Islamabad

Today I travelled from Kabul to Islamabad. The distance in my mind was far bigger than the actual distance between these two cities. It's practically just hopping of the ground with a plane for a lousy half hour, and down you fly into the humidity of Islamabad. Touching ground in Islamabad immediately made me notice that though this city isn't necessarily better off compared to Kabul when it comes to security (remember Mariott?), it does look quite different from the Pashtu areas across the border. It's green, roads lack potholes, traffic lights switch steadily from green to yellow to red and back again, on the edge of the street are public parks where people enjoy a walk; further all streets are clearly signed with numbers (even though the numbers don't really follow much logic - they jump from 30 to 36 and back to 32...). There are even few women walking around (!) that don't wear headscarfs (!!). And yet, once you drive past the signboard that says "diplomatic enclave" you know that the place is actually far from normal. And then you also start noticing the check points. And suddenly you get suspicious when you see people not just walking around in these road side parks, but groups of ten to twenty men in traditional Shalma Kamizes sitting in a circle under a tree, talking about god knows what. It's somehow an artificial place, that has gotten in touch with the reality of the "other" Pakistan in the tough way over the past few years.
I will be here for only two days, starting up a cross border program for Afghan refugees living in Pakistan, jointly with colleagues from IRC Afghanistan. The aim is to identify employment for young qualified afghan refugees in Kabul, and thus creating some pull factors for them to actually go back to Afghanistan. Anyhow, I am sure with the deteriorating security situation on this side of the border, we will have plenty of people interested in returning to Afghanistan...