Another week in Kabul

• NATO Fuel tankers bombed in Jalalabad
• Taliban take over a town in eastern Nuristan
• A suicide bomber blows himself up outside a military caterer in Kabul
• NGOs warned they may be the target of attacks due to proselytising Christians

I went to a party the other night. A correspondent who had written for me while I was at The National was having a barbecue. It seems like the thing to do here on a Friday – a barbecue in the garden. As we sat among the roses on Afghan cushions in the dimming light, eating burgers and salads and drinking beer from the can, a murmur went round. Heads started to turn and a whisper gathered voice: “legs” was all I heard. Then I saw her .... the woman in a skirt. It’s not that she had the type of legs that make men cry. It was simply that we could see them, from the knee down. I looked away almost embarrassed.

It’s strange how conservative we become when we live in countries where covering up is the norm. But we were at a party – where it was mostly internationals (the euphemism foreigners have awarded themselves here). There were no women in headscarves, although most had scarves draped around their neck and chest. There were tight jeans, tops that just skirted the hips, but nothing quite so daring as... gasp ... bare legs.

I never did get a chance to meet the bare naked leg lady but there were plenty of other interesting people. In fact, it is impossible to meet anyone boring (although it is possible to meet someone you don’t like) here in Kabul.

No one works in a biscuit factory – or if they do – they are making high energy biscuits for pregnant Afghan women, incidentally, one of whom dies ever half an hour due to complications.

There was the German woman working for a small Dutch NGO that helps refugees returning from Pakistan and the internally displaced with livelihood projects; the American woman who’s been here a dozen years and is a gender and environmental specialist; the Harvard fellow doing his Phd in nation building and who comes from Banda Aceh (my favourite place in the world); the Italian running an advocacy group; the Indian journalist who’s been here seven years and has found a house and a husband; and the girl like me - a British journalist who's doing some training.

Even my housemates are all quite fascinating (and should stop reading now); the country director of a German NGO who previously worked in Swat (the place, not the American crack police force); his colleague who gave up a lucrative career on Wall Street to do something good, his pregnant wife who wants to do a Phd on the structures of Pashtun tribal communities along the border with Pakistan; the Canadian lawyer; the ridiculously laid back 50-something German who's been here five years and can not only get his hands on a car, but into the ISAF camp for a booze run as well; and the young 20 something in her first month here who has lost one Afghan colleague in a plane crash and her boss in an attack on a project site in the north east.

I find myself saying "wow" a lot, bit like a teenager among really cool adults.

 Discussions are usually about, well Afghanistan.

 I met an American woman last week at the Grill, a Lebanese restaurant that serves hummus and falafel , and occasionally alcohol, although after the vice and virtue police cracked down last month, it is pleasingly dry. It was raining when I arrived - the garden empty. A few tables inside were full of Afghans and westerners. One (american)  woman was dressed in a red satin, sleeveless, strappy top.The woman I was meeting, an embassy official, was thankfully dressed in a jumper and jeans.

Part of her work here involves setting up prisons, training police and the judiciary. Not an easy task.
Illiterate villagers are given six weeks of training and a gun and told they are now police. They are also paid $185 a month. A translator at my office gets $400. A driver for the UN can make $600. No wonder there are problems encouraging locals to join the private sector when they can make so much money in NGO work. It's cannibalistic. The very money that is supposed to be furthering and developing the economy is stymieing it, as what educated Afghan will become a provincial judge on $150 a day if they can get 10 x that as a political analyst for the Canadian embassy? At some point the NGOs will leave and the economy will crash.

 The American woman I ostensibly work for, "the mother of Pajhwok" says that one of her greatest personal achievements was in making the staff at the agency believe in a future. How can you plan for tomorrow when your country is being torn apart by civil war, when you don't know if tomorrow you will be on the side of the victors or losers. How do you convince someone they need to make a plan, a system for hiring, for news coverage, for expansion, to prepare for a workshop next week even, when they don't believe in tomorrow.

So it was something of a personal moment for me when one of the editors I am training, who has for the past week or so been showing up in the last 20 minutes of my lessons, asked me yesterday morning, "so we have a lesson today Cassie?".

I told the American woman, who replied "Awesome! So do you think you'll want to stay longer?"