What Kabul really needs is a Starbucks

It's a little strange to sign up to living and working in a place you've never been. But it can happen.

It's properly strange though when that place is Afghanistan. Particularly when you notice that not everyone on your flight that's coming into land at Kabul airport is seated.

Men of all ages, with beards, and dressed in shalwar kameez, are moving about the cabin like it's their living room. And the flight attendants can't help because, of course, they're standing as well, holding the doors of the overhead luggage compartments closed.

I moved from the intifada in Gaza, to post-war Kabul in 2002.

Afghanistan had just been taken over by Western forces and the Northern Alliance, who'd driven out the Taliban. For me, the time had come to leave the Middle East, but I wasn't ready to move back to the smooth pavements of the West.

Occasional sojourns to London had sent me into a spin - there was too much to choose from in the supermarkets, and nothing felt urgent enough to care about. So, naturally enough, it was Afghanistan.

Some people - in my experience, mainly young men from the UK and France - have epiphanies when they go to Afghanistan. It restores to them some long lost sense of masculinity, they can roam about a bit, and feel brave, and they can justify as research, reading books from the Flashman series.

It was a moment with a French photographer on a hillside in freezing weather that convinced me I was epiphany free.

The views were dramatic - snow-topped mountains, and a craggy mountain path, beyond the Salang tunnel. As we stood by our four wheel drive vehicle, we watched an old man drag his donkey backwards up the mountain pass. I watched boys run about inside their compound down below us. And girls peek out from a shed at the back of the house, where no doubt their mothers and sisters lived as well.

Surveying the scene, my French photographer friend observed: 'Just think. One day - very soon - all of this will be gone'. I admit I said something to the effect of the sooner there was a Starbucks the better.

I found nothing brave in the brutality that abounded. And nothing noble in the suffering of these people, particularly Afghan women.

As a woman reporter, I had some access to their world. I treasured the moments after a dinner, when the men who were my hosts would allow me to peak through the curtain door of the kitchen, and greet the women who'd cooked our meal. We would speak as best we could - often with my male interpreter standing and calling out translations from the other side of the curtain. But there was a gulf between us.

They inevitably asked if I was married. And when I said not, they would ask how I had persuaded my father to let me travel the world alone.

That said, there were uplifting moments in that place, and I made some extraordinary friends.

When I left, I wrote a letter to Hamid Karzai, praising him on doing what I thought was about the world's most difficult job, but warning that I didn't think his advisors were telling him the full truth about what was happening throughout the country.

In retrospect, he probably would have been quite right to tell me to mind my own business. But instead, he wrote back, thanking me for my interest in the Afghan people and their well-being.

There is no easy solution for the problems of that place. And the West seems to suffer memory loss every time it returns with a prescription for making everything better. It will take bravery, without guns, to make even the smallest changes.

Kylie Morris's 'Podcasts from the edge' feature on the Morning Report. Kylie takes over from Sarah Smith as presenter of More4 News from Monday 18 June.

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