Business as usual in Kabul chaos

They call Kabul's traffic police the Eggmen. These immaculately turned out figures who stand each day on black and white striped podiums are the city's consummate survivors.

They have done this job through more than a quartercentury of wars and revolutions, coups and air strikes, surviving in the same way as an egg does when rolling downhill - by turning over and over to absorb the blows.

Everyone in this city has a bit of the Eggman about him, but the traffic police are the masters. They were trained by the Germans in the Sixties. Or rather, in most cases, their fathers got the training, and the men you see here are their sons, still equipped with the same white Stop-Go lollipop batons and blue and white peaked caps.

In contrast to the rest of this chaotic, dishevelled city, they radiate calm and order, clad in crisply pressed khaki uniforms hung with gold braid, and brightly shining shoes. Their movements are smart and unruffled as they wave and direct with sharp, confident waves of hands and baton.

But their real secret is restraint: the traffic police go unarmed - having discovered that to have a gun in this city is also to be a target.

And unlike traffic police anywhere else in the world, their commands are strictly optional. No tickets are ever issued, no summonses ever written.

Even a five-car multiple pileup earns little more than a muttered rebuke before the cop gets on with his real job of trying to keep the rest of the traffic moving. In a society of fast-tempered men with big machineguns and lots of vengeful brothers and cousins, this is a smart way to operate, and it shows.

The traffic police escaped the censure of the madcap Taliban and they were out in force the day the city changed hands, solemnly directing the Northern Alliance tanks as they clattered through the city boulevards.

Not surprisingly, they are totally ignored by most of the traffic, a bedlam of yellow and white taxis and swarms of bicycles. The bicycles wobble and lurch and make sudden turns, which the taxis avoid by dramatic swerves amid a cacophony of horns and tinkling bells and shouts.

One reason for the chaos is that this is a city without phones, faxes, e-mail or even newspapers and TV. To communicate means visiting someone, and it also means doing this several times because most of the people you dash off to visit will be out trying to visit someone else.

Another reason is that with the dead hand of the Taliban gone, the whole country is on the move. Four million refugees have fled in a quarter of a century of wars, and most of them seem to be on the roads coming back into the city.

The bazaars are packed, the roads teeming, the taxis full and the main roads heaving with huge brightly painted trucks bearing returning refugees sitting on tottering piles of their possessions. Gunmen are everywhere, gunshots common, but on the streets moneychangers squat by glass boxes containing thousands of American dollars and huge bricks of the local currency, the green-backed Afghan.

We are some way from having a working Starbucks, but the tea houses are packed and the star restaurant, the Herat, has had its lunchtime service, which had been due the axe for Ramadan, rescued by a flood of journalists.

To understand the love Kabulites have for the traffic cops - literally islands in the storm - is to understand what happens to a city traumatised by 25 years of conflict.

The history goes like this: In the Seventies a dictator got rid of the king and the Soviets got rid of the dictator and the Mujahideen got rid of the Soviets and the Taliban got rid of the Mujahideen and now the Northern Alliance combined with American air power have got rid of the Taliban.

And along the way almost everything in this city was blown up or stolen at least once and the people's psyche has been turned inside-out.

Thus you can visit the city museum, admiring both the collection of shell holes - here a rocket, there a 105mm shell - and the empty collections, long since looted, of artefacts marking the coming here of Alexander the Great, Ghengis Khan and Marco Polo.

The entire western suburbs are now a shattered wilderness, the legacy of the very worst period in all these wars, when the Mujahideen - including the present rulers of the city - fought a three way Beirut-style war for control.

The Taliban killed fewer people than the Mujahideen, but were crazier, pushing the city's sanity to the very edge of collapse with their bizarre dictates about the length of men's beards, the evil of high-heeled shoes and neckties, and the ban on dancing.

Rather than crushing the spirit, these dictates instead pushed much of life underground: Kabul's Eggmen still enjoyed their music, but only on music machines turned to minimum volume.

Underground life continues today. Seventeen- year- old Zarmina - my driver's fianc?e - runs a beauty salon from an unmarked apartment in Microrayon, an estate of once model blocks built for the Soviets to house what they hoped would be a new Communist nomenklatura.

" Women always wanted beauty," she says, speaking to me through a door because I am not supposed to see her face. "In the Taliban time, I had all my cosmetics hidden in the bookshelf. The women would come, they wanted to look good."

Kabul's once-prestigious Medical School reopened its doors to women this week, but the students all arrived in their identical blue burqas.

In the old days, Taliban religious police would beat them for not wearing the burqa. Nowadays, women get the same treatment from freedom- loving Northern Alliance soldiers wandering around town.

Elsewhere, many things are back out in the open. Shops once more sell televisions, and electrical shops have a huge backlog of broken stereos and tape machines, dating back seven years, that their owners want repaired.

On Chicken Street, the signs of the hippy tide that once washed up and broke here are again evident. A shop named Book Store sells the paperbacks they once bought with them - none of them printed later than the early Seventies.

Shelves are crowded with such titles as The God That Failed, Future Shock and Cohn Bendit's Obsolete Communism, together with Living With The Lama - Lobsana Rampa's Account Of His Mystical Communion With His Cat Mrs Fifi Grey Whiskers, published in 1964.

Next door is the Chelsi (sic) Supermarket which sells Swiss chocolate, HP Sauce and Marmite imported for foreigners via Pakistan. "I have a brother living in Chelsea, and I like the name," said its owner, Mohammed.

I point out that it should be spelled Chelsea and he looks blank. "It's also a football team," I say hopefully. "Football," he says with a frown. "Nobody plays football here. The Taliban used the national stadium for executions."

One thing that was just too big to keep underground for long was cinema, now back with a vengeance. The movie theatres are packed. Lines of Kalashnikov assault rifles are parked in racks at the coat check line, their owners each given a little ticket.

Sex is still banned in movies, but the Afghans make up for this with extra doses of violence. Rambo is the favourite, not just in Kabul but on both sides of the front line, apparently because of the extraordinary body count, something the demobbed soldiers can relate to.

Inside the cinemas, sitting amid the smell of a thousand mouldy socks, the audience babbles away through an Indian film. And why not? Few of the Afghans understand the language, so many just supply their own interpretation of the action on screen.

And the Eggmen have developed a fine line of black humour. One tale endlessly retold is of how, during its war with the Northern Alliance the Taliban's dreaded religious police pounced on a karate club, marching the members off for compulsory prayers - and minutes later the empty clubhouse was flattened by an Alliance rocket strike.

Today the government's Ministry of Religious Affairs has proudly invited journalists to view one of the few bits of culture not flattened by 23 years of bombardment. A Hindu temple on the outskirts of town is reopening its doors.

This may be the Islamic Republic, but the Kabul Eggmen have a soft spot for any religion that preaches eternal rebirth.