Two market traders encapsulate the sorry history of Afghanistan
By Martin Fletcher
I was last in Kabul in 1979, shortly before the Soviet invasion. In those days the Afghan capital was a favourite stopping-off point for long-haired Western hippies driving to India in their battered VW vans on the “Kathmandu trail”. Kabul’s high-walled British cemetery, the green and tranquil resting place of Kipling’s 19th-century soldiers, contains the graves of several such travellers killed by their own excesses or Afghanistan’s lethal roads.
Chicken Street was the biggest magnet, a short, narrow thoroughfare where traders hawked Afghan coats, silver ankle bracelets and plentiful pot. To my astonishment — despite 30 years of invasions, civil war, Mujahidin rockets and the Taleban’s reign of terror — it still exists, and still sells Afghan coats, onyx chess boards, brass dishes and faux-antique daggers.
To my even greater astonishment two shopkeepers, Mohammed Rafiq and Mohammed Fahim have been there all that time. “It’s a miracle we’re still here,” said Mr Rafiq, who sells rugs and colourful sequined dresses, and that’s no exaggeration.