A market for war rugs

Catching up on my RSS feeds post-Herat, I find a report from Wired's Danger Room blog on a consulting contract to rebuild the export market for Afghan carpets. The article is illustrated with, of course, a pretty awesome war rug.

War rugs

On my very first day in Kabul, I saw a carpet for sale at the Serena Hotel gift shop that struck me as gaudy and comic: a knotted depiction of tanks and grenades carefully labeled in English. I assumed it was some kind of touristy nonsense and dismissed it.

Tagging along with carpet-shopping friends yesterday, I learned that not only is that (admittedly kitschy example) a relatively common souvenir, it's also part of a far richer history of war rugs dating to the 1980s. Until recently, there was a War Rug gallery in New York, and even a show in Chelsea. There's even a Rugs of War blog.

Soviet-era war rugs have become rather valuable artifacts as both art and anthropology, and the tradition has continued in styles both weirdly beautiful and frightfully tacky. Some samples I saw yesterday (please forgive the photos; the thought of writing about these didn't occur to me until later, so I didn't even attempt to take blog-worthy pictures).


A Soviet-period rug Natalie put on hold; this carpet's war imagery is subtle - the pattern in the center is Kalashnikovs shooting at snakes, and yet the design is symmetrical and not particularly violent.


A modern rug detailing various weapons in surprising detail.


Another less-obvious war rug, this a recent sample - the pattern is of urban life, with roads and buildings, but also helicopters and tanks running along the lower border, just outside the city.


And the blatant - 9/11 and the "war on terror", woven by someone who clearly reversed the pattern (enlarge the image and you'll see the English labels are all backwards).

Welcome to wherever you are

Arriving in Kabul yesterday afternoon, Afreen and I met Attaullah, the friend of a friend who took us from the airport to our guesthouse. That evening, we got cell phones and SIM cards, but soon succumbed to exhaustion, partly fueled by three room changes in a matter of hours (one was not actually a double, in the second the A/C unit blew the fuse even if all the lights were off, but the third finally worked out beautifully).

(image courtesy of Afreen; click to see her full collection)

This morning, however, we set out with a driver to see some of the city I'll be calling home for the next couple of months. Fawad took us down Flower Street (as implied, it's lined with florists and strangely-adorned Corollas), then to the neighborhood of Murad Kahne to see the restorations done by the Turquoise Mountain Foundation. We wandered out to Kabul University, walked its campus with more trees than buildings, and even found the policy research center.

(Afreen and her camera, immediately popular in the market)

Traffic was predictably anarchic, but while the city displays poverty and division (concrete walls and barbed wire surround not only the government ministries and UN properties, but also private residences of any level of luxury), the violence I'd read so much about feels remote amid the chaos of ordinary life nonetheless.

(for sale at the Serena hotel)

Stopping in to ogle the Serena hotel over lunch, the usual surrealities found in walled-off luxury struck me walking across a marble lobby full of men wearing Kevlar. The gift shop offerings of traditional rugs interspersed with weavings of tanks and grenades provided comic relief from the fantasy world, and we soon wandered back out for another brief errand before collapsing back into the walled guesthouse garden to review Dari phrasebooks in preparation for the first day of work.

(A view from our room; photos of the rose garden to follow)