KABUL, Afghanistan — Nothing symbolizes the wrack and ruin of Afghanistan and its four decades of war better than Darulaman Palace, a once-magnificent edifice visible on its hillock perch for miles around. The palace has been pummeled and pockmarked by every conceivable caliber of weapon fired by nearly every faction in the country’s recent wars, with the possible exception of the Americans and their allies, because it was too damaged by the time they arrived to provide much useful cover.
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Now much of Darulaman Palace is obscured behind scaffolding and green netting, its mangled trusses and battered Corinthian columns visible only in snatches. Huge lettering hangs from the scaffolds, in Dari and Pashto, reading, “We Can Do It.”
Significantly, there is no such sign in English. Not only is Afghanistan restoring its most emblematic building, it is doing so entirely by itself. Funding is Afghan, and so are its architects, engineers and workers — even its technical advisers. Moreover, a surprising percentage of the professional staff are women, 25 percent, despite the lack of any gender quotas imposed by international donors — of which there are none.
The price tag, too, is Afghan: $20 million has been budgeted for the four-year project to rebuild the three-story, 107-foot-high palace. A few years ago, according to Omara Khan Masoudi, the former head of the National Museum, the United States carried out a feasibility study that calculated a $200 million cost for rebuilding the 150-room building, using foreign contractors, and the idea was rejected as impossibly costly.
When the project first got underway in 2016, according to Nilofar Langar, spokeswoman for the ministry of urban development, the first job was cleaning 600 tons of debris from the vast building, everything from human and animal waste to bullet and artillery casings. A foreign company bid $1 million to do the initial cleanup; a gang of Afghan laborers, led by women employed by the ministry, did it for $30,000, Ms. Langar said. “We saved $970,000.”
President Ashraf Ghani has championed the project as an exercise in national pride, visiting the site three times to check on its progress. He has pointedly refused any international help — although some donors may well note that because they underwrite most of Afghanistan’s budget, it is arguably international money in the end.
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