Recovering Kabul Still Faces Big Problems

[Moloch]

KABUL, Afghanistan - It's 11 a.m., and traffic on Taru Buz Khan street is nearly jammed in both directions, crawling past a row of computer shops with stacks of Dell boxes in the front windows.

Rickety yellow-and-white taxis — gotta haggle, no meters — jostle across four lanes with aid agency SUVs, new Chinese motorbikes, old bicycles and wooden carts drawn by horses and hand. Aside from the almost-constant swirl of dust, the streets are clean, with help from a small army of scavengers.

Across town, markets bustle with fresh bananas, mandarins and other produce brought in from the eastern city of Jalalabad or from Pakistan. Curbside money changers, waving wads of cash, do double business by hawking cell phone debit cards. Concrete — by the bag and by the truck — feeds a frenzy of construction and reconstruction.

There's a vitality, even impatience for things to get on in Kabul, from the culinary scene (there's an Irish pub, and both Everest Pizza and the Lai Thai restaurant offer free delivery) to the shops doing brisk business on bootleg DVDs and CDs after a ban on music and television during the hardline Taliban regime.

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