Kabul’s New Five-Star Hotel

We just noted the new luxury hotel planned for Baghdad. Not to be outdone, Kabul hosted the opening of a five-star hotel this week, complete with a swimming pool, health club and pastry shop. It’s apparently just the latest sign of progress in Afghanistan. An AP story about the hotel also notes the opening of a fancy Kabul shopping mall this year with the nation’s only escalators. Remarked Ahmad Jan, a 23-year-old tailor visiting from out of town, “I am amazed by these moving stairs.”

Moving stairs aside, you might not want to jet off to Kabul just yet. Reports the AP:

It has electricity for only a few hours a day. The vast majority of its residents are poor, living in single-room, mud-brick houses and drawing water from wells that are sometimes polluted with cholera.

Militants occasionally fire rockets into downtown and the threat of kidnapping forces many foreigners to live in tightly guarded compounds ringed by concrete bomb barriers and to travel in armored convoys.

But other than that, the place is perfectly safe. Sort of.

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