Garishly incongruous ‘poppy palaces’ lure affluent Afghans

[unhappycamper]

http://www.stripes.com/polopoly_fs/1.106498.1276103663!/image/1729192527.jpg_gen/derivatives/large_article/1729192527.jpg

This Street 6 house in Kabul, Afghanistan, is available to rent for $12,000 a month. It's a four-story, 11-bedroom dwelling of pink granite and lime marble, complete with massage showers, a rooftop fountain and, in the basement, an Asian-themed nightclub.


Garishly incongruous ‘poppy palaces’ lure affluent Afghans
By Karin Brulliard
The Washington Post
Published: June 9, 2010

KABUL — For rent on Street 6 in the neighborhood of Sherpur: a four-story, 11-bedroom dwelling of pink granite and lime marble, complete with massage showers, a rooftop fountain and, in the basement, an Asian-themed nightclub. Price: $12,000 a month.

It’s a relative bargain in this district favored by former warlords and bureaucrats — Kabul’s version of Beverly Hills. There’s a war on, but carnival-colored mansions are mushrooming alongside cratered streets and sewage streams. Vast outdoor chandeliers, heated indoor pools and acres of mirrored, skyscraper glass windows abound.

The grandiose houses, derided here as narco-tecture, have become the most obvious symbols of Afghanistan’s corruption, which ranks among the world’s worst and is fueled both by an enormous influx of U.S. dollars and by the opium trade. They have paralleled a building boom sweeping this and other Afghan cities, fed by the donor money that has helped distort an economy of haves and have-nots.

But unlike the roads and schools being built, the “poppy palaces” are so garishly incongruous that some observers view them as more cultural erosion in an oft-invaded nation. Traditional Afghan residences are low-slung mud brick with internal courtyards and little external embellishment. Poppy houses, critics grumble, are imported Pakistani designs, with Arab, or simply alien, influences.

“I mix designs from the U.S. and U.K. — I create my own!” said Haji Akram Mughal, a Pakistani architect who works out of a second-story Sherpur office. On a recent day he displayed blueprints for two mansions he designed for Afghan air force generals, one of which resembled a plantation from the American South.

[xchrom]

1. i find stuff like this so morbidly fascinating. nt

[Skidmore]

2. Ah, yes. The old Asian-themed nightclub in the basement where every

infraction of shari'a law may be practiced in privacy without fear of suffering the justice meted out to the poor.

[WinkyDink]

3. AS IF the U.S. is not corrupt and a part of this drug trade!