International Herald Tribune: Ignore those rockets; Kabul really is safe

International Herald Tribune: Ignore those rockets; Kabul really is safe
08.11.2005 On the first day of her first business trip to Kabul in January 2003, Virginia Sheffield found her car surrounded by "three very excited Afghans with guns." It was the sort of incident that plays to foreign fears of Afghanistan as a lawless, violent place that is best avoided by Western capitalists.

But contrary to that popular perception, Sheffield and other corporate executives say, Afghanistan is the place to be these days. Its economy is booming, opening up opportunities for foreign businesses small and large, they say, and the risk that looms so large in the American imagination of falling prey to thugs or terrorists is not only exaggerated, it is diminishing.

"This mentality that it's very risky is not the reality," Sheffield said.

Her encounter with the three men with guns took place as she and her husband were entering the grounds of the presidential palace to meet with President Hamid Karzai. Just as they drove past a sign warning that no photography was allowed, her husband fumbled with his camera, triggering the flash and prompting the rush of guards to their car. "I almost got arrested," she said, but after she showed them the photo her husband had inadvertently taken of his feet, they let the couple go through.

Since then, she says, she has spent more time in Afghanistan than in the United States, usually for three-month stints, to run Sheffield Advisors, a consulting firm for companies doing business in Afghanistan, and to help oversee International Business Services-Afghanistan, which provides temporary office space and other support to newly arrived firms.

Despite an upsurge in violence around the country - more American soldiers have been killed in 2005 than at any time since the invasion to oust the Taliban and its aftermath - Kabul has been largely spared and Sheffield says she feels safe.

Shaun Brogan, rooms manager at the $25 million, 177-room Kabul Serena Hotel that is scheduled to open in November in downtown Kabul, minimizes the risk of terrorist attack but says misplaced trepidation about it is bad for business. In mid-2004, he says, he saw rockets exploding over the city and "heard the bangs, but it wasn't really scary." Foreigners tend to think rockets go off every day, he said, while they are in fact quite rare. "But this is the challenge, getting experienced foreign nationals" that his hotel is trying to recruit to believe that.

In addition, he said, it is difficult to get international corporations to send people in to sell their products or to help train locals. "It's very frustrating when you're here trying to set up your business," Brogan said. "That's a psychological barrier that things are scary, making them not invest."

On the other hand, said Christopher Newbery, the hotel's general manager, once foreign staffers come to Kabul, "then they are great." Well, most of them are; the hotel did lose a Frenchman who had been hired to head the food and beverage division but got spooked by rocket blasts on the day of his arrival. "He lasted three days," said Newbery, who, like Brogan, is British.

To be sure, the threat of violence remains, but foreign business people face up to it stoically, if not casually. "We have had plenty of close calls, rocket attacks in Kandahar which are very close to home," said Ben Preston, 27, manager of the Kabul office of DHL Worldwide Express, the delivery service owned by Deutsche Post of Germany. Preston said he was doing some business inside Standard Chartered, the first postwar international bank in Kabul, the day before Afghan authorities discovered and detonated a bomb known as a Vbied, or vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, in a car out front. But he made light of the danger, saying authorities should also be concerned about Dbieds, or donkey-borne explosives.

By at least one measure - air travel - Afghanistan has become safer. Sheffield said her first flight on Ariana, the national airline of Afghanistan, "looked like something from a Keystone Cops movie. You had people carrying bundles, one guy was actually carrying a tire." Once on board, her seat belt did not work, so she tied her "seat belt in a knot and called it good."

Today, by contrast, coming to Kabul is "an experience as good as flying in the U.S.," she said.

Karim Khoja, the chief executive of Roshan, the largest cellular company in Afghanistan, says he has also witnessed the transformation of air transport.

In fact, it is more the chaos of everyday life - the pell-mell pace of construction everywhere, the erratic traffic, the worsening pollution, the unreliability of the work force - that bothers many foreign business people more than the perceived security threats do. Sheffield, the American consultant, complains that despite soaring real-estate prices, too often in the older buildings "you don't have power, you don't have air conditioning, you don't have elevators."

Khoja tries to see the bright side of the endless traffic jams, calling them a "sign of prosperity," all the while lamenting the worsening air pollution they produce. But Preston, the DHL manager, said the broader problem was the absence of enforceable regulations that, for example, enables anyone who can get behind the wheel of a vehicle to get a driver's license. For any business, local or foreign, such lack of oversight can cause frustration.

"It's desperate," Preston said. "You've got one thing you have to deal with local business but what is there in terms of contract law, or any kind of law?" He said he has met "people who say they are a painter, and they're just some yahoo" with no skill in the trade. Such problems delayed a construction project for DHL in Kandahar, in the country's south, he said.

Even so, he said, he takes such setbacks in stride. "I quite like working in places that are not too glitzy," he said. "It would be boring if it was easy."

Noor Delawari, director of thecentral bank, acknowledged the regulatory confusion but said the economy was booming in spite of it, expanding at a projected 14 percent this year, up from 10.6 percent in 2004.

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