENT LIFE magazine, September/October 2011

Two vast and mostly trunkless legs of stone stand in the hall; near them sits a shattered Bodhisattva, whose hunched shoulders and sorrowful gaze are the work of an Afghan sculptor from 1,700 years ago. In 2001, the Taliban broke it into a hundred pieces. And the Bodhisattva seems to be mourning all the cracks and plaster joints of its reconstruction.

It is difficult not to write about the Kabul Museum as a lament, and perhaps it was ever thus. The single white marble door on your left as you enter probably comes from the Kabul bazaar, burnt by the British in 1842 in revenge for their humiliation in the first Anglo-Afghan war, or from the Royal Palace in the Bala Hissar, destroyed in 1880 during the second British occupation. The museum bears the scars of the rocket that hit it in the spring of 1993; and of the militias who broke into the storeroom the following autumn, ransacking the cases, burning the records and removing most of the collection.

And yet it is not a depressing place. I first saw it at the beginning of 2002. I had walked from Herat to Kabul that winter. I had seen hundreds of pickaxe-wielding villagers, directed by Pakistani traders, uncovering, looting and destroying the ancient city of the Turquoise Mountain, the lost Afghan capital of the Middle Ages. The Taliban had just blown up two monumental Buddhas that had stood, carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamiyan Valley, since the sixth century. I found new craters, left by looters, on mountain ridges at 11,000 feet. In this country of isolated hamlets, the life expectancy was 37, literacy rates in the south were 8%, and archaeological looting had become a common occupation, along with heroin production and mercenary fighting.

Central Kabul seemed like one extended security checkpoint. You were stopped by men who ripped car doors open and pointed their rifles at passengers. You found roads narrowing suddenly into tunnels of sandbags, or closed altogether by concrete blast walls. You were pushed off the street by armoured vehicles with blaring sirens, by embassy convoys, by militias in pick-up trucks.

But the wide, five-mile boulevard leading south-west to the Kabul Museum took one back into a more peaceful nation. You could see the snow peaks on either side. Men, oblivious to the traffic, sat back on empty carts, pulled by ambling donkeys. This had been the first paved road in the country. King Amanullah had driven his seven Rolls-Royces down it in the 1920s, and although, since then, the avenue of plane trees had been cut for firewood, it was still paved. At the end of the boulevard, framed by 15,000-foot peaks and facing the museum, was his great ruined palace of Darul Aman—“the place of peace”.

The museum was not surrounded, like a NATO base, with razor wire and blast walls. Nor was it one of the garish palaces of the new Afghan rich, with bulging filigree balconies and pink cupolas. Nor, again, was it covered with the green tiles favoured by drug barons and warlords, contractors and ministers. Instead, here was a two-storey 1930s villa, with walls of muted grey pebbledash and a small line of white plaster decoration beneath the roof. Outside it in a shed stood two 1950s American cars, partially concealed by brown canvas sheets. And a railway engine, for a railway that does not exist.

Littered with stone capitals, the narrow dusty path leading to the entrance had remained unchanged since the piratical Hungarian archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein visited in 1943 (he died in Kabul at the age of 80 and is buried in the British cemetery). The glass of the ticket booth was plastered with fading postcards. In the tattered pile behind the desk were brochures produced during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, or President Daud’s regime in the 1970s, or even under the old monarchy. And the two ladies sitting in the booth seemed to have been there through all those years, always in half-darkness, finishing their lunch, surprised to be asked for a ticket.