War, And Other Drugs

The Afghan people have long been inured to violence and destruction. Now, as employment opportunities dry up, many of them are turning to drugs and crime. Amid the worsening security crisis, the road to peace seems impossibly long

- Rekha Dixit

On January 21, Omar Sadr got off his taxi at a roadblock and walked the remaining distance to work. In the foreground, he could see smoke billowing. The siege at Intercontinental Hotel was on. A cold dread gripped Sadr, a young researcher at the Afghan Institute of Strategic Studies. “I felt my life was under threat. I felt unsafe. And, I felt terror,” he said. Six days later, an ambulance exploded at a spot he had passed by only a few hours earlier. The toll is 100 and counting. “Luck and timing, that saved me,” he said.

Kabul is one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and every resident here has been exposed to terror, up close and personal. Everyone knows someone who was killed, or maimed, in a blast. Danger takes myriad forms. There is terror. There are bounty hunters, waiting to grab a ransomable prey. They are known to chop off and send bits of fingers and ears to frighten families and employers into paying up. Few have compunctions about bumping off a “worthless” victim. And, then, there are the petty thieves, driven by unemployment or drug addiction, who will kill for a few Afghanis. This is our life, we are inured to it, say residents.

Sadr’s resilience has weakened considerably, though. He has returned from a six-year stay in India, and he remembers his erstwhile residence in notorious Gurgaon as a safe haven in comparison with the chaos in Kabul. Sadr has returned with a wife, Rashmi Dangol, from Nepal, whom he met while studying at the South Asian University in Delhi. Rashmi—who got a job at the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University before him, and happily joined her in-laws months before he moved back—seems to have adjusted rather well to Kabul. Sadr is wracked with fear, misgivings and guilt. This was his hell; has he jeopardised Rashmi’s life, too?