The Lost City

Today it is a place of ruins and ghosts - but once it was a glittering metropolis of palaces and pleasure grounds. Are we civilised enough to give Kabul a future? by Philip Hensher

On the Emperor Babur's tomb, near Kabul, there once stood an inscription: "Drink wine in the citadel of Kabul, and send round the cup without stopping: for it is at once a mountain, a sea, a town, a desert." Babur loved Kabul, and said that "its verdure and flowers render it, in spring, a heaven". When Alexander Burnes visited Kabul in the 1830s, Babur's tomb was one of the places he loved best. "There is a noble prospect from the hill which overlooks Babur's tomb, and a summer house has been erected upon it by Shah Zaman, from which it may be admired. If my reader can imagine a plain, about 20 miles in circumference, laid out with gardens and fields in pleasing irregularity, intersected by three rivulets, which wind through it by a serpentine course, and wash innumerable little forts and villages, he will have before him one of the meadows of Cabool."

Kabul struck Burnes as a garden city. "The gardens are well kept and laid out; the fruit trees are planted at regular distances. The ground was covered with the fallen blossom, which had drifted into the corners, like so much snow. The Nawab and myself seated ourselves under a pear-tree of Samarcand and admired the prospect. There were peaches, plums, apricots, pears, apples, quinces, cherries, walnuts, mulberries, pomegranates, and vines, all growing in one garden. There were also nightingales, blackbirds, thrushes and doves, to raise their notes, and chattering magpies ..."

There were race grounds, palaces, pleasure-grounds, summer houses, orchards, vineyards; fruit was more plentiful than bread, and Kabul gorged on rhubarb, mulberries, and apricots, which it had learnt to dry in fourteen different ways. The bazaar was famous throughout Asia, and – something which struck every visitor – it was picturesquely illuminated at night with a lamp suspended before each shop. Kabul was a renowned trading city, and the civilizations of the East sent their merchants, laden with goods, through the metropolis. Many of the resident merchants were Qizzilbash, or Afghans of Persian descent, and the rich promises of Persian and Indian culture here combined to dazzle the visitor with abundance.

In the great bazaar, there were fruit shops, dried-fruit shops, poulterers, shoe-makers, hardware retailers, booksellers, sellers of paper (often blue, and Russian in manufacture). There were vendors of falodeh, a favourite dessert of the Afghans, a white jelly strained from wheat, drunk with sherbet and snow; in their shops, a pillar of snow stood on one side, a fountain playing over the desserts. And everywhere, storytellers, amusing the idlers, dervishes proclaiming the deeds of the Prophet and his heirs. An ancient city, said by the Afghans to be 6000 years old, a beautiful, stately, noisy capital, constructed of many histories, many myths, money, fruit, trade and poetry.

All gone now. The great bazaar was razed to the ground by the British as long ago as the 1840s. And since then, Kabul has been rebuilt, and destroyed, and rebuilt and destroyed, over and over again. There are no orchards in Kabul now, and no nightingales to sing in them, and American bombs fall, and the Taliban rule, over a city of terrible, blasted ruination. Destroyed, over and over again, by the folly of Afghans, by the malice of hill-dwelling zealots, by the righteous fury of the West, by ideologues, would-be emperors, warlords, the mad and the measured, over and over again.

History, here, rewinds wearily, and the acts of vengeance repeat themselves, once a decade or so. The British ride into Kabul to revenge the loss of an entire army at Afghan hands, and destroy the treasured heart of the city before fleeing the desolation. Russian tanks roll in, claiming friendship, pretending to prop up a hated regime and inspiring only civil war, and more destruction. Hekmatyar's guns thunder at the gates, for years on end. The Taliban, finally, ride into the city, hanging and killing to left and right.

None of these people care anything much for Kabul or its future, the Taliban least of all. Their contempt for the city is undisguised, and it is not just a lack of resources which means that they have made no effort to reconstruct the capital. Most of the Taliban do not even speak its language, and the Mullah Omar, their leader, did not take the trouble to visit the capital for months after its fall in 1996. It sounds incredible, but to them, it represents a symbol of the corruption of Islam, a decadent and despicable capital. Their culture is sharply opposed to the cosmopolitan, imperial, sophisticated history of the great city; their values are of the Pashtun-speaking hills, of plain-living, devout warrior-priests, living an austere life which is not just monastic but, when it is not celibate, predominantly homosexual.

That's the wrong word – they are not homosexuals in a Western sense – but they certainly emerge from a culture long noted in Islam for such attachments, and it's worth saying that official condemnation of sodomy was relatively slow to emerge. Their culture, in short, is strange and hostile not just to us, but to Kabul (which they have made little effort to reconstruct) and to pretty well the entire Islamic world. They care very little for their capital; its future is up to us.

So the annihilation of the city begins again, and the inhabitants of Kabul cower in their cellars, and run through the blazing streets. And perhaps, when the guns have fallen silent for a moment, the descendants of the storytellers Burnes listened to will start to talk, to console their terrified, information-starved listeners. Not the Arabian Nights, not the Alf-Layla wa Layla these days, but, bizarrely, the story of Titanic, embroidered, multiplied, hours-long, passed on from mouth to ear and mouth to ear; perhaps, too, tales of the Afghan past. Perhaps, for an hour or two, they pause and forget the reckless pride and cruelty of the Taliban, who have brought down fire from the skies upon the innocent, and listen to tales of the Prophet, who brought peace and justice and love where there was lawlessness. Or to tales of the great amirs of their great kingdom; of Dost Muhammad, who in the 19th century ruled justly – from his austere palace, the Bala Hissar.

The bombs, now, must fall. The folly of the Taliban has led them to this point, and their pride, which made them reject their one chance when they could have abandoned Osama bin Laden to his fate and saved their skins. There is no more talking to the Taliban, and we have decided to fulfil our urge to revenge. But if we want to go on considering ourselves civilized people, we need to think beyond this very understandable urge.

For us, at this point, there is a freedom and a duty. We have a freedom to revenge our own suffering, which we are expensively fulfilling with enthusiasm. And beyond that, we have a duty; we must recognise the faint dream-memory which still shifts in the fire-lit rubble of Kabul, the fading dream of a great city, a city of palaces, where the fruit is piled high in the rich bazaar, where the mosques are places of calm, wise devotion and not of an all-encompassing hatred.

What would it mean – not just for Kabul, not just for Afghanistan, but for the entire Islamic world – if we, in the West, proved ourselves ready to fulfil that beautiful dream? At present, it seems all too probable that the will of the West doesn't stretch to that, but just to pursue the "war against terrorism" by moving on, like locusts, to devastate one terrorist-harbouring tract of the earth after another. But with freedoms come duties. The greatest and wisest act of recent history was the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War, with Marshall Plan billions. The promptness and trust of that response helped Germans to recognise the intentions behind the bombs. They mourned the destruction of Dresden and Berlin, and that was their right; but, in the end, they saw that the promise of a future, and freedom, was more worth having.

It is too much to ask that we expect the inhabitants of Kabul to recognise the benign intentions of the bombs falling on them. To alleviate their suffering, in the form of humanitarian aid, will not be enough in the end. The challenge for the West is a terrible one, and, given that there is no domestic kudos to be had out of pursuing it, it will be an unusually strong and wise leader who carries it through; it is to follow our revenge with reconstruction. Not just aid, not just food parcels and medicines, but roads and schools and hospitals. Not millions, but billions. It is our plain duty. If we live to be 100, we will never see one plainer.