I've spent the last week trying to get access to primary source materials--which may or may not exist--from the First Anglo-Afghan War from the National Archives. Every time I go there's more waiting and new heads of such-and-such departments to meet and then I'm told that it's out of their hands and they have to get extra special permission for me and they'll try their hardest and I should come back in a day or four. I was warned that getting into the archives would be difficult and based mostly on how well-liked I made myself. The archives of the Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, are apparently simply impossible to get into. Even the Foreign Minister (and keep in mind that I don't bother fact-checking anything I write here, just repeat juicy tidbits I've been told) hasn't been inside. People at a research organization here told me that a while back an archivist from Cornell University had come to start cataloguing/organizing the Foreign Ministry archives and the Saudi government had even agreed to fund it all, but then when he showed up they told him he would have to do his cataloguing/organizing from outside the building.
I'm guessing the German government is the main backer of the national archives because all the display cases on one side of the main hall of different periods of Afghan history--which they've repeatedly suggested should be sufficient for doctoral research--are quadrilingual: Persian, Pashto, English, and German--and there are multiple display cases mentioning Afghan-German relations over the past two centuries (glossing over the period of courtship of Afghanistan by Nazi Germany). The other side of the main hall is all calligraphy, mostly in Persian with a smattering of Pashto. A group of schoolgirls were on there on a field trip yesterday, lining up to sign the guest book:
A couple evenings ago I joined live music night with a group of about ten men from the country's tip-top elite and two foreign women (the host said he was planning to invite five more beautiful women but his VIP guests had to be careful about word of them singing and dancing and imbibing getting out). The musicians were, my friend who kept making sure that I didn't think they were gay for dancing together told me, the direct descendants of Indian Muslim musicians who Ahmad Shah Abdali brought back to Kabul after sacking Delhi in one of his mid-18th century invasions of India. The three of them played, respectively, tabla, plucked rabab, and harmonium, and played what sounded to me--a complete laymen when it comes to ethnomusicology--like Indian rhythms with classical poetry for lyrics. The singer would recite one poem in Persian and then without stopping or as far as I noticed changing beat move on to a Pashto or Urdu poem that it took me a while to realize was a different language I didn't understand. Each line was repeated twice, and particularly deep Sufi mystical lines about selfhood or evaluating life would be greeted by cheers and repeated by the whole group the second time around. Sometimes just two men would get up and dance together and sometimes a group of five would do a semi-coordinating twirly circle dance together. Much giddiness. To express appreciation when the tabla player played an especially virtuosic solo or the singer belting out especially profound lyrics, men would dance over the the carpet on which the players sat cross-legged and elaborately toss a 500 or 1000 afghani note in front of them.
My friend I tagged along with to an expat dinner party last night told me to bring my passport, and that the host had been relieve that she wasn't bringing any Afghans with her as that would create [security?] problems. Many restaurants that cater to expats actually won't allow Afghans to enter, with the semi-official justification that they serve alcohol and even less official justification that it would make the expats and their security contractors worried about safety.
I had mango juice today with a financial consultant, from a firm whose selling point for the internationals is that it employs real Afghans who've lived in Afghanistan most of their lives (but have Western educations and values). I was about 40 minutes late. As I'm gradually learning, the walled garden cafes and restaurants where the elite hang out are mostly hidden away behind heavy gates with no outside signs so ordinary people in the neighborhood don't even know they exist (and so can't provide you with directions). The drivers of international organizations know where they are, but not regular taxi drivers.
Mostly we talked about my research project, which has been going nowhere so far, and his firm's frantic push to diversify as much as possible to the "real economy" (stuff like transportation and mining) before the aid market shrinks with the expected 2014 pullout of US/NATO troops. Right now their clients are mostly governments and aid organizations, and it seems to me the niche they've carved out as "authentic yet efficient" Afghans is one that can thrive most in an artificial "capacity building" economy.
The consultant also mentioned to me that in Kabul--though not Herat--the Turks have been far outcompeting the Iranians when it comes to exports and contracting, in part because Turkey isn't seen as having a meddling political interest. Many people have in fact started boycotting Iranian businesses, a bandwagon his firm has jumped on to show off their corporate ethics, with poor Iranian treatment of Afghan refugees as the proximate rallying cry. That leaves Turkish and Chinese imports of stuff like furniture and housewares and the former have a better reputation for quality. I feel I've been devoting too much of this blog to Iran-bashing, but it just keeps coming up.
I'm guessing the German government is the main backer of the national archives because all the display cases on one side of the main hall of different periods of Afghan history--which they've repeatedly suggested should be sufficient for doctoral research--are quadrilingual: Persian, Pashto, English, and German--and there are multiple display cases mentioning Afghan-German relations over the past two centuries (glossing over the period of courtship of Afghanistan by Nazi Germany). The other side of the main hall is all calligraphy, mostly in Persian with a smattering of Pashto. A group of schoolgirls were on there on a field trip yesterday, lining up to sign the guest book:
A couple evenings ago I joined live music night with a group of about ten men from the country's tip-top elite and two foreign women (the host said he was planning to invite five more beautiful women but his VIP guests had to be careful about word of them singing and dancing and imbibing getting out). The musicians were, my friend who kept making sure that I didn't think they were gay for dancing together told me, the direct descendants of Indian Muslim musicians who Ahmad Shah Abdali brought back to Kabul after sacking Delhi in one of his mid-18th century invasions of India. The three of them played, respectively, tabla, plucked rabab, and harmonium, and played what sounded to me--a complete laymen when it comes to ethnomusicology--like Indian rhythms with classical poetry for lyrics. The singer would recite one poem in Persian and then without stopping or as far as I noticed changing beat move on to a Pashto or Urdu poem that it took me a while to realize was a different language I didn't understand. Each line was repeated twice, and particularly deep Sufi mystical lines about selfhood or evaluating life would be greeted by cheers and repeated by the whole group the second time around. Sometimes just two men would get up and dance together and sometimes a group of five would do a semi-coordinating twirly circle dance together. Much giddiness. To express appreciation when the tabla player played an especially virtuosic solo or the singer belting out especially profound lyrics, men would dance over the the carpet on which the players sat cross-legged and elaborately toss a 500 or 1000 afghani note in front of them.
My friend I tagged along with to an expat dinner party last night told me to bring my passport, and that the host had been relieve that she wasn't bringing any Afghans with her as that would create [security?] problems. Many restaurants that cater to expats actually won't allow Afghans to enter, with the semi-official justification that they serve alcohol and even less official justification that it would make the expats and their security contractors worried about safety.
I had mango juice today with a financial consultant, from a firm whose selling point for the internationals is that it employs real Afghans who've lived in Afghanistan most of their lives (but have Western educations and values). I was about 40 minutes late. As I'm gradually learning, the walled garden cafes and restaurants where the elite hang out are mostly hidden away behind heavy gates with no outside signs so ordinary people in the neighborhood don't even know they exist (and so can't provide you with directions). The drivers of international organizations know where they are, but not regular taxi drivers.
Mostly we talked about my research project, which has been going nowhere so far, and his firm's frantic push to diversify as much as possible to the "real economy" (stuff like transportation and mining) before the aid market shrinks with the expected 2014 pullout of US/NATO troops. Right now their clients are mostly governments and aid organizations, and it seems to me the niche they've carved out as "authentic yet efficient" Afghans is one that can thrive most in an artificial "capacity building" economy.
The consultant also mentioned to me that in Kabul--though not Herat--the Turks have been far outcompeting the Iranians when it comes to exports and contracting, in part because Turkey isn't seen as having a meddling political interest. Many people have in fact started boycotting Iranian businesses, a bandwagon his firm has jumped on to show off their corporate ethics, with poor Iranian treatment of Afghan refugees as the proximate rallying cry. That leaves Turkish and Chinese imports of stuff like furniture and housewares and the former have a better reputation for quality. I feel I've been devoting too much of this blog to Iran-bashing, but it just keeps coming up.
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