War and Peace

Does Kabul Need a Green Zone?

by Una M.

category: Afghanistan

Published November 05, 2009 @ 11:40AM PT

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With Afghanistan's runoff election canceled and incumbent president Hamid Karzai handed another five year term, aidworkers evacuated after last Wednesday's deadly attack on a UN-approved Kabul guesthouse are heading back. But many are asking, what about the next time?

The attack on the Bakhtar guesthouse was not the first on aidworkers in Afghanistan since 2001, nor the first on foreigners. In 2004, five employees of Médecins Sans Frontières were killed in Badghis. In 2008, attacks on the Serena Hotel and on International Rescue Committee staff in Logar claimed ten lives. But there was something qualitatively different about the Bakhtar attack. I could feel it even here, in my cozy head office in the United States, as my colleagues discussed whether to approve an evacuation of our expatriate staff from Kabul.

The Bakhtar attack played on many fears at once. It was the ultimate home intruder scenario; the intruders were gunmen and suicide bombers come only to kill. The hour of the attack was early; people were still sleeping or were just waking up, disoriented and vulnerable. The location was a guesthouse --a private, intimate space-- not an office, the side of a road, or even a hotel. And the attackers were dressed in police uniforms, assassins disguised as protectors.

It was a perfect atrocity. The message the Taliban aimed to send could not have been clearer: you are not safe anywhere, and you cannot trust anyone, because we can reach you where you sleep, even in those places you thought you could retreat from this war.

Afghans never had either psychological or physical safe spaces, but until last week, at least some foreigners had both. Many probably still do. Yet, thousands of miles away, one easily catches a whiff of the fear coursing through the expatriate community.

Has the security environment in Kabul been fundamentally altered? Will organizations sacrifice their ability to touch and be touched by Afghan lives in the pursuit of greater security for foreign employees?

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan is already relocating half of its 1,300 foreign employees to temporary locations in Afghanistan and abroad, and will be looking for more secure accommodation alternatives to privately-owned guesthouses in the future.

"I am hoping that we don't respond to this by retreating into a Green Zone where we will be unable to interact with Afghans, and gradually become entirely divorced from their friendship and society," former UNAMA political adviser Gerard Russell writes on his blog. "The great thing about the UN is that it is a mixed organization with a strong role for Afghan staff. By contrast Green Zones encourage segregation and segregation encourages mutual ignorance."

As someone who eagerly wants to work in Afghanistan, I share Russell's hope that Kabul will not split fully into two separate cities, one Afghan and the other foreign, with parallel narratives that never intersect. I know that this is already largely the case, which makes the prospect of further separation that much more disheartening.

At the same time, I think about the fallen election workers sent home in caskets draped in UN blue, and the nightmarish descriptions of their final minutes, and I can empathize with the desire to retake at least psychological safe space in a war in which the most powerful weapon is the ability to instill fear.

Afghan and expat Kabul readers, what are your thoughts? If you don't want to leave a comment below, you can email me at Una@Change.org

[Photo: UN in Afghanistan send-off ceremony for fallen election staff, Kabul Airport: 3 November 2009.  Eric Kanalstein (UNAMA).]