Bryan Denton for The New York Times
In a dirty, bombed-out wasteland in the middle of Herat, 600-year-old minarets still stand, barely. Much of the city was destroyed during the war against the Soviet occupation. More Photos »
HERAT, Afghanistan — Women in Converse sneakers jog untrammeled — if still in full, flowing chadors — in this western Afghan city's biggest park, enjoying freedoms rarely witnessed in the rest of Afghanistan.
Rich businessmen, refugees for a few days of "picnic" from more violent Kandahar, pull on apple-scented shisha pipes like lotus eaters in the pagodas of the local pleasure garden. Unwary for once of kidnappers or suicide bombers, they punctuate the night with hoots of laughter.
Herat, an ancient trading city of minarets and wide avenues in the brown borderlands of western Afghanistan, has probably advanced further than any other in this country toward modernity over the past 10 years. There is a quiet and firm belief here that if any place can ride out the coming economic and security turbulence as international forces and money depart, it will be this city.
Yet there are still whispers of encroaching violence, tremors of economic downturn, calls by a local strongman to rearm against the Taliban, conservative opposition to modernization — and doubt.
"War will start," said Ghulam Reza, a slight man with a gray beard and turban, an old mujahedeen fighter who had brought his two grown-up daughters and their husbands to the Citadel, one of Herat's landmarks.
He wanted them to see how much the hulking battlements had been restored with, in large part, a $1.2 million grant from the United States Consulate.
He also wanted to show them where he used to fight when war stalked the city, and all of those parts were in ruins.
"Everything will go back to the early 1990s, when there was a civil war among the mujahedeen groups," he said, adding that there would still be hope if foreign forces stayed in large numbers.
There is the strong sense that Herat has an immense amount to lose.
The source of the city's prosperity is not hard to see — the snaking road from the Iranian border 80 miles away runs to the dusty 200-acre customs yard on the edge of town. There, beneath brown hills chalked with "Allahu akbar" and "My love, Afghanistan," lumbering trucks spill German air-conditioners, Chinese motorcycle parts and Saudi honey into the Herat economy for transport to the Afghan hinterland.
Although there are attacks in the districts outside the city, the Taliban have not secured a strong foothold in Herat. And trade and proximity to Iran and Turkmenistan have bred openness and a rich urbanization of furniture stores, office towers and storied homes, some in places where dirt tracks ran just five years ago.
The city has swelled in recent years to more than a million residents, according to provincial estimates. And the life here, in the quiet paved neighborhoods, the laughter of its fairs and chatter of its soccer fields, evokes something all too rare in Afghanistan — a people actually having fun.
But Herat is also a place where Afghan history has a tendency to splinter. It was here in 1979 that locals rose up against the Soviet-backed government, giving first momentum to a chain of uprisings that prompted the invasion and 10-year Soviet occupation of the country.
Much of the city was destroyed. In a dirty, bombed-out wasteland in the center of Herat, 600-year-old minarets still stand, barely, looking like haunted industrial smokestacks — a reminder to the people not only of their history but also of what they should be careful not to lose again, said Ayamuddin Ajmal, head of the department for the preservation of cultural monuments.
"They are the five fingers of our history," said Mr. Ajmal, a sturdy man with short black hair, as he strode one morning beneath the minarets. "They witnessed a lot. Those bullet holes are holes in our history."
A commander who took part in the 1979 rebellion, Ismail Khan, later became governor and self-styled emir of this region, his fatherly largess evident in Herat's parks and museums.
Now, he is active again. Leaving his office in Kabul, where he serves as minister for energy and water, he returned to Herat on Nov. 1 to gather thousands of his former fighters outside the city, urging them to reactivate their networks and prepare to counter the Taliban if the national army is not up to the job. That call raised fears around the country that old dividing lines were again becoming active among the network of mujahedeen warlords who waged the civil war.
Habib Zahori contributed reporting.
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