Post-Taliban Kabul Blossoms for the Rich

An Afghan vender, left, waits for customers in front of a commercial banner in Kabul, Afghanistan on Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq) (Musadeq Sadeq - AP)

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Eight-year-old Sajjad's kite struggles upward. It's nothing grand _ a plastic bag salvaged from a heap of garbage and fashioned into a diamond shape.

But it's a symbol of change in Kabul, five years after the Afghan capital was freed from a Taliban regime that believed activities such as kite-flying would distract youngsters from studying the Islamic holy book, the Quran.

The U.S.-led war and the Western-friendly government that followed eliminated that rule and a host of others. Girls have returned to school. Public beheadings and amputations as punishment for crimes came to an end.

The times have changed. But in Kabul today the question often asked is: How much and for whom?

Sajjad (he says he has no last name) lives in a neighborhood called Shirpur, a significant symbol of what has changed since U.S. and British bombs drove the Taliban from the city on the night of Nov. 12-13, 2001.

Part of it has been demolished and its inhabitants evicted to make way for a "new Afghanistan" of palatial homes _ scores of four- and five-story mansions boasting gold-painted marble columns and floor-to-ceiling windows flanking grand wooden doors.

The owners are the successors to the Taliban _ movers and shakers who in 2003 used their new power to seize and clear the land. About 250 of Sajjad's neighbors were tossed from their homes.

Miloon Kothari, the UN's housing representative, complained and Afghan President Hamid Karzai promised to investigate, but nothing has come of it.

Now, in the waning days of October 2006, Sajjad runs past a half dozen goats and a cow feasting on rotting garbage to get his flimsy kite airborne. He lives with seven brothers and four sisters in a single-story house of dried mud, straw and pebbles. He wears cracked plastic sandals and a torn brown shirt with only three buttons remaining.

One of his neighbors, Aziz Mohammed, a potbellied man with a speckled beard, stands ankle deep in the mud he is using to winterize his home of 25 years.

Mohammed says he has been told that his and his neighbors' houses will be flattened soon to make way for more mansions.

The owners of these mansions "are commanders, ministers. It makes me angry. These people use everything that isn't theirs and they ruin the houses of the poor people to build their homes," said Mohammed. "The Taliban were no good, they were just stupid people. But in this new life there is no job, nothing."