The Afghan Plan

Admin post: On Nicknames.

2011-10-09T19:05:00.005+04:30

Co-workers have started pining for nicknames, but they're all civilians, and civilians lack the built in "first name" of a military rank. I'm questioning what I should do for them, particularly given that approximately 95 percent of the people with whom I interact at this point aren't in the military. First initial and then nickname? That's what I went with below, but I'm reserving the right to change it at any moment. If you feel strongly, weigh in in the comments section. This seems better crowdsourced.

Kabul is a Different Universe.

2011-10-09T18:59:00.003+04:30

I.

There was a huge thunderstorm on Thursday night. At around midnight, lightning actually struck the main building of the Embassy, and the resulting flash and concurrent roll of thunder was loud enough that the Marine on duty thought we were taking incoming and hit the duck and cover alarm.

I was long since in bed by that point but the thunder had woken me up, and I dutifully followed the instructions posted on the back of the door:

"If in hooch, stay there!

Get under your bed!"

So I rolled on to the floor of the converted shipping container I call home and skittered under the bed. But the hooch I'm in is a temporary unit, meant to tide me over until enough people have cycled out of Kabul that I can get a permanent shipping container to call my own. And since I'm just there temporarily, I haven't bothered to clean the place since I arrived.

It's been three weeks since I moved in and my hooch is filthy, a fact underscored by the ocean of unidentifiable crunchy bits that stuck to my body when I rolled under the bed. And it's firmly autumn in Kabul, so the floor was freezing in addition to being unpleasantly hard.

The duck and cover alarm stopped and I crawled back into bed, but ten seconds later the Marine came over the loudspeaker (referred to, in the MilSpeak lingua franca of Embassy Kabul, as the Big Voice) and told us to continue ducking and covering. I rolled back under the bed, but wisely took my blanket, tacoing myself inside of it against both the cold and the crunchy things on the floor. The all-clear sounded 15 minutes later.

The next morning, I ordered a yoga mat to keep under the bed: I want something soft to lay on should meteorological phenomena -- or incoming fire -- make us take cover again in the future.

I still haven't cleaned, though.

II.

The Embassy was closed today for Columbus Day. Holidays were not a luxury we indulged in at the PRT, and I guiltily slept in until almost 7. I didn't make it to the gym until after 8, some four hours after my regular time.

There were a fistful of other people there when I arrived. One of them was staring down at the gym's gun-metal grey dumbbells, a prison-esque collection of chipped and rusty iron bars laid out in disorganized rows in front of the cracked wall mirror. While I was futzing around with the bench press, the gentleman in question was strapping his head into a skull cap apparatus that had metal chains coming down the sides of it, terminating in a metal holster somewhere below his chin. It toed the line between neo-electroshock therapy chic and, courtesy of the chains, something you might see at a heavy metal concert.

He hoisted one of the gun-metal colored dumbbells into the holster and began a series of head raises that seemed to be aimed strengthening his neck.

"There's something about this place that makes people act in ways that they would never act at home," one of my female colleagues had told me on Thursday. She was talking about the licentious atmosphere at the on-compound bar, where the primarily married but geographically single clientele are often overly forward in their drunken advances towards the very few females on compound.

The gym at 8 a.m. on a holiday is not the same as the compound's bar at midnight on a weekend, but as I watched a fellow gym goer sling around a dumbbell in a traction harness using only his neck, I couldn't help but think that she's maybe she's right.

III.

On Friday, I went to play frisbee on the helicopter landing zone at the military base adjacent to the Embassy. The HLZ is actually just a large empty field, and on Fridays (the Islamic weekend and our one day off), it hosts a bazaar and a series of sporting events throughout the day.

Few people turned out for frisbee, and I ended up just tossing the disc around with a friend from Pol-Mil (J. Fundraiser, who currently runs humanitarian demining programs but once ran Obama's campaign in the state of Idaho) and a couple of Afghan kids from the bazaar. They were both maybe 12 years old.

We were eventually joined by a trio of military guys -- a Polish soldier and two Americans, one of whom was an enormous and solidly-built full bird Colonel who easily weighed over two hundred pounds -- probably closer to 220 or 230. With seven players, we started up a makeshift game of ultimate.

At one point, I threw the disc down the field to one of the Afghan kids, and he and the full bird both charged hard for it. They jumped and collided and ended up collapsing in a heap near the end zone, with all two hundred and thirty or so pounds of Colonel falling directly on top of the Afghan kid.

The Colonel dusted himself off and got up, but the Afghan kid continued to lay crumpled on the ground, crying and clutching the shoulder that had just been crushed by a guy who was twice as big as him. I tried to check him out to see if his collarbone was broken from the fall, but he wouldn't let me touch him, and after waiting a bit to see if he'd shake it off, I asked the other kids if his father was around in the bazaar.

Someone ran to get him, and shortly thereafter the father appeared on the other side of the field and began making his way over to us. He was an amputee -- one leg cut off below the knee -- and was using the kind of crutches that have loops you can put your wrists through. He eventually made it to the side of the boy (still clutching his shoulder and crying) and poked at him with his crutch. He growled in gravelly Dari: "WHAT did you do?"

One of the other boys tried to respond for him -- "we were playing a game..." -- but the father cut him off. "Crying like a WOMAN! You are bringing shame on your family and tribe!" And then he slammed him in the head with his crutch. He went in for a second hit, but Fundraiser grabbed the bottom of the crutch as we both tried to calm him down. Intervention seemed like the right approach, but it was hardly a long-term solution since it's not like you can take the crutch away from the amputee, even if he's using it to beat his kid.

By that point, the kid had managed to get to his feet and was limping across the field, still holding his shoulder and crying for all he was worth. His father hobbled after him at a surprisingly fast clip, continuing to shout at him. Fundraiser and I watched them both run off, feeling for all the world like our attempt to do the right thing was absolutely the wrong thing.

"I meant to tell you," one of the other boys said to us. "His father is kind of crazy."

Out of Farah, into the Frying Pan

2011-09-30T21:15:00.003+04:30

I had dinner with Commander Killjoy while I was in DC. We sat outside at Hank's Oyster Bar, and ate seafood and drank beer and rehashed the PRT experience. We both conceded that we were happy to be out of Farah, albeit for very different reasons. It was the first time I'd ever seen him in civilian clothing.

"People have been hounding me to write a farewell blog post about Farah," I told him. "I've got nothing, though. I've written like 2,000 words, but it's just not working."

"Maybe that's what your last post on Farah should say, then," he said. "That there's nothing to say."

"That doesn't seem right either," I said.

***

I left Farah on August third, two days after I had met my replacement planeside when she arrived on our dirt and gravel airstrip. She had been my upstairs neighbor in Beijing, and I've know her for years. I can't remember the last time I was so happy to see someone.

She had been a blogger while we were at US Embassy Beijing, but she declined to pick up the blogging mantle at PRT Farah. "People don't want just any blog out of Farah," she said. "They went your blog. I'm not going to try to fill that void.

It's too bad: there was a lot to blog about in my last month, and I don't doubt that the same would've been true for her. The new team was an amalgamation of odd ducks, and as a team they would've provided a lot of material for blogging.

One of them was obsessed with home improvement, and had requested a dozen sheets of plywood to redo the flooring in his room in a self-shellacked ersatz hardwood. He and his team had gotten into a prolonged spat with the head of the human terrain team, an angry and short-tempered former marine, over the disposition a disused and largely forgotten volleyball court in a dusty back corner of the PRT -- his junior enlisted guys had wanted to build a tree fort-esque clubhouse (they called it, alternately, a "hangout spot" and, more creatively given the dearth of hunting and fishing opportunities in our province, "the Farah Rod and Gun Club"), but the Human Terrain Team had claimed the volleyball court as their own and got irate at the incursion into their turf.

The drama remained ongoing at the time of my departure.

Another member of the new team at one point stood up from his desk and announced his hatred of his office's collective work space, a windowless back corner in a characterless concrete-block building. "I hate this desk, I hate this office, and I hate this computer," he said, dropping the magazine out of his pistol and fake-shooting at the laptop in front of him.

He had, of course, failed to remove the bullet from the chamber, and the resulting shot echoed through the office, terrifying Princess and obliterating the laptop in question.

By sheer dumb luck, no one was hurt in the laptop ND, or "negligent discharge." But it was reported back to me that after my departure, a second ND had occurred in which one of the junior enlisted SecFor guys blew his own toe off while recklessly loading his pistol in the back of an MRAP. "The most dangerous place in Farah," I was told, "is with our team."

***

The new team was blog-worthy, but their first month on the ground -- my last with the PRT -- was nonetheless a challenge; they went through a protracted teething period, trying to figure out both what they wanted to accomplish and exactly how to go about accomplishing it. The process was complicated by a shortage of personnel, as they had neither a full-time operations officer for planning and executing missions off base, nor a supply officer for military acquisitions. The routine occurrence of getting off base, even for a simple dinner at the governor's house, became arduous, and there was a lingering feeling that missions weren't going to work out, but asking too many questions would get you yelled at.

In the mean time, I found myself simultaneously in a disagreement with the PRT over our role in the province and in a massive fight with the maneuver unit over a matter of policy. The subject of these disputes was never blog-appropriate (at one point I found myself citing the Geneva Conventions -- the Geneva Conventions, good lord), but it was ugly and cast a long shadow over my last weeks at the PRT.

I was ready to leave Farah when I did.

***

I feel compelled here to mention Major Tenacious, an Army Special Forces officer who was mostly embedded in the Afghan countryside, starting Local Police programs and trying to prepare Afghans at the sub-provincial level to take control of their own security. He was dogged and hard working, knew more about Afghanistan at the rural level than anyone I’ve ever met, and genuinely wanted to make the Afghan sub-provincial government work. He was the most persistent person I have ever met and had a saint-like ability to overlook or work around laziness and incompetence in those around him; I tended to think of him as The Major Who Cared Too Much.

Tenacious stopped by my office after my first major fight with the maneuver unit, and gently asked me what had happened. I was pretty down on it all at that point. "Well, " he said, "despite all of this, it's been great working with you. You're one of the only State guys who actually gets it -- who gets the military, who gets everything we're trying to do here." I was close to leaving Farah; it meant a lot to me.

"It's a shitty note to end on," I told him, "but I guess it'll make a decent last chapter for the book."

***

I split my home leave between my parents' house in Charleston, South Carolina and my own home in Washington DC, hopping between hotels and a couch generously proffered by college friends.

I had intended to work on a book about Farah while I was in the States. I hauled home the 26 notepads that I, a compulsive note taker, had filled with an almost verbatim transcript of my time at the PRT, written in a slapdash personal shorthand that's incomprehensible to anyone but me. (At one point, a half-full notepad fell out of my pocket on a helicopter and was lost to history. "Anything sensitive in there we should know about?" Lieutenant ________ asked me. " "Have you not seen his writing?" Killjoy asked. "It could be nuclear launch codes -- still wouldn't matter.")

I had vowed to write at least 50,000 words on home leave – an average of about 10,000 words a week, which seemed reasonable. But I was tired upon returning home, and a full schedule of social obligations -- lunches most day, dinners to catch up with old friends every single night I was home, that sort of thing -- meant that all I really wanted to do was sleep, and go to the gym, and sit in the park in the sunshine and not be in Afghanistan. It was better to be home than I had ever expected it to be. I wrote not a single word.

***

I arrived back in Afghanistan on September 21st. I flew commercial, on the Safi Airlines flight from Dubai to Kabul that's invariably packed with muscular, tattooed contractor types who eye you suspiciously as you sit in the waiting area. I slept for most of the flight, waking up only for the surprisingly excellent in-flight meal that Safi always serves.

There was a burly contractor type a few rows behind me, travelling with what appeared to be his Afghan wife and their child, who was maybe seven years old. We arrived, and I was walking down the stairs towards the arrival terminal when I heard the seven year old's tiny voice behind me shriek out, "NOOOOOOOOOO! NOT THIS PLACE!!!" And then bursting into tears, "daddy, you lied to me, YOU LIED TO ME!!"

I couldn't help but laugh, both at the kid who'd been duped into coming back to Kabul (he was later seen attached to the side of his father's huge rolling suitcase, clinging to it like a starfish as if willing it back into the cargo hold of the airplane), as well as at the stone-faced contractor types, who seemed to be silently saying -- I agree with you, kid.

***

I wasn't ready to leave America, but it's good, in a way, to be back in Afghanistan. There's a lot to say about my new job and life on compound (I've already run for cover once -- unnecessarily, it turned out) and what not, but it will have to wait. For now, I'm lapping up Kabul life: it feels like I'm on a different planet than Farah. I find myself eavesdropping on people's complaints and smugly thinking that they have no idea how good they have it. "I'm going to die if the PX doesn't get Doritos in soon," one said. "What is it going to take to get some reasonably priced wine in the commissary?" another asked. "The chow hall has guacamole but no tortilla chips? Being at war SUCKS!" said a third.

I've vowed to make it a year without complaining. We'll see how that goes.

Plus ça change...

2011-07-24T13:34:00.004+04:30

The Public Affairs shop is now staffed by two Lieutenants who look nothing alike but whom everyone, including their subordinates, confuses. Aside from the shared traits of Caucasianness and a thin, athletic build, they don't have much in common, but since they're (apparently) identical and inseparable, I've taken to thinking of them as the Public Affairs Wondertwins.

The Public Affairs Officer is Lieutenant Backcountry, a blond Air Force officer ("Air Power!") who subscribes to Bow Hunter magazine and pines for the woods of southern Illinois; his Information Ops (the military equivalent of a propaganda officer) counterpart is Lieutenant Slick, a rakish and brash Navy officer from Texas, with tattooed biceps ("INTEGRITY" and "LOYALTY"), bizarrely excellent posture and a penchant for undersized t-shirts. Backcountry is married; Slick has taken up the mantle of PRT Ladies' Man.

(We had a high-ranking USAID officer visit last week, and I prepped the PRT in advance that she controls a huge budget, and that if we wooed her appropriately, it could net additional funds for the Province. "Well," said XO. "If there's any wooing to be done, we'll need to get Lieutenant Slick on board").

The final member of the Office is Senior Airman BONZAI!!!, who fills the role of Combat Camera and who is desperate -- desperate -- to be catapulted into active combat so she can take pictures. In advance of recent combat operations in an unstable district northeast of the city -- an event that basically made me want to hide under my bed -- she begged to be loaned to the maneuver unit so she could tag along to war. She's a champion.

Anyhow, Slick gets called BackCountry and BackCountry gets called Slick, and it infuriates the both of them. I don't find it hard to keep them apart -- their names are written on their clothing -- but everyone else screws it up all the time. Noting the fury it inspires, I (engaged in a conversation with Backcountry during which I declared him dead to me), conscientiously called him Slick, just to watch the fireworks. Slick, having none of it, reached down to gravel at his feet, picked up the crumpled carcass of a long-discarded water bottle and hurled it at me, likely expecting me to catch it or duck. But I, out of either a misguided sense of bravado or an utter lack of reflexes, held my position unblinkingly and was subsequently clubbed just above the right eye. BONZAI!!! documented the blood gushing out of my face ("Do I look rugged?" I asked) while Slick sheepishly searched for band-aids and a baby wipe to clean me up a bit.

Which is to say: the new team is awesome.

Apparently Friendly Fire disqualifies you for the Purple Heart.

I had been dreading the departure of Killjoy and Company, but nine months on the ground in Afghanistan had long since driven out any sense of optimism they'd had upon arrival, and the base -- somewhat unbeknownst to me -- was redolent with their long-accrued lethargy. They continued to drive away on programs but everyone was tired, worn out from the grind of it all. The new team, by contrast, hit the ground brimming with an unbridled enthusiasm, and it's good to have them here.

USAID was horrified when I told her that the new team seemed to have reenergized things; "you're a traitor," she hissed.

(USAID later sent me a flurry of text messages expressing discontent that she remained nicknameless and demanding that I refer to her as "Princess," which is what I call her -- preceded by a long and sarcastic "awwwwww" -- when I feel she's being whiny. The first time she brought it up, I immediately responded, "Awwwwww, Princess, are you upset that you don't have a nickname?" I don't know why it never occurred to me previously to use it).

The new team is awesome, but the adjustment period has nonetheless been somewhat protracted; the corporate culture of the new team puts a heavy emphasis on internal paperwork, and things that used to be effortless have now become onerous. Operations, previously led by the laid-back and unflappable Captain Tomcat, has been taken over by Major ByTheBook, a straight-laced and severe Army officer who runs Ops with an iron fist, brooks no foolishness in official settings, and studs his speech with a constant stream of unexpected hooahs.

("He hooah'ed me in the bathroom," Lieutenant BackCountry said. "Wait, that sounds horrible -- that's not what I meant").

Team Civilian gave the new PRT a "capabilities brief" to try to get them up to speed what we do and what value we can add to the PRT, and Major ByTheBook has asked if we needed the military to set up the room in any way beforehand. "Actually, yeah," I said. "If we could get some streamers or like a balloon arch or something, that would be great. Oh, and maybe some Christmas lights -- and actually, if there's any way everything could get hooked up to The Clapper, that would be…" ByTheBook stared at me icily, unblinking. "I, uh, I'm kidding," I said. "No, uh, thanks though, we don't, uh, need anything for the room."

"Wow," said Dr. Death, the new PRT's physician, catching my eye from across the table, "That went poorly!"

(Dr. Death replaced Commander Quixote as the PRT's Doc. He named himself, having ordered camouflage "Dr. Death" name tapes to supplement the bland, navy-issued name tapes that use his actual name).

The mission schedule, previously referred to by the plain English term "calendar," has now become an "operations matrix," and the upkeep and maintenance thereof is the cause of considerable consternation. Getting a mission off base, which previously required swinging by Ops and asking if it was possible, now requires filling out a Movement Request Form and waiting for official approval, a process that takes between twenty four and forty eight hours. "I haven't done this much paperwork since the last time I had to fill out an insurance claim," I whispered during the first Operations Sync meeting to Senior Chief Yarnspin, the new team's gregarious, story-telling Senior Enlisted Advisor; "I feel like I'm at the DMV."

Changes to scheduled missions are not taken lightly. Princess ducked into my office in advance of going to ops, whom she had to inform of a change in destinations for a complex mission that had already seen several changes. "Do you think I need to wear my helmet?" she asked.

But the initial culture shock notwithstanding, I have overall found the new team pleasant and easy to work with. Killjoy has been replaced with Commander Bangbang, who adores guns and speaks in loving and reverent tones of the crew-served weapons mounted on top of our vehicles. "The Mark-19?" he said of the belt-fed grenade launcher on top of our truck one day. "It makes it rain metal. It's awesome." I make fun of him for having the eating habits of a fourth grader: he hoards candy, abhors vegetables and thoroughly enjoys a good chicken nugget.

I am genuinely sad to be leaving.

It's like Budget Circular #1, only for Stories.

2011-07-11T22:02:00.001+04:30

An Open Letter to Killjoy and Company's Team:

All right, there are a thousand things that I never blogged about while you guys were here. I'd like to say I'll go back and back-blog them, but that's unlikely. What's more likely that they'll get folded into a book if a book about Farah ever does in fact get written. That said, if I failed to blog about it AND it's not written down in one of my notepads (that is, if it's not work related), it's like it didn't happen. There is literally a zero percent chance of my remembering anything beyond this blog.

So then, my question to you is: what from this tour did I miss on this blog?

Obvious examples include:

-- The FOB Farah Marathon and Petty Officer Moonshine's triumphant finish.
-- The FOB Farah petting zoo, including that cow (and that weird cow guy), the arrival of turkeys (and those bizarre photos of Lt. Drac wrestling with one while holding a pistol), and ultimately the arrival and departure of Blanco Farah.
-- The Lieutenant _____/Sgt. Schoolmarm academic showdown (that I was fully complicit in as well), over academics in America as told through cotton gins and polio vaccines.
-- Captain Adventure's impromptu head surgery, which I've got well photo-documented but never wrote about.

What else is there? This is your only chance to jog my memory -- now, while the iron is hot. The comments section is at your disposal, or you can hit me up on facebook or email -- mhthornburg//gmail. Come on now: carpe diem.

And in the mean time, even though I remain (for now!) not in the Navy, allow me to say one last time -- fair winds and following seas.

And so it ends.

2011-07-11T21:47:00.004+04:30

The pizza oven was completed as Killjoy and Company were winding down their tour at FOB Farah. The Chief's Mess, which hosted the pizza oven as well as a barbeque grill (lovingly crafted by Chief Hammersmith from a discarded fifty-gallon drum), became the focal point of a series of going-away events -- evening barbeques and pizza nights -- in advance of departure.

I told Killjoy that the Civilians would be happy to cook for one of the barbeques ("Team Civilian is all over this"), and then got called away to Herat and ended up leaving the whole thing in the hands of our USAID and Agriculture team, with nothing to guide them but a crumpled up meat-request receipt from the chow hall.

USAID still hasn't forgiven me for this.

In the end, the vast majority of the prep work and cooking was done by Petty Officer Cinnabon, the enthusiast culinary specialist who replaced Petty Officer Frying Pan from way back when. (Cinnabon had a tendency to sweeten everything he cooked -- his pizzas, made lovingly on MRE days before the pizza oven was completed, were more like a pepperoni-strewn dessert than lunch. "The key to a good chicken marinade," he told me once, "is brown sugar; it counters the acid in the grapefruit juice so the meat doesn't get bitter." He paused in thought for a second and then added, "Actually, I put brown sugar in just about everything." This much I know is true: his cinnamon rolls were legendary).

I basically refused to acknowledge that the team was leaving -- or abandoning me, as I put it -- and continued to pretend that they'd be with me until the end of my tour, sometime around early August. But then the new team started showing up, and it was hard to ignore the fact that every evening it seemed like there was another "one last" event for the PRT -- one last poker game with the officers, one last game with the enlisted, one last dinner at the Italian chow hall, one last trip to the Governor's. The end was drawing near.

And then, almost without warning, I was driving people to the airport for their final flight out of Farah. The team was divided into three groups -- three chocks, they say -- and the first one left early, more or less as soon as the new team arrived.

The military flight system makes saying goodbye an awkward and repetitive process. "I might be leaving tomorrow" is a near-constant refrain amongst people close to departure, caused by the seemingly random cancellation and reallocation of flights. But chock one made it out eventually, and my hopes that chocks two and three would be delayed were dashed when they stepped up their departure times, pushing up from a July fifth or sixth departure to leaving closer to July first or second.

I took pictures at the airport as each chock was departing, documenting the elation at heading home and the boredom of sitting and waiting for the first of a thousand flights to get back to the States. Mostly I used the departure hall as a chance to photodocument the entire team, one by one, lest I missed any of them over the course of the tour. I shook a lot of hands, and wished everyone well on their way back to the States. It was sad, but the awkward uncertainty of whether they'd actually be leaving made it less emotional than it might've been otherwise.

And so it was that I said goodbye to Commander Killjoy, whom I've been almost attached at the hip with since his arrival in Farah. As I told him the night before his scheduled departure, when I cornered him in his office to shake his hand and give him a pair of State Department cufflinks -- I couldn't have asked for more in either a partner or a friend for this deployment. He and I shook hands one last time on the airstrip, before the air force announced the arrival of their flight and pushed me and USAID out of the terminal.

The abiding memory of his departure, though, will be from the Awards Ceremony held a few days before his departure.

I had made it clear early in this deployment that I was willing to read and edit anything the military wrote -- intel reports or analysis pieces, emails to headquarters, employee evaluations, awards and commendations, whatever. "God made the military for many reasons," I said more than once, "but the proper use of semi-colons wasn't one of them." I read things piecemeal throughout the tour but the brunt of the work came in February, when they dropped off a stack of nominations for bronze stars, Navy Achievement Medals and other awards -- one for every member of the command, it seemed -- on my desk. "If you do all of these," Petty Officer Hindsight told me, "I'll put you in for Warrior of the Month."

(Petty Officer Hindsight was the PRT's constantly cheerful Admin officer with a habit of Monday-morning quarterbacking everything I did. He reveled in the idea of being nicknamed Hindsight: "what you SHOULDA done…" said in his light Oklahoma drawl, was his standard opening line).

I find editing to be soothing in a zen sort of way, and having a hundred or so commendations to work through was actually kind of fun; I cranked through them in half a day, passed them back to Hindsight and then went on R&R. I forgot about the Warrior of the Month thing entirely.

And so, five months later, I was caught off guard when they called my name at the PRT-wide awards ceremony, held just before the final departure of Killjoy and Company. Petty Officer Moonshine, whose baritone speaking voice had left him type-cast as the awards ceremony EmCee, called me up with a command of "State Department, front and center, doubletime!" The award, read in its entirety, was apparently a labor of love that took three people -- Petty Officer Hindsight, Petty Officer Moonshine, and Commander Killjoy himself -- days if not weeks to write. It is easily the greatest award that I have ever received.

PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAM FARAH
THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT
COMMANDING OFFICER OF PRT FARAH HAS AWARDED THE

PROVINCIAL RECONSTRUCTION TEAM FARAH WARRIOR OF THE MONTH

TO

[DAKOTA]
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF STATE

FOR

Professional achievement as Provincial Reconstruction Team Farah's resident Master of the English Language and all things superfluous from February 1 through February 28, 2011. If wars could be won with ink, foes slain with the precise application of commas, comrades shielded by the eradication of dangling participles, and the disenchanted masses enthused by the transformation of dysfunctional phrases into self-sustaining sentences, then [Dakota] would be granted a place in the pantheon of American military heroes. However, since this is not the case, he is instead recognized as PRT Farah's Warrior of the Month for February 2011. His expeditious and near perfect editing of 94 command awards ensured their smooth and timely progression through the military approval channels. If not for [Dakota]'s selfless dedication to the team, three times the number of man-hours would have been expended while producing inferior results. [Dakota]'s accomplishments reflect great credit upon him, and are in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Navy.

(signed)
COMMANDER J.P. KILLJOY
CDR, USN
COMMANDING OFFICER

Yeah, yeah

2011-07-08T21:41:00.002+04:30

Keen observers and/or Facebook friends of mine will note that Killjoy and Company have left the FOB. The new team is on the ground and some of them (you know who you are) have already started clamoring for nicknames. But I'm not done blogging about the old team yet, so hold your collective horses: we'll be there soon enough.

When in FaRome...

2011-07-08T21:13:00.005+04:30

So, they built a pizza oven.

The project was the brainchild of Captain Adventure, who was determined to recreate the real-deal Sicilian pizza oven built lovingly by the Italian Special Forces guys on their chink of the compound. Adventure was the visionary behind the oven, but architect of the project was Chief Hammersmith, the PRT's Seabee and all-purpose handyman, who provided the vast majority of design input.

My primary role was moral support, which I provided by heckling the team as construction was underway. I consistently described the project as "Wiley Coyote-esque," a description I'll stand by: the oven in the initial phases was a heap of jersey cement and lopsided Afghan bricks, balanced on a sheet of plywood that was likewise balanced on four wobbly two-by-twos. The lip of the plywood bowed under the weight of the oven and had to be reinforced by an equally bowed stick, and the whole thing looked likely to collapse at any moment.

I'm not sure this photo captures the chaos.

Other stakeholders in the project included mostly Engineer Lovesalot (who seemed to be in charge of wedging in sturdy chunks of wood to brace less sturdy chunks of wood), Warrant Exasperated (constantly stirring concrete), Lieutenant Dracula (shovel operations), Captain Tomcat from over in Operations (Hammersmith's Assistant), Lieutenant ______ from Intel (role unclear), and Senior Chief Intimidating, the Senior Enlisted Leader whom I resisted nicknaming in part because I could find nothing fitting and in part because I feared he'd take offense and use me to practice his sniper skills.

("You can run," he said at one point, "but you'll only die tired.")

Hammersmith up top; Lt. Drac stirring concrete.
Note the haphazard plywood and random wires: Wiley Coyote-esque.

I did little for the actual construction of the oven -- I am the opposite of handy and generally cannot be trusted with tools -- though there is a single picture of me hoisting a bag of concrete. "I love that picture," Captain Adventure said. "It's the only time you've ever been photographed actually doing some work."

I left for my last R&R with the oven still in pieces and Killjoy questioning if the Pizza Collective had conspired not so much to build something as to just leave a huge mess for the incoming team. ("That is honestly the ugliest construction project I have ever seen," he said).

But I returned to a completely finished oven, complete with smooth walls (made, it seems, by bracing oiled boards against still-wet concrete) and brick and concrete pillars to brace the bottom. I declared it the single greatest construction project I had ever seen. "Honestly guys," I gushed somewhat embarrassingly, "it's kind of beautiful."

Chief Hammersmith; completed pizza oven.

They had worked out an assembly line process, assigning one person to roll the dough, another to top it, a third to toss it in the oven, manage the baking process and remove it when done, and a fourth to remove the pizza from the metal trays they bake on. (Senior Chief Intimidating, who primarily spearheaded the process of boiling canned tomatoes down to paste to use for sauce, also declared himself "quality control," slicing the pizzas and helping himself to a piece to ensure it was suitable for serving).

The oven is wood-fired and the PRT has a preference for cracker-thin crusts, rolled out with an old-school rolling pin on a glass cutting board that was obtained from god knows where. The ingredients were gifted by the Italians, who have an overabundance of cheese and cured meats and were willing to set up a little trade in exchange for the cheap, military-issue energy drinks (brand name: "Rip it!") that, under certain circumstances, can be smuggled out of the back of the chow hall by the case.

Civil Aviation and Desegregation

2011-06-21T21:20:00.002+04:30

Kam Air has begun offering domestic flights out of Farah airstrip. They're a small, primarily domestic Afghan carrier (I would translate their name as either "a little bit of air" or "less air"), and they're trying to tap into the heretofore unserved Farah market -- the closest civilian airport is in Herat, three hours away by road along a route widely feared to be controlled by bandits.

The airstrip is firmly on base and isn't set up for civil aviation, and the "terminal" is more or less just a concrete lean-to, capped with a defunct anti-aircraft gun. But having domestic Afghan flights out of Farah would be a huge step forward for the private sector, and might also cut down on a minor form of corruption in the Afghan National Army, which is rumored to take bribes for open seats on its flights. (They say that the corruption extends to kicking low-ranking soldiers off flights in order to make room for bribe-paying passengers, though I have no evidence that's the case; regardless, it's certainly a creative business model).

A Kam Air flight had landed unexpectedly at Farah last week, and a small gaggle of passengers clutching outrageously expensive tickets had attempted to talk their way on to the airstrip. But Kam Air hadn't coordinated with anyone on base and the maneuver unit was understandably unwilling to let them on, despite the best efforts of the harried-looking airline manager. Commander Killjoy and I had been on the airstrip to meet another plane, and were there to witness their rickety-looking Russian aircraft streak off the runway and hurtle west at a ridiculously low altitude over the base.

(We were in an armored car a safe distance from the aircraft, but we both ducked a little bit when the plane veered off the normal take-off path, seemingly inches above us. "THAT is why the Embassy forbids its personnel from taking Kam Air," I said. "Bah," Killjoy responded. "They clearly require at least a foot of clearance off of all buildings they fly over. I think the Embassy is overly cautious").

In order to prevent a repeat performance for the next flight, we met with Kam Air and the Provincial Director of Transportation this week to talk through the logistics of airstrip entry and passenger screening. It was clear that the Afghans had done their homework on thinking through the details, and the walkthrough (which I and Captain Adventure tagged along for) was relatively straightforward.

The Director of Transportation declared that there would be an initial security screening at the first gate, conducted by the police, followed by a second screening by the ticket checkers. At the gate that actually leads to the airstrip itself, the airline manager told us that he would personally conduct a third and final security screening. "Any weapons they are carrying," he said, "any AK-47s or pistols or anything, will be taken away from them here, before they enter the base. And they will get a receipt for it, and they will not get it back until they land at their next destination," he added.

"Only in Afghanistan would they be worrying about how to marry up passengers with their correct AK-47," I said to Captain Adventure. "Kind of makes you wonder what those first two security checks are looking for, doesn't it?" he replied.

We walked through the intended waiting room, which was dusty but should be of adequate size for waiting passengers, and discussed cleaning it (the base's responsibility) and the provision of electricity for air conditioning (Kam Air's responsibility). The Director peered through a window at an unused back store room and informed us that he needed the key to it. "This will be the waiting room for women," he said. "The men can wait in the big room."

"I am vehemently opposed to a separate waiting room for women," I said, talking mostly to the Maneuver Unit Major who was running the meeting. "This isn't Saudi Arabia. There's no need for that." I turned to the Director of Transportation and said in Farsi -- "there's no separate waiting area for women in Kabul International Airport. There's no women's waiting room in Herat, either. There's no reason to have one here in Farah."

He shook his head and gave me a disgusted look, rolling his eyes as if he pitied my ignorance. "Farah is different from Herat," he replied. "And it's really different from Kabul."

At the time, I wasn't particularly able to articulate why the request for a separate waiting room for women inspired such an intensely negative response in me. I think it was in part because my USAID colleague had just come back the day before from site visits to a project that offers "men's work" jobs to women who are willing to take them -- primarily sanding and painting houses and offices. If you'd asked me if I thought such a project were at all feasible in conservative Farah province, I would have laughed in response -- but the women she talked to were thrilled with the program, happy to be earning a living, and (perhaps most important of all), accepted by both the men doing construction work on the other floors and by their male relatives. If women in Farah can be trusted to paint and do industrial sanding, they can surely be trusted to occupy the same space as men while waiting for a flight.

("Oh god," said Killjoy when I relayed all of this to him later. "Did you have a cupcake moment?"

"It's not so much that he got hostile," said Captain Adventure. "It was more that he got -- uh, kind of uppity."

"That's a cupcake moment," Killjoy replied. "When it stops being a dialogue and starts being a lecture").

I held firm with the Director of Transportation. "There's no reason why this room can't be used for both men and women," I said.

"The women might be sick or maybe have some problems," he responded.

"Men get sick too," I replied. "Do you want a waiting room for sick people? Maybe you just shouldn't allow sick people to fly." I turned again to the Major from the maneuver unit. "This is your show," I said in English, "but I remain vehemently opposed to a separate waiting area for women."

We have a few programs aimed at women and fund an outstanding women-focused NGO in Farah city, but the simple fact is that while we work with women all we can, their status in Farah will never change until the men change, a proposition that isn't on the horizon any time soon. Aside from the four female politicians in the province and the head of the women's NGO we fund, I have not met a single Afghan female in the past year; it is as if they do not exist.

But this waiting room debate for once put me in a position to negotiate on behalf of women -- to turn to a man in a position of power and say that public spaces are not exclusively for one gender, and that women can in fact be allowed to co-exist and do not have to be tucked away behind a curtain in a small and poorly-lit back room. The point was not so much the waiting room itself as it was to challenge the fundamental thought process behind it -- to fight, in some small way, the misguided notion that women must be hidden from sight for their own good.

I do not expect that this gesture will change the province in any meaningful or lasting way. But simultaneously, I am not under the impression that I have any meaningful or lasting influence in Farah province; I do, however, have some small degree of influence on Forward Operating Base Farah, and that is why I was so unwilling to back down: for the only time since my arrival, I was in a position to do something on behalf of women.

The Major turned to the Director of Transportation. "We're going to work on this civil aviation thing slowly, step by step," he said. "For now, this is the only waiting room I have for you."

Victory.

In Memoriam

2011-06-20T20:00:00.004+04:30

There was another casualty on base last week. One of the maneuver unit's trucks hit an IED and the force of the blast flipped the vehicle; the gunner was killed during the rollover. They were two weeks away from going home.

I didn't know the individual in question, a twenty-year old PFC from Connecticut, but the news of his death, in relatively stable Bala Baluk district, still shook me and the rest of the base pretty hard. I went back to my office and was reading the news, and something in a clip on Mexican drug wars for some reason set me off -- I think it was the sound of the machine gun fire in the background of it. I found myself with my head in my hands, sobbing, and my first thought was -- I need to get out of this place. But that just made me feel guilty, because being away from Afghanistan won't fix anything; it will just make all the myriad problems of this place easier to ignore. My next thought was -- we need to get out of here. All of us.

The remains of soldiers killed in action are seen off in a procession called a Ramp Ceremony, attended by almost everyone on base. Soldiers form in ranks on either side of the road, come to attention and salute the flag-draped casket as it is driven by, accompanied by a soldier from the same unit. The remains are blessed by the chaplain, and the casket is loaded into a helicopter for repatriation. Once attention is called, the ceremony is silent and hauntingly beautiful. I have mercifully attended only three Ramp Ceremonies in my time in Farah, and I stood in the dark and cried through this one, for a soldier I never met who was two weeks from going home.

The entire event left me seized with hopelessness for the future of this country and questioning why we are still here.

It's just not working.

2011-06-19T17:50:00.004+04:30

(Lieutenant ________, from over in intel, has been hounding me about posting on the blog. I had been sitting on this post out of fear that it's too dejected or whiny, but upon re-reading it the problem isn't so much that as that it's REALLY far in the weeds on Afghan governance policies. Consider yourself warned).

I met a group of European medical students when I was at Victoria Falls, back in March. They had just spent a semester interning at rural Zambian hospitals as part of their medical education, and were doing some sightseeing before heading home. I had asked them what life was like in rural Zambia ("medically speaking, it's a little grim "), and they in turn asked me it was like living in Southwest Afghanistan.

"I really like it, actually," I told them. "Though to be honest, sometimes it's hard to maintain any semblance of hope for the future."

The med students looked at each other. "We've been working in rural African hospitals," one said. "We know all about the eradication of hope."

***

I arrived back in Farah last week. The PRT is now over eight months into a nine-month deployment, and the light at the end of the tunnel is clearly visible; my team is counting the days until they can leave. Their mindset is infectious: PRT Farah is done. Commander Killjoy is too disciplined to allow himself to slip from being mission-focused and is still driving hard on the programs we have going, but everyone else has begun the process of cleaning and packing and mentally checking out. Killjoy and company will be gone shortly hereafter, and I cannot help but be jealous at their departure.

I came back from my previous R&Rs refreshed and ready to get back to work, but this time has been different: I feel like I'm treading water, and my patience is worn thin. It is time for me to leave.

***

We swung by the Provincial Council last week. The Council is the only democratically-elected institution in the province, and every single other person in the provincial administration -- the Governor, the Provincial Ministers of Education and Health and Finance and Economy and everything else, all the way down to the District Sub-Governors -- are chosen by Kabul.

The equivalent of this system would be if the Governor of, say, Texas, were chosen by the President of the United States instead of by the people of Texas. The President or someone else in Washington would also get to choose all of the State's Gubernatorial cabinet-type positions covering everything functional within the State -- tax collection, school administration, road construction and maintenance, policing and law enforcement, judicial implementation including the penal system, the whole shebang. Washington's influence in this hypothetical extends all the way to the county level, with county administrators chosen by Washington, albeit with some consultation from the Governor.

In this hypothetical, if the good people of Texas do not like their Governor or one of their administrators, they have no means of getting rid of him. "Can you imagine if we tried that in the States?" I asked my language training classmates. "There would be riots," one responded.

And yet, this is the arrangement written into the Constitution of Afghanistan.

The people don't get to elect anyone in their Province, with the exception of the Provincial Council -- nine people directly elected to act as the "people's representatives" to the Government of Farah. Beyond that vague job description -- "be the people's representatives" -- they have little authority and are vested with neither budget nor actual legal authority of any kind. The position itself carries some degree of respect, though in the past the Council has complained vociferously of their lack of power and has threatened to quit over it. We meet with them weekly.

"We need fuel for the generator," the President told us during this visit. "You can tell how hot it is in here -- we don't have enough gas to run the generator to get the air conditioners going enough to cool the place down."

"Who provides your operating budget from Kabul?" I asked. "Is it the Independent Directorate of Local Governance? Or do you have some sort of special set aside from the President's Office? How does your money work?"

The Embassy has sent a directive to the field that our primary focus should be on budgeting -- on getting the Afghans to plan for and manage their own money. But the Afghan budgetary system is opaque at best, and the vast majority of Farah's bureaucrats have no idea how to request money from Kabul. The problem is that the province is not budgetary unit; there is no "provincial budget." If the province needs money for something, it's up to the director of the relevant Provincial Department to request money from Kabul for it. It would be great if it worked, but it doesn't: it's a ridiculous way to run a country.

The system works ok for cut and dried things -- if you need a school, for example, you'd go through the Education Department -- but it seems to happen frequently that certain Provincial operating costs (including but not limited to the purchasing of fuel for the Provincial Council's generators) get lost in the shuffle, with no one really knowing who should be paying for it. And since the U.S. Government hands out money hand over fist (16 million spent in Farah by this PRT; about 28 million by the PRT before it), bureaucrats on the whole would rather work through us than figure out how to get money from their own system.

"We don't get a budget," the Provincial Council president told me. "Kabul doesn't give us anything. You need to give us fuel so we can work."

"You have to have an operating budget of some sort," I said. I looked at Killjoy. "Right? Surely they have to." And again turning to the Provincial Council Chief, I asked -- "Who on the Council is in charge of requesting the money from Kabul? Who does your paperwork?"

To further complicate the budget issue, in order to request money, you have to respond to a large-scale budgetary data call put out by Kabul that must be completed three years in advance of the budget being crafted, a system that works (albeit with some hiccups) in developed nations but is inconceivable in Farah. Moreover, data is welcome from the Province, but is neither mandatory nor solicited; it's up to Kabul to figure out what is needed, and Provincial input is optional and not really asked for.

("Who on EARTH designed this system?" I asked the Embassy budgeting and finance specialist, a plucky woman from the Department of Treasury who had once written Arkansas's State budget. "It's not QUITE as bad as it seems," she said optimistically. "Well, kind of, at least").

"We don't get a budget," the Provincial Council president reiterated. "And it's hot in here."

Killjoy took a different approach. "Are you getting hooked up to the city power any time soon?" he asked. "If you're getting hooked up to city power, we can maybe see about getting you fuel until that happens."

"City power only works at night," the president replied. "Listen, we don't need much -- about 300 liters a month. That's nothing! We can't work in an office that's this hot."

Getting the Afghan Government to function as it should, with money flowing from the appropriate places to fulfill existing budget gaps, is one of the primary goals of the PRT. The act of connecting the budget people in Kabul, who should ostensibly have money for the Provincial Council, with the Council themselves is an act in Making Bureaucracy Function. But getting money from Kabul is a long and annoying process, and the PRT is seen as a gigantic, camouflage-swathed ATM. It feels like we've had this discussion in almost every meeting I have ever attended.

I started to launch into my sustainability shpiel, about how we can't just give away fuel if there's no plan in place for the Afghan government to take over and all of that. "It's not sustainable," I said. But I found that I no longer had the will to fight and couldn't bring myself to continue. We've been through this, a thousand times with a thousand different people. It just seemed so hopeless.

I focused on the plate of melon they had placed in front of me and let Killjoy talk.

On Formatting, or "Things That Haunt Me"

2011-06-02T16:43:00.004+04:30

I believe very strongly -- like, strongly enough to end relationships over it -- that sentences should end period space space. Period single space crushes me. I will hear no arguments about how we're no longer in a mono-space font universe and that period single space is the future: that's how animals end their sentences. Seriously, I've never seen a golden retriever hit the space bar twice after a period. Animals.

But I'm now back to blogging via blackberry (I bought one in Chiang Mai, which has the busiest English/Thai keyboard ever), emailing the posts to myself and blogger. Doing so totally destroys the formatting to begin with AND requires that I put the extra space in after each period manually, which is possibly the most annoying thing on earth.

So the burning question is: given the convenience of it, can I change to period single space without being too much of a hypocrite? That is, will the universe judge me harshly?

I have come to no final conclusion on this ~~ethical dilemma~~ question.

AFN and the Stars of Farah

2011-06-02T16:08:00.008+04:30

We had an AFN reporter wandering around FOB Farah for the week before my R&R. Reporters haunt the nightmares of most State officers, but AFN -- the Armed Forces Network -- seemed kind of harmless, and since the reporter they sent couldn't have been older than 12, I felt ok talking to him.

AFN mostly rebroadcasts U.S. television on behalf of the troops worldwide (we get it in the chow hall), focusing, it seems, on the staples of sports and mixed martial arts fighting. They produce their own public service announcement-style commercials which everyone else except me seems to hate but that I find oddly captivating, on topics ranging from the practical ("it takes a lot of paperwork to bring a dog overseas with you") to the historic ("and that's why to this day we still blouse our pants in our boots") to the somewhat grim ("suicide prevention tips" and "remember: rape is a crime").

The Embassy has given field officers blanket permission to talk to media in our province, so long as we don't stray from our work and generally stay on message. We don't actually have any media in Farah -- there is no functioning press, and with single-digit literacy rates, it's unlikely that any newspapers will be starting up soon -- but the blanket permission covers international reporters as well, so I was good for an interview. I badgered the AFN kid to do a story on me but he politely declined, focusing instead on the military members of the PRT who are partnered up with various members of the Farah Government. The PRT had originally referred to those individuals as Government "mentors," a term I loathed for its intrinsic arrogance; we now use "liaison officers."

I was assuming that the end result of these interviews would somehow end up on AFN television, which may happen at some indeterminate time in the future. For now, though, AFN has published the interviews as a series of YouTube clips highlighting the work of individual officers at the PRT. I was thrilled by them -- it seemed like our little province, so often forgotten, was finally in the spotlight for once. The first video to hit to internet was of Commander Quixote, the PRT's affable if slightly ADHD doctor, talking about his work with the Farah Provincial Director of Public Health.

(Commander Quixote -- or Doc Quixote -- is infectiously enthusiastic about everything in life, and spends his spare time stargazing or practicing on his purple and slightly sparkly electric cello. He addresses everyone -- even the enlisted -- as sir, and likes to throw an oorah in at the beginning and end of every conversation. He's a vegetarian and has been systematically starving himself in Farah, where the dearth of non-meats in the chow hall has forced him to subsist almost entirely on raisins and nuts. He loves good patient care and loathes the Taliban with every fiber of his being. You get the feeling he'd be tilting at windmills, if only there were windmills around at which to tilt).

Commander Quixote's video opens with some spectacular stock footage -- an explosion, the flames from which burn down into the words "Enduring Freedom," followed by a photo montage of someone shooting a machine gun and then some random Afghan bleeding from the face. I loved it as a video opening, but we all had a good laugh over it: nothing could less resemble Farah.

Video Link: http://youtu.be/GjXnJhzz0aE

I told Quixote that I thought his video was excellent, both very sincere and very on message, which is quite a compliment for me given the frequency that "whoa, whoa, whoa! I think you're off message!" passes my lips. "It was awful," Quixote replied. "I looked like a bobblehead doll. Seriously, have you ever seen anyone move their head so much?" he asked. Other things of note in the video, aside from Doc's head: the footage of the meeting takes place in the conference room just outside of my office. The huge map on the wall, barely visible in this video, is amongst my favorite things at the PRT.

Engineer Lovesalot's video was published at the same time as Quixote's.

(Engineer Lovesalot told me that he likes my blog but wishes I hadn't saddled him with "the gayest nickname possible." "What would you prefer?" I asked him. "How about... Lieutenant BIG MONEY?!" he replied. "That's way gayer," our Senior Enlisted told him. "Lovesalot it is," I said).

Video Link: http://youtu.be/y9MlTcEycUg

I love this video for a variety of reasons -- it makes Lovesalot look exceptionally rugged, for one -- but more important is that some of the footage was taken in the PRT parking lot, next to our ridiculous vehicles with a good view of the sharp and unexpected mountains that punctuate the desert just across the airstrip. It's a nice little snapshot of how things actually look like here.

Chief Blackboard, an elementary school principal from Oklahoma turned communications officer who doubles as the education ministry liaison, also got a brief video of her inspecting tents in the PRT's parking lot. (Blackboard has gone a long way to fixing the Education Department, so much so that the Provincial Education Director said he wished she'd never leave. That sort of actual know-how and ability makes me wish I had anything resembling an actual skill -- that is, an actual skill beyond knowing how to use semicolons and being really good at unjamming the xerox machine, of course).

Video Link: http://youtu.be/s0ZhgRvhvfg

I was there helping to lug tents around but I appear nowhere in this video, which honestly makes me think the AFN guy was intentionally avoiding me.

Next up was Captain Harmony, who is normally quite poised but comes off as a little stuttery in this video. It features the rinky-dink shipping container on base that serves as the "women's handicrafts store," which had been her initiative and which provides one of the only livelihoods available to women in the province. Note that the salesperson in the store women's handicrafts store is male: the base is widely assumed to be a roiling den of sin, and very few women are willing to come lest they be stigmatized as prostitutes. As is common practice here, the few women who do come always do so with a male relative escort.

Video Link: http://youtu.be/ybtdfoFpKWU

Harmony actually got a second video as well, though it's somewhat less inspired. It features footage of a women's shura in far-flung Shib-e Koh district, tucked in the desert in the middle of nowhere near the Iranian border. Sadly, it doesn't show much -- and it includes no images if the wasteland that is Shib-e Koh.

Video Link: http://youtu.be/Zc2P6ywKCc4

The final video -- and perhaps the most exciting of all -- was of Petty Officer Moonshine, who partners with the Director of Economy. The construction of the Economy Department's new office building had been massively labor intensive for the PRT, in no small part because the Director of Economy himself is extremely demanding. ("It appears that beggars can be choosers," one of our engineers said).

Video Link: http://youtu.be/OocnRUEucd0

This video is packed with exciting things. For one, for all my cajoling, AFN actually put in a tiny sliver of my head, visible from seconds 0:07 to 0:10. You also you see Moonshine sitting on a couch next to our lead USAID rep (who amazingly still has no nickname and was never appropriately delineated from the last lead USAID rep). I'm actually right next to her but the view is blocked by an interpreter, who was whispering to Commander Killjoy, sitting in the row in front of us. Killjoy himself appears in the video towards the end, standing next to the Governor during the ribbon cutting portion of things.

It is the goal of most Commanders to cut no ribbon over the course of their time in Afghanistan: we consistently seek to put the Afghan Government in front and keep ourselves in the background. That Killjoy got suckerpunched into cutting the ribbon -- and that AFN was there to record it for posterity -- should give me enough to make fun of him for to last the rest of this tour.

Recruiting talent

2011-05-28T20:15:00.003+04:30

It's something of an open secret that I've been considering writing a book about my time in Afghanistan. I'm not sure there's a market for another State Department PRT memoire out there (it kind of kills me that We Meant Well got there first), but I was so captivated by my time in southwest Afghanistan and so genuinely enjoy writing that it seems like it's worth a shot.

(Commander Killjoy was giving me a hard time about taking leave again, and I told him that I needed to plunk myself down on a beach in Thailand with an umbrella-laden fruity drink and try to get some work done on a draft of the book. "Don't you think you'd have more to write about if you actually spent a little time here?" he replied).

I'm not sure I'll even be able to get the book cleared by State -- I've seen a ton of interesting things here that didn't make the blog, both because I try not to talk much about work and because they felt sensitive in nature -- and State, particularly in this post-Wikileaks era, is hyper-sensitive about such things. But again, it seems like it's worth a shot.

That said, trying to crank out 120,000 words into a vacuum is daunting, particularly when I'm so pessimistic about actually being published. Simultaneously, posting potential book chapters on this blog seems foolish, on the order of why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free? (I feel like that metaphor is maybe not entirely appropriate here, which wouldn't bother me in the slightest if I hadn't disclosed that I'm considering writing a book a scant three paragraphs ago).

The point here is that I'm considering starting a new, clandestine blog on which to post potential book chapters. I'm not 100 percent committed to the idea yet (and I frankly fear that talking about writing a book when it's still in idea form is a bit like disclosing a pregnancy too early -- doing so is courting disaster). That said, if things do indeed get off the ground, I would probably want a small cadre of people -- five to ten ish -- to join Team Reading and to tell me candidly when things weren't as interesting as I remember them having been, or when I'm too in the weeds on Afghan politics, or when the paragraphs just aren't flowing and things frankly just aren't working.

A few people are doomed to be recruited for this activity -- I'm looking at you, EmailFromTheEmbassy -- and there are a few others I'm hoping I can recruit (C_Girl over at Hilarity in Shoes, and my Bohemian Artist friends, for example).

But if this actually comes to fruition -- and it certainly is possible that it won't -- then I'd welcome a few more pairs of eyes to look things over. I will likely not reach out to anyone, since I feel that being on Team Reading will be more annoying than not annoying -- but if you're interested in being on the review committee, drop me an email (link on the top right of the blog). Some things will be recycled from this blog (albeit touched up
and edited and maybe reshuffled); other things will be new, and possibly eye-wateringly dry. Regardless, I expect brutal honesty.

All of this is very tentative -- no promises all around -- but for some reason it seems important to me to lay the groundwork now before I go any further.

Test

2011-05-26T05:45:00.001+04:30

Trying out a new means of posting -- via email. Cross your fingers.

I will gladly pay you Tuesday for ...

2011-05-09T09:15:00.001+04:30

I was at a shura a few months ago in Pusht-e Rod district, a relatively volatile area north of Farah City. The district traditionally grows a significant quantity of Farah's poppy crop, and I had plunked myself down during the lunch hour to ask the District Agricultural Manager for his predictions for the upcoming growing season. He and the others elders around him were honest and forthcoming as we ate lunch (goat in tomato sauce over rice, torn apart and eaten without utensils), and our conversation eventually moved from poppy to the Taliban.

I asked them about the Taliban's reach within the district -- how many of them were around, how they went about recruiting, why people in the district joined the Taliban. He paused before answering.

Have you ever been hungry? he asked me. "No," I replied. "No, not really."

I've been hungry, he told me. You'll do anything when you're hungry. There's nothing else like it. When you're hungry, nothing else matters.

He stopped talking and tossed his empty plate and leftover goat bones away from himself. It's not easy to understand if you've never been hungry, he said.

***

Yesterday I was talking to Captain Harmony, our multi-lingual and musically talented Air Force Captain from Public Affairs. "So here's a question," I said. "Do you remember the last time you weren't hungry?"

"God, it seems like forever," she said. "It's like -- it's like that shura you went to with that guy. Do you remember that? Have you ever been hungry? Yeah, I've been hungry: I've been hungry on FOB Farah."

***

The Taliban declared the opening of fighting season on May 1st. They usually take the winter off, heading back to Pakistan to rest up and recover and then using the early spring to help with the poppy harvest, a laborious process that involves scoring the bulbs of the poppy plants, leaving them to ooze sap and then scraping the resulting resin off by hand. Fighting season starts once most of the harvest is in and things are calmer for otherwise-busy Taliban members.

They marked the opening of fighting season with a press release from their shadow government, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and announced their intention again this year to expel the foreign infidels while minimizing civilian casualties. It was nothing out of the ordinary, but the threat alert country-wide was raised and my boss in Herat implored us to stay on base for our own safety. FOB Farah was put into FP-Con C -- "Force Protection Condition Charlie" -- which means beefed up security despite the fact that there's almost no chance of our base being attacked.

(I had previously asked El Comandante during a Base Defense Drill if he thought there were any chance of us getting attacked. "Are you kidding me?" he said. "That would be the best thing that could possibly happen to us. Do you have any idea how much ammunition we have here? All the bad guys would be concentrated in one place and we could eliminate them all at once. It would make our job so much easier.")

In addition to increased security patrols, FP-Con Charlie stipulates that local nationals requiring escorts are not allowed on base. Escorted workers includes all construction workers, all fence-diggers (a military base requires almost nonstop fence building, it seems), and, most poignantly, all the local employees in the chow hall. To deal with the personnel shortfall, they put up large signs announcing that lunch and midnight chow were eliminated immediately and indefinitely.

The FOB Farah chow hall had not exactly been on a roll prior to their announcement of limited service, and a spate of food poisoning had obliterated some 25 percent of the PRT over a span of several miserable weeks. They had closed for a day to bug-bomb the entire place, but conditions remained largely unchanged and the number of sick-call patients held steady. Lieutenant SemperFit, tired of putting IVs in dehydrated diarrhea patients, had undertaken a comprehensive series of inspections of the chow hall but returned only with the advice that PRT members arrive at the opening stroke of 5 to get chow before it can get cold and start to spoil. Rumors circulated that eating the lettuce was tantamount to downing poison.

But for all the awfulness of the chow hall, having food was better than not having food. There are boxes of MREs sprinkled around the compound and while I enjoy them for their novelty, a good chunk of the military people won't touch them unless they're absolutely in a place where no other food is available -- they've been on too many deployments to too many wretched places where there was nothing but MREs for weeks upon weeks. And regardless, MREs are terrible for you -- they're meant for people actively engaged in combat, not for desk jockeys, and the caloric content is through the roof. They're a high caloric supplement to the junk food -- girl scout cookies, microwave popcorn, M&Ms and skittles -- that's all over the base.

FP Con Charlie also means that trucks have to be thoroughly inspected, box by box, before they're allowed on to the compound. The zillions of trucks laden with food headed for the DFAC have been sitting in the sun for days waiting to undergo inspection, leaving the chow hall almost entirely out of comestibles. Dinners have been an ad-hoc mishmash of whatever happened to have come in that day, and generally consists of deep-fried frozen foods doled out by harried-looking Dynecorps employees, a piece of meat on a good day, and a salad bar filled with raisins, croutons and olives. After a day of cobbled-together meals involving ramen noodles, beef jerky and dinner mints, coming into a cafeteria with no food in it seems almost torturous.

***

This morning I walked into the Civil-Military Operations Center (CMOC -- "see mock") next to my office and gleefully announced that I had found an unexpected can of soup in my bedroom. It was in the box of snacks left by my predecessor that I normally never touch, but have been pawing through since food on base has become scarce. "It eats like a MEAL," I read from the label. I wasn't faking the emotion: I can't really communicate how excited I was about this soup.

Lieutenant Granola thanked me for forwarding him an editorial on Bin Ladin from a Pakistani newspaper, and talk turned to U.S. assistance to Pakistan. Most of the military guys were in favor of immediately cutting off our 3 billion dollars in annual assistance, and I immediately went into USG spokesman mode, defending our Pakistan policies. "The last thing the world needs," I said, "is a nuclear failed state."

"So what if Pakistan fails?" First Sergeant McGruff asked. "So India kicks their ass around for a little bit? Is that so bad?"

"Pakistan could obliterate any number of Indian cities in a matter of seconds," I responded. "A hundred million, two hundred million dead instantaneously. It would be a catastrophe on a scale never before seen on this earth."

"Dakota," he said deadpan. "There are too many mouths to feed on this earth as it is. Jesus Christ," he said, as he threw his hands in the air. "There are starving people right here, on this FOB. Just look how excited you are over a god damn can of soup."

So that's where we stand: a week without lunch and with paltry dinners, and suddenly my colleagues are wishing for nuclear holocaust to bring down global demand for food. I want to go find that district Agricultural Manager and tell him that I do, after all, understand.

The Eyes of the Enemy

2011-05-06T19:48:00.002+04:30

Farah's reaction to Osama Bin Ladin's death was muted. Our engineers were headed out on a routine project inspection that morning and I asked the SecFor guys to poll passers-by on Bin Ladin's death, assuming that the Embassy would want man-on-the-street reactions. SecFor reported that the streets were largely empty -- they blamed the 120-degree temperatures -- but said that not one of the seven people they asked was aware of Bin Ladin's death. "It seemed like they didn't know who Osama Bin Ladin was," they told me.

I passed that information to the Embassy. It did not make the final report.

I am not under the impression that Bin Ladin's death will change much here in western Afghanistan. We do have an active insurgency in Farah, though whether they're truly Taliban (with Quetta Shura connections) or funded or supported by Al-Qaeda or the Osama wing of global terror is an almost academic debate, and one for which I have limited tolerance. They have attempted to blow up convoys and have succeeded in killing a handful of soldiers in Farah, and the exact taxonomy of insurgent fighter they fall under seems unimportant when placed in that light. The military generally refers to them succinctly as "bad guys," and I have taken to doing the same.

Generally speaking, though, the insurgency is something that I see little of. Fighting happens in outlying districts, and the PRT won't usually move in until the combat is done; there can be no reconstruction until the fighting is over, and the PRT is not a kinetic or maneuver unit, the military's euphemisms for combat troops. I have traveled on occasion to outlying districts and sat through shuras in the shadow of buildings riddled with bullet holes, but I have never been anywhere near active, ongoing combat. My year here, mercifully, has been nothing like the movie Restrepo.

The insurgency happens elsewhere. And so I was quite surprised when I, in mid-March, came unexpectedly face to face with a pack of Taliban.

They were reintegrating. There's a much ballyhooed Coalition program -- the Afghan Peace and Reintegration Program, though its names and subprograms seem to switch acronyms on an almost weekly basis -- that seeks to bring to bring insurgents and low-level Taliban back into Afghan society. The program on the Coalition side is managed by a charismatic British 2-Star named General Jones, who has visited Farah several times to discuss the program with the Farah Government. ("I'm implementing a nation-wide program," he told us in his charming north-of-London accent, "and I've only got two men and two dogs to do it.")

Jones runs the program on the Coalition side, but for the most part it's Afghan led and we take a largely hands-off approach, supporting from the background as needed. The idea is that non-ideological Taliban -- those who got swept up in the fighting for one reason or another but do not seek the eradication of all non-muslims or the restoration of a pan-global Islamic caliphate -- can be given a means to honorably exit the fight and a small subsistence stipend to get them back on their feet. It's not intended to be a jobs program, nor is the very small stipend intended to be a reward for coming back; it's meant to be a means of grievance resolution and community building. It's one of our exit strategies.

And so, when a pack of Taliban from central Farah Province decided to reintegrate, the Governor called us to let us know, and I and Commander Killjoy tagged along with a few other officer who were headed to assist with registering them in the program.

It is indescribably strange to stand talk to people who just days prior were holding arms against the United States. We were standing in the pleasant garden space just across from the Governor's office, outside a conference room used for large meetings, and exchanging the normal pleasantries that go along with meeting any Afghan, chatting like we were old friends instead two groups of people who, as of days ago, had been on opposite sides of the war. They were young -- early twenties or so, with scruffy beards and the black turbans favored by the Taliban. None of them had ever been to school for a day in their life, a fact which I, well-trained in reading faces from my visa tour in Islamabad once upon a time, could see in their faces without having to ask: it was etched into their eyes.

(After almost a year in Afghanistan, I can tell if someone is literate just by the brightness in his eyes, and I can pick out who the important people are in a crowd just by how they carry themselves; the requisite visa tour that all entry level officers have to go through can seem like a soul-sapping waste of time, but I will concede that it taught me to read people -- and to trust my instincts -- better than any training ever could have).

The reintegrees spoke only Pashto and no Dari, and seemed wary of talking to me through through an interpreter. But like a lot of Afghans, they could get by in Urdu, the primary language of Pakistan, and they opened up once we switched to a language they could talk to me directly in. They were rural poor, and claimed to have joined the insurgency for the wages it pays -- Ten Dollar Taliban, as they're known. One said he joined because it seemed like fun -- he was bored, and taking pot shots at passing soldiers seemed like something to do to break up the otherwise staid life of a rural farmer. The others nodded in agreement: it was a way to kill time.

I had expected that talking to members of the Taliban would be fascinating beyond any speaking of it: they were the physical incarnation of America's enemy -- actual, living examples of "bad guys" who likely had taken up the cause of Death to America and all of that. It is not inconceivable that even a scant week prior, they'd possibly have tried to kill me if our paths had crossed and it had been convenient.

And yet, they were remarkably uninteresting. They were all sheepish about their past with the Taliban, and seemed almost embarrassed that they hadn't engaged in any major combat activities. Mostly they just wanted the bags of wheat they'd get as a subsistence allowance from the reintegration process. We talked about farming and tending the fields, but ended up having not much to say to one another.

I left the larger group of reintegrees to go inside with Commander Killjoy, who was set to begin talking to the self-identified leader of the group, the one who had ostensibly convinced them to come in and reintegrate. He, in a clean set of Afghan clothes and with a larger and more commanding turban than the others, claimed to have spent significant time in the Pakistani city Quetta, home of the Quetta Shura which ostensibly guides all Taliban activities.

And again the Consular experience kicked in: I was convinced that this man was lying to me. I wasn't sure what it was that he was lying about, if he was just stretching the truth or embellishing things, or if parts of his story were true and just small falsehoods had been studded in, but I was positive that he was lying.

Without realizing I had done so, I switched into visa officer mode and began interviewing him as if he were a suspected fraudulent applicant in the immigrant visa line at U.S. Embassy Islamabad. I started grilling him, trying to trip him up within his own story so I could figure out what was true and what wasn't. I knew what I was doing, but I thought that I was doing a good job of keeping it lighthearted and friendly. "Lighthearted? Are you f__king kidding me?" the Commander told me later. "I'm not sure you realize how intense you can be, sometimes. That was really, uh, really something to watch."

(Commander Killjoy and I have since worked out a code word -- "cupcake" -- to use if either of us think the other is being too hostile with our interlocutors. I originally made it up to use on the off chance he went off the deep end, but the only time it's been trotted out has been to calm me down in the face of unreasonable and repetitive demands, something that makes me irrationally annoyed. The first time he used it ("did you get one of those cupcakes at lunch?"), I responded that I didn't see any cupcakes at lunch, and he sighed despondently about there being no point in having a code word if I refused to remember what it means).

And so I grilled him, through an interpreter since I don't speak Pashto and didn't want to give him the upper hand by speaking Urdu.

How often did you go to Quetta?

At least once a year.

How did you get there?

By road, and then over the mountains.

Through which cities? On which road?

Highway one, the ring road. And then through Spin Boldak and through Balochistan.

You drove? Or someone else drove? Or you took a bus? How did you get there?

I told you, we took highway one. Everyone takes highway one -- even regular citizens. It's not out of the ordinary. Starting to get defensive.

And when you got there, where did you sleep? What did the room look like? Did you have a bed, or a cot or did you sleep on the ground? How many other people slept in the room with you, and were you inside or outside? When you met representatives of the Quetta Shura, what did the room look like? Did it have a table or did you sit on the floor? What did you eat? Did you have to pay for the food or was it provided? How many meals a day?

And so on. I remained steadfastly convinced that he was lying to me, but the Commander told me gently that it ultimately doesn't matter if parts of his story were made up or embellished or whatever. He had been accepted by our Afghan counterparts and was reintegrating, and that was the end of the story; where or about what he was lying was no longer relevant. The Taliban leader looked visibly relieved when I stood and left the room.

After Osama Bin Ladin was killed, I noted on Facebook that I have lived in Pakistan and even driven through Abbottabad, but was not involved with the Operation that got him. I have spent exactly one day on the range and have never shot anyone, much less a major figure from the world of Islamic extremism or a terrorist leader -- such is not my role in this war. But I can say confidently that at least one member of the Taliban -- or ex-member, now -- will always remember me as the guy from the PRT who, for a period of twenty minutes or so, stared him down and made him bracingly uncomfortable. It's no take down of Bin Ladin, but there's still an odd sense of satisfaction to it.

Lonely Planet: Farah

2011-04-24T16:46:00.003+04:30

Lieutenant Granola was in my office this afternoon and happened to mention that he thinks (for whatever reason) that he might eventually be posted to the Central African Republic. I mentioned that I know nothing about the C.A.R. -- not even its capital city -- and think of it only as the sort of place that Foreign Service Officers get sent to when they're being punished for something.

We did a little googling -- the capital is Bangui -- which then led to us looking at the WikiTravel page for Bangui, which doesn't actually look that horrible. From Bangui, we leapt over to the WikiTravel page for Afghanistan to see what sort of advice they might have. The guide is actually surprisingly extensive, but there are tons of blanks waiting to be filled in, and Farah (mentioned only as a province in Southern Afghanistan, which is not where it falls in the USG's geographic taxonomy) has no page whatsoever. Granola and I agreed that this is unacceptable, and are both hell-bent on filling in the information to try to attract a few tourists to sunny Farah.

In the mean time, this photo from the Southern Afghanistan page (and the caption, faithfully reproduced here) was easily our favorite part of the whole guide:

Typical Rural Scene in Southern Afghanistan

Employee Evaluation.

2011-04-20T14:57:00.002+04:30

I was walking around base grousing about having to work on my personnel evaluation, my second-least favorite part of working for State. "I think I'm just going to take credit for everything the military has done," I told one of the SecFor guys.

"Don't you think they'll figure out it wasn't you?" he replied. "I mean, what are you going to write -- paragraph 16: '...and then I was all, TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT, and a ka-BOOOOOOOOOOOM!'"?

We Meant Well

2011-04-17T07:55:00.004+04:30

I have approximately nineteen billion words written about Zambia (complete with match.com-ready photos of me cuddling with lions and cheetahs), but the text is still on my first-edition 1940s blackberry and has to be manually transcribed on a regular computer, a proposition I haven't been able to face. Moreover, it's EER season -- Employee Evaluation Reports, that is -- and the Byzantine system review and promotion that State employs means that I (and the rest of the Foreign Service -- we in essence shut down for two months while we write about our own accomplishments) am fully consumed with googling for glowing accolades and finding alternate ways to make myself sound like a champion.

In the mean time, a fellow State Officer who headed up a PRT in Iraq has written a book due out in September entitled We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. It's not due out till September, but I for one am salivating for it. From the review on Amazon: Charged with rebuilding Iraq, would you spend taxpayer money on a sports mural in Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhood to promote reconciliation through art? How about an isolated milk factory that cannot get its milk to market? Or a pastry class training women to open cafés on bombed-out streets without water or electricity?

The scenarios listed above don't translate one-to-one with the Afghan experience, but there have definitely been similar surely-you're-joking moments, none of which I've written about here for fear of being off message and having State drop the hammer on me -- which is kind of unfortunate, since events like the influx of a troop of Hip Hop dancers to Herat in the name of cultural outreach are basically begging to be blogged about. (I heard about the event second-hand; if I had been there, I probably wouldn't have been able to resist).

The author of the book -- a fellow FSO named Peter Van Buren, whom I haven't met -- writes a bitingly sharp-edged blog at WeMeantWell.com, which is so blazingly honest that I'm shocked the hatchet hasn't come down from above yet. He says a lot of the things that a lot of us think but don't say, which is usually hara-kiri in the State blog world. I'd vaguely toyed with the idea of trying to turn my time in Afghanistan into a book -- probably more akin to Peter Hessler's Peace Corps memoire River Town than We Meant Well, but regardless, it appears that I've been beaten to the punch.

Admittedly Annoying Habits from Afghanistan

2011-03-22T16:50:00.003+04:30

A brief catalogue of annoying habits reinforced by eight months in Afghanistan:

1. Negative: Eight months with the military has wholesale eradicated the word "no" from my vocabulary and replaced it with "negative."

I will concede that this is a speech habit I coveted prior to my assignment with the U.S. military. It's a phrase that sounds very martial, which is similar to sounding rugged, only more so -- and since I have crafted an entire internet dating portfolio around appearing to be rugged, picking up the phrase "negative" just seemed to be the next logicial step, not dissimilar to talking enthusiastically about camping or pretending to have an interest in rock climbing. I had made some inroads into picking up the "negative" habit in Beijing by spending inordinate amounts of time hanging out with the Marines, drinking cheap beer and talking about push ups. At the time, though, I was still generally capable of saying "no."

Now that the vocabularic transformation is both complete and seemingly irreversible, I recognize that it just makes me sounds like a twit.

I will say that "negative" is a small step up from "nay," which is Urdu for no and which I used consistently upon returning from Pakistan. While "negative" at least implies some sort of military background, "nay" just indicates that you're big into Dungeons and Dragons and spend your spare time hanging out at Renaissance Festivals, likely while wearing a tunic and carrying an unsharpened sword -- that is, the opposite of the rugged look I'm going for.

2. Inshallah: At this point in my life, I am fully incapable of referring to any future event without throwing in an Inshallah, Arabic for "if it be the will of Allah."

I've consistently used Inshallah in lieu of "hopefully" since I've lived in Pakistan, but living in Afghanistan has reinforced a very specific feeling of impending doom you get if you don't use it -- like omitting it will cause something terrible to happen. (At one point after leaving Pakistan, I casually threw out an Inshallah at my parents' house, and my mother asked what it meant. "If Allah wills it," I told her. "Dakota," she replied icily, "I would like to remind you that we are Catholic").

Of all my annoying habits -- and I will concede I have many -- my consistent use of Inshallah is the one that most bugs the Godfather. "What time is the Ambassador's plane supposed to land?" he'll ask. "9:30 Inshallah," I'll reply, and he'll take a deep breath and get that exasperated look that indicates that dealing with civilians is his cross to bear, and grit his teeth and say -- "the scheduled time of arrival is zero nine thirty hours, whether Allah wills it or not. This is an Inshallah-free PRT. Zero nine thirty."

"Right," I'll rebuke him. "Zero nine thirty Inshallah."

3. Touching your heart: Shaking hands is an uber-mandatory part of Afghan culture, and every meeting begins with a long procession of people entering the room and shaking the hand of everyone present. If you shake hands and you really mean it, you finish the shake by using that same hand (always the right hand) to touch your heart while bowing slightly from the waist.

If for some reason you can't shake hands with someone -- for example, if they're the opposite gender and by extension touching them with your grubby male paws would be wildly inappropriate, or if their hands are full of AK-47, or if there's like a tiger pit or something in between you and them -- then it's perfectly fine to acknowledge their presence by making eye contact, smiling, touching your heart as above and bowing slightly.

Likewise, if someone offers you something you have to turn down (a lunch when you're pressed for time, for example) -- you can't actually say "no thanks" -- the no is rude, and besides you might slip up and say "negative, thanks," although mercifully that word has not yet invaded your Farsi vocabulary. Instead, you just say "thank you" twice (preferably in a slightly dismayed tone of voice), shake your head lightly and repeat the chest-clutch/bow routine. Offer declined, problem solved, off to the races.

After eight months in Afghanistan (and a year in Afghan Farsi classes before), I am incapable of acknowledging another human being without touching my heart -- even if we've only made eye contact and haven't actually shaken hands.

The Italian Colonel on my base has made it clear that this habit freaks him out ("I am not Afghan, you need not do this -- people will think you are too much Afghan now"). Lieutenant SemperFit, the PRT's Physician's Assistant, has informed me that clutching your chest is known in medical circles as Levine's Sign, and is one of the hallmarks of a heart attack; he invariably asks if I'm feeling ok and if I have any crushing pain in my chest radiating into my left arm.

(Lieutenant SemperFit is the PRT's well-built and vaguely exercise-obsessed P.A. who was previously seconded to the Marine Corps as a medic -- known in the Navy as a "corpsman." He's also a raging conspiracy theorist and has sworn never to eat Afghan food out of a persistant fear of being poisoned. I told him he's missing out -- the Afghan food I get off base is easily the best food available in Farah. "Right," he responded in that tone of voice indicating that he thinks I'm in idiot. "Till they poison you").

I was aware that the heart-touching thing was getting out of hand, but I didn't realize how deeply ingrained it had become until I dropped anchor in Zambia, where I've been heart-grabbing/bowing like a madman. Unexpectedly, though, it appears that Zambians make the same gesture. It is unclear to me if doing so is innately Zambian or if they're just responding to me, but I've gotten a lot of hands-on-heart in response. And a thanks-plus-clutch-plus-bow has actually been consistently enough to get rid of both taxi drivers and child beggars, two of the developing world's normally most persistant annoyances.

On Wandering

2011-03-19T15:27:00.003+04:30

In unrelated news, on the 13th of March, I flew to Zambia (via Dubai and Nairobi) for R&R. I'm headed to Namibia on the 20th, and then down through the South African Wine Country to Cape Town, from where I fly home on April 4th. More from me... eventually.

Law and Order: Farah Edition

2011-03-06T20:32:00.009+04:30

The military's got a thing for Task Forces. My small base alone hosts four of them, and even after eight months here, I only kind of know what they're each tasked with. There's task force Southeast (which works roughly southeast of here), Task Force South (which confusingly doesn't work south of here -- that's the no-man's-land of Nimroz Province), Task Force 45 (God only knows), and Task Force Arrow ("Straight Arrows!"), which took over for Task Force Fury ("Fury from the Sky!") and which disappointingly is an infantry unit and uses neither crossbows nor other medieval weaponry, despite their name.

The sheer number of task forces in this country is equal parts overwhelming and ridiculous. A buddy of mine at a PRT in the East got fed up with it and declared himself and his fellow civilians to be Task Force Mongoose, allowing him to say things like, "uh, why wasn't Task Force Mongoose invited to this meeting?" We at PRT Farah have yet to declare ourselves to be a Task Force, but now that I think about it, that probably needs to happen.

Last week, PRT Farah hosted Combined Joint Task Force 435 -- CJIATF 435, if you will -- which is is tasked with overseeing detentions in Afghanistan (they took over for Task Force 82, according to their wikipedia page, and do you see how this Task Force thing is out of control?), and is headed by Admiral Harward, a three-star out of Kabul.

Here's the thing: two or three weeks ago or so, I was up in Herat hobnobbing with the good people from an entirely different and unrelated Task Force named Task Force Shafafiyat, who also sometimes go by the English translation of their name, "Task Force Transparency." (Irrelevant sidenote: I myself would romanize the word transparency as "shifafiyat," with an i and not a in the first syllable, but I was gently corrected by Kabul on the spelling and now have to choose between the Embassy-preferred but clearly incorrect spelling, or buck the trend and go with what I know to be correct and by extension have others think that I'm wrong; I have devoted more time to this dilemma than you would think humanly possible).

TF Shafafiyat, as you might guess, focuses on government transparency, and is headed by General H.R. McMaster, a charismatic and outspoken one-star with a shaved head and a forceful personality. He was intensely engaging and he was memorable, and that's not something I say lightly given the number of painfully forgettable PowerPoint presentations I've had to sit through during this war. (The now-famous spaghetti-as-war-diagram chart shown to McChrystal was not a random outlier; "this war will be won through better and more complex powerpoint slides," I've heard said sarcastically).

I have an obscenely bad memory for names and faces, but McMaster's strong presentation coupled with his appearance (wiry, muscular frame and shaved head) stuck in my mind. I was consequently quite surprised when Admiral Harward, the three star from CJIATF 435, stepped off of his C-130 at Farah Airfield and turned out to be identical to McMaster.

Seriously, look me in the eye and tell me they aren't identical.

So ~~General McMaster~~ Admiral Harwood and the rest of TF 435 showed up to come to Farah to talk about rule of law, the physical infrastructure of Farah prison and other related topics. They had come in part because of a report that was written about Farah's general Rule of Law conditions, and I had contacted the Embassy in a huff to ask for a copy, annoyed that someone was writing about my beloved province without having the courtesy to run it by me first. The Embassy responded, attaching the report to a quizzical email that gently noted that I had in fact written the report in question, in late November. And even though it was certainly mine -- I recognize my own sentence structure, even in dry reporting cables -- I to this day have no recollection of having typed it out.

So TF 435 showed up and was whisked up to our conference room for a discussion on rule of law. I had prepped myself by studying the report I had supposedly written (I considered sending myself a kudos on its comprehensiveness), and the meeting went fine. In reality, though, it was just a warm up for the big field trip of the day, which involved taking the Admiral to the Farah prison, both to see the facility itself and to take a gander at the $985,000 extension that the PRT is funding to ease overcrowding.

Farah prison was the site of one of the largest jailbreaks in Afghan history, which happened just before I arrived in July of last year. Some 20 Taliban members bribed the guards to smuggle in explosives, blew the doors off their cells and escaped into the rugged districts of Northern Farah; other Taliban members had staged simultaneous attacks on police checkpoints to draw the police away and provide cover for the escapees. Visiting the Prison had been on my to-do list for some time, though other things always seemed to crop up when the PRT's rule of law guy (First Sergeant McGruff, a 30-year veteran of the Michigan police department with a gruff, no-nonsense bearing) was headed that way, and I was excited that the Admiral had finally given me an excuse to get there.

We hadn't told the warden or anyone else that we were coming until the morning of the visit, so when we showed up an hour after phoning them, we were quite surprised to learn that they had arranged a ceremonial brick laying for us on the site of the extension, with a few cinder blocks written in ribbon and ready to be layed down. (I went back to the prison a few days after the visit on other business, and saw that rather than cutting off the ribbon, the Afghan contracting company had just cemented them into place as they stood, ribbons and bows still festively intact).

The Admiral had arrived in advance of the Godfather and I, and we hustled to catch up; he was already inside the prison when we approached the gate. "You can't go inside," the guard told us. "There's some Admiral in there."

"Right," I responded, pointing to the haf-dozen military people with me. "He's ours. We're with him. We need to get inside."

"You can go inside later. There's some admiral in there now," he responded. My translator took over and explained the situation in hurried Pashto, and the guard glowered at us suspiciously but ultimately acquiesced. "No weapons inside," he told us. The Godfather had a pistol on him and stayed behind; I and the other visiting military headed in.

Heading in required crawling through a 3-foot high door made of rusty iron and secured with enormous bolt locks. The door and the crawl space after it were low enough that you had to go on hands and knees, and the final entrance to the prison was another metal door with a similar fastening schema. The walls on the other side, in the center of the prison courtyard, were 20 feet high and made of smooth concrete; when the door slammed shut behind you, that was it: if they didn't want to let you leave, there was no way of getting out.

I felt like I was in the Shawshank Redemption. It was kind of terrifying.

("If a riot breaks out, hit the deck before they start shooting and stay still till you think it's over," McGruff had told me. "It's a god damn kill box in there, and the Afghan guards on the wall aren't going to differentiate between you and them.")

I had assumed that there would be no riots while we there, that the Admiral would take a brief tour of the facilities and then we would bolt. But he had come with his Afghan counterpart, the national-level Minister of Justice, and when I came in, the Minister was addressing the crowd of detainees in fast Persian; from what I could pick out, it sounded like he was berating the detainees ("you are here because you deserve to be here"), and the crowd was not responding well, shouting at the Minister in Pashto and generally looking rowdy.

I've said before that my fight-or-flight response is keyed squarely to flight, and the whole thing left me with a rising sense of panic and an ongoing, head-turning and slightly desperate search for an exit; my instinct was to inch towards the door, but that seemed futile given the 20-foot walls ringed with armed guards. There was, in short, no avenue of escape. The whole scene -- dusty tents in the courtyard flanked by rows of drying prison laundry, and nothing but to look at but motivational slogans and a small patch of empty blue sky -- seemed to designed to eradicate hope.

"Can you even begin to wrap your mind around how much misery there is in this place?" one of the Admiral's aides asked me. "I really can't," I told him.

The Minister finished speaking, took a few questions ("I am an innocent man, and everyone knows it; why am I here?" and then more heartwrendingly, "I was told that I would be released when I turned 70. I'm 72 now; when will I be released?"), and then we high-tailed it out.

The Governor told us later that he thought it foolhardy that we entered into the center of the prison with so many obscenely dangerous criminals wandering around. Commander Killjoy later mandated that no U.S. personnel are allowed to enter the inner courtyard in the future ("It really is a kill box in there"), making our visit possibly the last by USG representatives. All things considered, I can't say I'm sad I don't have to go back.

On Pay Cuts.

2011-02-26T22:19:00.002+04:30

Wikileaks wasn't a big deal in my part of Afghanistan. The Governor occasionally asks me to stop taking notes during our meetings ("Hey Wikileaks, don't write this down"), but aside from cramping my habit of keeping a verbatim transcript of my life, it didn't really touch me. I was already a year out of China by the time the story broke, and the statistics here -- 9 percent literacy, 1 percent internet access -- meant it wasn't a big deal in Farah.

State got great press out of Wikileaks. "Wikileaks Proves Diplomats Doing Exactly What They're Supposed To" was a big leitmotif, and for a brief moment in time, State was feted as leading the charge for peaceful resolution of international problems. There was also the annoying undercurrent of "We Had No Idea Those Embassy People Were Actually Smart," but even that I'm chalking up as good press. The positives definitely outweighed the negatives, and I felt like State came out on top -- that people had come to know who we are and what we do.

State was briefly the golden boy of the Federal World. And consequently, I was taken completely by surprise when the House passed a 16 percent pay cut for Foreign Service Officers last week. It comes at a particularly bad time, smack in the middle of a two year pay freeze (which itself was hard to take) and in the face of a possible Government shutdown that may involve being furloughed.

But frankly, it's not about the money.

We're a small service, and the pay cut affects only junior and mid-level officers -- about 7,500 people total. You only take a pay cut if you if you're overseas, and the cuts only affect the Foreign Service -- the other agencies that live and work overseas are not included in this. State has been singled out. You can't help but feel like Congress is trying to punish the Foreign Service for something we did, but we don't really know what it was.

There's that old lingering perception that U.S. diplomats are the snobby elite, spending their time in Paris drinking champagne and mocking people who don't know which fork to use, and I have the feeling that THAT, somehow, is the problem here. But I thought, mistakenly it seems, that Wikileaks had cleared all that up -- that Wikileaks made it known that the United States Foreign Service isn't all champagne receptions and tea parties, and that the quiet work we do is helping the American cause, even though it's behind the scenes and most Americans are unaware of it.

I've committed to giving up two years of my life to live in Afghanistan. I'm not looking for thank-yous for it: I knew what I was getting in to when I signed up for this, and State has certainly incentivized my coming here. But to have Congress come back and say that giving up two years of my life to this place is worth 16 percent less than last year has weighed on me. A 16 percent pay cut is just the opposite of a thank-you; it's a direct statement that the work you do is not valued. It's hard to take it any other way, and it's particularly difficult to take when you're living on the edge of a rocky desert, 40 kilometers from combat operations and a thousand miles from nowhere.

Others in the Service are outraged about it, and there's been a flurry of well-written responses. My favorite, which I've re-read a thousand times, came from a friend of mine in Jordan. There's a movement to blanket congress with letters (I wrote mine, though not nearly as eloquently as others), though the Foreign Service undoubtedly lacks the numbers to make a difference. Even writing my Congresswoman felt futile, since I live in DC and my Representative in Congress has no vote.

My response has not been outrage so much as a lingering sadness; the entire ordeal (including some of the ugly, you're-probably-overpaid/stop-your-whining/if-you-complain-you're-not-a-patriot rhetoric it's stirred up) has made me question what I'm doing here. I had assumed upon signing up for this job that I'd have lots of these moments -- that I'd find myself questioning U.S. policy, or that we'd take repeated, terrifying incoming and I'd be unwilling to leave the base because of it, or that I'd miserable in the wake of casualties and question the logic of continuing on. But that none of that ever happened -- I've never wavered in my desire to be here or in my commitment to this place. At least until now, when the House voted to cut my pay. It really isn't the money (the bill is ambiguous and almost certainly won't pass the Senate or the President) -- it's the sentiment that goes along with it.

People have said that we're taking a pay cut because we enjoy our work too much, but that seems ridiculous -- like they should only pay people for working a job if it makes them miserable. The same cuts were recommended by the White House's Bipartisan Fiscal Commission, though budgetarily speaking, cutting 16 percent of 7,500 people's salary is not a significant figure, and it certainly doesn't explain why we alone were singled out. Moreover, the commission noted that even with the pay cuts, the Foreign Service will remain a highly competitive and sought after: some 25,000 people apply for 300 to 900 jobs annually. But I find that rationale to be wildly offensive -- that they can cut our pay with impunity because of how imminently replaceable we are.

I'm going on leave in a week, if the military can fix our runway so my plane can land. It's definitely time: we've been running ragged implementing a thousand different programs and hosting visitor after visitor, and an ugly internal fight with the maneuver unit over our housing has left all the civilians on edge; it will be good to get away for a few weeks. But it will also be good to get away and take a deep breath and re-examine all of this.

I like living in Farah and I love working with the military, and I don't feel like I'm done with my experience here. But the pay cut has engendered in me a significant homesickness, and made me focus on what I'm missing instead of what I'm gaining from this experience. I toyed briefly with leaving -- Afghanistan is what the Foreign Service calls a "no-fault curtail" posting, so you can cut your posting short at any time without any negative financial or career impacts -- but I think that impulse has passed and I'm back to committed.

I have been questioning, though, if instead of eking out time to study Pashto during the day, I should be eking out time to study for the GRE -- if it isn't time to reconsider this career and begin taking more concrete steps towards quitting and getting my PhD. I've heard others in the Foreign Service say similar things about moving on. I doubt that Congress's intention with this pay cut was to push us towards the door, but that may very well be what ends up happening.

Manuary and the Drowning of Farah

2011-02-21T19:32:00.001+04:30

I've said a thousand times that we don't even get clouds in Farah, much less rain, so when it rained -- rained hard! -- for five days straight, it was something resembling a natural disaster. Half the districts in the province claimed flooding damage, and the Province's Emergency Disaster Response Committee was convened and the whole thing took over our collective lives. The mountains that ring the FOB were wreathed in clouds, and being outside was eerie.

The rain turned the Afghan moon dust into a thick sludge, and large swaths of the FOB itsflooded. The maneuver unit (which owns the FOB) had to dig drainage trenches in the gravel, and the floors of my office and bedroom were covered in mud that got tracked in. In my bedroom, it dried into cakes that disintegrated back into rough powder, and no amount of sweeping is enough to keep it from clinging to the bottom of my feet and working its way into my bed. I've changed my sheets twice since the rain, but it still feels like I'm sleeping on the beach.

The weather kerfuffle happened to coincide with the end of the month of January, which our men and women in uniform -- or more accurately just the men, since none of the half dozen or so women here participated -- refer to lovingly as "Manuary" and celebrate by growing truly awful mustaches.

Growing mustaches for major events is a surprisingly large part of the military mindset. When the 4th Infantry Division ("Straight Arrows!") took over for the 82nd Airborne ("Stay All American!") as the maneuver unit on base, they promptly began growing "deployment mustaches" that lasted until people got tired of looking ridiculous and shaved them off. That was followed shortly thereafter by both Playoff Mustaches (kept until favored teams lost) and then the great month of Mo'vember, which, like Manuary, requires a mustache.

PRT participation in all of this was all but nil until Manuary hit, and then some primal urge kicked in and half the people around me grew awful mustaches. Some only lasted a few days, and others were picked off over time as trimming accidents took away too much from left or right and it was deemed unsalvageable. But more than a few hearty souls kept it up the entire month.

Engineer Lovesalot grew a particularly luxurious mustache (no doubt in part to spite Captain Adventure, whose scraggly mustache grows nearly straight out from his face, parallel to the ground); he began carrying around a fine toothed comb in the velcroed chest pocket of his uniform, and took to sneaking it out during staff meetings and surreptitiously combing his facial hair. "I started this as a joke," he said. And then guiltily added -- "but...but it feels really good."

Lieutenant Dracula, over in Supply, kept his mustache until he went on leave. "Is it normal to miss a mustache this much?" he opined after shaving it. "My upper lip feels so cold and afraid."

(Lt.Drac is of some vague Eastern European ancestry that actually has nothing to do with Transylvania -- but his first name is Vlad, and so Dracula it had to be. "I'm Ukrainian," he told me, but I don't see why that matters).

I myself did not participate in Manuary, as I'm already the proud owner of a significant quantity of facial hair and even trimming it too short causes Afghans consternation: they like full full beards. I did feel a little bit like I was missing out, but Drac's office mate (Petty Officer Moonshine, who owns a distillery in Breckenridge and has promised me a tour and some Bourbon the next time I'm in Colorado) consoled me: "It's not that you lack a mustache," he said. "It's just that you've got mustache all over your face."

Meanwhile, back at the frat pad

2011-01-30T20:41:00.000+04:30

Captain Adventure is roommates with Engineer Lovesalot, a Navy lieutenant whose geographic separation from the female species appears to be causing him physical pain. They're both fully grown men, but they carry themselves like frat boys and have an ongoing war of attrition based on causing the other just enough pain to be annoying. It's awesome to watch.

(Before I went on leave, I'd asked Lovesalot if he needed anything from Europe. He looked off into the distance, sniffed the air as if searching for a memory, and mournfully whispered -- "girls?")

The two of them have taken to carrying around cans of compressed air -- the sort you'd use to clean the dust out of a keyboard -- because if you spray it upside down on exposed skin, the propellant comes out in a streaming jet that's cold enough to sting.

"So we were in our room last night," Lovesalot said (Boston accent: flat vowels, final r's dropped), "and that bastard tried to get in me in the back of my arm, right here, back of the arm, but I ducked and he got me RIGHT HERE" (open mouth, index finger aimed at the tongue, talking as if though at the dentist and fully numbed) "right here on my TONGUE -- it tasted like I'd chewed up an aspirin or something, on my TONGUE -- and I was like, you got that in my fucking MOUTH," (mouth still open, still pointing indignantly at his tongue).

"So I told him, you gotta sit there and let me do that back to you, and he was like, twitching and trying to like, get away from it" (and here he imitated Adventure, tongue extended and eyes closed, head down and to the side, twitching in anticipation of the hit on his tongue), "but he took it, I mean he HAD to after that. Seriously, it was like aspirin."

I'm not sure I have done this story justice; living in the grown-up equivalent of a college dorm does sometimes have its upsides, though.

Yum yum, Give Me Some

2011-01-28T22:00:00.001+04:30

The Godfather, whom I've taken to referring to in real life as Commander Killjoy, has now become a loyal reader of this blog. He promptly informed me that the blog is worthless, as it barely focuses on him at all and certainly fails to document the vast universe of witty nuggets that pass his lips on any given day. He's made it clear that he expects this situation to be rectified, chop chop.

This directive came on the heels of a conversation in which he laid out his plan to use our recently-ordered simultaneous interpretation equipment to beam his inner monologue directly into the ears of his minions. I pointed out the logistics difficulties -- interpreter's equipment has only a short range -- and he decided on the spot (rapid, decisive leadership) to move all 92 members of the PRT into the Senior Enlisted office next to his. "But you'll only have 10 earpieces," I said.

"The best part of this plan," he replied, "is that you will only have an earpiece, and not a mouthpiece."

(The simultaneous interpretation equipment is a mic with 10 wireless earpieces for it, which will allow our interpreters, who do whispered translation during shuras, to be heard by everyone who has an earpiece and not just by those in their immediate vicinity; I told the Godfather that I'd ordered us a force multiplier from the Embassy and he promptly responded -- "You ordered another Commander Killjoy? Because that's really the ultimate force multiplier.")

I can only assume he's still mad at me for naming a to-be-slaughtered goat after him.

Christmas: there's an unexpected Kenyan-American on the SecFor team -- Specialist Masai -- and he, born and raised in East Africa, had been itching to get his hands on a celebratory goat. I had dropped a few not-so-subtle Yule-season hints to the Governor that being gifted a Christmas goat would be much appreciated, but it never came to fruition; rather than relying on the kindness of others, SecFor took up a collection of a couple bucks a man, and one of our interpreters called a guy he knows, and two hours and 90 bucks later a goat showed up at the front gate.

(There's a goat market just down the street from the FOB -- goat is the preferred red meat in the Afghan diet -- and said goat market is rumored to sell poppy and raw opium paste on certain days of the week; I have never seen the market and can neither confirm nor deny these rumors).

The goat was tied it up in a concrete bunker just behind the operations center and left it a bowl of water and a plate of goat-inappropriate food that SecFor generally appreciates -- turkey bacon and corn dog chunks, things on that order. The water bowl was Styrofoam and the goat hoofed through two of them before Masai took over, leaving the water at a distance where the goat could drink it without kicking it over, and supplying a tray of lettuce. "What are you naming it?" I asked the guys. "Oh, we're not naming it," I was told. "We don't want to get too attached."

I deemed that to be unacceptable. I named him after myself: Little Dakota.

I was worried that Little Dakota wouldn't provide enough meat for the entire PRT, so I checked with Captain Adventure (the tall and self-assured head of SecFor, who specifically asked for his nickname; I was going to call him Mortarshoot -- he's an infantryman at heart -- but Adventure seems equally apropos) to see if I could sponsor another goat. He greenlighted it. "If there's anything these guys could use," he said, "it's more killing." I ponied up the 90 bucks.

Little Dakota was small and black and gentle, and got along with everyone and generally abhorred violence in the form of headbutting, and when the second goat arrived it was clear that he was everything Little Dakota was not: wild-eyed and bucking, with a swagger in his step and larger, more threatening horns. Little Dakota was a peace-maker; the new goat was tougher, a warrior with no interest in diplomacy or making friends. The metaphor was too perfect; I named him Little Godfather.

Portrait in Sepia: Little Godfather in the foreground; Little Dakota in the Background

"I'm gonna be out there and make sure he puts up a god damn FIGHT when it's his time to go," the Godfather said. He didn't need to oversee the process, though: Little Godfather was out for blood, and would headbutt any SecFor guy who got too close.

I spent the morning of the slaughter feeding the goats animal crackers ("wrap your mind around how meta THIS is, guys") and generally trying to ensure that their last hours were pleasant. There was a brief discussion about where the slaughter should actually take place; we toyed briefly with the idea of doing it on the concrete slab formerly used for basketball but from which all the hoops had been removed by Sergeant Major MoraleKill, the senior enlisted man of the Maneuver unit, who had de-hooped the court as a means of preventing injuries. They ultimately decided to keep the slaughter on PRT turf, near the concrete bunker where the goats had spent the night.

There had been a spirited debate about who would actually do the goat slaughtering -- Sergeant DoubleD (who holds some sort of NCO position within the SecFor, though what he's actually tasked with is beyond me; the name DoubleD -- that's Domestic Dispute -- is taken from the ongoing and protracted arguments, punctuated with equal numbers of "baby I love you and miss you," that he has with his wife in the public arena of Facebook. "Facebook is nothing," I was told. "You should hear them argue on the phone.") wanted in on the action, but it was decided that Masai, who had long experience in all things goat, should actually be in charge of the first one.

Little Godfather was the first to go.

Just before the slaughter: Specialist Masai, assisted by Sergeant DoubleD

Masai took him by the horns (DoubleD had tried to pet him and had gotten headbutted, and kept a berth from that point forward), dragged him to the appointed area, and held him down with his neck over a fifty-cal ammo can -- a metal box used to hold bullets. Little Godfather bleated mournfully -- not an "I'm in pain" bleat or even an "I'm scared" bleat, but more of a "Wow, this is a shitty situation and I am helpless against it" sort of bleat that I found oddly depressing. The scene had drawn a crowd of cameramen; I walked away for the actual cutting.

A gaggle of bloodthirsty PRT-types; Captain Adventure is kneeling, second from right

Masai gutted and skinned the goats (Afghans usually skin the goats by attaching an air hose to them, in essence inflating the skin off the carcass; Kenyans, it seems, just use a balled fist to work the skin off the meat), and then they were wrapped in tin foil, buried in a pit just outside the FOB gate, and covered in hot coals and a thick layer of moon dust.

We dug them up six hours later. "I hate to be all food-safety civilian here," I said, "but maybe we should consider stabbing them with a meat thermometer to make sure they've reached an internal temperature of at least 160 degrees?" "You know, that's a good idea," Captain Adventure said. "Does anyone here have their meat thermometer on them? Sergeant DoubleD? Specialist Masai? Anyone? No?" He looked at me like I was an idiot, grinned, and started digging. The goats smelled delicious.

Little Dakota and Little Godfather were served alongside Carne Asada and an enormous pot of rice that the Governor's staff made for us. (In addition to the pot of rice, the Governor sent over four additional goats the next day; they were put into Dynecorp's FOB petting zoo along with a cow, a turkey, and multiple other goats). The final verdict on our goats was that they should have been dug up an hour earlier -- they were definitely over-roasted -- but Masai declared them delicious and tore into them; between him and our stable of interpreters, most of the meat was picked clean.

The first piece I had was tough and hard to chew, and I declared that I was definitely eating Little Godfather; the second piece was tender and soft, and I announced that the higher quality cut of meat clearly came from Little Dakota. "Of course Little Dakota was more tender," the Godfather replied. "Little Godfather was all muscle, and muscle is always tougher."

Everything is Illuminated

2011-01-21T22:10:00.001+04:30

A few photos from the New Year's Mortar Shoot. These were late-night illumination rounds, normally used to light up battlefields, with eleven rounds fired to ring in 2011.

"Late-night" might be a stretch -- it was 7:30 when they started, but the sun goes down early in the winter and there's no twilight in the desert; New Year's Eve was moonless, dark and still.

Expect the Unexpected

2011-01-10T15:06:00.000+04:30

It is raining in Farah. Our local staff says it's first time he can remember since February of 2009. I never thought I'd find rain so deeply unsettling.

Next Step: The Amazing Race

2011-01-07T23:39:00.000+04:30

New Year's Eve on FOB Farah was set to be relatively low key, with a barbeque followed by a celebratory early-evening mortar shoot. The Arizona National Guard barbeques less frequently than the Guamanians, but it's damn good when they do --they're unexpectedly proficient at carne asada, thin-slicing beef and then marinating it in lemons and garlic and orange juice and god-knows-what-else; the beef, eaten with roasted peppers and tomatoes tucked in a flame-toasted tortilla (sent in bulk by someone's wife, god bless her) is hands down the best thing FOB Farah has to offer.

I had every intention of eating myself sick at the barbeque, and woke up early on New Years Eve to hit the gym in advance of my over-consumption of grilled meat. Afterward, I was back in my room and contemplating a nap when I got at knock at the door from Lieutenant Granola, a Michigander with a firmly crunchy-Seattle mindset, right down to his new-age Paleolithic dietary habits. "Hey," he said. "I, uh, just wanted to make sure you were still in for the Adventure Race?"

"That's tomorrow, right? What time?" I asked.

"Not tomorrow," he said. "Today. In, like, half an hour. You're in, right?"

I was already cripplingly sore from the gym -- it was in essence my first time to exercise since going on leave in November -- but there was no way I was missing the FOB Farah Adventure Race. I put on running shorts and a plain grey t-shirt, but then thought better of it and tossed on my winter marathon outfit: white shorts over black and red tights, an army t-shirt with the "ARMY" crossed out and "CIVILIAN" penned in above it, and a headband to top it off. I was going for sporty, but it's clear from the pictures that I actually looked vaguely village people, with a dash of Richard Simmons thrown in for good measure.

"I'm not sure you needed to write it on your shirt for people to know you're a civilian," the Godfather said.

I met Granola on the basketball court, and we were joined shortly thereafter by our other teammates -- Warrant Exasperated, a good-natured but generally grumpy Warrant Officer from Public Affairs, and Sergeant CapsLock, whose wife has the endearing habit of writing his Facebook updates in blaring boldface ("TALKED TO CAPSLOCK TODAY, HE RECEIVED ALL THE PACKAGES WE SENT HIM, HE GOT THE PACKAGE THE "BLUE STAR MOTHERS" SENT TO HIM, HE LOVED IT ALL, HE IS DOING WELL, HE IS VERY BUSY").

The four of us were the only team the PRT fielded, and we were one of almost twenty five teams. The Italians were out in force, accounting for almost half the teams, and most of the rest came from the Maneuver Unit (the actual war-fighting types we share the base with), though a few other teams were represented as well -- the guys from the Fire Department had a team, as did the Air Force (who, as you might expect, run our airport) and Dynecorps, who are supposed to be in charge of repairing things like the laundry machines, though given how few of the laundry machines actually work it's hard to say what they actually do.

It was new year's eve, and as such one of the teams featured the Chaplain dressed as Old Man 2010, with a long fake beard and a cane. Another of his teammates was there in an oversized diaper, dressed as baby 2011. It was 65 degrees and sunny. It was set to be a good day.

The organizers distributed maps of the FOB ("Don't lose them," we were told. "It's a security risk if you do"). Each of the teams, it turned out, had been allowed to organize one event, and a total of eleven teams had done so. The first team to finish all eleven events would win the race and take home the grand prize of being able to cut to the front of the chow hall line for an entire month.

The organizers shouted out -- "Ready… Set… GO!!" and our entire team blitzed off the basketball court, sprinting at full speed for the space outside my office. We had decided to hit our own event first, because it was relatively close and because we knew where it was, giving us an advantage if we sprinted there -- if another team beat you to an event, you had to cool your heels and wait until they finished before you could start. As planned, we made it there first, and promptly set to work.

PRT EVENT: Pick up a gigantic all-metal tow bar (used to move disabled Cougars and weighing something in the neighborhood of two to three hundred pounds), walk it fifty meters away, around a cone, and back to the starting line.

It was surprisingly easy: 300 pounds actually isn't much for four people as long as they all work as a team.

Another team, hauling the tow-bar.

We dispatched the event with no problems, checked the map, and bolted for our next station.

MARINES: The Combat Medicine event. Pick up two stretchers loaded with "patients" made of 100 pounds of ammo cans. Haul the stretchers fifty meters and load them onto an up-armored humvee. Grab the rope attached to the front of the humvee and drag it 50 meters. Pick up your buddy and fireman carry him 50 meters to the end of the compound, and then switch roles, with the former patient becoming the fireman and vice versa.

I've never met a Marine who did anything in moderation, and this event absolutely reflected that mindset. Just hauling the ammo cans would've been enough for an event; just dragging the humvee would've been enough for an event. Add in the stupid fireman's carry and the whole thing became obliteratingly, over-the-top difficult. The Marines, in the mean time, were throwing smoke grenades and yelling at you to "give it more of a combat feel."

(The Marines had apparently wanted to do a "run and gun," which would've entailed sprinting to a range and blasting away at a target, but they were told that live ammunition and speed trials is a recipe for disaster and that they should make other plans).

I was paired with Granola, who's about the same size as me but considerably stronger; that said, I had no idea how to actually fireman's carry someone and his attempts to talk me through it were less than effective ("where the hell do my arms go?!"). I ended up bending the rules and giving him a lame piggy back ride, which we deemed good enough. Despite my logistical difficulties, I fared much better than CapsLock, who was stuck fireman's carrying Exasperated, who's well over 200 pounds of muscle. It nearly crushed him, and he spent the rest of the race trying to recover.

We were two events in, and all of us were already gasping for air like wounded seals. We started to run to the next station, dialed it back to a jog, walked for a bit, and then slow-jogged/half-hustled past the airport to a section of the compound owned by the guys who go out in advance of us on missions to make sure there are no IEDs in our way.

ROUTE CLEARANCE PACKAGE: a standard tire-flip event. Cover fifty meters with one huge tire that you aren't allowed to just roll, as a logical human might do, but rather flipping it end-over-end.

Most teams were putting all four guys on the tire at once, but we had two guys go in at time, taking turns, so you in essence only had to do half the event. It took us a minute and forty seven seconds, and then we were off to the airport.

AIR FORCE/CARGO EVENT: Pick up a box, drop it onto a steel air force palette, and then strap it down with cargo netting. Physically speaking, it wasn't a particularly difficult event, and I actually enjoyed it because cargo straps are one of those things that you see from time to time on the FOB but that you never get a chance to play with -- sort of the ultimate That's Someone Else's Job-type toy.

It basically just required tossing some netting over a box and then putting on clips ("actual air force requirements are way more strict," Exasperated said). We knocked it out in a hurry, paused briefly while CapsLock threw up ("I'm not sure I can run anymore, guys"), and then slow jogged it up the helipad for the Dust-Off crew's event.

The Dust-Off crew are the Medivac guys, and the hospital is emblazoned with "PICK 'EM UP, DUST 'EM OFF, SET 'EM BACK DOWN." In addition to a fleet of helicopters, the hospital also has an ambulance truck labeled BAND AID 1.

DUST OFF EVENT: A rope toss. I'm sure there's a name for the game -- it's something you'd see on someone's patio if they were hosting a barbeque that a lot of kids were coming to -- but I have no idea what the name is and halfhearted googling didn't get me very far. You basically had to take little weighted rope-type things and throw them onto a rack. The rack was divided into three levels (red, yellow, green), and you had to get one rope onto each level of the rack before you could move on.

This much we now know is true: people in the PRT have terrible aim.

We finished, and then decided to swing back around to the far side of the FOB to cover all the far away events before finishing with the center of the FOB, which was event-heavy and close to the finish line. We headed through the Italian side of the compound to the mud area where they park their tanks.

ITALIAN EVENT: The Italians on the FOB right now are a unit of Lagunari out of Venice, and they wanted an event that would reflect their maritime heritage. (The Lagunari are the Italian equivalent of Marines -- Marines, you might say, ostensibly guard the Marina, while the Lagunari ostensibly guard the Laguna). The closest water is about a thousand kilometers away, so they built a boat out of wood and attached it to long metal poles, and made their event involve hoisting it onto one's shoulders and hauling it through the desert. The boat weighed, without exaggeration, at least 70 million pounds.

Seriously, 70 million pounds.

From the gate, you had to pick up the boat, set it on a metal barrier, climb over the barrier two at a time, pick the boat back up, set it on another barrier, climb under barrier two at a time, and then head off around the corner.

Over one barrier, under the next.

After the barriers, the boat had to be carried through 50 meters of Afghan moon dust that was at least a foot thick. About halfway through, the Italians turned on the fire hose.

It was freezing cold, and it tasted like unfiltered Afghanistan tap water, and it was MISERABLE at the time, but looking back at this picture now it looks outrageously fun. I'm debating if I can somehow use this picture for internet dating.

From the mud field, you had to drag the boat up and over a five foot mud hill. You then take it back through the mud field -- again with the fire hose treatment. And then, because the event hadn't been physically challenging enough, you had to put the boat down and climb over a concrete barrier.

Me and Granola going over the wall, with Exasperated in the foreground.

Exasperated was wearing camouflage pants from his uniform, and they snagged on the top of the wall as he went over it, ripping a chunk out of them. They continued to tear throughout the rest of the remaining events, eventually leaving him with a gaping hole in his crotch. "Thank god you're wearing underwear" was the universal sentiment.

All that was left after the wall was to pick up the boat and again go through the first-under-then-over routine with the barriers. Then you had to rotate the boat 180 degrees to get it back in the starting position, ready for the next time. Viva Italia!

It took us FOREVER to do this event, which was outrageously brutal. We had to stop more than once and catch our breath and allow our aching shoulders and biceps a second to rest. There was only one boat, though, which meant that all the other teams who arrived after us had no choice but to cool their heels while we finished; we were, in essence, delaying the entire field of participants, which was kind of awesome. We finally crossed the finish line, rotated the boat the mandatory 180 degrees, and then limped downfield to the fire department's event.

FIRE DEPARTMENT: There had been rumors that the fire department would also be doing a mud event, and we collectively weren't sure we could face it. Their actual event -- pick up four fire hoses, run them 50 meters down and back -- turned out to be a cakewalk. Anything more might've been fatal.

We finished and then jogged up to the main FOB for the last four events, the first of which was at the chapel.

THE CHAPEL: The chapel's event involved picking up a huge rope, hauling it onto the top of the concrete bunker outside their building, and then back around to the beginning. "We don't, like, have to pray or anything?" I asked. "No. Well, I mean, you can if you want to," they told me. We moved on.

TASK FORCE SOUTHEAST: Task Force Southeast is another group of Italians on the FOB in charge of three of the districts in the east of the province. They've built a traditional wood-burning pizza oven in the middle of their compound, and the pizza that they serve all too infrequently is so mind-blowingly amazing that I kind of get a little choked up just thinking about it. I was hoping -- praying, even -- that their event would somehow involve eating massive amounts of pizza, and I was set to dominate.

Tragically, their event just involved crossing a 30-foot rope that was strung up between two MRAPs. I was unexpectedly good at this: you have to hook your legs onto the rope and then sort of spiderman your way across, and since I'm pretty flexible, I found it easy. We finished, asked for pizza ("no pizza"), and then moved on.

DYNECORPS: Dynecorps does FOB maintenance, and their event ironically involved leaky pipes. You were given three six-foot lengths of pipe, a bucket and a tap at which to fill the bucket. You had to fill the bucket from the tap, and then use it to fill the pipes with water, and then (plugging the bottom of the pipe with your hand) carry the water ten feet to another bucket. Finishing required getting about two gallons of water into the final bucket.

We watched the team in front of us struggle and struggle and struggle with this, which was odd, because we dispatched the whole exercise in like 45 seconds before jogging off.

We couldn't find the final event. We searched, Granola and I ran to the basketball court to ask the organizers, we double checked the map: nothing. We finally figured it that they were outside the chow hall, but it added a good five minutes to our time and ratcheted up the frustration quotient by a good amount.

TASK FORCE ARROW: Task Force Arrow are the infantry guys on compound, and their event was all about brute strength. "I assume you're all familiar with a four-man push up?" they said. (I was not; my team filled me in). "Do a four-man push up, and then in the up position, walk on your hands to the finish line." It was about 25 feet down.

A four-man push up requires you to get on the ground, like you're doing a regular push up. Someone then comes and, lying down perpendicular to you, puts their feet on your back. Someone else puts their feet on his back, and so on, until all four people have in essence woven themselves into a square. It's like doing a regular push up, only with the entire weight of someone else's legs resting on top of you. The final product looks like this:

I found this IMPOSSIBLE. I just couldn't do it -- I wasn't strong enough to make it happen. I made it into the "up" position once or twice, but I wasn't even close to strong enough to walk on my hands in that position. I ended up dragging myself along the tile to the finish line, and it was only with Exasperated in essence pushing me from behind that I made it. It was brutal.

(I can say without hesitation that I was the weakest link on my team as far as strength goes; that said, I and Granola -- who is my on-again-off-again running partner -- were without a doubt the fastest on the team).

We finished, and I looked at Granola and declared that we had to finish strong -- we had to sprint it in. We bolted for the basketball court, and as we rounded the corner I threw my arms in the air and shrieked out "PRT!!" We hit the finish line and I tossed them our score card on which each of the events had been checking off participation.

"Uh… where's the rest of your team?" they asked. Exasperated and CapsLock finally rounded the corner (Exasperated clutching shut the huge hole in his crotch), and we collectively crossed the finish line.

I had been expecting to come in dead last. I have no pretentions about my own prowess as an athlete, for one, and the military guys -- all of whom seem to be at least 10 years my junior -- usually work out twice a day, and really, who are we kidding? But we planned our route well and rarely got stuck at any of the events waiting for others to finish, and we had enough hustle in our step to end up crossing the line in fourth place. Given that there were some 25 teams, we were more than pleased with fourth -- beaten only by two Italian teams and the guys from Route Clearing Package.

There was no prize for fourth (third place got cigars, I think, which has no appeal to me), but being able to gloat victoriously is certainly a reward unto itself.

The Grand Return

2010-12-24T16:56:00.000+04:30

I came home from leave and found the door to my office covered in red medical biohazard bags, inflated like balloons. The inside had been lovingly draped in as many rolls of toilet paper as one can fit inside a space that's barely large enough to turn around in.

There was a meeting the next evening to go over the form and structure of one of the line ministries, and the Petty Officer leading the meeting opened his requisite power point with a slide captioned "What Turkeys Do We Have Running This Place, Anyways?" The photo accompanying the slide indicated that my office had been occupied by a different member of the team in my absence:

It's good to be home.

The Seige of Bologna.

2010-12-21T20:18:00.000+04:30

I was wandering the streets of Bologna in an attempt to hungry up -- Italy for me was just killing time between bowls of pasta -- when I came across a group of carolers in the central piazza. They looked like students from the university, and they were surprisingly talented for a ragtag group that appeared to have just collected in the streets.

They were singing in Italian (a language I at best pretend to speak) and I didn't recognize any of the songs, but that didn't detract from the experience of it. The singers were accompanied by two guys doing a bang up job on rhythm guitar, and a guy was playing the clarinet and a girl was on the sax, and they were both OUTSTANDING. Though I will concede that it's possible that they were just enthusiastic, since I sometimes confuse the two.

People were drinking wine straight from the bottle, stumbling around and singing along, and the whole thing was outrageously fun. There was a guy who appeared to be dressed as Jesus, and I assumed the whole thing was somehow related to the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which is way more of a big deal in Italy than in the States.

But then they stopped singing briefly, and the guy in the middle -- he was dressed as a friar and really looked the part -- started shouting something in Italian to general cheers. And then I thought I maybe heard him shout something like occupazione dell'Afghanistan, and I thought -- Oh good LORD, am I at an Afghan war protest?

But then they started singing again and it went back to being so fun that I thought -- maybe I'll stick around and try to confirm it's a protest before I make any hasty decisions about leaving. I will concede that staying did make me feel a little guilty (What would The Secretary do!?), but I rationalized it in the same way that I rationalized eating double-digit helpings of tortellini every day: R&R comes but thrice a year.

So I stuck around, head bobbing with the music and generally enjoying myself (though occasionally feeling stupid for having failed to purchase a delicious bottle of cheap local prosecco). And then suddenly everyone stopped singing, and someone shouted Andiamo! and the whole thing moved half a block down the piazza.

I walked with them -- still somewhat guiltily, I will concede -- and used the opportunity to examine the participants up close. Jesus, it turned out, had dreadlocks and a general unwashed look that really contributed to his whole Messiah air -- the guy, tinsel crown and all, was just nailing it. They were carrying an effigy of the pope (Immaculate Conception not war protest, I kept telling myself) and a bunch of people had signs in Italian that included the word chiesa -- church -- but I had no idea what they were all about because my Italian is really limited to plaintive requests for lasagna and sangiovese.

It was only when I spotted the sign with the MasterCard logo on it, and the words MasterCardinal written under a Catholic-looking face surrounded by cynical dollars and euros that I realized I was at an anti-church protest. And then Jesus and the sax player started handing out free condoms, and the friar started reading a list of complaints to which the crowd responded with mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa and it all fell into place.

I left feeling significantly less guilty.

Julebryg and not you.

2010-12-11T16:51:00.000+04:30

I went to a bar in Copenhagen to have a Christmas beer -- a julebryg -- as part of my ongoing vacation plan to lap up all the things we don´t have in Farah. I asked the person next to me if I should leave a tip (nope!), and it was enough to start a conversation.

"You're not from here," he said. I told him he was correct, that I'm an American but living in Afghanistan, and his eyes narrowed a little bit.

"What do you do there?" he asked me. Heavy emphasis on the there, with an ominous sound in his voice.

"Development," I said. "Schools, roads, hospitals." That isn't strictly true, of course -- development is firmly USAID's schtick, and one that State doesn't have much to do with. I figure, though, that we're all part of same development-related team, and schools and hospitals are easier, conceptually speaking, than the more nebulous "governance advising."

He took a swig of his beer. "You're in the army," he said. It wasn't a question.

"No," I responded. "No, I work with them -- I live with them, actually -- but I'm not in the army. They do their thing, and then we come in afterward for reconstruction, for schools and roads and everything else the people need."

He looked pointedly away from me and down the bar. "It's horrible," he said, "that war of yours."

(Technically speaking, the war is not strictly ours: Denmark is a troop-contributing nation and has about 750 soldiers in Afghanistan, mostly holding down a fire base in Kandahar province that's affectionately known as the tallest, blondest Combat Outpost in all of Afghanistan. It didn't seem like the time to bring that up, though).

He shook is head. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I don't want to talk to someone who's part of that horrible war." And then he stomped off. It was all every uncomfortable, even though I wasn't particularly sad not to be talking to him any more.

"I hope you threw that whole viking destruction of Europe thing right back at him," a friend of mine commented. I didn't -- I'm not nearly that clever -- but it did lead to a little bit of introspection. For one, there's the whole Vietnam Vet Gets Spit On aspect of it, even though I'm not a vet and generally don't welcome or entertain comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam.

But more interesting is that it occured to me later him getting all hot under the collar in my involvement in the war didn't faze me at all, because I don't actually think of myself as being part of the war. That seems kind of ridiculous, now that I've typed it out, but it's true -- the war seems like something that's tangential to me, that's happening around me, mostly in other places though occasionally very near to me, but something that I really have nothing to do with. The fact that I'm surrounded by a sea of camouflage and get driven to my meetings in a car capped with a .50 caliber weapon doesn't really change that fact.

That may be a little ridiculous, but since I work hand in glove with a bunch of guys who consider their job title to be "warrior," I (job title: bureaucrat) will leave the war to them.

Foreign Service Vacation Spots

2010-12-07T18:29:00.000+04:30

I'm currently in tiny San Marino, the world's oldest republic. I thought (in a moment of Foreign Service über-geekiness) that it would be cool to visit the World's Oldest Republic AND the World's Oldest Parliament -- the thingfellir, or some such, in Iceland -- on the same trip.

I'm finding Italy (which, come on -- is completely magical, no matter how stereotypical it is to love it here) to be short on Internet cafes, which is killing me since a question from work popped up a few days ago. But in the mean time, a friend flagged for me the fact that people have been googling looking for the author of the Afghan Plan, and I thought maybe it might be the Tigers, so I posted a link to my email on the upper right. Just thought I'd flag that here before we move on.

And now, back to my regularly-scheduled cobblestones, white wine and glorious pasta.

Fear and loathing in...

2010-12-04T20:55:00.000+04:30

Two of my buddies -- a married couple out of US Embassy Sarajevo -- are working on an art project in which they're attempting to get a photo of people standing in front of iconic local scenery from every country in the world, holding up the equivalent of about twenty bucks in local currency.

The two of them are probably my most Bohemian friends in the Foreign Service -- she herself spent a year on a Fulbright studying the cult-like underworld of the Venezuelan beauty pageant industry, and he was the genius behind last year's "31 days, 31 jack-o-lanterns" project. Knowing them is refreshing: the Foreign Service is long on lawyers but sadly short on artist-types.

The places I'm going to on this trip are slightly out of the way and by extension lend themselves well to their project, and I was excited to join in: Iceland and Malta aren't exactly Congo or North Korea, but it does take a certain determination to get there. I figured I'd snap a photo in every country I made it to, and if that turned out to be their first photo from, say, San Marino, then all the better.

I arrived in Vienna, my first stop on this trip, and promptly forgot to take a photo.

I was determined to do better in the Netherlands. I wanted a quintessential Amsterdam photo, a variation on the theme of sex, drugs and fries with mayo. I went to the Red Light district. I was ready to take some pictures.

I want to pretend that six years with State hasn't turned me into a stodgy bureaucrat. I like to think of myself as laid-back and West Coast, easy going to a fault, though the people who know me find that risible given how ridiculously high strung I am. ("West Coast?" one of my actually West Coast friends said. "You're, like, SO buttoned up East Coast").

Buttoned up East Coast or not, I still think of myself as a grungy backpacker type, a position that was validated by my buddy in Vienna who referred to me repeatedly as a dirty hippy. I actually loathe hippies (I think of them as the willfully unemployed -- and no, you can't have a dollar, go wait tables like I did when I was your age), but I can see where she's coming from since I'm traveling for three weeks but only carrying two changes of clothes. I thought I'd fit right in with the other unwashed people in the Red Light district and this whole photo project would fall right into place.

Good god I loathed the Red Light district. I, Mr. No-Fun from the Embassy, felt like I was surrounded by dozens if not hundreds of potential American Citizens Services cases, people who could stroll into the Embassy at any time with no money or documents, no recollection of where their hotel is, and a pending court date for wanton theft of munchies-type food. I wanted to grab the people around me, glassy eyed from the coffee shops at 11 a.m., and shake them by the shoulders and tell them not to lose their passports.

My distaste at the roaming hordes in the Red Light district dovetailed with an assumption, innate and unshakable after six years at State, that all female sex workers are the victims of human trafficking. Even in a city as well-regulated and up-and-up as Amsterdam, it was all I could think of. I had to fight the urge not to ask strangers if they needed help in contacting the Embassy of their home nation.

I also found, when surrounded by the chronically high in the market of sin, that I was unwilling to ask anyone -- "hey, can you hold this twenty bucks for me?"

I grit my teeth and bought an order of fries with mayo, a food product that formed the staple of my diet in Amsterdam. I held the fries at arms length with a twenty Euro note wrapped around them, snapped two quick pictures with my ungainly camera -- one with the fry stand as a backdrop, the other next to a "dancing girls" sign -- and then bolted.

I vowed to do better in Copenhagen.

Side By Side: Vienna and Farah

2010-11-30T21:17:00.000+04:30

I flew to Vienna to meet my buddy at the Embassy there. She's actually at the US Mission to the United Nations, which is a separate embassy from US Embassy Vienna, and they've put her up in an obscenely nice apartment right in the heart of Vienna, overlooking the Rathaus and a scant two blocks from the city's main Christmas market.

It was a pleasant reintroduction to the civilized world.

This trip was the second time I've visited her at an embassy overseas. We met when I was learning Urdu and she was a few doors down on the South Asia hallway, studying Sinhala with an amiable, guacamole-loving Buddhist monk in advance of her departure to Sri Lanka. I visited her on one of my R&Rs from Pakistan, and while we were sitting at a beautiful, slate-tiled outdoor dessert cafe in Colombo, sipping cappuccinos and devouring chocolate cake and chatting about life at our respective posts, she remarked that the things that people complain about at our two embassies were remarkably different.

On this trip, we ended up sitting in a beautiful, wood-paneled Austrian cafe, drinking white wine and local beer and scoffing down obscene quantities of schnitzel and ribs and Austrian potato salad. As I laughingly told her about the new SecFor team, who wanted more practice with long-range mortars and consequently arranged a training that moved the firing pit to on base rather than its normal spot across the airstrip on the long range, and how the civilian crew had all basically hit the deck and taken cover at the first concussive volley of outgoing fire, she reminded me of that same statement: the things people complain about at our respective posts could not be more different.

"Oh, I wasn't complaining," I told her. "It was a one time deal, and I actually enjoy that we have a robust perimeter defense." I am terrified of coming across as whiny or unjustifiably complaining about life in Farah -- there's no room for whininess at a PRT, and we have it GREAT compared to so many other places -- and she said that she knew I wasn't complaining but that her previous comment still definitely applies: so very different.

I don't know what people complain about in Vienna. I do know, though, what people complain about at other PRTs -- things like taking incoming rockets daily and then having to hang out in freezing cold outdoor concrete bunkers while they wait for the all clear, or of having a half kilometer outdoor walk to the bathroom, which itself has a habit of flooding and leaving fetid water ankle-deep on the floor, or of sour relations with the military or host government, so they have to beg to get a rare ride off base or a meeting with the Governor, or perhaps worst of all, of being on a base where multiple people are killed every month, and the horrific psychological burden that dealing with that entails.

I also know what we complain about in Farah. Dear US Military -- for the thousandth time, corndogs are a not a breakfast food. Regular corndogs at breakfast are bad enough, but the "breakfast corndog," consisting of a piece of sausage jammed onto a stick, dunked in blueberry pancake batter and deep fried, is truly an abomination before god and man. Your prompt attention to this matter will be much appreciated. Heart, --Dakota.

People often ask how life in the PRT is, and always say that on pretty much all fronts, it could be worse. It's not Vienna, that's for sure -- but given that the worst thing I have to complain about is the ubiquity of corndogs, it could definitely be a lot worse.

On Ag and Absence

2010-11-25T15:10:00.001+04:30

Ag left the PRT in early October, an event which devastated us but which I failed to mention here. He was slated to leave in early 2011, but the Department of Agriculture offered him a swank position in his former home bureau of resource conservation, overseeing most of the American southwest from an office in Albequerque, and he deemed it too good to pass up.

Ag had an even-keeled, roll-with-the-punches temperament that was perfect for PRT life, quick to laugh and invariably capable of finding the hilarious in every aspect of life in the field no matter how unpleasant. His departure left a pretty big hole in the team. (At one point, after a four-hour shura in a remote district in the north, I asked Ag if he knew where the bathroom was. He waved me towards a well-used and nearly full pit latrine, and wished me luck paying "king of the mountain." When I came back, he grinned impishly and asked -- "so, did you top it off?")

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 95 percent of Farah's economy is based on subsistence agriculture. The most prevalent licit crop is wheat, with some "vech" (or mung beans, a lentil-like commodity) and a smattering of other fruits and vegetables -- mostly cucumbers, tomatoes, and pomegranates. Farah pomegranates (which are white, and both sweeter and more mild than their red cousins) were apparently voted as the second best in Afghanistan, after Kandahar. I, who had no idea that pomegranates were a ranked circuit, was told in no uncertain terms that Farah's pomegranates are in fact Afghanistan's best, but that the presence of so many national-level powerbrokers in Kandahar meant that no one dared give first prize to another province. Corruption runs so deep in Afghanistan that it's assumed to extend even to the world of produce judging.

Farah also has plenty of illicit agriculture, and the province ranked third in opium production last year. Massive military operations in Helmand and Kandahar, the first and second largest opium producers respectively, are rumored to have pushed a significant chunk of the poppy farmers north into Farah, and that possibility, coupled with a spike in drug prices due to a wide-spread poppy blight last year, may very well land Farah in first place next year.

(During a PRT visit to remote Purchaman district before my arrival, the sub-governor proudly proclaimed his district to be poppy-free. Ag, eagle-eyed, pointed to a field visible from the district center and proclaimed, "that's poppy right there!" The sub-governor apparently looked sheepish, and then theatrically ordered his police to destroy the field, which they did by thrashing wildly at the stalks with the buttstocks of their AK-47s. Ag appreciated the spectacle of it, but noted that the actual opium had been harvested some three weeks prior.)

The point of all this is that Farah is first and foremost an agricultural province, which made Ag, with his Masters in range management and comprehensive knowledge of irrigation, easily the most popular American in all of Farah. He never let it go to his head: at shuras, he never introduced himself as an "agriculture expert" or by any such title, but just as "the PRT's farmer." His departure left us with a massive dearth of technical agriculture knowledge, from the basics (like when planting season is for various crops), to advanced agricultural calculations like pump to pipe-size rations for deep-well irrigation systems.

I sat in on Ag's last meetings before his departure in the hopes that I could glean enough information to finish his last outstanding piece of business, a PRT-funded fertilizer-for-wheat exchange program. I took furious notes on the differences in Diammonium Phosphate and Urea fertilizers and was willing to pretend that I knew enough to make it work, but Ag assured me that the gregarious head of the Farah Farmer's Union would cover the technical details and all I had to do was quarterback the budget process. The military was doing the funding, though, so my role was reduced to coordinating oversight of distribution to ensure equity and transparency, things that fall more naturally in my lane.

The other thing about Ag's unexpected departure is that it left us with only three civilians at PRT Farah -- myself and two USAID officers. The staffing gap, coupled with a series of events that required me to be in Farah (mostly the elections and post-elections kerfuffle, followed by the military's RIPTOA) meant that my own leave was pushed back repeatedly. We are allotted three R&Rs, which normally breaks down to one every two and a half to three months; I waited four and a half months to take my first.

All of which is to say that I'm currently on R&R. I won't say unequivocally that I won't be blogging about Afghanistan -- the rambling agriculture post above was supposed to be about Vienna -- but it's far more likely that I'll be waxing poetic about cobblestones than about mud-hut architecture (which does, I will concede, have a certain charm). I'm back to Farah sometime around the second week in December, just in time to join our new communications Chief (an elementary school principal who desperately needs a nickname) on the committee for the Holly Jollification of FOB Farah.

The point here (I can practically hear the Godfather: "oh, you had a point?") is that if you're only looking for posts about Afghanistan, consider yourself duly warned that things will likely be on a different track until I make it back to FOB Farah at some point in mid-December.

Change of Cast

2010-11-23T14:15:00.000+04:30

The old PRT ripped with little fanfare. People began trickling out in waves, leaving 10 to 20 at a time until only about 40 of the original hundred were left, and those 40 held a brief ceremony on their second-to-last day to officially transfer authority to the new guys.

It was a short affair. The PRT had already held an awards ceremony for the entire team before people started leaving (everyone received a certificate for participating in Operation Enduring Freedom; some received a second award for extraordinary services rendered), so the transfer ceremony was quick and to the point.

The Guam guys had been pared down to a barebones force of maybe 20 people, which still left them as the largest remaining section of the PRT. Despite being down 30 guys, they seized the occasion to choose a random person -- an enormous body-building captain from Supply -- and sing happy birthday one last time. El Comandante gave a brief speech covering the same themes he talked about every time he addressed the PRT as a whole -- discipline, consistency, teamwork and professionalism.

The Navy is ritualistic to a fault, and tradition dictates that during TOAs (as Transfer of Authority ceremonies are called), a flag or standard is passed from team to team. The flag began with Senior Chief Literal, the old team's gruff, no-nonsense Senior Enlisted Advisor, who had spent the five minutes in advance of the ceremony practicing color guard-esque flag maneuvers while I stood three feet away and annoyingly photo-documented it.

(Senior Chief Literal spent the four months I knew him taking everything I said -- piercingly sarcastic or otherwise -- at its literal face value. "There's nothing healthy in the cafeteria," he groused. "Did you not see the fried pork chops?" I asked him. "Surely those are on your diet." He stared at me unblinkingly, shook his head and replied flatly, "no, fried pork chops are not on my diet." He was towering and bracingly physically fit, and I did everything I could to spread an insidious rumor that he kicks his legs while doing pull ups -- a process called kipping that's considered cheating and will disqualify your efforts during a military physical fitness test. "I've learned so much from Senior Chief," I told people within his earshot. "Like how to do pull ups correctly. I had no idea it's all in the legs." That statement, which is about as close to defamation of character as you can get with the military, would invariably cause my interlocutor to look disbelievingly at Literal and ask -- "you KIP!?" El Comandante warned that I was risking death and that if Literal clubbed me, it would be totally deserved. "How could I possibly be afraid of someone who kips while doing pull ups?" I asked).

Literal passed the flag to El Comandante, who took it and saluted. He then passed it off to the Godfather, who by that point had already spent two weeks shadowing El Comandante in preparation to take over as the new commander. He in turn passed the flag to his Senior Enlisted Advisor, whom I don't know well enough yet to assign a nickname. Salutes were passed back and forth, and authority was officially transferred. The Godfather spoke briefly, citing some African concept of team. I took notes, but he speaks quickly in a stream-of-conscious style that was hard to get down on paper.

I wasn't in Farah when the last remnants of the old team left. The had some difficulty arranging a C-130 to Kandahar which delayed them for a few days, and while they cooled their heels (giddy at departure, annoyed with the delay), I and the Godfather flew to Mazar-e-Sharif, in Balkh province in the north, to attend a joint RC-North and RC-West conference on sub-national governance.

The conference was hosted by the Afghan central government out of Kabul, and I found out later that other State PRT officers had been told that there was no need to attend. I failed to get that memo. I also failed to realize that it wasn't a working-level conference, and my woeful lack of suit and tie left me feeling bracingly underdressed throughout the conference, which was a forum for provincial leadership to connect to the central government and which I had no place attending. "For the first time in Afghanistan, I feel completely underdressed," I told the godfather. "Why?" he asked deadpan, motioning at my cargo pants and polo shirt. "Just because you're dressed like a hobo?"

I anticipate that we'll have an excellent working relationship.

Going, going... Guam.

2010-10-21T20:51:00.000+04:30

The Guam guys who are here are the second rotation of Guam National Guard to come through Farah, and will be the last. They'll be replaced by Arizona National Guard, who will likely be equally adept at personal protection but much less happy-go-lucky, and who will almost definitely be less likely to barbeque, which the Guamanians do weekly. They've come to the rescue on many a Friday night, when the only choices were starvation or wretched surf-and-turf at the chow hall, with limp fried shrimp and withered lobsters served alongside shoe leather steaks.

Guamanian barbeques (always with lilting steel drum music in the background) were the social highlight of the week, and the Guamanians were excellent cooks. They have an odd penchant for singing the happy birthday song, and every week they'd gather everyone together before eating, run through the ubiquitous Catholic before-meal prayer, and then point to someone in the crowd and shriek out -- "hey, is it your birthday? It's your BIRTHDAY!" and then launch into the song for no reason at all.

(Guamanian food is generally excellent, and they make a corned beef that they smoke and then cook on the grill that's truly outstanding. I will concede that the one time I got miserably sick in Farah was off Guamanian barbequed fish, dredged in a garlic mayonnaise sauce and grilled in a foil packet, served alongside a lemon juice-cured raw fish ceviche that I knew was folly to eat. Both were delicious but desert ceviche was a bridge too far, and I was incapacitated for days. I have no regrets).

A Guamanian barbeque in full swing. The guy in camo clutching a diet soda is there heretofore un-photo-documented Captain Firepower.

I assumed I'd turn this into a photo post, but it turns out that I have very few photos of the Guam guys -- I usually take photos on missions, and they're always on missions but always in the background, pulling security. The photo below was taken just after one of those missions, as they were unloading a .50 cal from an MRAP. "Take a picture," they told me. "It'll make your mother feel better about you being here."

Two Guamanians with a gigantic gun. Feel better, mom?

The guys could start circulating out of Farah as early as Saturday. I'm hoping I can catch up on photographing and blogging about people before the grand exodus begins -- there are hundreds of people who haven't been mentioned here who deserve to be written down, lest I forget them at some point in the future.

On a hillside in stunningly beautiful Purchaman district, Eastern Farah; the truck laden with Afghan Police and Guam guys hadn't been able to handle the grade, and this photo was taken from the window as we drove past them. The Staff Sergeant in the front, one of the SecFor leaders, has an uncanny knack for catching my eye during painfully long meetings and giving me a wink as if to say -- man, I'm glad it's you and not me who's stuck taking notes.

Out with the old, in with the...

2010-10-20T21:15:00.000+04:30

It's RIPTOA season here at PRT Farah. A RIPTOA -- that's Relief in Place/Transfer of Authority -- happens whenever one military unit transfers out and a new one swoops in to take their place, and they've been happening around me with alarming frequency.

The Italians at PRT Farah were the first to go, with the 9th Alpini replaced by some numbered division of Lagunari, the Italian equivalent of the Marines. The Alpini, who wear awesome but kind of ridiculous feathered fedoras with their formal uniforms -- part alpine woodsman, part keebler elf -- were nice enough guys, but aside from hobnobbing with their commander (a tall and handsome Colonel with a gracious, gentlemanly manner) when we both ended up at the Governor's compound, I rarely interacted with them. The entire compound was invited to their TOA ceremony, though, and would've seemed rude not to see them off, so I went to see what sorts of pomp and circumstance they may have on offer.

I was pretty excited for it. Tragically, though, I've been toying with the idea of running an on-compound marathon and Fridays (our only day off) have by necessity become my distance day, so I ended up going more or less directly from running 20 miles in the desert heat to the TOA ceremony with only a brief shower in between. Consequently, I spent most of the ceremony sitting in the back of the tent trying not to pass out and wondering when it would end. It definitely featured a lot of exciting military parade-type things, like presenting arms and standing at attention, as well as repeated occurrences of a lot of soldiers simultaneously thundering out one word -- it sounded like "Sa! Ba! Do!", which I would translate as "Sat! ur! day!" -- but beyond that it's hard to say exactly what happened. There were a lot of speeches, but the sound system was rigged through tinny speakers that sounded not dissimilar to the drive through at any given fast food joint, and I was too busy taking deep breaths and trying not to throw up to decipher when they were speaking English vice Dari or Italian.

(I later asked an Italian what they hell they were barking out when they all shouted in unison, but he told me in rough-shod English that he hadn't shouted anything -- that only the Lagunari and not the Alpini had been shouting. I tried again -- "right, but what were the Lagunari shouting?" -- but he just thumped his chest and shook his head and said "I -- no Lagunari," and I decided it was best to just let it drop).

Given my physical duress and complete inability to pay attention, I found the Italian TOA to be unsatisfying. I was consequently excited to invite myself along when the PRT commander decided to drive up for the TOA up at RC-West headquarters in Herat, to witness the Italian General whom I'd met a few months prior RIP out and be replaced by another General whose name I never caught. (The military chain of command in my region is something I should know inside and out, and the gaping holes in my knowledge frankly make me question my own bona fides).

We left at five for the drive up to Herat. It's not easy to sleep in the back of an MRAP -- strapped into a five-point harness and wearing a heavy Kevlar helmet -- but I can sleep under any circumstances and napped through the trip, waking up only briefly to stare in rapture at the camels that I still get giddy at spotting. We had car trouble and made it into Camp Arena with only minutes to spare before the TOA, which actually turned out to be ideal because it meant less sitting around and waiting for the thing to start. We were positioned in the back with other Americans, behind the speakers, and I was determined to find out what the Italians were shouting.

But the RC-West TOA was a more staid affair than the one in Farah, with a good handful of speeches but no shouting at all. The sound system was clear, though, and I took notes on what was said, partly because I wanted a record and partly to force myself pay attention. The speakers included the departing Italian General, multiple Afghans, an American 3-star who had flown in for the event, and finally the Italian Minister of Defense, a towering, enormous man in blue pinstripes. They all covered roughly the same ground -- the commitment of the soldiers, the progress that was made, a recognition of those who died, and a nod to the task that still lies ahead. Aside from two dizzyingly fast and powerful-looking fighter jets called Tornadoes screeching by to punctuate the ceremony, it was business-like with little pomp.

(The ceremony was followed by a reception with significant quantities of food and few plates, and I and the PRT's Senior Enlisted Advisor spent the time passing a plate back and forth between us and raiding the smoked meat and Italian cheeses, and I crammed dozens of stuffed olives and fried artichoke hearts into my mouth: such things do not exist in Farah).

The back-to-back Italian TOAs are a harbinger of what's to come: the current PRT, under the command of El Comandante, will RIP out and be replaced by another PRT in just two scant weeks. Everyone here is leaving -- Captain Firepower, Lieutenant Moneybags, and all the rest of the cast of characters will be headed home or to their onward assignment. I'm dreading their departure -- as far as teams go, they're all outstandingly easy to work with, and El Comandante and I in particular have an easy, unspoken synergy that we fell into immediately upon my arrival.

Mercifully, the advance party of the new team has arrived, and they're equal parts laid back and easy to get along with, the kind of guys you'd like to go get a beer with if that were an option here. I'll be with them more or less to the end of my time in Farah, with them ripping out at about the same time that my replacement is slated to arrive.

It's hard not to be sad at grand departure, though -- everyone is busy packing, and some people have countdown calendars with only single-digits left on them. The post office has been jammed with people mailing home boxes of stuff, and I've been on the receiving end of seemingly dozens of half-used bottles of shampoo and moisturizer and the like. Two days ago I snagged a 500-pack of Q-tips that I was desperate for, and today I ended up with a bottle of Creatine powder just for having been in the right place at the right time.

Getting free stuff is always nice, but it only kind of blunts my desire to shriek out take me with you! when people start talking departure logistics in meetings. I know this feeling will pass once the new team is on the ground, but for now, I can't help but find myself pacing the conference room, wondering if there's any extra room on the C-130.

Culture Clash

2010-10-01T20:08:00.000+04:30

A not insignificant chunk of the training we go through before arrival focuses on the differences in culture between State and the Military. You can divide us into two opposing columns: we're passive-aggressive; they're hyper-confrontational. We tend to be egalitarian; they focus on rank and discipline. They keep a tidy desk; we live in squalor. Physical fitness matters to them; if we had push-up tests, we'd lose the vast majority of our service. Few foreign service officers smoke; the military loves its cigarettes but REALLY loves its smokeless tobacco.

Having been good friends with the Marines at my last two posts, none of this was new to me. I was a little surprised at how many people here use tobacco products -- everyone smokes cigarettes, all the officers smoke cigars and it seems like every enlisted man has a hunk of chaw in his mouth at any given time -- but beyond that nothing surprised me.

"Foul language," we were told, "is another area where the military isn't like the civilian world. You can expect that the language will be a little salty." This also wasn't news to me -- but I must say that I'm surprised at the the degree to which it's rubbing off on me. I wasn't particularly saintly in my speech habits before this deployment, but I also can't remember ever having dropped the F bomb in a staff meeting. Here, that's closer to de rigeur.

All of this is to say that I anticipate that the language in this blog will continue to go downhill. I don't anticipate studding my writing with obscenities, but as I continue to quote the people around me, the likelihood of using foul language goes up. It is, I suppose, one of the lesser-mentioned dangers of living and working with the military.

Chariots of Fire

2010-10-01T19:56:00.000+04:30

Herat is a self-drive city, and I spent the five days of last week's conference being driven around by an amiable but high strung development advisor who's directly embedded with a military maneuver unit. He's got a Peace Corps gone rogue type demeanor, and he had the habit of referring to the military only as GI Joes: "I'm sharing a bathroom with 80 GI Joes," he said. "How many GI Joes you got sharing your bathroom?"

RoguePeaceCorps's style of driving toed the line between aggressive and manic, and he punctuated wild turns of the wheel ("you see how off this alignment is?") with long strings of full-throated but unconventional invective, directed mostly at pedestrians and stray dogs that tried to cross the street. "Shitdog! These kids have a death wish! Son of a … bastard!"

Self-drive is liberating, but there are upsides to riding in steel-plated convoys driven by well-armed Guamanians. Chief amongst them are that we don't get lost (we roll with a fancy GPS system and have a direct link back to an operations center) and we don't deal with checkpoints, since it would take a lot of bravery and some pretty heavy artillery to even attempt to stop a Cougar.

Because we don't deal with checkpoints, I have no idea how they work. It was clear in Herat that there's a system, but it was opaque to me -- sometimes we would dart around the traffic that was waiting at the checkpoints, and at other times we'd stop and wait. Checkpoints are universally acknowledged to be the most dangerous places in Afghanistan, and I found it nerve wracking. RoguePeaceCorps, with his predilection for aggressive driving (at times it seemed like he was using both pedals simultaneously, so erratic was his starting and stopping), didn't help things.

On the first day of the conference, we got stopped at an Italian military checkpoint just as the sun was setting, in between the conference site and the base where we were staying. There was a line of heavy trucks to our right, and we pulled into the oncoming traffic lane to pass them when we hit the seemingly impromptu checkpoint. We were waved to a halt by an Italian soldier in front of an armored humvee, its gun turret pointed in our direction. The Italians, RoguePeaceCorps told us, are known for being quick on the trigger, and he was nervous. "They shoot, man, they just shoot -- but we're sure as fuck not staying here till it gets dark," he said. A tiny Afghan car behind us, carrying far more passengers than the vehicle was intended for, tried to swing out onto a dirt track to beat a wide path around the Italians. They too were flagged to a halt. They put their car in reverse and inched back towards the road, but again got a signal to stop.

RoguePeaceCorps was muttering "this is not good, not good" to himself. He called one of the Operations Centers in Herat, but they weren't tracking any checkpoints. He called the Security Officer for Consulate Herat and was told the same thing. It was unclear if the Italians could see the diplomatic license plate strapped to the back of the sun visor on the passenger side, and equally unclear if such things matter to them at all. RoguePeaceCorps kept inching forward, and the Italians shined a high-powered flashlight in our direction to signal that he should stop. He pounded on the wheel. "What do you want me to DO?" he shouted.

"Those are dazzlers, right?" my USAID colleague from Farah asked me half-jokingly, half-nervously. "You know what comes next, right?" He was referring to the brief we have to sit through in Farah before every mission we go on; some slides never change, and the Rules of Engagement slide is one of them:

You have the inherent right of self defense. You must have positive identification before firing. Do not fire on historical sites or lines of communication. Escalation of force: Step One -- warning. Hand and arm signals. Step two: enhanced warning. Dazzlers.

The Italians were at step two, using dazzlers, and that put us only one step away from step three:

Step Three: Lethal Force. Shoot to disable, shoot to kill.

There's a feeling of helplessness in all of this that's hard to communicate. You're staring at a gun turret being manned by a military force that's considered quick on the trigger, and they appear to have escalated their warnings up to just shy of using lethal force; the driver isn't sure what to do, the sun is setting and everyone's on edge, and meanwhile you're stuck in the back seat while someone else has their foot on the gas pedal. You can't poke your head out the window and ask what you're supposed to do, because the windows don't go down on armored cars and even if they did, putting your head out of the armor and into the line of fire feels like it would be suicidal. You're pretty sure that you'd have ground the car to a halt by this point, but it's still inching forward and you don't have your foot on the gas pedal.

They hit us with the dazzlers again, and RoguePeaceCorps hit the brakes definitively. My heart was pounding. The Italians seemed to be waving us off the road onto the dirt path the local car had tried to take earlier. "I think they want you to go around," someone said. "Through fucking IED land over there? No fucking WAY, man!" RoguePeaceCorps responded. The local car that had tried to veer off earlier cut through the brush. We stared at the Italians, and they continued waving their hands and signaling with the dazzlers that we should be moving. Not moving seemed as bad as moving. My heart was still pounding.

We waited a few minutes more, and cars from the other side of the checkpoint that has also been directed around started arriving at our side. "If they made it without blowing up, we should be ok," RoguePeaceCorps said. We pulled off and eased our way through the scrub. We passed by the checkpoint and saw that the humvee blocking traffic had indeed had a 240-Bravo with its muzzle pointed directly at where our car had been stopped. It was guarding an Italian truck that had broken down and was stopped with the hood popped open. We made it back onto paved road and sped back to base, arriving before sunset.

Journalists have accused US forces of seeing the war through the periscope of armored vehicles, fully unaware of ground truths because we are unwilling to put ourselves on the streets without a significant protective layer. People in Herat say that being in a self-drive city is liberating, with the freedom to go wherever they want or need at any time without the advance notice required to scramble a convoy. I can see where both of them are coming from, but at the end of the day I have no complaints about having a military escort and an inch of steel between me and the outside world.

Blatent Plagiarism

2010-09-21T16:47:00.000+04:30

I don't intend to turn this into a photo blog. I've always been more of a writer than a photographer (I am aware that I have little skill with a camera), and my favorite blogs have always had more words than pictures.

That said, between the elections, Burn a Koran Day, and the PRT's own internal travel schedule, I've been swamped, and the last thing I've wanted to do when I get home is sit down and write. I keep telling myself I'll catch up, but it's unclear when that's going to happen.

I'm sprinting off again tomorrow to a conference that will be interesting from a work standpoint, but that will also be something of a mini-vacation inside Afghanistan. I was asked to give a presentation on political reporting, which has been a good chunk of my baileywick here in Farah. I made a powerpoint as a matter of course, but since powerpoint is the worst medium on earth, I kept the words to a minimum and included a photo on each slide. The majority of the photos were stolen from our PRT's photographer, Senior Airman Paparazzi. He's an incredible photographer, award winning within the military, and stealing from him is far better than wading through the thousands of bad photos I've taken here.

I keep telling myself that one of these days I'll catch up on writing. In the mean time, though, I thought I'd toss up a few of Airman Paparazzi's photos from our recent trip to the farflung mountains of Eastern Farah, as a placeholder until I actually get around to writing about it. None of these are necessarily representative of the district we were in -- but they're such perfect photos from a composition standpoint that I can't tear my eyes away from them.

In advance of the elections, these sorts of posters were everywhere. They each carry the candidates name and photo, a brief statement, and the candidate's number and symbol, a common practice in countries with high illiteracy rates.

This policeman was one of several guards posted during the district shura we were attending.

The huge cloud of dust is from a helicopter landing in a dirt field, not an explosion. I had exited a different helicopter in advance of this one landing.

Way better than United. Even in Business Class. Seriously.

2010-09-19T21:38:00.000+04:30

I've been traveling a ton lately. After riding several different aircraft, my previous suspicions have been confirmed:

Blackhawk is the only way to fly.

Terry Jones and the Unravelling of Sanity

2010-09-13T15:28:00.000+04:30

The end of Ramadan and Eid-ul-Fitr coincided with the anniversary of 9/11, which likewise coincided with International Burn a Koran Day. The timing couldn't have been worse.

Eid-ul-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan, the holiest month in the Islamic calendar. Ramadan is the month in which the Koran was descended to Mohammad via the angel Gabriel, beginning in roughly the year 610, in a cave on the outskirts of the city of Mecca. ("Descended" -- nas'l shud -- is the verb in Farsi used when describing the process by which the Koran was revealed to Mohammad). The name Koran, or Qur'an, means "the Recitation," and derives from the first word of the first chapter revealed to Mohammad, the opening of Sura 96:

Recite! In the name of thy Lord and Cherisher, who created --
created man from a mere clot of blood.
Terry Jones, the fringe pastor with a congregation of about 30 people who drew the world's ire with his Burn a Koran Day plan, is proud to say that he's never read the Koran.

My personal thoughts on Burn a Koran Day are unimportant, though I fully agree with the Secretary's statements that the whole idea is disrespectful, intolerant and divisive, worthy of being condemned. The whole thing is coupled with more of a shaking sense of outrage, a disbelieving, head shaking, how-dare-you sort of wrath, for both the idiotic act of burning Korans and for the direct disregard for the lives of thousands of people around the globe. I am not surprised that appealing to reason ("what you're doing is offensive and wrong") -- didn't get much traction, but it honestly makes me clench up in anger that Petraeus's appeal to conscience ("you're putting our troops directly into danger") was equally ignored.

(Quoth Captain Firepower: "If I ever meet that guy, he's gonna get his jaw broken. I believe in free speech, but if you're gonna say some stupid shit, you've gotta be able to take a fist for what you believe in.")

Burn a Koran Day echoed through Afghanistan, and Farah was no exception. It took a few days for the news to reach us -- word travels slowly to the Afghan hinterlands -- but when it did arrive, it resulted in protests, mostly in the outlying districts. If Burn a Koran Day had actually taken place, it would've been much worse, Obama and Petraeus's denunciations thereof notwithstanding.

As it was, it was nerve-wrackingly tense -- not from a personal security standpoint (I have great faith in our FOB's perimeter defense), but just from the idea that SOMETHING might happen. Any of the would-be situations that might have occurred in conjunction with Burn a Koran Day would ultimately have been a lose-lose us. That something could have been riots outside our gates, or major protests in the city, or a heavy-handed police response or warning shots gone wrong, or even just a roiling mass of angry people that eventually shouted themselves out and went home peacefully; even in the best-case scenarios have no upsides for us -- none of it would have inched Afghanistan closer to self-sustaining stability, or improved the lives of anyone or upped the standing of the Afghan Government or America in the eyes of the Afghan people. That, more than anything, is what Terry Jones does not understand about his idiotic Burn a Koran Day publicity stunt: that in pointlessly infuriating Muslims around the globe, he has not only endangered our lives, but also made a nearly-impossible job that much more difficult.

Burn a Koran Day was cancelled, but there were still isolated protests around the province. We were overrun with requests for information on them, and I spent the day trying to figure out what was rumor and hearsay (2,000 people, spun into a frenzy by during prayers, three people killed) and what we actually knew for certain (200 to 300-person protested outside a NATO Combat Outpost; four wounded by warning shots fired by Afghan police, one of whom later succumbed to his wounds), and fielding questions from the Embassy and DC about what was happening.

The protests largely fizzled after a day, and September 11th itself, the National Day of Remembrance, was quiet. There was a memorial service on compound at 8:46, the time the first plane hit the north tower. It was held in front of a hand-made memorial with a sculpture of the towers made of plywood, painted grey and adorned with flags and a timeline of the events of 9/11; just in front of the towers was a rusted chunk of twisted metal, taken from the towers themselves. The memorial was made by two army Captains (one current, one former) who lost relatives to the World Trade Center on 9/11 -- a father who was a New York City firefighter, and a brother whose office was on the 101st floor. It all comes full circle: from New York to Afghanistan, where it all started.

As far as call signs go, it could be worse.

2010-09-07T21:30:00.001+04:30

I'm behind on blogging. I've been running ragged for the past few days, ankle deep in meetings and reports, and traveling a considerable amount both inside and outside the province. There's a lot to write about, but there's also a lot that can't be said on the blog; hopefully I'll catch up over Eid.

Eid -- that is, Eid-ul-Fitr, literally "the celebration of the breaking of fast" -- is the three-day holiday that's coming up roughly this weekend, to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Muslims spend the month abstaining from food, drink and tobacco from sunrise to sunset, and it's always a difficult month, even if you're not fasting. Work days are generally cut in half for most Afghans, making it hard to get things done, and you can't help but feel bad for people sweltering during the long summer days without even water to drink. There's an oblique sense of guilt that accompanies having lunch or slugging back a surreptitious diet soda, even if it's only done in the privacy of the compound where few Afghan eyes can see.

We held an Iftar last night, the traditional celebratory meal eaten at the end of a day of fasting during Ramadan. It was a huge event -- a dinner for over 50 Afghans, held outside on rented carpets intended for weddings. We catered Afghan food (cinnamon-spiked basmati rice, whole roasted chickens, a side of meatballs and Afghan flatbread), and supplemented it with food from the chow hall that we know our Afghan counterparts enjoy but rarely get -- beef stew, fish in a lemon-butter sauce, chicken fingers, and a side of sweet corn.

About half the guests, just after breaking the fast. People were still arriving as the sun set, and most of the Americans were still outside greeting people.

It was a beautiful event, made more so by a lucky streak of perfect weather -- no driving dust or sandstorms, just a light breeze and relatively cool temperatures. It took the entire team to put it on -- security ringing the perimeter, and everyone else pitching in to do whatever needed done -- helping set the "tables" (carpets on the ground, covered in traditional Afghan eating cloths called dastarkhuan), or plate rice and meatballs, or lay out sodas. I was a little panicky about the entire event, and my constantly calling audibles left Sergeant Charlie (a Vietnamese-American who labeled the fridge in the Civil-Military Operations Center with a sign that reads "replace the water you take: Charlie is watching you") referring to me as "Bridezilla."

I will concede that I was picky on things like soda distribution -- I wanted them all in a cooler, not set out at individual places; who can know if our guests want an orange or a strawberry flavored Fanta, or a regular pepsi or a diet? I also had a lot to say about the placement of table cloths and the distribution of rice and fish and chicken fingers; the person tapped to be in charge of food, a Navy culinary specialist with a degree from Johnson and Wales (Petty Officer Frying Pan, if you will, although I'm reserving the right to change that nickname at a later point in time) was thrilled with my micromanagement, let me tell you.

Regardless, Bridezilla will stand by many of his requests: "can you move the MRAP so it blocks that broken down car up on blocks right in front of the entrance?" and "can that Air Force girl ditch her M-16 somewhere before the Afghans get here?" hardly seem unreasonable to me.

The Commander of the PRT (El Comandante, if you will), greeting an Afghan entering the FOB.

Pie in the Sky

2010-08-26T08:01:00.000+04:30

The weather in Farah since my arrival has been blue skies and hot wind, with the relative clarity of the day depending on how much dust the wind kicks up. Everyone has commented on how cool it's been relative to before my arrival, with temperatures in the 100s but never topping 110 and only one day that was so truly brutally scorching that it felt like the earth had moved closer to the sun.

We've been hit by a series of sandstorms over the past few days, with wind whipping through the valley and driving fine sand into your eyes, the dust blotting out the mountains in the background. It's still hot, but the sun feels dimmer in the mornings. Flights have been grounded, and you can't help but feel constantly unclean from the layer of grit that accumulates in your hair over the course of the day.

It's been about a month since I've seen clouds. There are, on very rare mornings, a few wisps of cirrus off in the distance above the mountains, but for the most part the sky is an empty blue. There's just not enough moisture.

This morning the sky was completely clouded over with ominous grey storm clouds, the first I've seen in a month. It actually made me a little panicky, and I thought about going back to the barracks and waiting it out -- like clouds were enough that work would be cancelled due to inclement weather. "It looks like it's going to rain," I said to my coworkers. "It won't," they replied. "It already rained this year, and you missed it."

Here today, Guam tomorrow.

2010-08-25T21:49:00.000+04:30

The Med Unit held a Combat Life Support -- CLS -- refresher for the SecFor guys a few days ago, and they let me tag along to try to pick up some pointers. I had gotten a two-day intro to CLS before I came to Afghanistan and loved it, and I was grateful that they let me sit in for the refresher even though I was never officially certified. It also shows a certain willingness to pitch in during emergencies rather than just being cargo; "good that you're trying to be more than just self-loading baggage," the XO said.

The SecFor guys can't shake their happy-go-lucky nature, so CLS class was a quick classroom refresher followed by an hour of cavorting in the sun for the practical exercise. The classroom time really just sought to reinforce the need to tourniquet early and often, although I did learn a few new and exciting medical nuggets. For example:

-- If bullets are still flying, everyone -- including the medics -- should be shooting back. "The single best medicine on any given battlefield is FIRE SUPERIORITY," we were told.

-- All CLS certified personnel can put in IVs. Generally speaking, CLS-certified personnel shouldn't bother putting in IVs, since too often people get distractedly obsessed with doing so and the patient bleeds to death while they're looking for the vein. (I never learned to put in IVs; doc promised to teach me if I swing by the Med Unit).

-- Don't get shot in the chest. That's really the big take home message of combat medicine. If you get shot in the chest, you'll probably end up with a sucking chest wound, and then air will build up in the chest cavity, and then the medics will have to stab you in the chest, through the ribs, with a gigantic, 14-gauge hollow needle to relieve the pressure so your lung doesn't collapse. "You'll thank them," the instructor told us. I'm not sure I believe that.

After classroom time, we walked down to the running trail. It was a perfect day for hanging out in the dust practicing medicine -- sunny and clear, hot with just a little bit of breeze. We split into groups of five, and I invited myself along with four of the Guam guys rather than sticking with the one other civilian who'd been in the training. The Guamanians bring a laid-back, fun-loving island attitude to everything they do, and it made it hard to recreate the actual stress of real-world combat medicine. "Trust me," the instructor said. "Doing this during actual combat SUCKS."

We started at the tourniquet station, but it was a little chaotic as people were still dividing into groups and figuring out where they should go, and we weren't sure if we should start or not. "Do you have any questions about tourniquets?" the instructor at the station asked. No one did. Before anyone could practice putting one on, the medic leading the training shouted "ROTATE! GO! GO! GO! Combat HUSTLE!"

My group took "Combat HUSTLE!" to mean "sprint between stations," and we did -- the Guam guys shouting GO! GO! GO! GO! GO! the entire way.

We arrived en mass at the stretcher station. "That sergeant over there is down and needs a stretcher!" the instructor said, waving towards a guy reclining in the dust. "Go get him!" The stretchers are stored folded into a small square, and getting them extended out to a usable format is apparently difficult; you have to unfold it, pull on it, and then twist the handles simultaneously to get a flat platform on which the patient can rest. The Guam guys wrestled with it for about 20 seconds when another group (slower than ours -- they apparently didn't get the "combat hustle" memo) showed up. "Looks like we're double booked," the instructor said. "You guys can go ahead and rotate."

As soon as she said the word rotate, the Guam guys started shouting "GO! GO! GO!" again, and we were off, sprinting like idiots. The instructor for the next station was standing next to mound of dirt, not unlike a snow-fort you might make if were living in place that had snow instead of several inches of hot dust on the ground. "All right!" said the instructor. "One of you has been shot in the chest!" I clutched my chest and threw myself theatrically into the dirt, hyperventilating. "I've been shot in the chest!" I shouted. "DAKOTA'S BEEN SHOT IN THE CHEST!" the Guam guys shouted. "Bang bang!" said the instructor. "They're shooting at you!"

One of the Guam guys grabbed me from behind, sliding his arms under my armpits and lifting me from the shoulders; another grabbed my legs at the knee, and the two of them picked me up more or less effortlessly and carried me behind the dirt pile. They dropped me and then joined the other guys, who were peering over the top of the dirt pile with index fingers and thumbs extended, pantomiming shooting and shouting "bang bang bang bang bang!" (Only one of the four pantomimed holding a rifle; finger pistols were the order of the day). "Ok!" shouted the instructor. "Treat the patient!"

They got out a kind of bandage made of plastic called a chest seal ("wounds from neck to navel get a piece of plastic"), pressed one to the front of my chest and the other to the back where the exit wound would be. "Anything else?" the instructor asked. "NEEDLE DECOMPRESSION!" they shouted simultaneously. (One thing's for sure: you can't fault the Guam guys for enthusiasm). They got out the ridiculous needle for chest decompression, counted down the correct number of ribs, and then indicated they'd stab it in right there. "Good," said the instructor. "Not good," I said. "You didn't say anything about anesthetic."

"ROTATE!" they called, and off we sprinted.

The next station was on pressure bandaging. "Your buddy's bleeding heavily from the arm and leg! Fix him up!" the instructor said, waving to another instructor lying on the ground. Two of the Guam guys sprung into action, one with an Israeli bandage (a wrap with a piece of plastic embedded in it to act as a fulcrum for putting pressure on wounds) and the other with quick-clot laced bandages and an ace wrap. It quickly appeared to devolve into a competition to see who could use the most gauze, resulting in a mummy-like conglomeration that may or may not have been effective stopping blood flow but that was definitely fun to look at. "We would've just tourniqueted him anyways," they said.

Pressure bandaging was the last stop, and all the groups came back together; it had been a fun training and everyone was in a good mood, laughing, drinking water, and standing in the shade of the ambulance practicing different ways of carrying patients. "Fireman's carry!" they shouted. "Assisted walking! Doberman!"

"What's the Doberman?" I asked. "Well, you get down on all fours and straddle the patient," I was told. "He wraps his arms around your neck, and you drag him forward on all fours, like you're a doberman." One guy threw himself on the ground to demonstrate, lying face up on his back in the dirt. The other guy got down on all fours on top of the patient, as promised, and the patient put his arms around his neck and interlocked his fingers so he could be dragged forward. The medic took about single step, dragging the patient about a foot. The patient shrieked and let go -- apparently the act of dragging him had filled up the seat of his pants with a good amount of hot, fine-powder dust.

"All right, listen up!" the lead medic shouted. "We're not done! There was an IED attack! We've got a MasCal! The patients are just over that hill -- GO! You've got FIVE MINUTES till the med-evac birds get here!"

(A MasCal is a "MASs CasuALty event." The wonkiness of the abbreviation had never occurred to me until I typed it out).

We all ran over the hill, and all the medics who had previously been stations instructors had arranged themselves in various positions. I was in the first wave that scattered to deal with patients, while a second wave ran off to get supplies. I took the farthest patient, a guy who'd pulled his foot up into his pants to simulate losing a foot. I took his tourniquet from him -- everyone carries a first aid kit for the medics to use; you in essence carry your own medical supplies to be used on yourself -- and put it on his leg as instructed, as close to the joint as possible.

"Too high," he told me. "For a foot wound like this, you'd want it lower, so more of the leg could be saved once they got me into surgery." I moved it to below the knee. The lead medic came up behind me, stopping briefly to grab a shoe ("Didja lose this?" she asked the patient) before heading over. "Tourniquet's WAY too low," she told me. "Put it as close to the joint as possible." I looked at the patient and he looked sheepish, and I moved the tourniquet. Just then, two helicopters flew over head. "The birds are here! Move the patients! GO GO GO!" (The helicopters weren't part of the training; it just so happens that the running trail abuts one of the helipads, and the trainers got lucky in the timing of the landing).

A Guamanian ran up with a stretcher. They loaded the patient on and then started jogging him towards the ambulance. "Combat speed!" they said, promptly dropping him into the dust. "Try again!" they shouted, hauling him back up and, eventually, wobblingly, over the finish line.

CLS training was outstandingly fun and a good little refresher of how to use everything in the med kits we all carry, but I largely put it out of my mind until I got an email this morning, asking if I'd mind if Public Affairs used my photo in their newsletter. They try to find bizarre looking photos for the newsletter and then have people write in with captions for them, a la the New Yorker. A shot of me and one of the Guam guys sprinting between stations had been chosen. "Everyone," they told me, "will appreciate what appears to be a random civilian being chased by a crazed Guamanian."

I for one look forward to the captions.

So Much for That "Fitness" Merit Badge

2010-08-22T15:22:00.000+04:30

I vowed before arriving in Afghanistan that I'd leave in better shape than I arrived. With not much to do in the evenings except hit the gym, it seemed like departure with a respectable physique was in the bag. But I was in the SecFor office just two days ago when I stumbled across an entire case of Tagalongs -- the chocolate-covered, peanut-butter filled shortbread girl scouts cookies. Tagalongs, as far as I'm concerned, are god's food, perfect in every way. I could make a meal out of Tagalongs, if doing so wouldn't cause your heart to explode out of your chest and deflate on the table in front of you. "Who do I need to beg for one of these cookies?" I asked.

"Dude, just take a box," Captain Firepower* told me. "They're not anybody's. We've got cases lying around -- they just show up in the mail. The girl scouts are…" (and here he grinned) "…very patriotic."

So I took a box and devoured a quarter of it on the spot, fingers covered in the outer chocolate made soft by the desert heat. But then that whole fitness goal came back to mind, and I guiltily decided to drop the rest off in the office next door to mine, where they had previous complained that my predecessor was a "net subtractor" from the office snack pool. "Be an adder, not a subtractor," they had told me, and Girl Scout cookies seemed like the sort of thing that would make me a hero and ensure that I could continue pilfering from them for the foreseeable future.

I strolled into their office brandishing the cookies and announced that I had great news. "I brought some Tagalongs," I said with flourish. "You'll note that I'm being an adder, not a subtractor."

"Oh god, more Girl Scout cookies?" they said. "There's a whole case of them under the TV. We put them away when we all started to get fat." I examined the area under the TV, and sure enough there were some 20 boxes of Girl Scout cookies -- Samoas, Do-si-Dos, more Tagalongs, a few flavors I hadn't even seen before. I ripped open a box of Samoas (my favorite!), shoveled two into my mouth at light speed and then put the rest next to the Tagalongs. I was almost dizzy at the idea of an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of free Girl Scout cookies.

And now it's two days later. I've eaten more cookies in the past 48 hours than I probably have in the last two years. My Grand Master Plan involving healthy living and plenty of push-ups has largely been supplanted by a world where Girl Scout-endorsed shortbread products almost literally grow on trees. The guys next door have vowed to put the cookies away ("damn you for bringing these out again," they said), and part of me is hopeful that they will; the other part of me, though is wondering why anyone would bother striving for visible abdominal muscles when there are Thin Mints to be had.

*Captain Firepower is the plucky young captain in charge of ensuring we've got enough firepower on missions. I'm moving to a nickname only policy in this blog.

In Memoriam

2010-08-20T20:49:00.000+04:30

There was a casualty on August 17th, the first since I joined the PRT. He was a member of EOD, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, the bomb squads made famous by the movie The Hurt Locker. He was on the team called when three IEDs were found in the Shewan district of Bala Boluk, where I had been just a few weeks prior; he had apparently defused one of the bombs and then picked it up to move it to another location for a safe, controlled detonation, as is common practice. It exploded, killing him instantly.

I had seen him around base but can't say that I knew him -- we had never spoken. Press releases said that he'd previously won a purple heart in Iraq when the shockwave from a bomb had perforated his eardrum, leaving him deaf on one side. He was, by all accounts, well liked, and a lot of the members of PRT had hung out with him. Even without having known him, it's hard not to be affected by the quiet, almost disbelieving sense of loss on base. There's always hope that he'll be the last, but I can't imagine how I'll take it in the future if it happens to someone I know. He was two weeks away from finishing his tour.

His name was Derek. He was 24 years old.

Annie Get Your...

2010-08-17T19:31:00.000+04:30

Every trip off base is considered a mission, and every mission is preceded by a convoy brief. Much of each brief is repetition, and my favorite part that's always repeated is the slide on the "principles of fire control." The first bullet points, high at the top, instruct one to destroy the greatest threat first while avoiding target overkill -- "one shot, one kill, hooah? Hooah." The final bullet point, way at the bottom -- almost like a suggestion or a plaintive request -- is to avoid fratricide.

("It should go without saying," the Commander told me when I asked why it was so low on the list. "But you did say it," I pointed out. No change to the slides).

During the Embassy in-brief, they remind gun-qualified people not to carry on compound unless they're specifically part of the perimeter defense plan -- to avoid not fratricide, but rather "a blue-on-blue incident," a euphemism I find pleasant.

Every uniformed American is required to carry a gun at all times except while exercising. For most people that's either an M4 or M16 rifle or a pistol worn in a holster under the armpit, strapped to the thigh or tucked into their waistband. A few unlucky people are stuck lugging around guns that are large enough to require kickstands to operate, like the 240B ("two-forty Bravo"), and it's odd to see them in essence hauling a large piece of machinery around with them to the chow hall or laundry room. Odder still is to see a rifle dangling by its strap on the towel hooks outside the showers, or the barrel of a rifle poking an inch or two out from under the shower curtains that partition off the stalls in the restroom.

The Lieutenant in charge of giving out money ("Lieutenant Moneybags"), next to a pile of guns.

The Bases of Greater Herat

2010-08-15T20:35:00.000+04:30

It took five hours to cover the 250 kilometers between Farah and Herat, the cultural capital of Afghanistan and home to mosques, minarets and my boss. I had been pretty excited about the trip for a number of reasons, not least of all being that I was finally going to get to see the fabled Blue Mosque of Herat. I'd been scheming to get to said mosque since my failed efforts to sneak into Afghanistan while traveling after my junior year in college, when I was a carefree idiot and the Taliban were still in charge.

But of course I didn't make it to the Blue Mosque -- which, I discovered after some mournful googling, is actually called the Jumah ("Friday") Mosque, to avoid confusion with another Blue Mosque in Afghanistan, in Balkh province in the north. I didn't actually make it into Herat proper at all: our trip was exclusively to military bases on the outskirts of the city, first to Camp Stone (run by the Americans, with a chow hall that stocks both excellent onion rings and non-alcoholic beer), and then on to the heart of things at Regional Command West (RC-West, if you will) headquarters at Camp Arena, co-run by the Spaniards and Italians.

It was definitely an interesting trip, tagging along with the Commander of our PRT to his meetings to provide the governance-focused civilian view on things. We had scores of meetings, the most important of which was with the general in charge of RC-West -- a stately, handsome Italian one-star named Claudio Berto who looks exactly like you'd expect an Italian general to look. After years of working at huge embassies (tiny cog, enormous machine), it was definitely odd to be one of two people sitting down with a general in charge of thousands and thousands of soldiers, and to have my opinion matter to him.

I am slated to head back to Herat in September, and am determined to see the blue mosque come hell or high water. In the mean time, I was more than content with a truly excellent pizza, a half dozen espressos crammed into a 24-hour time frame, and a ride home that happened to pass by a small herd of wild camels.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

2010-08-10T21:48:00.000+04:30

I made it just over two months without trimming the hair on my chin. The photo above, helmet hair and all, is the end result of that effort: a decently commanding and certainly respectable beard. Afghans approved.

But the long hair on my chin was remarkably annoying while wearing a helmet -- the two-pronged chin strap curls the facial hair back under and makes your whole face itch. I also felt like the beard was getting some pretty unattractive 3-D puffiness to it that had to go.

I'm headed off to another city tomorrow to meet my boss. He's about 250 kilometers away from me, and I've been in country almost a month without having met him; the beard trimming was in no small part an attempt at respectability in advance of that meeting. The base he's located at is run by the Italians and is known for its pizza and excellent chow hall; I've only been in Farah about three weeks, but I can't pretend I'm not excited about that.

I do feel oddly naked with most of my facial hair gone, though, and a resurgence may very well be forthcoming.

Dust and Soil: Bakwa

2010-08-09T20:35:00.000+04:30

Yesterday I went to my second province outside of Farah City Center: Bakwa.

"Ah, you're going to Bakwa, eh?" said the Doc. "It's, um, pretty bleak." "Bakwa?" said the coarse-mouthed First Lieutenant in charge of giving out money. "That place sucks balls."

I was again tagging along with our Ag guy, who was going to hold a shura (an Afghan community gathering, like a town hall) to discuss deep irrigation wells. I wanted to talk elections -- just to check the pulse in a rural area and see if anyone had any interest whatsoever.

Bakwa is very much a disputed district. The Marines have put in a lot of effort, but it's still a toss up on security, and some of parts of the district still have distinct Taliban leanings. There's little water but excellent soil, two conditions that make opium an attractive cash crop, and the district is one of the major poppy producers in the region.

This is what they're fighting over:

Taken from the window of a Cougar on the three-hour, forty-kilometer drive to Bakwa.

It was admittedly not all so bleak as that, and there were the odd splashes of green and a few strategically placed mud huts here and there. For the most part, though, it was wide open nothingness.

Also from the window; touched up to remove a bit of the glare, which definitely upped the color.

It was 120 degrees when arrived at Bakwa's district center, a sun-baked, trash-filled empty lot; I exited the Cougar next to a pile of burnt cans and chicken feathers, next to some cast-off concertina wire. We were in the "city center," though in reality there is no city, and not much of a district center, either. People come in from time to time to have meetings, but almost no one lives there, and even the village opposite is abandoned. The Marines, at the request of the populace, kicked out the Taliban and fixed up the central bazaar, but there are few merchants and even fewer shoppers. "We cleaned it up for you -- there's a butcher, a baker, some shops," they said during the shura. "If you don't shop there, the merchants are going to give up and go away."

The parking lot.

The actual district center, where shuras and meetings are held, was reasonably nice, filled with chairs and carpets; twenty five Afghan elders were waiting inside to talk about deep irrigation wells.

The entrance to the district center. The red words on the right read "in the name of God;" the white on the left is the beginning of the words "Welcome to the peaceful city of Bakwa."

Doc had warned me that every time he goes to Bakwa he ends up getting mortared; the Marines are fully tuned in to the sound of rocket attacks, and I was set to be the first one to hit the deck the second they shouted "incoming." But they never did: the population of Bakwa, no matter their political bent, wants deep irrigation wells more than anything. Ag (in lieu of his name, I'm going with his position) explained that at this time, the PRT can only fund twenty wells, and that the district leader, in negotiations with individual villages, would be in charge of determining where they would go. Farmers would be required to swear that they will not use the wells for opium production. Ag acknowledged that twenty wells isn't enough for everyone, but it's a start.

I briefly talked elections (a topic on which I will say nothing until after they take place on September 18). Our Marine liaison officer reminded the elders that continued funding for projects -- like the solar street lights previously installed, the upcoming deep irrigation wells, and a potential future program for fertilizer distribution -- were contingent on the continued support of the people for the Government of Afghanistan, and not the Taliban.

And then we had lunch. Bakwa is known for its wheat and Afghans, to the fullest extent of their ability, are definitely foodies with surprisingly refined palettes; stone-ground Bakwa flour is considered to make better bread (Indian-style naan, cooked quickly in a hot clay oven) than what's found in Farah city. The bread accompanied chicken and potatoes in an tomato-lentil sauce, and was indeed better than what we have in the city. ("Our bread tastes like feet," said the First Lieutenant, "except when it tastes like potting soil.")

Quoth the Gunny of the Marines: "this is a hundred dollar meal. You believe that? I gave them a hundred bucks. For this. WHERE'S THE RICE?" It appeared that the organizer of the shura had absconded with the remainder of the money, and I seconded the gunny's feeling: Afghan rice is ridiculously good.

I wandered outside to take a few more photographs (SecFor followed close behind; "you're not allowed to wander off alone, sir"). We weren't attacked or shelled, we got some work done, and I got a couple photographs of a pretty desolate place.

I secretly love this picture.

And that was that.

Fields and Canals: Shewan

2010-08-06T18:11:00.000+04:30

My first trip out of Farah city was to Bala Boluk (literally "Upper Block") district, due northeast of our FOB. We were headed out to a series of villages near the town of Shewan to check on some USG-funded water projects -- a stream diversion project to keep the Farah river (the "Farah Rud," in Pashto) from eroding a town wall near Shewan itself; a dam-like "superpass" that will facilitate irrigation near the town of Tahksirak, and another canal-related project in the village of Shia Jinggal.

These villages are tiny, and there's no hope of knowing where they are. You won't find them on common maps of Afghanistan, and I include the names here only because I find them mellifluous and pleasant-sounding. Because of the Farsi influence, almost all place names have the stress on the last syllable; Shia Jing-GAL, Tahk-sirAK. Farah is no exception -- it rhymes with "hurrah," not with Sarah.

I was tagging along with our Department of Ag rep, a soft-spoken, good-natured Texan with an easy smile and a light southern accent. He's pleasantly self-effacing, but with a comprehensive knowledge of all things agricultural, he's arguably the most important civilian in bucolic Farah: he knows when and how to organize seed distributions, what sorts of fertilizers to hand out, how to drill wells and run irrigation lines. The link between poppy sales and Taliban funding makes poppy eradication and replacement high on the list of USG priorities; the PRT does a lot of Ag outreach.

The road to Shewan is paved for the majority of the trip, making it a relatively pleasant and quick jaunt through dusty fields of nothing -- about an hour and a half to cover about forty miles. The city itself used to be firmly owned by the Taliban, but the Marines booted them out and the PRT was quick to move in with quality-of-life projects; the waterworks that we were headed to are part of that.

We were supposed to meet the contractor in Shewan's city center and follow him to the stream diversion project, but he no-showed us. We tried to call him, and then to get through to him with the help of our Afghan assistant. No dice. The Lieutenant who's generally in charge of doling out money like candy notices that trucks -- tiny little Mazda pick ups -- were passing by laden with rocks, and he flagged one down. Through a Pashto translator, he determined that they were going to our water project. They agree to let us follow them; some officers from the Afghan National Police (the ANP) came along as well.

Here was the problem: we were not in cars. We were not in armored cars or up-armored Humvees, which themselves are pretty massive vehicles. We weren't even in MRAPs, Mine-Resistant Anti-Penetration vehicles, heavy trucks with a V-shaped bottom that explosions deflect up and away from.

We were in Cougars.

Cougars are massive vehicles that appear to be made from converted tractor-trailors, draped in inches of steel and so fully blast-resistant that insurgent rarely bother to waste their explosives on us, preferring softer targets. (If you look closely in the picture below, you'll note that SecFor has attached a Guamanian flag somewhere on each of the Cougars -- either on one of the antennas, or under the covering on the gunner's turret). They're enormous.

We were off the road for about four minutes when we got stuck.

I wasn't sure what was going on; generally speaking, the passengers are forbidden from getting out until the door is opened by SecFor. There aren't a ton of windows in the back of a cougar, and the five-point harness seatbelt keeps you pretty firmly tied down. And it's pretty unlikely that I, the least handy person on earth, would be of much help.

They eventually tied the bumper to the front of another cougar and bump-pulled it out of the gulch it was stuck in. We pulled into the riverbed of the Farah Rud -- it dries up in the dead heat of summer -- and drove to the project.

It was 110 degrees at 11 in the morning, but the project hands were happy to see us, and they pointed out what they'd done. The project is a community effort involving something called gabions -- strong, four-foot wire baskets woven by women in the cities and then filled with rocks by the men; they're stacked to create walls to divert the stream. Having women weave the raw materials for the project and the men provide the labor makes both genders stakeholders in the project -- something rare in Afghanistan. It also ups the number of people involved, providing both livelihood and a means of occupying otherwise idle paws.

A policeman, friends with one of the workers, pointed to a distant building across the flat, rock-strewn brush. "The Taliban were there two days ago," he said. "They shot at us, but we wounded two of them." I asked if they planned to stop work because of the threat and he shook his head. "They're always threatening," he said. "They told even told the shepherd to stop taking his goats around. They're not reasonable."

We walked down the bank of the river for a bit, past a massive marijuana field that probably covered the area of half a football field. Aside from the tiny plants that grow wild on the compound of US Embassy Islamabad -- DEA assured us it was low quality -- I'd never seen it cultivated before. "This is nothing," said the plucky captain in charge of ensuring that there's enough firepower on each of our missions. "It'll be shoulder high in a few months." He's in the army and by extension not a pot smoker, but he exudes West Coast and I don't doubt him.

Despite supporting agriculture projects in the hopes of finding viable alternatives to growing narcotics, the PRT is not in the business of drug enforcement. Dealing with a half a football field's worth of pot -- which, our translators assured us, is likely only for personal use -- is well out of our jurisdiction. We walk away.

The next project is in Shia Jinggal and as we're pulling up, the gunner leans down from his seat and calls out, "just so you know, sir -- this isn't exactly a friendly neighborhood."

Shia Jinggal is an ancient sun-baked mud-brick village with a single narrow street running the length of it. It was beautiful, albeit spare; I cursed myself for forgetting my camera. The surrounding area was lain with opium fields, harvested a few months prior; there were poppy stalks drying for next year's seed at the entrance to the village.

It was eerily empty, completely silent except for the sounds of our footfalls. "Anybody home?" called out one of the SecFor guys. Nothing. They pulled in tight around us. "This," I was told, "is definitely not the village to take your helmet off in."

We walked through the village without seeing anyone, ending up at a stream running behind it. There was an emaciated cow on the bank of the river, and piles of clothes left by women who had been doing the washing but run to hide at the approach of soldiers. The call to prayer sounded behind us.

We kept walking. The stream curved around the wall of the village, and there was a massive dog, an angry Afghan mastiff, chained to a tree and barking furiously; he threw himself at us but caught on his chain, yanking backwards each time and making himself angrier than before. "If they didn't know we were here before, they do now," SecFor said. We kept walking.

The project, headworks for a new canal, hadn't started. The Ag guy pointed out where it would be, but it was obvious that the no work had taken place. Eagle-eyes SecFor spotted a man in the fields, staring as us. They kept a close eye on him, I looked for him, but never saw him. We walked back.

In the stream near the village, three old men with long white beards were performing their required ablutions before prayer: feet to above the ankles, hands to the elbows. We tried to ask them questions, but they waved us off, focusing on washing. We walked back through the village, still empty and silent, creepy beyond any speaking of it.

A pack of kids was waiting at the entrance. There were probably twenty of them, none older than 13 or 14. They stared at us, silent and hostile. "Give us something," one called out. "Candy."

The lead for SecFor, an enormous Guamanian with close-cropped hair and a thin mustache, whirled around and moved in close to the pack of kids. "Do you remember the last time we were here?" he asked. "Last time, when we gave you pencils and candy? Do you remember what you did? Ask them if they remember," he told the translator.

And then pounding his chest, a wall of towering, furious muscle, he said hissed out "I remember. You broke the pencils, and you threw them at us. And rocks, too. It doesn't matter if you remember, because I do. I don't forget."

And then to the translator: "You tell them to think about what they did last time. And tell them that we'll be back, and maybe next time we'll think about giving them something, when we're damn good and ready." And he stalked back to the vehicle. I have never been so happy to leave a place.

In the vehicles, we debated moving on to a third locale. The day had already gone long because of difficulties in locating our destinations, but the Ag guy said he knew where the final village was -- a third of a mile walk from a washed out road where we'd stopped before. They asked me if I was game. "As long as it's less hostile than Shia Jinggal, then absolutely," I said.

The vehicles dropped us in an empty spot near the highway where a small dirt road quickly became impassable, cut with a ditch from a dried out stream. We started hiking, leaping the ditch and then continuing on past hip-high corn fields fed by low irrigation ditches. The walk took maybe ten minutes.

The canal works were in beautiful, a tree-lined grotto adjacent to a walled village. The concrete for the first stage of the canal had been poured, and a few kids with bare feet and sun-bleached hair were working on it halfheartedly. The military assumed the brunt of the work had stopped, as is traditional, because the mid-day heat is too brutal to work in.

A passing goat shepherd waved to us, and a few old men came out to greet us. "Welcome to Tahksirak," they said. A pack of kids came out to talk to us, to shake hands and hang out; it was infinitely more relaxed than Shia Jinggal -- pleasant, even, in the shade of the trees next to the running water. I took off my helmet; some of the kids grabbed for it, and I rapped it with my knuckles, pantomiming that it can stop bullets.

The elders pointed out what work had been done, and thanked us; they were grateful for the canal. We asked if they'd had any problems with the Taliban, and the oldest looking of the group, with a long, white beard and thick round glasses, kicked his sandaled foot into the air. "I'll stomp them myself if they try to come here," he told us. The engineers took photos for their reports, and I waved my goodbyes to the kids. The elders shook our hands and told us to come back any time, and they clearly meant it. We were maybe five miles from Shia Jinggal.

Background Info: Subnational Governance.

2010-08-01T20:18:00.001+04:30

Before I get any further along, I think it's time to dig a little bit into the subject of Sub-National Governance -- that is, the structure of local politics in Afghanistan.

Doing so is terrifying for a handful of reasons:

1. It's complicated as hell and I'm pretty likely to get some things wrong, which is bad because it's in no small part my job to know and understand this stuff.

2. It's entirely possible that I'll get all wrapped up in the subject (I won't lie: this stuff turns my crank) and get carried away, and in the mean time the few readers of this blog may slip into a coma at the how dry the material is.

3. Saying too much or (worse!) editorializing on the topic would put me WELL out of my lane and get me thumped on the head. And I nobody wants that.

With that in mind, here's a quick sketch of how the politics of Afghanistan functions at the provincial level:

At the top, you've got the Governor. As you might expect, he's in charge. Here's the thing, though: the Governor is not an elected official. He's appointed by the President, and he's not necessarily from the same province he's appointed to. It's as if Obama were allowed to choose the Governor of, say, Georgia, and it wouldn't be unexpected for him to pick a Michigander for the post.

The Governor isn't democratically elected, but the Provincial Council or PC is. In Farah, the PC is nine people, and it's mandated by law that a certain percent -- a third, I believe -- be women. They're the elected representatives (at the Province level) and are sort of a conduit for the cares and concerns of the people whom they represent.

Here's the thing, though: neither the Governor nor the PC have a budget to work with. There is, in fact, almost no such thing as a Provincial budget. Ponder that for a minute: if the Governor or the Council want to build a road or a school are accomplish any of the other millions of things a functioning local government does, they have no money to do so.

When things need to be accomplished, it's up to the Provincial Line Ministers, also known as Provincial Department Directors, to make it happen. In order for them to do so, THEY have to contact Kabul to get the money. So the Ministry of, for example, Education, has a guy on the ground who's the Province-level head of education, and he -- or, very occasionally, she -- has some money that comes from Kabul for opening or closing schools or what have you. It's not a lot of money, because the nation of Afghanistan is pretty cash-strapped as of now, although obviously that big mineral find of a few months ago may change that.

So, if the Governor and the PC determine that they want, say, a road built, they can't just authorize it. They have to work with the Line Minister for Rural Rehabilitation and Development, who himself may have to lobby Kabul for funds. It's supposed to something resembling checks and balances, though it's hard to say how effective the checking and balancing actually is.

Being wholeheartedly American, it's easy to come in and try to Monday morning quarterback the whole arrangement and "fix it" with a bent towards democracy as we know and love it: have the Governor be popularly elected, give him a budget and the PC veto power, tie PC seats directly to districts so there's some semblance of geographic representation, and move on from there.

But the part that's easy to overlook that we so firmly lack in America is that the physical geography of Afghanistan is overlain with an extraordinarily complex human geography called tribalism. Tribes are generally associated with (but aren't strictly limited to) the Pashtun majority. They tend to end in 'zai, the Pashto word for "sons of" -- the Popalzai and the Barakzai, the Nurzai, Alizai, and Achakzai, what have you. There are tribes upon tribes, and (because it's not already complex enough), there are also sub-tribes to contend with.

By definition, an election means that there are winners and losers, and in a tribal environment, that would translate directly to a win or loss for an entire tribe. Accusations of corruption in elections would be magnified by the stakes involved in getting one's own tribe elected. By bringing in a Governor from another province, entrusting ministers from Kabul with the budget and having them be advised by a group of locally elected officials, you reduce the influence of tribalism in the distribution of public goods. It's not perfect, but it does, to a degree, make sense.

Wheels Down

2010-07-30T21:42:00.000+04:30

When the flight from Kabul breaks through the clouds over Farah, it does so over a vast expanse of nothingness. The ground is an ocean of red mud studded with occasional mountains, and there's neither greenery nor people as far as the eye can see: no trees, no villages, no roads or houses or signs of life. There's no water, either -- nothing but flat, dusty, hard-baked red clay nothingness. As you approach the PRT (in a small 18-seat prop plane too small to stand fully upright in, flown by Australian contractors), things don't improve much. You pass a few dusty walled compounds, zip by more mountains, and just when you think you may be moving vaguely in the direction of civilization, the ride ends and you suddenly come in for a landing.

It's beautiful, though in a stark sort of way.

I was met on the tarmac by the entire civilian crew of the PRT, who helped me drag my bags out of the airplane and load them into the back of an armored Land Cruiser. We dropped off the bags in my temporary quarters -- a bedroom with room for three, though I was the only occupant -- and then I was taken to my new office.

Amongst my favorite Chinese expression -- and one that I find myself using here all the time -- is, "The sky is high, and the emperor is far." Nowhere has that phrase been more applicable than in my new office. "This box," I was told, "has all the servers in it, so don't spill anything on it. The computers break down all the time so you'll need to call IT in Kabul and have them walk you through how to fix it." (Fiddling with servers when you're at an embassy is, generally speaking, frowned upon). And then, far more comical: "Those boxes are all parts to your Land Cruiser. You'll definitely need to replace the battery and probably do some other repair work as well." I didn't realize I was getting a car -- much less an armored one -- but it just goes to show how far the Emperor really is: if I were in Kabul, there would be a hundred employees and a thousand different regulations standing between me and "light repairs" on an Embassy-owned vehicle.

They gave me a windshield tour of the massive compound, which seems to go on for miles. "One thing we don't lack for," I was told, "is open space." The base is sprawling and full of identical, unlabelled buildings; I anticipate being lost frequently. There's plenty of room to run and a long jogging trail next to the airstrip, which itself abuts a long range -- that is, a mortar range. The air in Farah in July usually hovers around the 120 degree mark (it was a balmy 105 on my arrival -- "when is this cold snap going to end?" asked the XO), so the range is generally in use before the day gets too hot; I was told to anticipate waking up to the sound of outgoing mortars.

We swung by a military staff meeting so I could be introduced and then hit chow -- lasagna night, not a ton of healthy food but definitely not bad lasagna, and all the ice cream you can eat at a price -- $0 -- that can't be beat.

I spent a few hours talking to the guy I'm replacing about everything I could think of -- who the movers and shakers in the province are, which areas are Taliban controlled vs. not, all the way down to the nitty gritty like how to do laundry on base. (You drop if off with in the laundry with a yellow ribbon tied on the bag to indicate "civilian clothes;" it gets washed and folded and returned, usually the same day). And then it was bed time.

The next morning started with a convoy brief, the meeting in advance of travel to make sure everyone is on the same sheet of music as to where we're going and how we're getting there. The meeting is run by SecFor, or Security Forces, who are there to protect the members of the PRT, both civilian and military. The SecFor team in Farah is an instantly-likeable group of happy-go-luck guys from Guam, enthusiastically upbeat and outgoing to a man. Half of them responded to roll call with an enthusiastic army Hooah, and when I was introduced as the new State guy, they were the most welcoming of the bunch. Convoy brief is largely for the SecFor themselves and for routine missions is mostly a review. At the last slide, left on the screen for half a second at most, the SecFor lead noted -- "really, if you don't know this stuff by now -- that's as wrong as two boys kissing and the Pope watching."

And then I was taken to meet the Governor.

So here's the deal: I am thirty years old. I have a batchelor's degree in worthless from a second tier university (possibly even a low-ranked first tier university, depending on who you're talking to and whether they graduated from the same school as me). I have about six years of work experience with the Department of State, and of those six years, three have been spent in language training (thank you, US taxpayers). Prior to State, I worked as a contractor to the United States Department of Education, where I was primarily in charge of unjamming the Xerox machine, though occasionally my boss would entrust me with a dollar fifty to go get him diet cokes. What I'm saying here is that I'm a mid-level functionary in a large government bureaucracy. And I'm here to help.

And all of a sudden I'm in the fourth largest province in Afghanistan, a province that covers an area about twice as large as Maryland. It's got just under a million people, which puts it on par with Montana, population wise. It produces some legit agricultural products -- a lot of wheat, some pomegranates, some grapes and corn and a few other things -- but it also produces a heck of a lot of poppy. Of eleven districts, one (Purchaman, which literally means "full of orchards") is accessible only by air; a second, Gulistan ("the land of flowers"), is three days drive away due to lack of infrastructure, despite how small the province is. Some areas are fully under the control of GIRoA; others are still wrestling with the Taliban, and laid over top of all this is a complex map of Pashtun tribalism. It's mind-blowingly complicated.

And the Governor wants to meet me, because I am replacing a person with whom he has built a slow and steady relationship over two years, whom he trusts and turns to frequently for advice and counsel, and I am somehow supposed to take over that role.

I think I'm up for it.

Obviously there's more to say on this topic -- this will be a year-long saga -- but it's bed time. After a week, I finally got internet installed in my room, so more regular posts should be forthcoming. In the mean time, to everyone who emailed to check if I was ok during the long silence -- not to worry.

Onward and Upward: to the PRT

2010-07-23T22:22:00.000+04:30

Tomorrow's the big day: deployment to my PRT in Farah province, in the southwest of the country along the Iranian border. Sandwiched between Helmand province in the south -- famous for its opium production and home of the big Marine Corps offensive in Marjah -- and Herat, a relatively stable province in the north, Farah is truly the middle of nowhere.

I was surprisingly productive during the extra days I was stuck in Kabul. I spent a few days checking in -- making sure all the IT stuff worked, filling out paperwork to get my danger, hardship and language pay correctly lined up, collecting equipment for the field and getting reinforcement lectures on embassy policies, security, what have you. Admin type stuff: important but mind numbing.

And then I had consultations. "Consultations" are usually 5 days just before you leave for post during which you're supposed to be meeting with people who know about where you're going and may be useful in your future; in reality, those five days are rarely so productive as all that and generally involve a lot of leisurely latte drinking. But my consultations in Kabul were actually useful: meeting with people who either know about Farah or want to know about Farah, or who have too much money lying around and need someone to help them hand it out before the end of the rapidly approaching fiscal year.

I was introduced to a USAID guy who had just come back from Farah. He, a former Marine with a booming voice and an infectious oorah-enthusiasm for the province, gave me the full run down on everything he could think of: what kind of projects we've funded and in what areas, where the Marines are and where they're pushing, where the Taliban is more in control and the Government of Afghanistan (GIRoA, or the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, pronounced "Jie-rowa") is less in control, and vice versa. He pointed out rivers and mountains, major transportation links, and gave me a rundown of how the various Pashtun tribes are distributed.

He made me extraordinarily excited to be heading to Farah.

"Get a good look at all these plants now, though," he said. "All this greenery -- there's NOTHING like that out there."

So tomorrow I head out to my dusty corner of nowhere, to the military base pictured below, surrounded by miles of flat nothing in the hot Afghan desert for the next year. ("It's beautiful. Kind of. In a way," I was told). I'll be with about 500 American soldiers and 500 Italians, sandwiched between peace in the north and full-scale war in the south. I'm nervous, but in a first-day-of-school sort of way: will the Governor and other local leaders like me? Will I get along with the soldiers? What if there's something important I've forgotten to do? Ultimately, it will be fine. In 24 hours, it will be home.

And just for good measure: a few photos of Farah, culled from the internet.

Pashtun no more?

2010-07-22T07:12:00.000+04:30

The quest for a commanding, Pashtun-style beard may be coming to a rapid close: this morning I shaved the neck portion of my facial hair and I feel infinitely better. The rest may need to be trimmed down shortly.

The Kabul Conference and Clinton

2010-07-21T11:16:00.001+04:30

So, Clinton was here.

The Secretary walking in with Ambassador Eikenberry. Probably not my strongest photography ever.

Let's try a different shot.

This photo is perhaps even worse than the last one.

So, despite my not so good photography of the event (I'm sure my parents are thrilled that they dropped a bazillion dollars at Christmas to get me the camera that recorded that moment for posterity), it was still cool to see Clinton. I'd like to think she came just to see me, but the reality of it is that she came for the Kabul conference, the single largest donor conference to take place in Afghanistan in a good fistful of decades. The whole world was here, it seemed -- Clinton comes with an understandably large staff, and and there were Foreign Ministers from dozens of countries, each with their own entourage.

(Through a series of coincidences, a buddy of mine ended up sharing a car with the Egyptian Foreign Minister. "Did you talk to him?" we asked over dinner last night. "A little," she said, "but what was I going to say? Lecture him on bringing democracy to the Middle East?" She, tasked with note taking but inappropriately badged to get past the hordes of security, spent the majority of the conference in the parking lot).

The conference basically shut down Kabul, including the US Embassy. Most of our local staff were off and consequently most non-essential/non-conference support sections were closed. The commissary and coffee shop on compound were likewise shut and the Embassy felt like a ghost town: everyone was sucked into working.

The conference is the reason I'm still in Kabul. I was slated to fly out to the field more or less ASAP on a regularly scheduled Embassy flight, but all of our planes were grounded for the big event.

(The Embassy, through the offices of USAID -- the Agency for International Development -- owns and operates an airline for domestic flights in Afghanistan. Formerly known as PRT Air (Provincial Reconstruction Team Air), Embassy Air owns and runs over ten aircraft and operates in all provinces of Afghanistan on both a regular schedule and charter basis).

I had exactly nothing to do with the Kabul Conference. I kept waiting to be tapped on the shoulder and asked to go take notes, but it never happened. That's not hugely surprising -- as a field officer, I'm assigned to a section of the Embassy (IPA, or Inter-Provincial Affairs) that had nothing to do with the conference, and it's rare for one section to poach from another. And I was in the check-in process, which is somewhat sacred since if you don't do it, you can't function in your job -- you'll lack computer access, and info on who to contact for what, and your pay won't be right, and what have you. On top of all that, about half the world was flown in TDY (that is, on a temporary basis), so there were plenty of hands on deck besides mine.

But I did get to hear Clinton speak, in the main lobby of the chancery. She thanked the Ambassador for his hospitality ("Ambassador Eikenberry," she clarified jokingly. "I mean, you guys have a whole STABLE of Ambassadors here." She's not kidding -- there are five people of Ambassador rank at the Embassy, with six if you also count SRAP Richard Holbrooke, the President's Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan).

She thanked the Americans working in Afghanistan and then gave a special thanks to the Afghans who work at the Embassy, recognizing that doing so often puts them at risk. She joked about conditions at the Embassy -- she seemed to know that housing is the number one morale issue at post -- and gave us a quick rundown of her participation in the Kabul Conference and the document that Karzai had presented to chart the way forward.

In short, her brief remarks (maybe five minutes total) made her seem both extraordinarily competent (she's clearly up on all things Afghanistan, as one would expect) as well as extremely dialed in to what's going on for all of us on the ground. Little things like acknowledging the housing situation and thanking our local staff for putting themselves in harms way made it clear that she wasn't giving a standard set of remarks. Bottom line: I remain completely enamored of my boss.

That's all I've got for now (more on the process of checking in at the Embassy in a day or two). But in clearing off those photos of Clinton from my memory card, I also came across a few photos of me from training, including this awesome shot in body armor, so I'll close with that.

Both rugged AND enthusiastic. Perfect for match.com? Oh yes.

Rockin' the Kabul Look

2010-07-18T18:06:00.000+04:30

There's definitely a US Embassy Kabul look. And that look, amongst the men at least, definitely involves facial hair. I've had a beard since 2006, where I grew it in Pakistan as a joke but kept it once I realized how much I liked it. Beards were definitely making a comeback in DC over my last year at home, but not like here: EVERYONE has at least a little bit of scruff, and I for one am feeling right at home. I don't plan to shave much, if at all, over the course of the next year, and when I mentioned my plan to grow what I lovingly refer to as a "hostage beard" to some guys at the Duck and Cover, someone immediately chimed in with advice:

"Dude, get some scissors," he said. "You've got to trim the mustache part. I had about three months worth of facial hair on me when I bit into an apple, and a good inch of 'stache got caught between my teeth and the apple, and I about ripped off part of my face. I was honestly near tears -- and when I pressed my upper lip to try to make some of the pain go away, my hand came away all bloody. You can go all ZZ Top on the chin part -- but get yourself some scissors for the mustache."

The Embassy Kabul look also features khaki cargo pants (which I invested in heavily) and polo shirts. There's a slim minority at the Embassy sweltering in suits in the 100 degree heat, but the majority seem to be rocking polos.

The Kabul look also seems to involve sidearms carried in thigh holsters.

I've never been around so many guns and I think it's gonna be a while till it starts to seem normal. Some of it isn't too out of the ordinary -- the contract guards carrying M4 rifles and the Afghan National Army guys holding AK-47s, and that's all fine and good and close to normal, especially within the context of Embassy and foreign and all that. But then you realize that the barricade in front of you, the one you've walked by a dozen times without thinking, is actually a machine gun nest. And it's actually manned, by a guy with his hand on the butt stock of the weapon: this isn't a game.

More people on compound carry guns than I've ever seen before. And it's strangely comforting. I'm not armed and don't plan to be at any time (I'll leave that to what my military Subject Matter Expert in Indiana referred to as "our trigger-pulling friends in camouflage"), and diplomats are, technically speaking, forbidden by the Geneva conventions from carrying weapons. I'm not sure how much regard the Taliban will have for my healthy working knowledge of international treaties and vast array of intimidating ballpoint pens, though, so I can't say I'm unhappy to have so many people at arms distance who have a pistol strapped to their thigh.

Equipment Distribution

2010-07-17T11:09:00.000+04:30

Before you go to Afghanistan in general, but in particular before you go to a PRT (that is, a Provincial Reconstruction Team -- the reason I'm headed to Farah), everyone's got advice on what to bring.

Definitely bring a flashlight and a leatherman; you'll constantly need to do light industrial repairs. Be sure to bring a sleeping bag, and you'll need a backpack for overnight missions. Buy a hand-held GPS so you can give coordinates if you need to call in a medivac. Definitely bring a kindle; no, don't bother with a kindle -- you'll never have time to read. You'll need chemical lights. Don't forget granola bars and other high-energy non-perishable foods. Unless you're keen on bleeding to death, purchase and carry a tourniquet with you at all times.

And so on: everyone's got something that they couldn't have lived without when they were in the field in Iraq, or that their cousin told them they wished they'd left at home when he deployed to Afghanistan, or that their fiancee asked them to mail while they were supporting a PRT, or whatever.

Today was gear distribution today, and I was under the impression that we'd be getting body armor and a helmet (made entirely of kevlar and called, appropriately, a "kevlar"), and maybe a laptop to go with it, although maybe not since maybe the guy I'm replacing already has a laptop and maybe I'll just take his.

And so I was quite surprised when the packing list of gear they distributed took up more than one page, with half of the things I'd been told to buy and a lot of which I'd lugged from home handed over for free by the Embassy. For posterity's sake, I'm going to include the whole list here, in the hopes that it may help other people who are headed to PRTs in Afghanistan with their planning and save them from purchasing and hauling over a lot of unnecessary gear.

Embassy Provided Gear:
-- Body Armor (including plates) and Kevlar Helmet
-- A laptop (with the promise of a second laptop later), with mouse.
-- 8 port ethernet router
-- 500 gig external hard drive and an 8 gig memory stick
-- Digital Camera with 4 gig memory card
-- Iridium Satellite Phone
-- Ballistic Sunglasses, including both tinted and clear plastic lenses.
-- Hand-held Garmin E-Trex GPS device
-- Fireproof Nomex flight suit
-- Fireproof Nomex protective gloves
-- Sleeping bag
-- Backpack
-- Leatherman multi-tool, including a carrying case
-- First Aid Kit, in a camouflage bag that can be worn on a belt
-- Water purification tablets
-- A "rescue flash" signal mirror
-- A "heat sheet" space blanket
-- Chemical light sticks
-- A keychain-style "microlight" flashlight
-- A flashlight, in a carrying case
-- A miner-style headlight flashlight
-- Trauma shears/medical scissors
-- Ear plugs
-- A big, plastic, rolling "gorilla box" to carry it all in
-- Padlock for the gorilla box.

The only recommended item they did NOT/NOT include was a tourniquet.

And now I'm off to mail home an unnecessary sleeping bag and other crap I no longer need.

Arrival in Kabul

2010-07-16T18:00:00.000+04:30

With the exception of immigration officers, no one working at Kabul International wears a uniform -- not even a name badge. This makes it hard to know if the person in jeans and a sporty striped shirt demanding information actually needs to know where you work or if he's just shady and wants to know. Likewise, the guys pushing carts and trying to help you with your bags -- they could be freelancers looking to make a couple Afghani, or they could be airport provided, or they could be someone else: unclear. There was a pack of foreigners -- 90 percent of the plane, it seemed -- trying to fill out the supposedly mandatory registration forms. Guys who might've been working (without uniforms in a chaotic environment, it's surprisingly hard to tell who's a worker and who's a hustler) asked where I worked, and when I whispered US Embassy, they waved me forward: no forms required.

My bag, an enormous military duffel that's far too large and will have to be scaled down, miraculously arrived. The guy from USAID's bags arrived as well and I was glad he was there: two Embassy people meant double the chance of a ride actually showing up. We grabbed rickety carts (the right wheel of mine was ellipse shaped and rolled like an egg going end-over-end) and pushed through, and a guy just beyond baggage claim was there holding an American flag sign. It turned out I had nothing to worry about: the Arrivals and Departures Unit at the embassy is massively organized, and unbeknownst to me I was one of something like 8 people arriving on that flight.

They led us to cars, past a large sign reading "NO WEAPONS" with a Kalashnikov with a crossed red circle over it. In the parking lot there were large police cars mounted with huge UN-style antennas that arc from the back the front bumper, where they're tied down when not in use, and the sides of the cars were stenciled in Dari with Poliis dar hidmat-e-mardum, "Police in Service of the People." Our drivers distributed body armor, triple checked that everyone was accounted for, and drove us into the city.

I was expecting Islamabad -- a sort of leafy green sleepiness with groups of men clustered around markets but the streets relatively empty and dotted with the odd donkey cart. Instead, it was Beijing: packed beyond any speaking of it. Cars were everywhere, veering down the wrong side of traffic, honking, pushing forward with little regard for traffic laws. Pedestrians were everywhere, seemingly with no regard for self preservation, leaping into traffic without looking and appearing to throw themselves in front of our cars. (A friend who works in Saudi told me that most Islamic head coverings eliminate peripheral vision for women, and I couldn't help but wonder if they could even see us coming). It was rush hour and the streets were packed with truly massive numbers of people milling around, almost what you'd expect to see outside of a stadium during a major sporting event in the States.

We passed checkpoints manned by guards carrying what appeared to be snub-nosed AK-47s. (The AK has a distinctively curved magazine that's significantly longer than those on the rifles that our guys carry, and that's what I'm going on; despite weapons familiarization, I know almost nothing about guns). It was hot and dusty on packed streets, and in an armored car wearing body armor I felt very conspicuous.

We arrived at the Embassy remarkably quickly and were met on arrival by representatives from Kabul/IPA/FSU -- that is, the bureau of Inter-Provincial Affairs/Field Support Unit. I was taken to my temporary housing (one of three beds in a surprisingly nice building; not the six-beds-in-a-hooch situation I was expecting). I took a deep breath, feeling like I'd made it: I was ok. I brushed my teeth in celebration.

They gave us cell phones ("consider this phone to be part of your uniform; carry it at all times") and had us fill out some paperwork -- standard Embassy forms acknowledging receipt of cell phone, requesting access to the computers, what have you. They gave us a quick tour of the compound, through the Embassy logo store (polos, t-shirts, keychains and other stuff emblazoned with the Embassy logo, as well as, somewhat inexplicably, a selection of locally grown vegetables). We swung through one of two cafeterias, where all food is free for the price of your initials. We passed the pool and volleyball court, and looked through the window at one of three gyms.

The USAID guy peeled off for a welcome dinner with other AID types, and I ate with the guy in charge of my in-processing -- surprisingly tasty chicken teriyaki, steamed vegetables, a pineapple juice box. I swung by the Marine guard to get my Embassy badge (different than a State badge, applicable only to Embassy Kabul) and then walked to the Embassy bar -- the Duck and Cover -- to meet a friend from training for a beer.

The executive summary is that Embassy Kabul looks good to very good. The main chancery is even architecturally sound (I'd include a picture but photography is strictly verboten), which isn't bad given that we're in a war zone. Compound life appeals to me: it's like college, where everyone's around all the time and there's always something going on if you know where you look. Only unlike college, there's a significantly larger amount of danger pay and I don't have to wait tables.

And all of that is good news, because I just accepted a handshake on a second year in Afghanistan, transferring from my post in the field to a position in the Public Affairs section in Kabul. I'm guessing that after a year in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a thousand soldiers and an incredible amount of dust, a swimming pool and a couple hundred like-minded civilians will do me good.

Transit

2010-07-15T23:26:00.000+04:30

Dubai Airport and things are already a charlie foxtrot. I had checked my bag in Dulles all the way through to Kabul ("You can do that?" "We can do that. Trust us."), but Safi Airlines indicated that in order to transfer the bag from United, they'd need the baggage claim number. I had been late for my flight -- it was pouring in DC and my cabbie stopped in traffic and informed me that he wasn't willing to go to Dulles, and I had to beg another cab for a ride, and arrived at the airport late. In the sprint from check in to gate via an intensely slow security line, I lost the baggage claim tag.

"You can't have checked the bag through to Kabul," Safi Airlines told me. "They don't do that." ("They said they DO do that!")

"We can't locate the bag without the claim ticket," they told me. "Go to the gate and see if you can find it in your bag. You can't talk to United here because they only run night flights, so they're closed until the evening. And you're late, so run."

I tried to run to the gate but got stopped at customs, waved to a separate office where an officer scanned my passport, type type typed something into his computer, stared at the screen, called over another officer, type type typed some more, keyed in my passport number again and again and again, stared at the screen, typed, stared, waited. I had done the same thing thousands of times to visa applicants in Islamabad and karma picked a hell of a time to come back and bite me in the tail. Ten minutes later, near frantic, I was stamped through and allowed to leave. I have no idea what the delay was.

I was flying on Safi International (the name is derived from the word "saaf" and roughly means "cleanliness") and our flight was delayed at least an hour. This was great news, since it gave me a window to locate the baggage claim number. I called United in the UAE; they routed me to the airport baggage desk. "Have you filed a report for your lost bag?" baggage asked. "I just need the tag number," I said; "The bag isn't lost. Yet." "Ok," they replied. "Do you have the tag number? We can't file a report without the tag number."

I tried again and was transferred to India. "Cargo services; what is the nature of the material you'd like to ship?" Try again. "Reservations. Do you have an existing itinerary?" Panting in panic. God only knows what these phone calls cost me, on my US cell phone, roaming on Dubai telecom.

Finally I got through to baggage in the US (via a call center in India), who gave me the number, which I gave to a sparkling gate agent named Sama who was lovely and helpful and with whom I fell instantly in love. "Check back at noon before boarding," she told me. "I'll know then if we've located the bag." I did; they had: everything was ok.

I struck up a conversation with another guy at the airport and found out he was a contractor working in aviation out of Kabul airport. I ran into another colleague -- a USAID guy whom I'd met in Indiana -- and we started talking. The aviator asked what we do and I muttered State and the AID guy said AID, and then all of the training I'd had about loose lips sinking ships kicked in and I got started to get panicky that maybe we should just stop talking because god only knows who's listening. This is the paranoid schizophrenia that State wants us to have, and it was by god driven into me. They kept talking and I couldn't handle it (DID YOU LEARN NOTHING?), and so I put on my iPod so I couldn't answer more questions.

Safi Airlines. I was crammed into seat 24 Bravo; back of the bus, middle seat, sandwiched between two enormous gentlemen.

This is the profile I observed of people traveling to Kabul: heavily American (based on the accent of overheard English) with an added dash of Arabs (guttural Arabic) and only a few Afghans (more Pashto than Dari overheard); amongst the Americans, an almost equal split between white and black; significantly more male than female; stocky to muscular with little in the way of a neck; heavily tattooed. One guy wore a shirt proclaiming When I die, I'm going to heaven. I've done my time in HELL: Konduz, Afghanistan. The "hell" was in flaming block letters; I felt less conspicuous in my jeans and polo shirt.

Tuckered out from my fight for my baggage, I fell asleep immediately. They woke me up for the in flight meal (beef with rice and vegetables, side of mango pudding, definitely not bad), and I fell back asleep until near landing. I woke up as we were starting our initial approach over desolate, red dust mountains and low-slung houses in valleys. Either it was hazy or there was a dust storm, but visibility was limited. We approached, came in for a landing, and then pulled up hard for a second go around, denied landing permission by the tower. We came back ten minutes later, landed hard, bounced twice, and then taxied to the gate.

Welcome to Afghanistan.

Laying the Ground Work

2010-07-12T18:23:00.000+04:30

T-minus 36 hours till I board the plane for Dubai, and I'm more or less hyperventilating at everything I still have to do: hit the pentagon to get the ID card that allows me to eat and shop on base; repack my bag so it's light enough to carry by myself; return my tags to the DMV and cancel my car insurance, as well as my cell phone plan and gym membership. And I need a haircut, and some dental work, and there are still goodbyes to be said.

The process of getting to Afghanistan is far more daunting than the idea of going to war. The paperwork is incredible, so much so that State has hired contractors to help streamline in-processing. There are checklists upon checklists. Things that seem like they go without saying must be specifically requested, and if all the boxes aren't checked, you'll be denied landing permission. Do you need transportation from the airport? Do you need housing upon arrival? Will you be collecting danger and hardship pay? Request them in writing or expect to be be denied.

My favorite piece of paperwork was the gym membership waiver, reminding those of us headed to a war zone that moderate physical exercise can result in injury and the Embassy is not responsible should things go pear shaped. This was on top of the form reminding employees that Afghanistan is a hardship tour and we should be prepared to wear a minimum of 30 pounds of armor and expect our housing to be sub par.

There were weeks of training. My 39 weeks of Dari, the Afghan dialect of Farsi, ended three weeks ago and I'm already slipping, despite spending all my time chattering to myself in broken phrases.

And then there was Indiana, an intensive intro to Afghan village life and working with the US military -- the ins and outs of protective details and how to be protected. It was taught at a mock Forward Operation Base (FOB) in rural Indiana, three hours from nowhere: FOB Panther, named for the local high school's mascot.

The scope of the training was incredible. Groups of 8 civilians, each coupled with one military and two civilian "subject matter experts" (SMEs -- "smees") who had just returned from working in the field in Afghanistan. Each group of civilians was being protected by a small contingent of 6-12 National Guardsmen who'd been called up to spend two weeks learning personal protection tactics, as well as how to deal with the somewhat persnickety animal that is a Federal Civilian.

("We should call this OEF-1," one of the Guardsman said in reference to us and playing off the acronym for Operation Enduring Freedom. "That stands for 'Over Educated Fucks.'")

The bridge between each group of civilians and their protective soldiers was a Sergeant, tasked primarily with training the soldiers but also with making sure the civilians know their role in the game of personal protection -- how to act, how to react, and how to be a help rather than a hindrance.

Our Sergeant was a Scottish immigrant who combined Hollywood-style drill sergeant gusto with a highland brogue. He had for a healthy contempt for civilians, and generally referred to us as "you lot" -- as in, "what YOU LOT forget is that if you ask these people what time it is, they'll tell you how to build a fucking watch!". Having been tasked with molding us into war-ready team members in a scant six days, he was determined to make the best of it even if he couldn't make us do pushups. He was, in short, awesome.

He spent a week berating us into being better protectees, lecturing us about how idiotic civilians always refuse to keep their helmets and body armor on (our military SME later conceded that it would be impossible to conduct a meeting with a helmet on). He drilled into us that if at any time he or another member of the security force barked out the code phrase "Bayonet! Bayonet! Bayonet!" (always three times, to be clear), that we should run for the door.

("If YOU LOT were put in charge of selecting the egress word, you'd probably pick something STUPID. Like 'lunchtime.' If I called out "lunchtime! lunchtime! lunchtime!" would any of you be running?" And then gesturing to a more heavyset member of our group, he added, "Well, except him?")

We practiced "downed driver drills," taking control of armored humvees from the backseat using a throttle control lever on the dashboard. We learned how soldiers communicate by the sounds of their guns -- that certain guns shot for certain periods of time signal a safe curtain in which you can bolt for the safety of the armored vehicle. We were in mock ambushes and mortar and IED attacks, simulated with fake grenades and light arms filled with blanks. I learned, in no uncertain terms, that I am the first to take cover. I confirmed that my fight-or-flight impulse is keyed squarely to flight, and that few people are faster than me. Lacking a gym, I spent my evenings running the perimeter of the base in body armor.

The military had purchased a former mental hospital, and littered the lawns with rubble and the charred, rusted carcasses of bombed out automobiles. Some of the buildings they detonated and some they sledgehammered to make them look old. They covered the walls in graffiti in Dari and Pashto: "Death to America, death to the Soviet Union. The Mujaheddin are the champions of the nation." They hired Afghans as role players, to act as translators and partners, adversaries and devils' advocates. It was as close to Afghanistan as you could be, though lacking mountains and with significantly more corn.

We practiced sitting at a table across from a group of people making demands: the clinic needs money for medicine. The roads are poorly paved and need resurfacing; promise that you'll do so. Your government must pay to refurbish this building; you built it two years ago but already it's falling apart. The point is to focus on the long term, emphasizing sustainability. If we refurbish the building, will it be falling apart again two years from now? What are your maintenance plans and who have you hired to implement them? What resources do you already have that you're not utilizing? There was enormous pressure to cave and promise resources that weren't ours to promise -- State promising USAID money or committing the military to something not within our purview. Our SMEs confirmed that we can expect more or less every meeting in Afghanistan to have an element of high pressure salesmanship to it.

We offered condolences to the family of someone mistakenly killed by a US airstrike. We met with the Governor, the Provincial Development Council, and leaders from civil society and NGOs. We visited a remote combat outpost and considered requests for the expansion of civilian personnel in the outlying districts. We rode a blackhawk, which filled me with a child-like sense of glee. It was like summer camp, only with a lingering sense of dread that we could be attacked at any moment. I have never felt more prepared for an upcoming assignment than I did following the training in Indiana.

And then came a few days in West Virginia, at a State-contracted raceway in the middle of nowhere. First was offensive driving training. How to stop at high speed, reverse at high speed, use your car to ram another car out of the way. How to generally be street aware and keep one's eyes peeled for potential insurgents, car bombs, IEDs, ambushes.

Did I crash the Crown Vic assigned to my group? Maybe. Maybe I lost control of the car while backing up at 40 miles an hour, and maybe I turned the wheel the wrong way and got a little panicky and maybe I slammed on the brakes (in contravention of everything they taught us) and maybe we had a little dust up with a concrete wall. And MAYBE the car stopped working after that and had to be towed off. The world may never know. (My colleague, taking a cue from me that speed kills, practiced escape by reversing at an outrageously slow pace. "Ah yes," I said, "here we are escaping from the terrorists at a nice, leisurely pace." Although by that point, I wasn't really in a position to be making fun of anyone).

Then came explosives familiarization: classes on the physics of explosions, the creation of blast waves and primary, secondary and tertiary dangers of explosions (which are, respectively, the blast itself, the shrapnel caused by the blast, and any impact a person may have with a ground or other objects when lifted by the blast wave). It was accompanied by video after video of things blowing up -- of car bombs and truck bombs and people dying. And then came a demonstration: low explosives and high explosives, det cord (high explosives contained in wire), a blasting cap, TATP (the liquid explosive that prevents one from taking a water bottle though airport security), and finally a lump of C4 about the size of half of bratwurst, stuffed into the ashtray of broken down Cadillac. "This demonstration," I told my colleague standing next to me, "has eradicated my desire to go to Afghanistan." "I was just thinking the same thing," he told me.

And finally weapons training. Three hours of classroom time taught by a firearms loving ex-marine. (My burning question: "With the exception of pulling the trigger, is there any way to make that gun go off?" The answer: an emphatic no). Then two magazines with five bullets each for five different guns; fifty rounds total. I started with a baretta, the service pistol carried by our troops. I waited in line, got to the front, and told the instructor that I'd never touched much less fired a gun and was skittish. He walked me through it: safety on, safety off; magazine in and out; hands here, second hand wraps around, grip tightly, aim through the sights and fire. He was extraordinarily patient. I think I hit the target once or twice.

Moved to the Glock and then on to one of two rifles -- the M4, carried by our soldiers. I repeated my spiel: first time touching a rifle, third gun ever shot, kind of skittish. "Pffft. My fifteen year old daughter can shoot this gun," the instructor sneered. "Ok, that's not helpful," I replied.

Then combat medicine: how combat medicine is different than civilian/EMT medicine (there's more focus on bleeding and hypothermia), how to tourniquet and pressure bandage to stop bleeding, how to treat puncture wounds to the chest to prevent lung collapse. "I know some of you are squeemish about seeing people bleeding," our medic instructor told us before putting on a video. "But this next video only LOOKS gruesome. It's fake. If you look closely you can tell that it's actually just a rump roast that they put into a pair of pants and are pumping fake blood through."

And that was that. Afghan prep: one glorious year, complete.

I finished writing this in the air over the Persian Gulf, off the northern coast of Saudi Arabia. I'm about half an hour from Dubai and less than a day from Afghanistan. I'm more nervous about simple logistics -- will there be anyone at the airport to pick me up? What will my room look like in Farah? Do I have too much stuff? -- than I am about being in Afghanistan. I feel well prepared. I also feel like I have no idea what I've gotten myself into.

The Afghan Plan

Admin post: On Nicknames.

Kabul is a Different Universe.

Out of Farah, into the Frying Pan

Plus ça change...

It's like Budget Circular #1, only for Stories.

And so it ends.

Yeah, yeah

When in FaRome...

Civil Aviation and Desegregation

In Memoriam

It's just not working.

On Formatting, or "Things That Haunt Me"

AFN and the Stars of Farah

Recruiting talent

More Questions Than Answers.

Test

I will gladly pay you Tuesday for ...

The Eyes of the Enemy

Lonely Planet: Farah

Employee Evaluation.

We Meant Well

Admittedly Annoying Habits from Afghanistan

On Wandering

Law and Order: Farah Edition

On Pay Cuts.

Manuary and the Drowning of Farah

Meanwhile, back at the frat pad

Yum yum, Give Me Some

Everything is Illuminated

Expect the Unexpected

Next Step: The Amazing Race

The Grand Return

The Seige of Bologna.

Julebryg and not you.

Foreign Service Vacation Spots

Fear and loathing in...

Side By Side: Vienna and Farah

On Ag and Absence

Change of Cast

Going, going... Guam.

Out with the old, in with the...

Culture Clash

Chariots of Fire

Blatent Plagiarism

Way better than United. Even in Business Class. Seriously.

Terry Jones and the Unravelling of Sanity

As far as call signs go, it could be worse.

Pie in the Sky

Here today, Guam tomorrow.

So Much for That "Fitness" Merit Badge

In Memoriam

Annie Get Your...

The Bases of Greater Herat

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Dust and Soil: Bakwa

Fields and Canals: Shewan

Background Info: Subnational Governance.

Wheels Down

Onward and Upward: to the PRT

Pashtun no more?

The Kabul Conference and Clinton

Rockin' the Kabul Look

Equipment Distribution

Arrival in Kabul

Transit

Laying the Ground Work