Amid dark talk of foreign infiltration in Kandahar after a merciless run of suicide bombings, another, more benign, influence has already breached the city defences: the cafélatte.
In a dusty square clogged with wheezing rickshaws and turbaned men, Kandahar’s first coffee shop has opened. Starbucks it is not — patrons are more likely to be fingering prayer beads than surfing the net — but The Coffee Shop offers freshly ground beans, pastries and the first flowering of café culture in the violent, arch-conservative south of Afghanistan.
Returned refugees, town grandees and thirsty mullahs drop their sandals at the door and take a seat to read a book, chat about politics and order a drink.
Surprisingly in a land where sweet green tea is king, most opt for a steaming cup of fresh coffee.
”A lot of friends said it was a nice idea but wouldn’t work,” says the owner, Mohammad Naseem, a returned Afghan-American entrepreneur. He gestures to the tables of chattering men hunched over coffee cups. ”Now look at it.”
Since opening six months ago, The Coffee Shop has become something of an intellectual oasis in a city that was once the heartland of the Taliban’s rule. A giant painting of the 18th century Pashtun legend Ahmad Shah Durrani hangs on a wall beside photographer Steve McCurry’s famous portrait of a green-eyed Afghan refugee girl.
Customers can read freely from bookshelves stacked with tomes of Persian poetry and Pashtun history of Qur’anic verse. Dog-eared American bodybuilding and interior decoration magazines offer lighter reading.
Everyone who’s anyone in town drops in, says Naseem — professionals, journalists, once even a few mullahs. Some are straight out of central casting, such as the Americans from the nearby CIA base in the former home of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Omar.
Many customers have come home from Pakistan, Iran and the US.
At one table Farid Khan, a finance ministry employee, flicks through Crusade Wars, a Pashto book about ancient conflicts between Muslims and Christians.
The 22-year-old’s family, who live in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, calls twice a day to check he is alive. ”They say, ‘It’s too dangerous there, please come home’,” he says, ”but it’s not as bad as they think. We Afghans need people to come home, to make things happen.”
Naseem, a self-confessed coffeeholic, says he opened the cafe ”to have a place to hang out with my buddies”. Young men have unappealing alternatives for fun in Kandahar — either internet cafes with enclosed booths and a steady stream of pornography, or the samawads — seedy tea houses clouded with a thick marijuana fog. The city’s only cinema was razed by the Taliban years ago for a mosque that remains unfinished.
By comparison The Coffee Shop is a clean-living establishment. All drugs are prohibited — including, unusually, tobacco — and reading is encouraged. ”The south has a very intellectual history but people dropped books for guns during all the years of war. I want to reverse that,” Naseem says.
”Life is a risk in this part of the world. If we take a risk, we take it proudly. Sitting at home doing nothing means the enemy wins,” he adds. ”That’s what they want — for us to be afraid, to hide, to leave the city.”
By late evening The Coffee Shop has filled up and the atmosphere resembles a pub on a Friday night in London. A BBC stringer bursts in, swapping loud jokes with a bank official who responds with a monkey-like laugh. The barefooted customers explode into laughter.
As ever in Pashtun society, there is one glaring absence — women. To solve this Naseem plans a ”family” area upstairs, but separate from the boys. Selling coffee is one thing but sexual liberation might be a bridge too far.
”I don’t want to do anything out of whack with local culture,” he says. ”You can’t rush things around here.” – Guardian Unlimited Â