When in FaRome...

So, they built a pizza oven.

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

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

I'm not sure this photo captures the chaos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chief Hammersmith; completed pizza oven.

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


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

Civil Aviation and Desegregation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victory.

In Memoriam

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

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

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

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

It's just not working.

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Formatting, or "Things That Haunt Me"

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

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

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

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

AFN and the Stars of Farah

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

Recruiting talent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Questions Than Answers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Test

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

I will gladly pay you Tuesday for ...

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Eyes of the Enemy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How often did you go to Quetta?

At least once a year.

How did you get there?

By road, and then over the mountains.

Through which cities? On which road?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lonely Planet: Farah

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

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

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



Typical Rural Scene in Southern Afghanistan

Employee Evaluation.

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

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

We Meant Well

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

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

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

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

Admittedly Annoying Habits from Afghanistan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Wandering

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

Law and Order: Farah Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Pay Cuts.

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

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

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

But frankly, it's not about the money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manuary and the Drowning of Farah

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





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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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