Globalista

The barbarians are at the gates, you can't drive through the Khyber Pass anymore (the Taliban cut the road at Sarobi in 2006), yet Kabul has a thriving, alcohol-fuelled social scene which carries on behind heavily armoured steel doors. Since the insurgency started to gather pace in 2004 there is the sense that this debauch just can't go on. Yet it does, night after night, beer after whisky, triple vodka after tequila slammer.

It was the climate that first attracted Babur, the great writer and founder of the Mughal dynasty, to Kabul. Although the civil war has destroyed most of the trees and turned it from one of the most pleasant places in which to be expatriated into the war-ravaged and dusty city of today, visitors can still enjoy the perfect early summer days and warm evenings under the stars.

Afghanistan has been both blessed and cursed by its position at the junction of three spheres of civilisation: the Persian, central Asian and Indian. Any army from any of these spheres wanting to invade another - and there have been many - must pass through Afghanistan, and the plaque at the Khyber Pass records only some of them: the Aryans, Alexander the Great, the Mughals and the British (who left a fine railway, now a collection of tunnels and rails suspended high above the ground). Toynbee rightly described Afghanistan as 'the great roundabout of empires.'

If its position has cursed it militarily, it has blessed it as a centre for trade. The Afghans crowding the bazaars selling cloaks, kalashnikovs, fighting quails and grilled sheep heads are the descendants of inhabitants of the territory that was the very heart of the Silk Road. The Bagram Treasure, now in the US as part of a travelling exhibition of the highlights of the Kabul Museum, testifies to this. It contains ivories of naked women from India, gloriously multicoloured Roman glass, an ancient Chinese mirror: all these objects show how enterprising and profit-minded our ancestors were. The Silk Road left an extraordinary artistic legacy in Gandharan art, in which the realistic Greek sculptural tradition met Buddhism and produced some of the most beautiful and serene renderings of the human face that ou species has ever produced.

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Globalista's Pick of the Press

23 April 2009 - The Guardian - Dam of Awe to be Afghan national park
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