Meet Herb-i-Islami in video - my 1969 Volkswagen Beetle in Kabul. This debut video blog courtesy of expert film maker Sam French is Part 1 of a journey to repair, restore and eventually drive the old girl back to England.
The decrepit VW classic is being expertly and lovingly restored by a team of Afghan workmen. Zia Hassan Faqiri, the lead mechanic, has been working on Beetles (known as Folooks in Kabul) for 45 years.
We are also negotiating with some of Kabul’s best artists to try and get funky paint job once she’s got a fresh coat of classic cream from the body shop. (More on this later).
Bugs (and their Combi-van cousins) flooded Afghanistan in the 1960s and 70s as hippy travellers plied overland routes from Europe to India and Nepal, in search of free-love, weed, enlightenment and whatnot. A few of them were left behind.
A handful of my friends - journalists Jeremy Kelly, Ash Sweeting, Shoib Najafizada and aid worker Jess Stober - came along for second opinions, encouragement and advice.
The Times
Jerome Starkey in Kabul
Dressed in drab overalls with calloused hands that labour long into the night, Zia Hassan Faqiri is an unlikely bastion of Afghanistan’s hippy heyday.
Yet for 45 years the father of eight has fixed the hippy’s motor of choice: the once-ubiquitous Volkswagen Beetles and Combi vans that filled the overland routes from Europe to Kathmandu.
Today his mud-walled workshop in a residential part of Kabul is the closest Afghanistan has to a Volkswagen garage. A handpainted sign proclaims his name, his trade and the circular VW logo.
“When Zahir Shah was on the throne (before 1973) there were thousands of Folooks in Kabul,” he said, using the local corruption of the German word Volks, which has become synonymous with Beetle in modern Kabuli dialect.
“Now, in the whole of Afghanistan perhaps there are 100 or 200 Folooks. The foreigners brought them here from Europe. Every day we’d have 10 or 15 come to our workshop.”
The men, Mr Faqiri said, had long hair and the women wore miniskirts. “We had a lot of freedom,” he said. “Things were better then.”
Free love for Mr Faqiri meant a time when he was free to teach young Afghan women how to drive, sitting together in the front of his four-speed Beetle. “Most of them are now in America,” he said.
In the early 1960s demand for VW mechanics was so high that Mr Faqiri, now 60, worked at the city’s main workshop during the day and set up his own stall at night. He remembers driving along new roads to Kandahar in the south and Laghman in the east, now hotbeds of insurgency.
He even drove a Beetle to Bamiyan, 2,800m (9,200ft) above sea level, then home to Afghanistan’s 5th-century Buddhas that were later destroyed by the Taleban. The air over the mountain passes was so thin and the tracks so steep that some early Beetles had to go up in reverse to get power from the low-ratio gearing.
Back then, he said, the cars on Kabul’s streets were a mix of Russian Volgas, French Citroëns, German Mercedes and American Jeeps. The first car that he worked on was an English Land Rover that the owner had crashed in the newly opened Salang tunnel — at the time the longest and highest in the world — which connects Kabul with the country’s north through the Hindu Kush mountains.
The Times has a special interest in his workshop because Mr Faqiri is in charge of reconditioning a 1969 rust bucket recently purchased by this journalist. “People love these cars,” he said. “Some people keep them in their gardens just for show.”
NATO leaders are divided over the speed with which they can start handing parts of Afghanistan back to Afghan forces, it emerged yesterday, as US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, acknowledged…
THIRTEEN-year-old Sabri spends three and a half hours a day in a small village school for girls and more than five hours a day lugging water from a nearby river, up a steep mud track, to the caves in…
The Times
Jerome Starkey
Winston Churchill knew the perils of Afghanistan’s snipers more than a century ago. Today, it seems, the Taleban sharpshooters are just as deadly. In his account of 1898 of a British excursion into the borderlands between what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, he quoted Kipling’s Arithmetic on the Frontier: “A scrimmage in a Border Station/ A canter down some dark defile/ Two thousand pounds of education/ Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.”
Churchill’s report refers to the snipers as armed with long-barrelled, elaborately inlaid, jezails or muskets. Their fire was accurate and intense. “These sharpshooters enjoyed themselves immensely,” he wrote.
The fatal shootings of two British soldiers in Helmand have renewed fears over Taleban snipers. In February General James Conway, the Commandant of the US Marines, told Congress that the biggest threat was not necessarily the improvised explosive device. “It is the sniper that takes a long-range shot and can penetrate our protective equipment.”
In 2006, when British soldiers were first sent to Helmand, they would mock the Taleban insurgents’ “spray and pray” technique. Nonetheless, in the early years of the conflict, liberal rules of engagement meant that US and Nato soldiers could respond with 1,000lb bombs dropped on the insurgents’ firing positions.
By 2008 the Taleban, obliterated in battle against a better trained, more disciplined and technologically superior enemy, had switched to home-made bombs. Face-to-face contact became rare. But as Nato’s rules of engagement were tightened to reduce civilian casualties the Taleban tactics evolved.
By last month the coalition military officials admitted that there had been an alarming rise of “pinpointed” attacks and “small sniping incidents”. The Taleban, meanwhile, said that they had trained more fighters to use the Russian-made Dragunov rifles.
When a US sentry was shot in the head last week, his commanding officer blamed specialists trained overseas. “What country they are from I couldn’t tell you. But the skill of the enemy fighter that took down my soldier is not something that was trained here,” Lieutenant-Colonel David Flynn said.
The bullet is thought to have been fired from at least 400 metres — well beyond the accurate range of an AK47.
Both sides use sharpshooters to sap enemy morale and Nato is fighting back. “I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that we have people who hunt snipers and kill them,” Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Breasseale, the Isaf spokesman, said.
Kipling’s poem reaches a bleak conclusion. Training, wealth and technology are no match for valley scamps “blessed with perfect sight”.
“No proposition Euclid wrote/ No formulae the text-books know/ Will turn the bullet from your coat/ Or ward the tulwar’s downward blow/ Strike hard who cares – shoot straight who can/ The odds are on the cheaper man.”