In London, after a week-long trip to Kabul, I passed by an advertisement for an Andy Warhol exhibition at the Tate Modern. The Taliban, with their AK-47s and black turbans, have in the frenzy after 9/11 become like the subjects of Warhol’s iconic Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe posters: notoriously consumed in mass-produced images around the world.

In the weeks leading up to my trip to Kabul, I had been apprehensive owing to the impression of the city that I had been sold through pictures – moving and still – of the Afghan capital. Through encounters with people in the fragile city, though, I was able to add a human dimension to the now stereotypical images that circulate widely in the media.

The morning I landed in Kabul, the sound of heavy explosions prompted Ahmad Saddique, who was escorting me to the Serena Hotel, to usher me into the hotel’s vast underground space. Security officials restricted all the guests’ movements while suicide bombers detonated a few kilometers outside the hotel, targeting ministry buildings to disrupt the oath-taking ceremony of cabinet members into the Karzai government.

Before the commotion began, Ahmad – who is barely 24 and runs a car transport company servicing foreign visitors to Kabul – was telling me, “business is better these days. During the time of Taliban, you couldn’t drive in a Pajero or Toyota Corolla because you could get shot and the car would be taken away.”

That day, on January 18, Ahmad was at a roundabout a mere hundred meters from the presidential palace when a suicide bomber detonated. An ensuing five-hour-long gun battle between the Afghan National Security forces and Taliban insurgents put the war-torn city back on red alert. For Ahmad, the day “was bad…. People were running and crying.”

Many young Afghan men have spent their teenaged years roaming the cities and villages that connect the Middle East to Central and South Asia. Ahmad remembers learning English in Islamabad, while others like him describe memories of revelry in Peshawar and Karachi.

Muhammad Nabi, a Tajik solider, had also spent time away from Afghanistan, but returned to join the Afghan National Army in the hope of defending his country. In an effort to attract boys such as Nabi to the army, ISAF officials say that pays have been made more competitive. But in some regions the Taliban still offer more to attract “foot soldiers.”

Recruitment into the army remains difficult at the officer level because of low literacy rates, explains a US army captain on a dry and dusty mountain hill in a Military Training Centre on the outskirts of Kabul. I look around and see that hundreds of old Soviet tanks – damaged and destroyed – litter the plains.

A recent conference in London indicated a policy shift in Afghanistan. The western alliance has demonstrated its willingness to talk to certain elements in the Taliban, with the goal of alluring younger men, and potential fighters, into legitimate roles regulated by state institutions. Building the military might of the Afghan army will also be critical in transforming the battle for the NATO alliance.

But the growing surge of military forces remains a concern for locals. Shakeela Abraimkhol, a journalist who works for Tolo TV, which broadcasts in Dari, feels that many Afghan want NATO troops to leave “but if they do, then the Taliban will come.” For her, it would be impossible to carry on with her profession under that circumstance.

Thirty years of the war has ravaged the landscape of Kabul, but life is far from desolate. A tour guide at the mausoleum of the Mughal Emperor Babur tells me that before the era of the turban, in the 1970s, Kabul had been filled with “nightclubs and women in skirts.”

I laugh. “You think it will happen again?”

He looks into the distance and whispers, “Inshallah.”

Fatima Mujtaba is a graduate student at SOAS in London.

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