Once called paradise, now Kabul struggles to cope

By Raju Gopalakrishnan

KABUL (Reuters) - The empire of Babur, the 16th century founder of the Mughal dynasty, stretched from Samarkand to central India, but he died pining for Kabul and insisting on being buried in the place he called paradise on earth.

His open-air tomb on a hillside in what is now the capital of Afghanistan is set in an oasis of greenery. With the snow-fringed Hindu Kush ranges providing a majestic backdrop, the tomb is set amidst a garden of walnut, mulberry, apple and pomegranate trees as well as a small marble mosque, fountains and water channels.

But the views below are far from paradise. These days the tomb overlooks a war-ravaged city of about four million people, dusty and choked with garbage.

There is little piped water and roads are mostly unpaved. Bombed-out and bullet-pocked buildings are common, piles of plastic bottles litter the Kabul River, and street are jammed with cars that raise clouds of dust and exhaust fumes.

"It has the highest amount of fecal matter in the atmosphere in the world," said Pushpa Pathak, a senior adviser to the Kabul municipality. "Less than five percent of households have sewage systems.

"If you are awake at 4 a.m., you can hear the donkey carts taking shit out of the city."

This ancient method of cleaning dry toilets is crumbling because the farms that used the waste as fertilizer are getting further and further away due to the speed at which the city is expanding.

As late as the 1970s, Kabul was an enchanting little city, with gardens, trees, quaint bazaars, and magnificent mosques and palaces.

"It was the Switzerland of the east," says Pathak. "People used to honeymoon here."

Ten years of Soviet rule, the battles for liberation and then a devastating civil war brought ruin and destruction. International isolation during the rule of the Taliban and the war to oust them followed.

The first to go were the trees -- cut down for fuel or because successive warlords feared they could provide cover for enemies.

"No road leading out of Kabul has any trees today," says Pathak.

Intensive artillery bombardment of the city from adjoining hills marked the civil war, reducing many of its buildings to rubble. Anything that survived slipped into disrepair.

LAST SIX YEARS

Since U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban in 2001 and President Hamid Karzai took over, there has been relative peace, but only marginal improvement in the city.