KABUL, April 29 (Reuters) – The maze of nameless streets and
numberless houses in Afghanistan’s capital is making it
difficult to catch insurgents and thwart attacks, prompting
Kabul’s police chief to ask on Sunday that a system be
installed.
Most of the city’s dishevelled, dust-filled streets have no
names, and of those that do, few are marked. For the majority of
Kabul’s four million inhabitants, navigating is a trick of good
memory and a stream of questions to locals and passers-by.
“I have repeatedly asked the Mayor of Kabul to create a
system,” Ayoub Salangi told Reuters. “But it is a vast project
and requires a lot of money.”
Eleven years into the NATO-led war against Taliban
insurgents, Kabul still has no official street map.
“From a security point of view, not having street names is
devastating. There is no way to know where anyone is,” said the
47-year-old lieutenant-general, who oversees Kabul’s
14,000-strong police force.
Though Kabul was one of the first areas in Afghanistan to
have security responsibilities transferred from NATO in 2008,
confidence in the local force is eroding as most foreign troops
look to leave the country by the end of 2014.
Kabul’s security forces were praised by NATO mentors and
local authorities earlier this month for repelling a coordinated
attack by insurgents who took aim at foreign embassies and the
parliament, suffering relatively low losses.
Salangi blamed weak Afghan intelligence for allowing the
insurgents to slip under the watch of security forces and into
the capital.
(Reporting by Amie Ferris-Rotman and Hamid Shalizi Editing by
Maria Golovnina)
