More Questions Than Answers.

I'm on R&R. Yes, again.

I felt pretty bad leaving again so soon after my last R&R, a feeling that the military seconded and that Commander Killjoy went out of his way to reinforce ("no one is forcing you to go on leave"). But guilty or otherwise, I think passing up 20 days of paid vacation out of some misguided sense of solidarnoszt with my military colleagues would be foolish. And I needed dental work, a fact I clung to defensively as I bought my plane tickets to Bangkok.

But the guilt has lingered, and Ive been working to make up for it. Mostly I'm getting things ready for my departure, organizing the things I need to pass on to my replacement and figuring out how to best do so. Looking back, it seems to me now that State did a terrible job of preparing us for this deployment, and I'm hoping to pass on enough information that the next crop of officers coming in -- probably not my replacement, but the group that follows her -- can hit the ground with a better sense of which way is up than I had when I landed in Farah.

As the ostensible "governance advisor" to the Province, there were things I should have known before my arrival but was never told and had never thought to look up -- I didn't know what questions to be asking, much less where to find the answers. They taught us Farsi, slapped "Governance Advsior" on our business cards, assured us we were experts and then shipped us off to rural Afghanistan without knowing a damn thing about the place. I spent my first few months waiting for someone in the military to call me out on it -- to shriek out that the Emperor has no clothes and to stop inviting me on missions outside the wire. I think we can do better.

There's an Afghan Area Studies course that goes along with language class -- I referred to it lovingly as "Rise and Fall of the Taliban Parts One Through Seventeen" -- but it was taught by an academic, not by a Foreign Service Officer, and was at best tangentially useful. It focused almost exclusively on the modern political history of Afghanistan, a topic that was often interesting but rarely useful. The course lasted a year and was followed by a completely worthless "Introduction to Provincial Reconstruction Teams," taught by a guy who had spent a year in Herat (a city that resembles nowhere else in Afghanistan), and who mostly just focused on his questionably legal business partnership with a Turkmen-owned dairy factory. ("You'll need to be an advocate for companies like these -- and you might end up a partner in the firm, like I did").

Meetings at the Embassy in advance of being shipped ot to the field were more useful, but Kabul is a busy place and the people we met with were understandably strapped for time. We spent a scant 45 minutes with the Embassy's expert on Provincial and District-level political structures, and it was the most useful 45 minutes of my entire training -- but 45 minutes is only enough time for a galloping overview, hardly enough to get one's feet wet. And I was in receive mode -- I again had no idea what questions I should be asking.

And so that's what I've been working on during this trip: I've been sitting at rickety Thai sidewalk cafe tables, sipping Tom Yum soup and fresh squeezed tangerine juice, and coming up with a comprehensive list of questions that people at the Embassy or back in Washington should be able to answer but that field officers on arrival can't -- unless the other field officers were somehow better prepped than me, which I will concede is a possibility.

What is the form and structure of the Provicnial Governor's Office? What is the assigned role of the Deputy Governor, the Provincial Executive Manager and the Administrative Manager? Who controls hiring for those positions, and how much latitude if any does the Governor have in firing them if necessary? Does the Governor's Office receive a budget beyond the U.S.-funded Performance Based Governor's Fund? If so, how much is said budget, what is the process for requesting it and how much latitude does the Governor have in executing it? What are the budgetary reporting requirements? Who compiles said reports, and with what frequency?

It gets pretty thick into the weeds of Afghan rural governance pretty quickly -- but this is the sort of information that field officers should have at their fingertips. To steal a phrase from the military -- we come in without knowing what right looks like.

What is the form and structure of the Provincial Director of Economy's office? What taxes is he legally allowed to collect, and are the revenues from said taxes returned to the Province, or sent directly to the Central Government? What are the obvious avenues for corruption, and what transparency measures if any are in place to prevent said corruption?

I'm not filling in the answers, though at this point I could answer almost all of the two pages worth of questions I've come up with so far. It took a full year of being knee-deep in the politics of Farah province, but at this point I would indeed consider myself an expert on Afghan sub-national governance. Most of my answers to these questions would start with "it is my understanding that...", but that's a facet of having garnered the information from Afghans themselves, and since the Afghan system of Government is obscenely complex (and designed, it seems, to keep power concentrated in the hands of a few), even they are frequently unsure of the answers.

But it's a start. When I finally finish, I'll pass the list of questions on to State's training center and give a copy to the Embassy so they can better prepare field officers who are coming through Kabul en route to their PRTs. I'll walk my replacement through them and make sure she knows at least as much as I do before I leave. I'm not under the impression that my year-long presence in Farah has in any way made a difference ("You need to be prepared to accept 'my province did not get worse' as a measure of success," we were told during one particularly pessimistic training class), but I can at least try to set up future officers for success.

Lonely Planet: Farah

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

We Meant Well

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

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

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.

The Seige of Bologna.

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.

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

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...

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

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

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.

Out with the old, in with the...

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.

Chariots of Fire

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

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.

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.

The Bases of Greater Herat

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.