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Kabul Greens

Jun- 3-2004 » Filed Under: Link of Interest

This is not Stryker, or even Iraq related news, but I liked the story and thought I would pass it along.

[Link to Full Article]
By Scott Baldauf, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – Haji Iqbal Rashidzada tees up for the first hole. It's a tricky shot. He stands on a bare patch of dirt on a small brick building, about a hundred feet above the green. To the left is a major hazard, a bombed-out building shot full of bullet holes. In between is about 371 yards of desert brush and thistle.

And the green, well, actually it's black: a large round patch of sand covered in oil to keep the sand from blowing away.

Challenging? You bet. But the point is, it's a golf course, in Afghanistan.

Whack. Mr. Rashidzada sends the ball sailing into an impossibly clear blue sky.

"It was like this before, when I used to come here as a kid; just desert and we used to tee off with every shot because there wasn't any grass," says Rashidzada, an Afghan now living in Dubai. "When I went to Peshawar and I saw a real course with grass, I thought they had made a mistake."

The Kabul Golf Course is like most things in Afghanistan, a work in progress best seen in terms of potential than reality. It might seem crass to be opening a golf course when hundreds of thousands of Kabul residents still live without proper shelter, but this is the way development happens in a postwar zone.

Schools and clinics and roads are built, electricity and water are restored, and here and there the trappings of a prosperous prewar society are revived.


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