Recovering Kabul bustles by day, freezes by night

KABUL, Afghanistan - It's 11 a.m., and traffic on Taru Buz Khan street is nearly jammed in both directions, crawling past a row of computer shops with stacks of Dell boxes in the front windows.

Rickety yellow-and-white taxis - have to haggle, no meters - jostle across four lanes with aid agency SUVs, new Chinese motorbikes, old bicycles and wooden carts drawn by horses and hand. Aside from the almost-constant swirl of dust, the streets are clean, with help from a small army of scavengers.

Across town, markets bustle with fresh bananas, mandarins and other produce brought in from the eastern city of Jalalabad or from Pakistan. Curbside money changers, waving wads of cash, do double business by hawking cell phone debit cards. Concrete - by the bag and by the truck - feeds a frenzy of construction and reconstruction.

There's a vitality, even impatience, for things to get on in Kabul, from the culinary scene (there's an Irish pub, and both Everest Pizza and the Lai Thai restaurant offer free delivery) to the shops doing brisk business on bootleg DVDs and CDs after a ban on music and television during the hardline Taliban regime.

But while there's no doubt the Afghan capital has taken many steps forward, it remains a rough, tightly guarded garrison town with all the attendant problems: crime, a legion of beggars and a fast-growing chasm between rich and poor that is being fed, in part, by the very people sent to help save the country.

In fact, life for most people is miserable, especially with the onset of the fourth winter since the Taliban's fall.

A huge influx of foreign aid and the arrival of high-salaried foreign workers has skewed the local economy, as has the booming drug trade, which accounts for an estimated 60 percent of gross domestic product.

Rents and other costs have jumped. Some people have turned metal shipping containers into shops and homes. Those who otherwise would be on the street, with the temperature dropping, crowd into war-battered buildings on the verge of collapse.

Beggars have multiplied, including many women in worn burqas. Swarms of kids try to sell a pack of chewing gum or a newspaper, always for a dollar.

On the hillsides surrounding the city, where residents have carved houses into the steep inclines, smoke billows from fireplaces. There is no hum of generators here, and little or no electricity. Aid agencies are giving out winterization kits to help the most needy survive until spring.

The end of the Taliban's strict edicts has not meant the end of the burqa, the all-covering women's garment that to the West became a symbol of repression. The number of women wearing them has dropped to perhaps 50 percent in the capital, but cultural change has come much more slowly than the security and technological advances.

Windows in the capital still rattle occasionally from the concussion of an explosion, but these days it's much more likely to be troops blowing up weapons caches they are still finding than a terror attack.

That is not to say it has been without incident. Three U.N. workers were kidnapped in the capital and held for five weeks before being freed last month. An explosion on popular Chicken Street in October killed three people, including a U.S. woman.

Those with money have embraced high-tech with the same fervor as the Taliban disdained it.

Satellite dishes are sprouting like mushrooms. Kabul's burgeoning media industry includes more than 150 publications, plus two private TV networks in addition to the state-run one, and plasma screens are available. Internet cafes have opened and cell phone sales are booming.

Still, the reminders of war are everywhere, from buildings pockmarked by years of conflict to amputees on crutches or in wheelchairs to the regular German patrols in a string armored personnel carriers.

Electricity ends at the edge of the city, much as security and the government's power have so far.

By 10 p.m., the city is locked down for the night, a light fog adding to the feel of a ghost town.

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