Bowling, riding and kite-flying: everyday life in Kabul - Guardian

War, from a distance, can seem all-consuming. Before I first visited Kabul, I flicked through a collage of reports on bombings and suicide attacks and imagined a hell-on-earth of flames, gunmen, craters, rubble and fear.

What I found instead was a traffic- and fume-choked city of more than five million people, cradled by snow-capped peaks, full of vibrant, if precarious, life. In the well-guarded Afghan capital, violence is a menace that contorts and shadows daily life, but it is not the city’s sole defining feature.

Several dozen people die in Kabul every year from suicide bombings and Taliban attacks, but as many or more are killed by car crashes, air pollution or the dangerous act of giving birth in a country that provides little help for expectant mothers.

Civilians in Kabul inhabit a twilight zone between war and peace. They are always stalked by the possibility of an attack, haunted by memories of family villages in Taliban-controlled territory that they can no longer visit, tormented by reports of atrocities visited on rural relatives or friends by both sides in the conflict.

Yet, their daily worries are most often the same mundane concerns that bother families in far more peaceful places. For the poorest, it is simply whether they will eat the next day, or whether they can scavenge some fuel to stave off the winter chill.

The slightly better-off worry about whether they can find a decent job, how their children are doing at school, whether their doctor has correctly diagnosed a lingering cough. And, in between, they try to have fun.  Read More