Published
internationally in July 2003 as Kabul: The Bradt Mini Guide.
First published in Kabul in September 2002
as a pamphlet.
What’s new
Bulletin Board
Services
Guesthouses
Articles
|
May 10 2003 The Spoils of War in
Kabul Now Include Thai Restaurant Wall Street Journal front page Also published in Naples Daily News. Lalita Thongngamkam Goes Where U.N. Does, Looking to Make Money From World's Crises By ANDREW HIGGINS Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL KABUL, Afghanistan -- One recent afternoon,
shortly after a bomb blew a 10-foot-wide crater in one of this ruined city's
main roads, Lalita Thongngamkam went out hunting for vital
supplies: jumbo prawns flown in from Dubai and bottles of cabernet sauvignon
from Australia. Passing a bombed-out factory, a huddle of
beggar children and the rusting carcass of a Soviet armored vehicle, the
Bangkok-born businesswoman looked on the bright side of desperate poverty,
decades of war and the decay left by Osama bin Laden's toppled Taliban hosts. "In a country like this, there is not
much competition," said Ms. Thongngamkam, purveyor of quality cuisine and
souvenir T-shirts to nation builders in broken states around the world.
"When a country gets in trouble, I'm always interested." Over the past decade, she has followed a
caravan of United Nations officials, relief workers and reconstruction
contractors, journeying to Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, East Timor, Kosovo
and now Afghanistan to cash in on pockets of prosperity created by
catastrophe. Last month, she opened a Thai restaurant
called Lai Thai in Wazir Akbar Khan, an enclave of walled villas once
favored by al Qaeda militants. It depends for business on a fragile boom in a
city patrolled by foreign troops and kept afloat by foreign funds. Always on the lookout for a promising new
calamity, Ms. Thongngamkam follows the news closely, visiting a newly opened
Kabul Internet salon to check up on events in Iraq and in other potential
zones of turmoil. Electricity frequently falters, but a generator keeps the
computers running. Iraq might be her next stop, but only if the
U.S. military grants a role to the U.N. in the running and reconstruction of
the country: "I always follow the U.N.," she says. Her logic: U.N.
officials earn more than soldiers do and eat out more often. Mostly confined to their bases, America's
9,000 troops in Afghanistan make occasional purchases of black-market Uzbek
vodka but have otherwise disappointed a nascent food-and-beverage industry.
U.S. diplomats venture out a bit more. They need special permission from
embassy security staff to dine out after dark but do sometimes leave a
heavily fortified embassy compound for lunch. Ms. Thongngamkam, a 52-year-old divorcee,
first visited Kabul last fall, traveling here from Kosovo, where she had
opened a restaurant after the U.N. took charge of administration in 1999.
Increasing stability in Kosovo had begun to cut into her principal
competitive advantage -- the absence of competition. "Everything became
fairly settled, so I started to look for a new place," she says. Kabul "looked like a good place for
me." It had a plethora of U.N. agencies, a wrecked economy, enough
violence -- sporadic rocket attacks and bombings -- to keep most rivals away
but just enough security to allow the lifting of an after-dark curfew.
Curfews are death to the restaurant trade. Impressed, Ms. Thongngamkam decided to
relocate to Afghanistan, along with her staff of cooks and waitresses based
in Kosovo. She rented a house and turned the living room into a restaurant
serving spring rolls, king prawn soup, ginger chicken with coconut milk and
other traditional Thai fare. Business has been brisk, despite fears that
Islamist fighters are regrouping in the south of the country and an order,
now lifted, to U.N. staff to stay indoors. "Everyone still has to eat," says
Ms. Thongngamkam, who declines to say how much she earns. One evening,
customers included six U.N. employees, French aid workers, German officers
from an international military force that patrols Kabul, and a group of burly
Americans who arrived armed with pistols in a four-wheel-drive vehicle
without a license plate. They refused to say who they were. Aside from opium production, which has soared
since the Taliban regime collapsed under American bombs in late 2001, serving
foreigners is "the only real economy," says Dominic Medley, the
British author of Kabul's first tourist guidebook since 1972. (A government
minister earns $40 a month; a driver for a foreign outfit can earn 10 times
that.) Tourism is unlikely to take off anytime soon:
The Afghan tourism minister was murdered last year and the State Department
"strongly warns U.S. citizens against travel to Afghanistan." But,
says Mr. Medley, who runs a training course for U.S.-funded Radio Free
Afghanistan, foreign aid, which is to total about $1.8 billion this year,
will keep Kabul from falling off the map. The U.N. has more than 700 international
staffers in Afghanistan. Nongovernmental organizations, only a handful
of which operated under the Taliban, now number more than 1,000. Their
purchasing power stirs some resentment. "Restaurants are not
reconstruction," scoffs Burhanuddin Rabbani, an Islamic cleric and
former president. Popular nightspots now include an
Afghan-Italian pizza and kebab joint, an Iranian restaurant and a couple of
Chinese places. For a few weeks, Kabul even had an Irish bar -- just a few
doors down from a mosque. For security reasons, the U.N. prohibited its
people from drinking there. Late last month, the bar closed down after
warnings that it might be targeted by terrorists. The Transitional Islamic State of
Afghanistan, as the country is officially called, bans alcohol but often
turns a blind eye to discreet drinking in private by foreigners. Kabul, says Ms. Thongngamkam, is still a
tricky place to run a business. It's a lot more difficult than Kosovo or East
Timor, she says, but easier than Rwanda, where she tried, briefly, to sell
souvenirs to aid workers after the 1994 genocide, or Somalia, where she gave
up scouting for business because the only relatively safe forms of
transportation were helicopters and armored cars. Being female, she says, helps: Even armed men
in Afghanistan feel uneasy with a feisty, unveiled foreign woman. Ms.
Thongngamkam's first venture was a food trading company in Bangkok, where her
then-husband served in the Thai armed forces. But Thailand, though plagued in
the past by military coups, was too tame -- and far too competitive. With her
three children at school in Australia, she shifted to crisis catering abroad. Her biggest headache now is bureaucracy: The
Afghan government, which has scant authority beyond the outskirts of Kabul,
still runs 32 ministries, each generating its own red tape. To help negotiate
the maze, she has recruited a well-connected young Afghan as a partner. Nonetheless, she is already expanding,
converting two upstairs bedrooms of the house she rents into additional
dining areas. Reservations are recommended, though calling to reserve a table
sometimes isn't easy. The restaurant's land line doesn't work and Kabul's
mobile network, set up under a license first issued by the Taliban,
frequently fails, especially when it rains. A sideline in mementos is also
doing well: Ms. Thongngamkam just ordered a new batch of T-shirts from
Thailand featuring a map of Afghanistan decorated with tanks, rocket
launchers and other weaponry. To stock up on supplies, Ms. Thongngamkam
shops at Kabul's first and only supermarket, run by a Swiss company that
flies in food and drink twice a week from the United Arab Emirates. Located
on the edge of a British military camp near the airport, it serves foreigners
only. Shopping there recently, Ms. Thongngamkam wandered the aisles cursing
the high prices, before loading up on beer, whiskey, wine and frozen corn.
She was too late for prawns, which were sold out. On the drive back into town, she got a call
on her cellphone: Her Afghan partner had run into trouble finalizing
paperwork for a new venture – a guest house with a fitness center offering massages.
Officials, who earlier this year banned cable television as un-Islamic,
didn't like the idea of massage. Another call brought happier news: a booking
for a party of 16. For all its troubles, she says, Afghanistan is still a
"very sweet cake" for risk-takers. A few years ago, she opened a
restaurant in Australia. It flopped. "In stable places, there are too
many competitors," she says. |
||||||||
|
كابل،
افغانستان |
The Survival Guide to Kabul©
|