KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — The narrative that death lurks on every corner and in every alleyway of Kandahar city is powerful.
Written by a relative handful of violent religious zealots and the world’s most powerful military machines, the storyline is fed and reinforced incessantly by those who profit from it. War and instability are, after all, lucrative business.
And it is brought home to far-flung breakfast tables and living rooms by a media that finds normalcy a far more complex, subtle and boring topic.
Even so, a sit-down lunch at a Kandahar restaurant, a stroll through the bustling bazaars or a peek into the myriad stores, schools or building sites all reveal a Third World city that is far from besieged, even if it does face its own unique challenges.
“I liked the place so much, I had to come back,” says Tylere Couture, of Campbell River, B.C.
“I love it here.”
Couture, one of just a few westerners in the teeming city, is a captain in the Canadian Forces reserves who served at Canada’s main outreach base in the city in 2008.
He was one of two CIMICs — soldiers whose job it is to liaise with the locals to try to figure out their thinking and concerns.
Couture is back now as a civilian, working as a development contractor and finishing a Master of Arts program. He’s clearly in his element.
“I feel safer than when I worked at the (military base),” he says.
“Not necessarily because the city is more secure; more because I don’t look like a giant target any more.”
In the heat of a random Thursday afternoon, the city is anything but on edge.
Children frolic with abandon in the main canal as ice-cream vendors push small carts that serve up familiar treats at about 70 cents US each, about one-third the Canadian price. Commerce flourishes, or at least carries on in a thousand different ways.
In the restaurant, men sit on the floor of a raised platform around the edges of the room, eating and chatting. Others, including a couple of uniformed officers, eat western-style at tables in the middle. Everyone ignores the large flat-screen TV hung in one corner that soundlessly beams NBA and other sports highlights.
The paint might be a bit shabby and the rugs on the walls sport scenes that look right out of The Road to Avonlea, but the food is served hot and fresh and the sheer normalcy is overwhelming.
Every now and so often, an American military convoy passes down one of the main streets, a reminder of a massive NATO presence that’s otherwise largely invisible along the byways of the city.
Rifle-toting Afghan police are ubiquitous, but they mostly just stand around in the heat, or sit at various building entrances, half asleep. Overall, they lend a certain air of irrelevance, rather than one of incipient security.
It is barely more than a week since a large, well-orchestrated insurgent attack on several targets tied up Afghan and American security forces for two days.
The battered Kandahar Hotel and a few other buildings bear pock-marked and blackened witness to a spectacular, but utterly unsuccessful, attack that grabbed world headlines, further fuelling the city’s under-siege storyline.
Couture watched the battle from the roof of his home, about a kilometre from the most intense fighting.
Yes, he says, the city did largely shut down for the better part of a day, but it was back up and running even before the fighting ended.
A couple of kilometres from where kids leap from a bridge into the cool canal waters, a motorcycle packed with explosives recently exploded, blasting one child to bits and killing several others.
But city life went on.
Like most tragedies, one’s fate depends on being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In that regard, Kandahari lives are not hugely different from anyone else’s.
The biggest difference is that those currently trying to write the story of Kandahar are determined to have the last word — in blood, if necessary.