KABUL, Afghanistan — As poignant in its imperial ambition as in its otherworldliness, the Soviet-era swimming pool atop Swimming Pool Hill here is as good a symbol as any of the doubtful legacy of empires.

Dug 30 years ago, it was barely ever used by Kabul’s swimmers, as the hill became entangled in barbed wire, first a gun placement for the Soviets and then the Taliban, before the whole area was bombarded by Western firepower in the 2001 invasion.

Now restored, its five diving boards hang pointlessly above an empty pool and an indifferent city stretched out below that is consumed with yet another stage of Afghanistan’s precarious history, the pending withdrawal of more recent foreign occupiers — the United States and its allies.

Like the pool, Kabul holds many glimpses of its Soviet past hidden in plain sight around its jumbled hillsides: a polytechnic school built in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union and the United States jostled for cold war influence in Afghanistan by building big infrastructure projects; or a car factory expanded after 1979, when the Soviet Army marched in to wrench this nation more forcefully into the Kremlin’s sphere of power and way of thinking.