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.
Showing posts with label Inner Workings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Inner Workings. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Sunday, June 19, 2011
It's just not working.
(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.
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.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
AFN and the Stars of Farah
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.
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.
Friday, May 27, 2011
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").
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.
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?
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.
Friday, May 6, 2011
The Eyes of the Enemy
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
As far as call signs go, it could be worse.
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Annie Get Your...
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.
("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.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Background Info: Subnational Governance.
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
The Kabul Conference and Clinton
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.
Let's try a different shot.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
