Of the thousands of expatriates living and working in Kabul, journalists are among the lucky few to enjoy freedom of movement as the security industry tightens control and boosts profits by exaggerating the prevailing threat.
Private security firms earning billions of dollars in Afghanistan appear to be taking advantage of the “zero risk” approach that most embassies and non-government organisations such as the UN take to life in the war zone.
These firms are now working with the construction industry to build fortified “life support compounds,” as the WSJ recently reported, to house foreign contractors as the Western military presence winds down.
The compounds, natural targets for insurgent attack, are bubbles in which foreigners are isolated from Afghanistan. This apartheid feeds the resentment many Afghans feel about the foreign presence in their country, and the prevailing double standard of most embassies and NGOs in not extending the same security measures to their local staff.
The vast majority of foreigners in Kabul already live and work in maximum-security compounds effectively controlled by private security firms. Many of the people running these firms have little or no experience in Afghanistan. They rely on recycled rumour to set a daily agenda, and have minimal understanding of where or how any threat could be manifested.
A friend with intimate knowledge of the military and security landscape of Afghanistan estimates that one particular road in the capital where senior diplomats and the UN representative live costs a minimum of $20 million a year to secure with armed guards and sniffer dogs.
At least one embassy now demands all international staff give 48 hours notice of movement outside the compound, permitting travel only to other embassies, the UN and two over-priced restaurants within the so-called Green Zone. Anywhere else must be in the company of armed guards quaintly dubbed “guardian angels”.
What the security companies probably know, and their clients choose to ignore, is that by wearing body armour and travelling in armed convoys of armoured vehicles, the internationals are drawing attention to themselves, and thus exacerbating the threat.
It is a vastly different approach to most of the journalists and a few others working in think tanks and low-profile NGOs in Kabul, who travel in soft-skin cars or taxis and live in local housing, with a scaled-down security presence and lashings of common sense. It seems to work: the kidnapping of Westerners in Kabul is rare.
Many of the internationals working with embassies and higher-profile donor organisations are unable to do the jobs they came to Kabul to do, because the security regime prevents them from meeting and mixing with Afghans.
Nor can they check on the projects they are meant to be administering – funded with billions in tax-payer dollars -- because they are not permitted by their security contractors to move outside the city limits. It is unlikely they'd be welcomed anyway in armed convoys that could attract the attention of insurgents or corrupt officials.
I have never met a foreigner working in Afghanistan against their will. Accepting the risks of being in a war zone is the most fundamental condition for being in one. Yet many endorse the self-defeating security regime to counteract their own fears while they receive huge danger allowances on top of their salaries.
The foreign correspondents know what they're getting themselves into. Unfortunately, everyone else is just trying to get out.
As the Western experiment in Afghanistan is being packed up for shipment home, the diplomatic, aid and military folk should ask the journalists and the Afghans what's going on outside the bubble; they might just learn a thing or two about Afghanistan.
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