Urban space as disputed territory and memory infrastructure. Insights from Kabul
The University of Warsaw’s Tomasz Rawski and Agnieszka Nowakowska reflect on a recent visit to Afghanistan and the unintended consequences of the blast walls in Kabul.
The Taliban's unexpected takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021 ended the war with the United States that had been going on in this country for the past two decades. However, the radical regime change hand-in-hand with the international community's fears of the Taliban returning to the fundamentalist politics the world had come to know in the late 1990s, changed Afghanistan's international status. With the transformation of the pro-American Islamic Republic into the Taliban-ruled Islamic Emirate, old territorial disputes such as the one over the Durand Line (which marks the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan), have come to life again. Most importantly however, Afghanistan itself became a disputed territory – a de facto state which exists in reality but hasn't been recognized de jure by any country in the world.
The fortified checkpoint-entrance to a ministry (left) and a T-wall surrounding a mosque (right)
Several months after this change, we found ourselves in Kabul, where the urban space of the broad city centre still looks as if the city is under permanent siege. The main reason for this is the ubiquitous T-walls – blast walls made up of blocks of reinforced concrete produced in the shape of an inverted letter ‘T’ that are more than 3.5 meters high, dozens of centimetres thick and always topped with barbed wire. Over the previous two decades, the Americans encased probably every important object located in the centre of Kabul with T-walls in an attempt to protect themselves and the local residents from terrorist attacks. That’s why today these blast walls stretch for miles along Kabul's main streets, hiding inside not only ministry buildings, courts and embassies but also mosques, schools, museums, universities or even major city parks. You can access each of these by passing through an entrance guarded by several men with machine guns. Over the years the guards have been, and still are, mostly local Afghans – members of the local police and army working for the pro-American administration yesterday, and numerous Taliban warriors representing the new government today.
Blast walls maze as disputed territory
Moving around and through this blast wall maze gives the impression that each ‘particle’ of Kabul’s urban space is a separate, tiny, disputed territory. It is not so much any general institutional rules that seem to have authority over each of these places, but the Taliban warriors themselves standing at each gate. Whether we would be allowed inside depended, each time, on negotiating with the guards. Although sometimes the outcome of these negotiations was determined by our de jure arguments – that is, our official papers signed by the Taliban Minister of Culture or our documented role as academic researchers – much more often it was the very fluid dynamics of the current de facto communication that mattered. The results were quite difficult to predict - sometimes we were not allowed into a regular city park for any reason, and another time, we were given the keys to one of the oldest mosques in Kabul just to open and visit it on our own, without any control.
The Façade of the National Archive building (left) and a T-wall blocking main gate to the National Museum (right)
Moreover, these negotiations and visits to the institutions behind the walls, produced a lot of questions which we asked the Taliban: Why is the Kabul University campus a place accessible only to people with special passes, and not a public space for everyone? Why are only Afghan military and political elites, and not ordinary people, allowed to pray in the old Id Gah Mosque? When are you allowed to take a photo of the façade of the National Archive and when you are not, and why? Why is a massive T-wall still blocking the main gate to the National Museum whereas this facility is widely open to the general public? Is a hundred-year-old Tajbeg palace already considered an historical monument managed by the Ministry of Culture, or is it still a guarded government facility under the control of the Ministry of Defence? Some of these questions were posed by the Taliban themselves during these negotiations. If we didn't learn the answers to many of them, it was, more often than not, because neither the guards themselves, nor their direct superiors, and often even the staff of the institutions we visited, knew these answers.
There are several reasons why the Kabul mosaic of public spaces hidden behind blast walls might remind us of more classic disputed territories. Firstly, in both cases, the legal and administrative status of these spaces is often undetermined and unclear not only to outside observers like us, but also to those people who administer them. The supreme institutions responsible for keeping control of these spaces shift quickly, buildings and offices change hands, other spaces, due to conflicting property claims, end up in an administrative vacuum for months or even years, and so on. Secondly, in both cases, the rules of the social game look – at first glance – as if they were devoid of a broader institutional framework; as if they were created ad hoc, on the ground, by local actors exercising de facto personal power over this or that piece of space. And even if it later turns out otherwise – for example, that there exists a general rule regulating access to urban parks in Kabul – it is still applied selectively depending on the place and the person on the ground. Thirdly and finally, in both cases we are dealing with a space of increased physical discipline and control of social life. While residents of classic disputed territories are usually subject to some political and legal segregation, for example on the basis of ethnic or religious criteria, the blast walls in Kabul effectively divide the physical space and residents into those who are free to get inside and those who must be disciplined and punished if they do so.
Blast walls maze as memory infrastructure
At the same time, the miles-long grey blast walls of Kabul provide a perfect infrastructure for making street art. Before the Taliban takeover, a local art and activist group named ArtLords gained worldwide fame by making blast wall murals in Kabul and other Afghan cities. They used street art in order to animate grassroots civic struggle for gender equality, human rights, public health and other key issues confronting Afghanistan. Today, ArtLords members, forced to leave Afghanistan after August 2021, continue their work abroad, while in Kabul other processes have come to the fore.
The entrance to the former US embassy
Exploring blast walls as memory infrastructure, we could clearly see that while the new Emirate’s government had painted over some of Kabul's murals from the Republic period, their policies are far from being coherent. The Taliban has been most consistent in emphasizing its symbolic dominance on the walls immediately adjacent to the main entrance to the former Green Zone, the diplomatic enclave of the West. Here they have made sure, quite meticulously, that the freshly whitened walls clearly display the most important evidence of their recent victory. At the entrance to the former U.S. Embassy the symbolic attributes of Afghanistan's new, internationally unrecognized, statehood, are plain for all to see. To the left of this entrance, we now have the giant Muslim shahada, which also occupies a prominent place on the Emirate's snow-white flag. On the right-hand side there is the official emblem of the Islamic Emirate, with a centrally located book symbolizing the Qur’an and a portal symbolizing mihrab – the main place inside every mosque which indicates the direction of Mecca.
New mural with the US flag falling apart (top) and old mural with the US flag encouraging women’s empowerment
A little further along the same wall, you can see a representation of the United States flag sadly falling to pieces, accompanied by the slogan written in Pashto: With God's help our nation defeated America. This new mural refers to the older artwork from the same wall, now painted over, where the centrally placed US flag symbolically encouraged the social and professional empowerment of Afghan women. Other Taliban victory slogans in Pashto also stretch along that wall: Our unity is the secret of our victory; The end of occupation is the beginning of independence; Happy homeland of freedom, and so on. The walls surrounding the narrow core of the Green Zone leave you in no doubt as to the total dominance of the Taliban's interpretation of Afghanistan's recent past.
Various depictions of Amanullah Khan and the previous state flag
But the Taliban lack consistency in painting over street art in other sectors of the city, which is why you can often come across murals that remind you of the country’s past. Sometimes they are just remnants of former ArtLords projects which used to promote recent peace-building policies, but now have been stripped of this context through partial removal. As a result, today they provide only a general aesthetic impression which, at first or second glance, can be difficult to fit into any broader narrative. Much more often however, the murals are simply left alone and devoid of maintenance, they gradually deteriorate. This is the fate of depictions of the historic red-black-green flag of Afghanistan - the official state flag during the recent Republic period – which is now a banned symbol. Similarly, images of Amanullah Khan, the early twentieth-century king of Afghanistan, scattered throughout the whole city, are also deteriorating. Amanullah Khan’s rule is one of the crucial puzzles in the Afghan national narrative which was promoted by the previous government. He is considered to be the first pro-Western modernizer in the history of Afghanistan who sought to introduce liberal constitutional rule based on individual freedoms and equal rights for men and women. You can see his street art image in a wide variety of different aesthetics, but nevertheless, they are all slowly disappearing.
As intense as informative
Our experience of careful, research-driven passage through the concrete blast wall maze which still so strongly defines the broad urban centre of today’s Kabul, is as intense as it is informative. It gives an anthropological insight into the logic of disputed territories; something we are used to thinking about particularly in the context of international politics. Now we can see how this very same logic can nest in far less obvious contexts. Its clear manifestations in the urban space of Kabul, show how deeply it can penetrate the micro-level of social relations and shape the ordinary everyday lives of its inhabitants. Our experience also provides information about the latest memory trends in the urban spaces of Kabul. In particular, it shows that Taliban activity – selectively – counteracts the memories of the recent past; the past which is tangible and still alive to the city's residents, while they seem to ignore the memory of the more distant past. Maybe they hope that time will erase the latter one itself?
However, the most important conclusion brought by the blast walls maze experience might be that even the most thoughtful and planned actions and projects usually produce some unintended consequences. These concrete walls, which were created according to the logic that urban space should be shredded into pieces and people should be disciplined and controlled, all in the name of security, at the same time provide huge infrastructure for different bottom-up activities that could undermine this logic, at least symbolically. The main question for today’s Kabul is: when will this grassroot potential get a chance to finally come out in full force?
Dr Tomasz Rawski is a political and cultural sociologist. He deals mainly with issues of nationalism, symbolic/memory politics and nation-/state-building in contemporary Eastern Europe, with particular emphasis on the former Yugoslavia, Poland and Russia. He has published a book on Bosniak symbolic strategies of nation-building in Bosnia and Herzegovina after 1995, as well as several articles on these topics. Tomasz has participated in several previous research projects focused on memory studies, including Horizon2020: REPAST. He has been a visiting scholar at University College London, Uppsala University and University of Sarajevo.
Dr Agnieszka Nowakowska is a sociologist and historian. She has conducted fieldwork in Poland and Lithuania. Her main interests are memory studies and sociology of education. Her PhD examined history teaching in Vilnius, and described the results of contact of official narratives about the past with everyday practices of memory.