Photo: First mall in Kabul, Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Tomas Munita)


This too is Afghanistan. Often forgotten in the predictable images that portray Afghanistan as a medieval and militarized landscape, is the other Afghanistan which is rising very slowly and very tentatively.

This mall, which opened in 2005, has about 90 shops and is one of the only fully air-conditioned spaces in the country. It also boasts of having the only escalator in Afghanistan. There is a five-star hotel above the mall with 177 rooms starting at approximately $200 a night.

Given that Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on earth, this mall is mainly a temple to capitalist consumerism... only the smallest minority could afford to buy the iPods or PlayStations or flat screen televisions on sale here. Few could even afford the imported shoes. Apparently, however, the bridal outfits can be rented for that special occasion.

So the real question is who does shop here? Journalists report that some of the shoppers are those Afghans who returned from exile after 2001 to help "rebuild" their country. Others are expatriate contractors and overpaid development workers (St. Petersburg Times, 26 November 2006). The rest are most likely warlords and corrupt government officials (or a hyphenated combination of both) and their family members.

The space of the mall should not be read through a Western lens. This is not a public space for the masses to congregate and perambulate; the average Afghan subject would probably not make it past security. Rather this mall seems to be a zone for Afghanistan's elite which resides behind compound walls. This is a class that seems to be generally alienated from its national surroundings. They seek parity with one another and a Globalized Gulfie elite that they meet mainly through satellite television and the Internet (Statesman, 3 February 2008).

I think it would be fanciful to believe that this mall will bloom or metastasize (depending on your political point of view) to cover every urban area in the country in the near future. It is more likely that this mall will remain a small capitalist shrine for the next decade or so. The mall will continue to serve a sheltered elite that longs to build an alternate future.

Like their Taliban rivals who renamed the country the Emirate of Afghanistan, the Afghan elite also long for a utopia by the same name. However, the elite's vision of an emirate is inspired by the Persian Gulf states rather than a Deobandi interpretation of an idealized Islamic state. In either case, neither group is particularly concerned about the res publica. Nevertheless, while neither the Taliban nor the elite have strong social roots in the country, the elite are far more dependent on foreign financing.

Labels: afghanistan, corruption, kabul, mall, south asia