A House, a Nation Rebuilt

A top embassy posting here is a job of privilege that typically comes with a chauffeured limousine, a generous salary, a staff of servants and guaranteed entree to the grand soirees of Embassy Row. So it was all the more discouraging when Yar M. Mohabbat found himself crouched in the bathroom of the Afghan Embassy one night, trying to fix a broken toilet.

It was 1997 and he was the acting ambassador assigned to a four-story mansion in a Washington neighborhood where gardeners preen and maids polish. But to him, it felt more like a 4,000-square-foot shack.

Seven thousand miles away, his beloved Afghanistan was sinking under the burden of famine, drought and political havoc. And the $4-million embassy--which once played host to a president and a king--seemed to be falling apart along with it.

The roof leaked, the electrical wiring was shot and the pipes burst. There was no money for heat, so Mohabbat put a blanket over his aching knees and learned to type with gloves on. And when the Afghan government finally did battle with the Taliban, the wealthy neighbors on Wyoming Avenue could look out their windows and see the conflict writ small, as Mohabbat and a diplomat-turned-Talib fought over which flag would fly above the decrepit house.

The U.S. government settled the dispute promptly, virtually turning its back on the country and shutting the embassy down.

Now, five years later, Afghanistan has a new government and its official American headquarters a second chance. And as the Bush administration works to rebuild relations with a country in ruins, it also must help restore the most important symbol of Afghan sovereignty on U.S. soil.

“My embassy was very poor and totally ignored,” said Mohabbat, who was there watching in 1997 when the State Department locked the gates. “I tried to do the work myself. I laid the tiles in the bathroom. I was trimming the trees, mowing the lawn. Even the lowest-ranking person from the State Department never did anything, never came to visit.”

Not anymore. For weeks, federal contractors have been wiring, plastering and roofing to make the mansion livable again. Next month, the new interim government is set to reclaim the keys. And the brick-and-concrete metaphor of a nation’s downfall is today a symbol of its hard climb back to international respectability.

“The Bush administration has accepted the cost of making it safe, but making it presentable and decent, that is up to us,” said Haron Amin, currently the top Afghan diplomat here. “And I have every intention of making it a gemstone.”

For many of the estimated 200,000 Afghan Americans living in the U.S., this is more than a building; it is a national symbol. And they would no more countenance its ragged state than Americans would tolerate a shabby White House.

Calls have poured in from around the country with volunteers offering their services. A landscaper wants to replant the tired grounds. Art collectors have offered antiques, Persian rugs, furniture. There is talk of a painting party with pizza.

Afghan diplomacy here has struggled on a shoestring budget and borrowed supplies since it was abruptly reborn after Sept. 11, when the tiny nation captured the attention of a superpower that had ignored it for years. Leaders of the Afghan community seized the moment, converging in Washington to establish relations between the Bush administration and the rebel Northern Alliance.

They had no place to land. With the embassy’s more than 40 rooms unusable, they squeezed into a borrowed one-bedroom condominium in suburban Virginia, practicing cell-phone diplomacy until nervous neighbors complained and they were evicted.

They wound up in a suite of offices a few blocks from the White House. The staff of 14 is mostly volunteer, the computers borrowed, the pens donated and the $8,000 monthly rent paid by a generous donor in California.

Soon the embassy will be theirs again--impoverished, but theirs. Amin, who worked there as a young diplomat, walked through last winter and found a place frozen in time. The calendars said 1997, the in-boxes were still full. Dead termites carpeted the floors and the winding staircase appeared to sway from rot. The upstairs library had no books.

The writings of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar were taped to the walls. Amin tore them down, a new beginning.

“There had been a total abandonment of the building, and a total abandonment of Afghanistan,” he said. “Now the embassy needs help. Many here work on a promise more than a paycheck. We are accepting all donations.”

Once the embassy was a lovely place, home for a time to a chief justice of the United States. Its purchase by the Kingdom of Afghanistan in 1943 was a milestone for a bellicose country rent by tribal wars. According to the lore, A. Hussain Aziz--the man who would become Afghanistan’s first ambassador to the U.S.--traveled to Washington in the midst of a world war with two suitcases full of money and bought an embassy.

The 1950s and ‘60s were the glory days. Then, the Afghan capital of Kabul was the Paris of Central Asia, its women dressed smartly in heels and pillbox hats. And the embassy was its sophisticated reflection, where statesmen regularly rode up the circular driveway in black limousines.

President Kennedy lunched there a month before he was killed. They served him Afghan ravioli with green onions. The king gave him melons. “President Kennedy liked it very much. The melons were round and very tasty and this was very much appreciated by the president,” said Ravan Farhadi, currently the Afghan ambassador to the United Nations, recalling the momentous day with great clarity.

But when Afghanistan fell to the Communists in 1978, life deteriorated; the house and the nation suffered as one, their fates linked.

The money from Kabul dwindled and there was hardly enough for diplomatic salaries, much less simple maintenance. But Afghans are known as much for their pride as for their hardship, and neighbors on the block could see Mohabbat struggling to preserve the mansion’s dignity, trimming the shrubs with a pair of scissors.

He drove himself to Washington’s stylish cocktail parties, parked around the corner and saved face by pretending his chauffeur was waiting down the street. Little did his peers suspect that his embassy’s toilets were so unreliable, he and his small staff had to use the local McDonald’s.

Then, in 1997, the Taliban gained ground in Kabul. Mohabbat returned from a Memorial Day holiday to find his second-in-command, Wardak Jamal, had joined the zealous regime. The Taliban’s white flag was flying over the embassy.

Outraged, Mohabbat brought it down and raised the republic’s colors. And all that day the neighbors could watch the flags go up and down as the two men hollered at each other, dragging their banners from the pole to the window and back again.

“I called the State Department and they said leave the flag there,” Mohabbat recalled, his voice rising anxiously at the mere memory. “I said, ‘Even if someone kills me, I will bring that flag down.’” That night, the Taliban threatened to shoot him.

When the U.S. government finally did respond, it was to vacate the place and change the locks. Mohabbat fled with his family to St. Louis, where he lives today, seeking work as an architect.

Through the years, the neighbors watched as the grass died, the paint peeled and poison ivy crept over the wall. Transients camped out near the reflecting pool in what used to be the backyard gardens.

The degeneration was all the more striking given the regal facade most countries seek to put on their outposts in this most important of world capitals. The more than 170 embassies here are the grand dames of international diplomacy: Plans for the Japanese mansion were approved by the emperor himself; the grounds include an antique tea house moved piece by piece from Japan. The British Embassy is an adaptation of an English country house with Art Deco lanterns capped by royal crowns designed by Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, known as one of the greatest British architects of his generation.

So Afghanistan’s sorry presence was not overlooked on the posh street where Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld lives around the corner and the director of the Washington Chamber Symphony is right next door.

The road back poses its challenges. Even the most modest show of patriotism can be taxing for a country so ruined its gross domestic product is not measurable.

Kabul approved a new national flag in January, the day before Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, head of the interim government, arrived in Washington for his first meeting with President Bush. Protocol officers panicked. The aunts of an embassy worker went to G Street Fabrics, bought red, black and green material and sewed all night.

“It was a Betsy Ross moment,” Tom Lauria, the embassy’s spokesman, likes to say.

Amin leads a staff of more than a dozen Afghan nationals--some old enough to have fought with the rebel Northern Alliance, some young graduates of American universities who want to serve their first country.

And others, like 28-year-old Homeyra Mokhtarzada, a former CNN producer who left to work for the embassy and recently was named its second secretary. She is the first woman appointed to the diplomatic corps since the defeat of the misogynistic Taliban.

“Afghanistan is ready to join the modern world,” she said, herself a sign of a new time.

For now, though, a big green Dumpster sits near the embassy’s front door and construction trucks park on the lawn, still something of an eyesore on a block where chauffeurs stand in waiting.

But when Amin and the rest of the embassy staff drive past, they envision a humanitarian salon where people can meet to discuss the country’s future and help reestablish education and the arts. A place that speaks of possibility rather than waste.

“I have to measure my words,” Amin says, struggling to articulate the significance of the building’s rebirth. “It is a symbol of pride. Moving in and making sure it represents the Afghans in the best possible sense will be truly a momentous occasion.”