Simply to have survived through 25 years of Soviet occupation, brutal civil war and Taliban rule is heroic. Gulla Jan Hairran did a lot more than that. During the most chaotic years in Kabul, the country's capital, Hairran protected one of the city's prime assets: a diesel power station in the northwest. That Kabul's dark days—and nights—are over is almost entirely due to the 49-year-old father of six. After a decade of idleness, the plant is operating and providing 70% of the city's electricity.

Raised in Afghanistan's Parwan province, just north of the capital, and educated at Kabul Technical School, Hairran worked at a dam in Kandahar after graduating in 1974. Later, sponsored by UNICEF, he traveled to Switzerland to do a six-month course on how to operate small power plants, and, upon returning to Afghanistan, took a job at Kabul's Badam Bagh power station. But after the Soviets abandoned Afghanistan in 1989, the city was steadily torn apart. Warring factions pounded the capital with artillery. Scavenging was a way of life. Hairran realized his 44-megawatt power plant was almost certainly doomed. He decided to keep marauders from dismantling the plant—by doing it himself.

Hairran hid fragile components behind false walls in his house. He buried expensive, Swiss-made tools and stacked up sandbags to protect the control room from rockets thudding into the city. Every day he toured the station, keeping it clean and operational and, most importantly, rotating the turbines just enough to keep the shafts from bending under their own weight.

Eleven days of torture in one of the Taliban's grimmest prisons couldn't persuade Hairran to surrender crucial supplies or say what he had hidden. He was against the Taliban's oppressive rule, and he didn't want them to loot the plant because he knew the city would need the electricity someday. "This station was a trust placed by the people upon my shoulders," says Hairran. "If I owned this station myself, I would have left it long, long ago." When the government of Hamid Karzai took control in June 2002, Hairran revealed his secret. A short six months of repairs later and at a mere cost of $2 million, Hairran was able to bring his station back on line. Building a new plant from scratch would have cost an estimated $75 million and taken a year-and-a-half. In a nation torn apart in a seemingly endless struggle for power, Hairran was a one-man crusade to preserve another kind of power: the type that every resident of Kabul needs.

—Reported by Ebadullah Ebadi/Kabul

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