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Business is booming in Kabul, but as the west prepares to ship out, ordinary citizens worry about what lies ahead Under the trees, the Karimi family have spread out a rug. The Afghan summer sun filters through the leaves. There is chicken, fried potato cakes, salad and water melon. This is a Friday afternoon ritual, at least since the security improved enough to allow the family to drive the 10 miles from Kabul without fear of insurgents or robbers. The Karimis came back to the city in 2002, after living as refugees in Iran through the civil war of the early 1990s and the rule of the Taliban that followed. Now three generations live together in Kabul: 70-year-old Syed Hussein, Fatima, 29, a student teacher, her husband and her two children. And every Friday they come to this patch of riverside woodland on the outskirts of the city. “When we came back, life was very hard,” Fatima says. “But every year that has passed things have got better.” Syed Hussein, her father, smiles when asked when times were best in his long life – the average life expectancy for Afghans is still only 44, two years more than a decade ago. “Afghanistan is a wonderful country… the only problem is the Afghans!” he says and chuckles at his own joke. “The best times were when I was a teenager. Since, it has been just trouble after trouble.” Physical reminders of those troubles surround the family’s picnic site, known as Daoud’s Garden after Mohammed Daoud Khan, the president deposed and assassinated in a communist coup in 1978. There is a large military base less than a mile away. Once manned by Afghan auxiliaries fighting alongside the Soviets, it is now full of Afghans being trained to fight with, or instead of, US-led coalition forces. A major American base is close by too. An Afghan commando unit guards the approaches to the gardens. “Without these soldiers we could not come here,” says Fatima. “In fact, we could barely go anywhere.” For behind the bucolic scene lies deep anxiety. Every year in Kabul there is a different theme to the interminable conversations about “the situation”. In 2008 it was the apparently inexorable advance of the Taliban, almost to where Fatima and her family were picnicking. In 2009, it was the new “surge” of troops and money announced by President Barack Obama. In 2010, it was the success or failure of the expanded campaign. Now, without exception, talk is of the withdrawal of western troops, aid and attention from Afghanistan. Within weeks, Obama is expected to announce the first departures. David Cameron has already said he wants 450 of Britain’s 9,500 men out within months. The international community has agreed that all foreign combat troops are to be gone by 2014, leaving the Afghans to fight the Afghans. “This is a very worrying thing,” says Fatima, and the festive atmosphere of the picnic cools. “If the west go, then it will all fall apart and the Taliban will come back.” The Karimis are from the Hazara ethnic minority, persecuted under the largely Pashtun Taliban’s rule. They are also Shia Muslims, whom the Taliban once saw as heretics. Their moderate traditions – Fatima wears a simple white headscarf rather than the all-covering burqa – meant they suffered greatly when the radical movement were in power. Now there are functioning universities, schools, relative law and order and even improving electricity. “But we still have much to fear,” Mousa, Fatima’s husband, said. Many in Kabul are more worried about their wallets than persecution. The 10-year international effort has seen Kabul change from being a moribund city of fewer than 400,000 to a bustling metropolis of 4.5 million flush with cash. The last two years have seen an explosion in conspicuous consumption. There are blocks of luxury apartments under construction, giant video hoardings advertising energy drinks, BMWs and Hummers blasting their way through the traffic with overpowered horns. Miralam Hosseini, 56, sells at least two $140,000 4x4s every week. Across the street from his showroom, an electronics shops stocks the latest 52in flat screen. “We sell one every few days,” said Mahmud Shah, who returned to Kabul earlier this year after seven years in London. Cars and televisions alike are always paid for in cash. “Narc-hitecture” – vast and garish villas built by those said to be involved in Afghanistan’s $4bn drugs trade – is becoming increasingly visible. There are also the new restaurants where lunch is 30 times the average daily wage. If soaring food prices pose a huge problem to millions in the city, they do not bother those who have profited from the boom. But there is a sense now that the party is over. Little of the money in Kabul – other than the profits of the narcotics trade – has been created here. Beyond drugs, Afghanistan still produces very little. Profits from the country’s vast mineral or metal deposits are a distant prospect. “No one is within a decade of even beginning to successfully mine, process, transport and sell all the copper and iron that is here,” one European diplomat admitted. Much of the economy has thus been built on the tens of billions poured into Afghanistan by the west. Huge sums have been embezzled, vast wasteful contracts have fuelled a “construction sector on speed” and the main bank is alleged to have made $500m in undocumented and potentially fraudulent loans, many to associates or relatives of the president, Hamid Karzai. Once much disappeared to Dubai. More recently, following the global turndown, the cash has stayed in Kabul. Land prices have risen fivefold. Then there are the tens of thousands of consultants, translators and office staff working for international NGOs or foreign government contractors. Salaries of $3,000 are common, an enormous sum locally. The best paid earn much more. “I vetoed a contract giving a local consultant a salary three times that of the president of my country,” said the diplomat. “Then I found out it had been done anyway behind my back.” The new money and the westernisation that has gone with it is most evident in places like the Gulbahar Centre, a recently opened complex of luxury flats, shops and fast-food restaurants in the heart of Kabul, only a hundred metres from the new main mosque. Last week Samer, 18, and Zohour, 21, were having lunch in Big Chief Burger on the ground floor of the complex. One was a “cultural adviser” for the US embassy; the other a business student and son of a major government transport contractor. “It’s a stressful place to live. I relax by going to the gym or hanging out. This is an Islamic country so there are no bars or clubs,” said Zohour, wearing a sweatshirt, baggy shorts and flip-flops. “I’m worried about when the Americans go. Now the war is a long way from here. We don’t want it any closer.” Some observers have noted a parallel with the 1980s, when Kabul benefited from Soviet aid, reconstruction projects and jobs while the war continued in the countryside. As early as 2005, a World Bank report noted that “the main beneficiaries of [overseas] assistance have been the urban elite”. There are bombings and attacks in Kabul but few casualties and little destruction compared to the south or east. A Nato military intelligence officer told the Observer that the economic “rural-urban divide” was one of the biggest drivers of the insurgency. When the Soviets left, Afghanistan was plunged into civil war and much of Kabul destroyed. Now all in Kabul are worrying what the departure of the most recent batch of foreigners to intervene in their country will bring. “The whole of the American effort and that of our allies is starting to be framed around this concept of 2014 and the need for an Afghan lead by then,” a US official told the Observer . “Is there a rush for the exit? Absolutely not. Too many people have lost their lives, too many valuable things have been gained.” This at least is a sentiment Fatima and her family would agree with. “They can’t leave, they simply can’t,” said Mohammed, Fatima’s brother-in-law. “It’ll be chaos, anarchy. The Taliban will be back. Everything that has got better will get worse. I am certain the foreign troops will still be here in many, many years.” Afghanistan Taliban Jason Burke guardian.co.uk