Temat: Poland is more dangerous than Afghanistan!

Poland more dangerous than Afghanistan!
Sag-e zard baradar-e shaghal ast, yellow dog (Afghan greyhound) is jackal’s brother. Translating this into colloquial speech would go like this: The Afghan and the Pole are twins. The former as worthless as the latter, as Polish Studies Professor or a historian would say.
I was there at those times when female tourists from West Europe would walk the streets wearing shorts and T-shirts, while discotheques and night clubs used to lure foreigners, as well as well-to-do Afghan youths who were looking for arousal and adventures, watching dancing girls from Europe, with alcohol and drugs. In 1976 alone Afghanistan was visited by 7,000 Poles who went there to buy famous Afghan sheepskin coats. The Welayat Wat was dubbed by my compatriots Sheepskin Coat Street. Despite the fact that there were the Kabul City prison and custody centre, this commercial name caught on among Polish tourists’ terminology. There were around 50 shops selling the above-mentioned item and in no time at all almost all shop owners spoke Polish. Today there is no Sheepskin Coat Street. In 2008 bulldozers levelled the shops in order to widen the street in a bid to solve the city’s huge problems – traffic jams. The prison and custody centre survived. Parwa nest! No problem!
From the April 1978 Revolution till as far as 1987 I used to travel there with my wife. At those times Kabul was not destroyed to the degree it was when I saw it in March 2002, after a 15-year break.
From 2002 to 2008 Afghanistan unerwent some HUGE changes. More than 11 bridges were rebuilt along a very important Kabul – Salang – Mazar-e Sharif road; the new surface was laid on 3,500 kilometers of roads in the whole country. More than 100 “skyscrapers”, that is buildings 8-10-story high were erected in the capital during 6 years. These buildings change the city landscape. I don’t like them, but the locals are delighted with them. De gustibus non disputandum est, that is you don’t argue about likes or dislikes.
In Polish media of mass information Afghanistan is being depicted as Savageland, a Black Hole or Terrorland.
This picture is false.
Afghanistan’s surface area is 647,500 sq. kilometers and is divided into 34 Provinces.
At present we have three Afghanistans.
The first one is composed of militant welayats, that is Provinces, that border Pakistan: Nimruz, Helmand, Qandahar, Zabul, Paktika, Paktia, Nangarhar, Kunar and Badakhshan. Decisive majority of its inhabitants are Pashtuns and Belujis, millions of whom live on the other side of the border in Pakistan. There are forces in the world that make use of this fact for their own purposes and results of their activity are being reported in the press or radio and TV stations almost every day. The situation in these nine Provinces is really dangerous and war atrocities are daily occurrence.
The second Afghanistan is formed by the welayats adjacent to the front line: Farah, Uzurgan, Ghazni (Polish troops are stationed here), Logar, Wardak, Kabul, Helmand and Takhar. Terrorists acts do occur here, and now and again armed clashes take place. Mostly when a local warlord is dissatisfied with the amount of money he receives from the central government, that is U.S.A. The Tajiks and Pashtuns live here who have no relatives in Pakistan. I seldom visit these provinces, but I can state with full responsibility that you can live there, provided that you keep your eyes wide open. If you are out of luck, you may be hit by a falling brick in a wooden church...
The third Afghanistan exists in the remaining 17 provinces!
Life takes its normal, to a large degree quiet course here: the front line is at a distance of 500-1000 km from here. Terror acts are as rare as explosions of bombs planted by mafia in Warsaw or Gdansk. Many roads and steel-and-glass sky-scrapers are under construction. These buildings are strikingly distinct from the local ones and don’t fit the surroundings. In 2002 the journey from Kabul to Mazar-e Sharif took me 36 hours (including the night spent at Pul-e Khumri), while the same journey made in 2007 took only 8 hours to get there! It was by night that I performed this journey through the Salang Pass, famous for the mujaheddins’ fight against the Soviets, and adrenalin level was high in my veins, not so much for the fear of the Talibans, but because I first had to go through the most highly located tunnel in the world and then negotiate a couple of miles on the verge of the precipice with the stream humming among the sharp rocks 300 meters below.
It is not always so that what we do see is in reality what we think it is. In Afghanistan black is not always black, white is not always white and I am not prepared to argue about that with anybody.
It would be to everybody’s advantage if mass media put more pressure on the fight against drunk driving. I call drunk drivers POLISH TALIBS.
It’s them who terrorize us, as is clearly witnessed by the reports of the organization named “PARTNERSHIP FOR ROAD SAFETY”:
1. During the last 17 years there were almost 1 million road accidents in Poland in which more than 110,000 people died and more than 1 million were injured. Daily death rate is 15, while 160 persons get injured. In real terms it means that all inhabitants of average Polish city like Kalisz, Koszalin or Legnica died and almost every inhabitant of the capital city of Warsaw got injured.
2. 1 out of 10 road accidents is caused by a drunk driver. In 2007 police arrested around 160,000 drunk drivers.
3. 5,536 casualties on Polish roads gives Poland second place in the whole EU in terms of transport accident casualties.
IT IS POLISH DRUNK DRIVERS WHO POSE A DANGER!
THEY ARE EUROPEAN TALIBS!
On the 17th April 2007 TV evening news bulletin showed President Karzay’s expose in which he kept inviting tourist to come and visit Afghanistan and stated that Northwest part of the country, including its roads, is safe, and local security forces, following Turkey’s and Iran’s example, have Tourist Police units and will guard the guests as if they were the crown jewels. In 2007 Afghanistan was visited by more than 7,000 tourists and all of them returned safely to their homes. In 2008 their number rose to more than 8,000 and nothing unpleasant occurred.
President Hamid Karzay has already signed a decree establishing Bamian Valley National Park, the main attraction of which will be painstakingly restored “Standing Budda” monuments. We have well-founded hope that this project will be carried out pretty soon, because the Japanese took it to their hands to reconstruct the carvings. Tourists from the Blossoming Cherry Country are seen everywhere and from afar.
Nobody here instigates others to do evil things. This tour is for people seeking sensations other than admiring beautifully-carved bodies at Costa del Sol, Ibiza or the Seychelles. This tour is not for the guys who tremble with fear before anything starts.
In 2007 a GUIDE TO AFGHANISTAN in the „Lonely Planet” series was published. So, somebody does go there, after all?


TOMASZ KAMIŃSKI
taktomasz@o2.pl