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NEWS > EVERYONE ELSE > KABUL DEEMED THE SAFEST CITY IN THE WORLD
KABUL DEEMED THE SAFEST CITY IN THE WORLD
December 14 2010
Kabul, Afghanistan – Life is never like it is in the movies. Whether love, romance, hate, passion, or any other of the myriad of experiences that make their way across the silver screen the reality of those things is often very far from the romanticized 
version we see in dark theatres. Sometimes those things are much better in real life, sometimes they fail to live up to the fantasy that we create in our heads, often though all of those experiences are simply renditions, ghosts, of real experiences.
War is another of those experiences that is so often portrayed in film in starkly different ways from reality. As one of the more popular genres of film story telling virtually all aspects of war have been covered, but limited by the conventions of the medium those stories often constrict and compact the reality of conflict. Real war does not involve constant fighting or bloodshed at every corner. Real wars are often mundane, drab, with intermittent moments of life and death danger. The movies rarely portray that aspect of conflict as it doesn’t create the kind of tension necessary to maintain interest, one more case of the divergence between fiction and reality. That belief of constant conflict often informs real life however which makes it reasonable that people assume nations like Afghanistan know nothing but bloodshed. However, a new NATO report indicates otherwise, citing Kabul as the safest big city in the world. 
“The children are probably safer here than they would be in London, New York or Glasgow or many other cities. Most children even in places like the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, go about their daily lives in safety. So it is a little bit like a city of villages,” said NATO spokesperson Mark Sedwill. “While it’s clear that this is still war zone and that there are dangers inherent to that many of the problems faced by children, and adults, are unrelated to the conflict. People aren’t killed by bombs, they are killed by other things and that makes this a safe place.”
74 children have been killed thus far by improvised explosives, a number dwarfed by the 850 who die every day from diseases such as diarrhoea and pneumonia.
“It really has been quite a remarkable turnaround in Kabul in particular. Under Taliban 
rule young girls, as an example, were never allowed to attend school. Now they just risk having acid thrown in their faces or having their schools gassed. That may seem foreign to many people in the west, but it’s a far cry from where things were,” said Scrape TV International analyst Gustav Hander. “Child rape is way down, ritual slaughters are virtually non-existent and so many other factors that used to burden the children and adults of Afghanistan are simply no longer major concerns. Sure these things happen in isolation but they happen in western cities as well.”
NATO officials have found no connection between the mass numbers of illness related deaths and the current conflict.
“There is little doubt that Afghanistan is a poor country, a country that will likely suffer for generations to come, but it is clear in places like Kabul that improvements can be made, that change is a very viable option and that the people of the country do not need to live in fear that their lives will always be threatened,” continued Hander. “Many of the problems that do still exists are endemic and unrelated to the conflict. Infant mortality rate for example, or suicide bombings. These things are part of living in Afghanistan and totally rational when compared to other big cities around the world.”
There have been no reports of school gassings reported in the New York or London area in the past year.
Emil Uliya, International Correspondent
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