Standing Up for Order in Kabul Takes Nerve and a Tough Hide

The bravest man in Kabul is not a ruthless warlord or a battlefield veteran but a slender 66-year-old whose only weapon is a hand-held stop sign with its reflective paint worn off.

For 38 years, Shamsuddin Sultani has been a Kabul traffic cop, a fearless choreographer of a daily cataclysm of vehicular volume that has at least tripled in the few months since peace and a new government replaced a quarter-century of war.

Armored vehicles of the international peacekeeping force joust with four-wheel-drive aid delivery vans for priority on narrow, crumbling streets pocked by years of war and neglect. Cars and buses with more passengers on them than in them refuse to brake at intersections for fear of pitching their rooftop fares. Battered bicycles toting televisions, lumber or whole families weave defiantly through the gridlocked, smoke-belching throng as pushcarts, rickshaws and makeshift wheelchairs move in their wake.

Leaning on the horn seems obligatory, and Kabul drivers have added melody to the madness with musical klaxons emitting incongruous strains of “Frere Jacques,” “London Bridge Is Falling Down” and “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”

Signal lights damaged by bombing have been repaired at three intersections, but there is seldom electricity available to run them. Street signs also disappeared over the years, but police say their restoration is a low priority because most drivers are illiterate anyway.

“There are too many cars now for our roads, but the bigger problem is that nobody follows the rules,” complains Sultani, who regularly gets bumped and bruised but is hurt most by drivers’ deteriorating respect for those seeking to bring order to chaos.

As Stability Returns

to Kabul, So Do People

A victim of its own success in securing relative stability over the last five months, Kabul has seen an influx of foreigners, refugees and new business that has exceeded expectations.

“Peace and security have brought about this congestion,” says Abdul Azim, deputy chief of the national traffic police squad that is part of the Interior Ministry.

The number of vehicles licensed in Kabul has increased by only a few thousand this year to about 107,000. But Azim estimates that at least 80% of the cars, trucks and buses on the road are unregistered. With only 514 poorly paid employees to deal with formalities and enforcement in this city of 2.7 million, the force doesn’t even bother issuing tickets, and only the most serious accidents warrant investigation.

“Our city center is just too small for the number of cars trying to get around it,” says Azim, who notes that paved roads extend for only about a two-mile radius.

Azim says his office plans to urge the next Afghan government--to be chosen in June--to encourage development on the outskirts of Kabul to spread the economic activity and its incumbent traffic over a wider space.

Authorities recently imposed one-way traffic on some of the narrower streets that had become impassable, but the growing volume has already jammed those relief valves.

“If the number of cars keeps increasing at this rate, there won’t be the possibility to move at all in about another month,” predicts Sultani, who says today’s traffic is at least three times what it was at any point in his long career.

Traffic has grown so dramatically in recent months in part because the personal car is both a family’s most coveted asset and a way to make money.

“In other countries, people drive to get themselves to work, but for Afghans the car often is our work,” says Mohammed Aref, a 39-year-old who worked for the German chemicals giant Hoechst before its plant here, like most companies’, was shuttered by bombings and trade sanctions. “I have to work as a taxi driver to support my family until the factory starts work again.”

No special license is needed to become a taxi driver; the only criterion is that the car be painted white and yellow. With neither income reporting nor tax payment required, any car owner or contracted driver can pick up fares.

At Mohammed Zarif Mamozai’s driving school--the only one in the country--students plunk down the equivalent of an average monthly salary of about $33 to take the 36-hour course leading to a driving license.

Most Afghans learn how to drive from a relative and simply take to the road, but the school has persuaded its clients that it offers professional training, even if its sole vehicle is missing a headlight and lists precariously to the driver’s side.

Auto dealers are reporting booming business. At the Zaheb Car Sales lot in central Kabul, Baryalay Azizi says he and the other salesmen have seen monthly sales grow from about eight vehicles six months ago to more than 30 last month. They sell everything from shiny new $38,000 sport-utility vehicles to a battered ’93 Toyota Corolla priced at $4,000.

“Now that the situation seems stable, a lot of people are getting money from relatives abroad to get a car and start a business,” says Azizi, whose lot, like all sales operations here, accepts only full advance payment in cash.

Some cars have come out from under a canvas covering or inside a rural outbuilding now that the Taliban rulers have been chased from power.

“Under the Taliban, people were afraid to drive because their cars could be confiscated and there would be nothing they could do about it,” says Mohammed Kabir, 42, an instructor at Mamozai’s driving school. “Now people are bringing their cars out of hiding and putting them back on the road.”

Traffic Makes It Tough

for Nation to Move On

All that traffic gets in the way of those struggling to feed and assist a population that, although free of bombs and bloodshed, is still in peril from drought and disease.

“We waste so much time just getting across town to pick up our deliveries,” says Fraidun Jahani, a driver for the World Food Program, which tries to feed the millions of Afghans displaced by ethnic conflicts or destruction of their homes. The lack of a public bus system fuels much of the traffic. Those with jobs must pay private drivers as much as a fifth of their daily income to get shuttled to and from work.

An even bigger contributor to the four-wheeled mayhem has been the return--just in the last 10 weeks--of more than 500,000 refugees from abroad, many of them borne home by right-hand-drive cars, vans, trucks and buses from Pakistan.

In a country virtually devoid of statistical information and populated by those who regard registration rules as an avoidable nuisance, there is no official figure for the number of right-hand-drive cars plying Afghanistan’s roads, which are designed for left-hand-drive cars.

But an eyeball estimate suggests that the proportion is well over half and expanding daily.

Azim, of the traffic police, blames the right-hand-drive cars for most of the accidents plaguing Afghanistan’s crude highways, as those drivers have to veer into oncoming traffic to see if the way ahead is clear to pass.

“This is an assault on our national culture by those who claim Afghanistan should be part of Pakistan. They are trying to force a change in our road system so they can claim we belong to them,” says Aga Mozafari, head of the international transportation department of the Commerce Ministry.

Allowing an unfettered inundation of cars may help the Afghan economy in the short term, he says, but the bedlam now prevailing will eventually damage business and the mending nation’s ability to attract investment.

“Right-hand-drives should be banned, and they will be within a short time, but we also need to impose prohibitive import duties on older cars so Afghanistan doesn’t become a dumping ground for the worst vehicles of the world,” Mozafari says.

“We have to decide how much longer we are willing to be backward.”