Petty Bureaucrats of Kabul

There is a newly emerging petty bureaucrat here in Kabul (the designation ‘petty’ not to be taken as a jibe). In the spectrum from the lowest paid — whose efficiency remains the lowest too — on the one hand, and the highest paid civil servants, the petty bureaucrat stands somewhere in the middle. These are symptoms of a transformative process through which bureaucracy sheds its skin to replace it with a new one.

The older type generation of civil servants (ie, the lowest paid) earn somewhere between $1 to $3 hundred and seem as though they mostly appear in the same threadbare outfit (a sign of undisturbed public sector tedium in any place); usually with a stubble covering their chin, a sensibility toward modern day mannerisms that has hardly been awakened, an interest in efficiency and current technology that is generally inadequate or absent, and who either own a car from early 1990s, use the barely available public transport, or prefer Chinese made bicycles for commute. The predisposition for change among these, by some unfortunate event, seems to have dried up for good.

And, at the opposite end of the spectrum, the actual technocrats who are usually not present in the social scene but provide the technical backbone of the state — these are few, show up temporarily, and rightly earn the highest; somewhere between $10 to $20 thousand.

The petty bureaucrat loiters in the zone of average mediocrity between these two points in the spectrum. Though not a bureaucrat of any kind myself, if I were, I would fall under this category. These are the inbetweeners who’ve acquired neither the proper old nor the profitable aspects of the new; the over-confident pretenders who lack in intellect deeper than the outer surface. Among these, the prevalent social attitude of seeing English equivalent to a catch-up sign to anything perceived as modern has led to a neglect of building genuine capacity in other domains. Intellectual creativity — largely still in an infantile stage — is usually consumed in them by insubstantial grasp of some nihilistic philosophy; poor Nietzsche and I wonder why but Wittgenstein are badly misunderstood and abused around here. Or, anything beyond small talk usually feels like a yawn-inducing topic of conversation.

The inbetweener attempts at being seen clever by throwing around intelligent catchphrases — usually by switching the language entirely to English by some undeclared convention. The worst among these, the ‘cool kids of Kabul’ are hopelessly vacuous and driven by modest aspirations usually having to do with money, hair style (add to this the fashionable forlorn beards nowadays), inane debauchery, travels abroad, owning many cell phones at once, and talking … just for the sake of it. In short, the pitiable triteness that is called “being smart” by my generation and the ones after that.

These inbetweeners are the ones that will lead Afghanistan to a future that remains bleak, to say the least. Neither the lowest paid nor the highest paid will remain and are bound to disappear at some point. The lowest paid because they will soon join antiquity (one wonders why they haven’t already) because of their already evident inadequacy in dealing with anything new. The highest paid because the country’s economy cannot pay them anymore. Foreign aid, NGO jobs, foreign military presence …the economic sources of easy income are propelled by winds that mostly no longer blow toward Kabul, at least not with the same generosity as before.

Perhaps this pressure on the inbetweener group has led to some genuine talents emerging among them — who will take the place of the highest paid in future but not with the same pay scale. The ‘cool kids’ will perhaps take the place of the lowest paid — the system has to fill the bureaucratic gap through some logic of its own. The situation, after all, is not that despairing — if some all-consuming security downturn does not devour all that retains the promise of building a decently functioning bureaucracy.

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