The new Afghanistan is a myth

'The new Afghanistan is a myth. It's time to go and get a job abroad'
As British troops prepare to tackle the Taliban's remnants, hundreds of thousands of jobless Afghan refugees who returned home to start a new life are queueing up to leave again

Dan McDougall in Kabul
Sunday February 5, 2006
The Observer


An unforgiving wind howls across the Shomali Plains from the distant snowcaps of the Hindu Kush. Overhead, a US Chinook helicopter disappears into the dark mass of clouds, an armoured Jeep dangling from its grey hull, straining against the winch cable. It's just past 5am and the roar of the rotors momentarily drowns out the first call to prayer of the day echoing from the minarets of Kabul's Ismailia mosque. Within minutes, other muezzins follow suit, in a bleary-eyed symphony across the city.
Outside the iron gates of the Iranian embassy, braced against the winter sleet in woollen caps and ankle-length chupans, hundreds of Afghan men roll out blankets and kneel towards Mecca. At each bow the men's noses merge with the slushy grey mixture of mud, snow and sewage that covers the rutted pavements and roads of Kabul. Their prayers are for a new life elsewhere and food for their starving families - they are queueing in the dawn's half light to leave Afghanistan.

'I wish I hadn't come back home from Iran after the Taliban left. I had a better life there, I had occasional work at least, so I am going back.' Zahair Mohammad stands in the line trying, with hundreds of others, to get an Iranian visa. 'I was thinking positively for a long time about rebuilding a life here in Kabul, where I was born, but I was wrong, very wrong. It's time to go. I need to work abroad, like most, as a cheap labourer and send money home. What we're hearing on the radio about a new Afghanistan is nothing but a dream.' He gestures at the kilometre-long queue. 'I was a refugee before and now I'm choosing to become one again. I'm not alone.'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1702513,00.html