In Kabul for the first time, I had an eerie sense of having been here before, a nagging memory of Sarajevo during the brief cease-fire interlude of 1994, when the city hovered between no war and no peace. Just like Sarajevo was then, Kabul is today divided into heavily militarised zones where the internationals are located — from the NATO-led security mission to the UN to the embassies — and the rest of the city, where little security is visible and people appear to move about relatively freely.

Like Sarajevo, too, this apparent freedom of movement is illusory. Marketplaces are open again, but the shoppers are mostly internationals. Restaurants are tucked away behind sandbags inside fortified upper-class homes, banks are heavily guarded but empty, and there is no throng outside the one cinema hall we see, which is showing a Bollywood movie. We ourselves are escorted everywhere by our hosts, not to keep an eye on what we do but to make sure we are safe. There is a new class in Kabul, those with security — and the most privileged layer of this class, set apart from all others, is the internationals.

Yet — and this is unlike Sarajevo — there is no hostility towards internationals in Kabul, or at any rate no palpable hostility. This could be partly because we South Asians are inured to the existence of classes apart, in a way that the Europeanised Bosnians are not. But there is another reason too. In Afghanistan, the internationals had learned their lesson from Bosnia. They were not going to be vice-regal (which makes the US-UK proposal that Lord Ashdown, the former High Representative in Bosnia, take over as UN head in Afghanistan, all the more puzzling). And they were going to support state-building.

... contd.