Kabul Tense But Weirdly Normal After Monday’s Attacks

Rush hour, Kabul (photo by P.J.)

Since arriving in Kabul on Thursday, I’ve noticed some changes that friend’s and colleagues tell me are a direct result of Monday’s multiple attacks on the Afghan capital.

The most obvious of these is the number of police checkpoints. Just driving from the airport to my house–usually a 15 minute trip–my driver and I were stopped three times by police. While the police mostly just wanted to poke around the car, I was also asked to produce my passport twice, and for the first time since the Aug. 20 presidential election, the cops actually seemed to be paying attention to who was in the car and what was in the trunk.

Same thing on the way to work this morning.

And everybody I talked to today, no matter where in the city they were on Monday, said that they felt like the hours-long gunfight was right in their backyard. “It sounded like it was happening next door,” said on of my translators, who was miles away from the fighting. “I swear I thought I was trapped between two armies in the middle of a gun-fight.”

But Afghans have been through this before (many, many times before) and less than a week after combat raged in downtown Kabul, life is back to normal. On my way home this evening, I passed the Gulbahar Center, a new, multi-level shopping mall that was the base for part of the insurgent attack, and the traffic was jam-packed in front of the now bullet riddled building, just like always.

“What are you gonna’ do?” asked my driver, sounding like a New York cabbie. “This is a main traffic circle and people have to get home from work.”