Barney Rubin’s friend Naser Shahalemi was in the Serena Hotel in Kabul when suicide bombers shot their way in and blew themselves up:
I look through the glass outside and see a Corolla turn and wrap to the front of the Serena Door and then the driver jumps outs and throws himself on the ground. The Corolla hits the wall of the front glass doors.Then I just hear hundreds of bullets shooting, I hit the ground because the bullets at this point sound extremely close to me. I start crawling through the Chai Khana on my knees and I get back to the second lounge in the slip door…
I turn on the afterburners and start cutting up the hall following a trail of blood leading to the basement. Everyone is running as fast as possible. I lost my cousin Arif in this mess. I get down two flights of steps in the secure basement of the Serena where I see Arif. We greet each other, and I check to see he isn’t injured. I asked him are you OK, he is fine, we quickly move to the deeper portion of the basement … We get in the cafeteria and more Afghan politicians are amongst us, with Europeans and foreigners. Karzai”s oldest brother is also trapped with us and he is pacing frantically as we are unaware of what is going on in the lobby. We can hear shots and we can hear booms, but the remaining security personnel is posted at the doors and is ready to shoot at will.
More people come to the basement, as the terrorists have infiltrated the gym and spa area. They have shot dead the spa manager, Zina a very pleasant Filipino Girl who was just doing her job working in Afghanistan to support herself and family abroad. The Terrorists move into the gym and shot an American dead in the face on the treadmill.
As someone else notes in the Comments section, “everyone’s in shock, Serena felt like the one place you could relax”. So what does it all mean for the international community’s presence in Kabul? Barney’s own analysis is pretty bleak, but also extremely insightful – go read.
Whatever happens next, this is a major decision point for everyone concerned in Afghanistan. Such operations will continue. Even if the vast majority do not succeed, the result will be a mix of the following:
1. Many if not most of the civilian foreign expatriates currently involved in the delivery of aid or other activities in Afghanistan will leave.
2. Most of the rest will be concentrated into a Forbidden City like the Green Zone in Baghdad. The U.S. Embassy is already such a compound, and the area around it in Wazir Akbar Khan is already so fortified that it might not take much more to turn that and the adjacent areas of Shahr-i Naw (palace, main ministries, UN offices, embassies) into such a zone.
Part of the problem, he continues, is the way that the international aid community has come to be perceived by Afghans:
Collectively we have generated an infrastructure serving only our needs that dwarfs the infrastructure provided for Afghans. This infrastructure — of which the Serena Hotel is the flagship — is the most visible part of the aid system to Afghans. Projects may mature in a few (or many) years, but right now Afghans see the guest houses, bars, restaurants, armored cars, checkpoints, hotels, hostile unaccountable gunmen, brothels, videos, CDs, cable television, Internet cafes with access to pornography, ethnic Russian waitresses from Kyrgyzstan in Italian restaurants owned by members of the former royal family and patronized by U.S. private security guards with their Chinese girlfriends and Afghan TV moguls, and skyrocketing prices for real estate, food, and fuel, traffic jams caused by the proliferation of vehicles and exacerbated by “security measures” every time a foreign or Afghan official leaves the office — I could go on, but the Serena is a symbol of all that.
What it comes down to, he says, is this:
As far as I know, all this aid is not there because of anybody’s generosity, though Afghans are required to say so from time to time … The US and others are in Afghanistan for their national security interests. It is possible — though not necessarily so — that these interests will coincide with that of many Afghans for a while. That’s the question Afghans are asking: are the foreigners here to help us as well as themselves, or to help only themselves, even at our expense? That’s the political question at the heart of counter-narcotics policy. That is the political question at the heart of disputes over civilian casualties, status of forces agreements, detainees, and how aid is delivered…
When I visited Afghanistan under the Taliban in 1998 people quietly let me know how frustrated they were. In the Pashtun areas, at least, people felt a degree of personal security as long as they obeyed the Taliban, but they were bitter about their poverty and lack of development and freedom. The universal strength of that feeling was the most lasting impression of that visit. Everything I have seen since has confirmed and reconfirmed it. But it has also confirmed and reconfirmed that Afghans are losing faith that they are actually being offered a share of what they think the “international community” has to offer.
I don’t have a blueprint on my hard drive on in a cache somewhere. But the Serena bombing is a sign that unless Afghans are really in charge of their country, it will not be rebuilt. I know that some plans are out there. It’s time to take a new look at them. Are they unrealistic? Maybe. But what is definitely unrealistic is thinking we can succeed with the approach we have used so far.
