KABUL, Afghanistan - The long war here has had a lot of ups and downs, but that has not been the case with the country’s elevators - at least until recently.

Few capital cities are so poorly furnished with vertical lift. Elevators almost never exist in two- or three-story buildings, and rarely even in structures of five or more floors. And when there are elevators, they are chronically out of order, even in the five-story building that houses the president’s cabinet, the Council of Ministers.

The lack of elevators was not a problem when most of Kabul was a warren of mud-brick shanties that barely reached more than head-high. Now that something akin to a skyline is emerging, financed by a multibillion- dollar reconstruction boom, elevator doors are finally starting to open and the familiar ding of travel between floors can be heard.

Among those along for the ride is Ahmad Wali, whose company, Ariana Security, has installed 37 elevators in Kabul in its first year in the business. Although his company’s original line of work was security systems, Mr. Wali was inspired by all the broken elevators he saw around town ? in the few buildings that did have them.

“I thought this would be a good business,” he said, though it has proved to be an uphill battle. Nonetheless, he is a man with a (mudsplattered) Mercedes in a land of (mud-splattered) Toyotas.

In a country among the last in the world to modernize, the very idea of elevators seems alien. In Pashto, the country’s most widely spoken language, there is not even a word for elevator; most speakers say “lieft,” borrowing from “lift,” the British term for elevator. In Dari, the second language, it is a mouthful: “bala barenda,” which translates to “peoplelifting- thing .”

The biggest impediment to elevators is not the chronic electricity blackouts, in Mr. Wali’s view, so much as the public’s attitude.

“Even when there are lifts, people don’t use them because they’re afraid of them,” Mr. Wali said.

“People think they’ll fall down and don’t understand how secure they are, with a parachute and an emergency brake,” Mr. Wali said.

“Parachute” is industry jargon for an automatic stopping device that kicks in when an elevator overaccelerates, which is a fancy way of saying “falls.”

One obvious peculiarity of Afghan elevators is the absence of an inspector’s certificate posted inside them, since the Afghan government has no inspection system for elevators ? or for much else.

The lack of an inspection program, Mr. Wali said, accounts for the high percentage of elevators permanently stuck between floors. There is little incentive for building owners to maintain their elevators properly, especially when Kabulis seem to accept stairs as their natural destiny.

The United States Embassy compound here, although mostly only two stories high, has working elevators in profligate abundance by local standards ? eight in all. The State Department pays an American company, PAE, a whopping $182,136 a year to maintain them, according to a recent report by the United States Office of the Inspector General.

When it was the turn of the Russians to pump money into the Afghan economy, more than three decades ago, they apparently did not deem elevators a sensible investment. The legacy of that is row after row of Soviet-era apartment blocks, like those in the Microrayan area of the capital that are five or more stories without so much as a shaft to stuff an elevator into. These were considered luxury housing for party apparatchiks.

The Russians did incorporate elevators into some of their bigger showcase projects, like the 18-story Ministry of Communications building in downtown Kabul ? although those often break down. The result is that, unlike in the capitalist West, the lower an official’s rank, the higher the floor.

Even relatively new buildings have a troubled relationship with their elevators. The Gulbahar Center, an indoor mall, has a central atrium with fancy half-cylinder glass elevators, which were dead in their tubes one recent afternoon.

“They work,” a shopkeeper insisted. “They just turn them off for lunch.”

Last year, Mr. Wali’s company restored the elevators in the Soviet- built Cinema Pamir building, a 14-story bullet-riddled structure with a movie theater on the ground floor and offices above . However, this year bureaucrats and businessmen are trudging up the shabby staircase once again.

“The elevators were fixed last year,” said Haji Moi Wali Khan, who works in the building next door. “But a couple of weeks ago I had to walk all the way to the top. Nothing works in our country for very long.”


By ROD NORDLAND