Find yourself downtown Musa Qal’eh and you’ll immediately be struck by its bustling bazaar.
If its early in the morning you’ll find traders hawking all manner of wares from the cracked pavements, waving you inside from the entrances to their simple concrete stalls. There’s over a thousand shops here – in a manner of speaking – and it’s the economic heart of the district.
You’ll find colourful haberdashers, resplendent with beautiful cloth from Pakistan, you’ll pass butchers offering freshly slaughtered goat and chicken, (speckled with merrily feasting flies). You’ll see heavily laden and garishly decorated trucks (jinglys) groaning under the weight of goods purchased in Kandahar by groups of local shopkeepers. You might even find a dingy café or two serving the area’s infamous soft-serve ice-cream. If you can afford it you can buy television sets, hairdryers and fridges, or make calls from the dozen or so satellite phone shops which serve as the district’s telephone service.
Although the district is primarily a subsistence, agriculture based economy, commerce is alive and well for those with a little extra cash or an entrepreneurial flair. And its slowly growing, with 10-20 new shops appearing in the past three months.
If you ask the shopkeepers what they think is important to continue this growth – as we did a few days ago – you’ll be told a consistent message; they want security. For themselves, for their trucks bringing goods up on the notorious desert highway from Gereshk, and for their customers. Things haven’t been great in the past three months in that regard – the summer fighting season has taken its toll on people’s appetite to go shopping. But they will also say that its about providing basic services like reliable power, and finding better ways of managing the municipality.
All told it’s a pretty reasonable request, one that is guiding the government’s redoubled efforts to attract more business to the heart of Musa Qal’eh. The challenge is clear; if the conditions are right, then – as no doubt you will have seen from your brief shopping trip – business can flourish here.
