Mr. Winkie Finds a Friend

I will eventually get photos, but there are at least six kittens scurrying around the pool and climbing the trees and jumping up on the tables and begging for food.  I can't prove definitively that Mr. Winkie is the father, at least not until the DNA tests come back.  But all the scandalous rumors and hearsay that swirl about this mysterious angry war-ravaged cat make me suspect that Mr. Winkie found his groove, at least once, and/or got Bob the girl cat drunk on catnip.
The kittens, by the way, are adorable.

On the top is the view of an intersection from the citadel walls.  Notice the tuk-tuks, the three-wheeled mini-taxis.  Most are painted in bright colors with various exuberant designs, often featuring a nominally English word and a heart with an arrow piercing it.  Traffic, as you might imagine, is extraordinarily orderly.  Women in burkas with absolutely no peripheral vision whatsoever, holding their child's hands, take tentative steps into the street hoping to cross even though they have little idea what car, motorcycle, tuk-tuk or donkey cart might be careening toward them.  The billboards are for political candidates for the elections in three weeks.  The second is a park, the last just the neighborhood next to the citadel.  There were many more women out on the street than I have seen in Kabul, though nearly all were wearing either blue burkas or the black chador like you see in news clips from Iran.

Rain in Kabul

On Thursday it thunderstormed and hailed in Kabul.  I missed it, because I was in Herat.  Several flights were canceled, and when we got the airport there was no airplane waiting for us.  About 45 minutes later, an airplane showed up.  It wasn't ours, but we didn't care.  We asked where it was going; it was going back to Kabul, and it had empty seats.  So we hopped on.  When we got back, we had just missed the thunderstorm, but we were in time to see a small rainbow over the mountain to the northwest of the airport.  Later we heard that the plane that was ours had landed in Herat, nearly two hours late.  If we had stayed for it, we would have been stuck at the PRT in Herat at least two days more, because there is a curfew and the planes don't fly on Friday, which is maintenance day.  So blindly taking a flight pays off once again.

Citadel of Herat

Supposedly there has been a citadel on this site in Herat since before the times of Alexander the Great.  Supposedly Alexander the Great himself garrisoned troops on this site, though it would have been little more than a mud fort at that time.  But before the time of Tamburlaine this citadel had grown, had progressed beyond packed, dried mud to include kiln-fired bricks and more or less the shape of today's recreation.  The foundations are 14th century or so; the tiles on the towers are also Timurid, but most of what you see is a reconstruction that continues today.

Friday Mosque

We didn't have time to visit the Blue Mosque, also called the Friday Mosque, in Herat this time.   It's the one in the distance, beyond the two minarets in the foreground.  It's a massive complex - it starts at the minaret to the right and continues past the minaret on the left in the background.

Minarets in Herat

Herat used to have a massive madrassa complex, built around 1500, called Musalla.  Today all that is left are these precariously leaning minarets.  Time has done significant damage; soldiers (British in the 19th century, warlords in the 1990s who used the minarets for artillery target practice) have done more; and today, the most immediate threat to the one minaret obviously about to tip over is traffic.  The vibrations from the vehicle traffic are loosening the minarets' foundations.  Iron cables hold up the smaller minaret on the left. This is a view from the walls of the city citadel.

Ghor

W

We made a brief stop at the airport in Chagcharan, Ghor Province.  This is the poorest province in Afghanistan, and the town is a tad isolated.  As you land you taxi over to this sight - two Soviet planes that didn't quite make as successful a landing as you have.  The runway is packed dirt, gradually getting slightly less packed each time a plane hits it.  The plan is to pave it.  I saw at least 15 yards of a paved ramp leading toward the runway itself, so this project is almost certain to be finished during my lifetime, assuming I have the Methuselah gene.  Once the rain and snow come, the airport is pretty much cut off for four months.  Last year there were 42 straight days when Chagcharan had no outside communication whatsoever. 
Coming next: Recipes from "To Serve Man" for use during those months when no food comes in.

Mountains in August

On the trip to Herat, we flew over the central Hindu Kush westwards.  This is during the heat of August.  The temperature in Herat was in the 90s, so these mountains, about halfway between Kabul and Ghor province, are pretty high.

Canada

I went to dinner last night at the Canadian embassy.  They have a very pretty residence with a beautiful yard on a fairly quiet street.  The Canadians also have a PRT in Kandahar, one of the more militarily active provinces, in southern Afghanistan bordering Pakistan near Quetta, the presumed current home of Mullah Omar.  And a man who had worked at that PRT last year told us a horrendous story.  The insurgents frequently target local officials, police chiefs, tribal elders, security guards, etc, people who hold some sway in the village or whose death sends a very pointed political message.  When these people are assassinated, most people in the village understand:  You don't have to kill everybody - just make sure that everybody knows they could be killed.  Generally, when the insurgents assassinate someone, it's someone of some local stature.  Well, on the Canadian PRT, numerous Afghans worked.  Among them was one whose "stature" from an assassination-worthiness point of view was minimal to non-existent: a very elderly grandfather, if not great-grandfather, probably at least 65 (this in a country where the life expectancy is 44), whose sole job was to refill the water stations.  All day long, and in Kandahar the days are long and very hot, he lugged water bottles from building to building, and then went home to his very, very modest rural mud house.  One day last year, perhaps frustrated that they couldn't penetrate the PRT itself, the insurgents waited until the old man headed for home, waylaid him on the road, murdered him and left the body in the ditch. 

Brief Notes

I am due to visit Herat in the northwest, the most Persian of Afghanistan's cities, sometime next week, with luck.  Two other trips I thought I might take this week, one to the north and one to Marjah, the site of recent Marine battles, are unlikely, as is the trip to the coolly-named Nimruz province.  Nuristan is also looking dubious for a visit anytime soon, which is sad, since Nuristan, I read, "the province of light," was not long ago called "Kafiristan," the province of unbelievers.  The "light" refers to the forcible conversion to Islam a century or so ago.  Another time, perhaps. 

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina just visited Kabul.  Senator Graham is apparently a colonel in the South Carolina Air Reserve.  And he wears his fatigues when he visits.  Yep, sat right through an hour-plus long meeting in his uniform.  I don't think I've ever seen a member of Congress do that before.  I am also due to visit a Kabul shopping center in the next few days.  Jody knows the rule - only one mall visit per calendar year.  So this will be it until 2011, though I think the Dubai mall should have counted against the quota.

Also, I learn that schedules and meeting agendas referring to "P4" mean Petraeus, the four-star general.  Everything is reduced to an acronym here, at least everything referring to the US military.  If we could actually wage the counter-insurgency as well as we write about waging the counter-insurgency, we would long ago have won.

Disjointed Notes

Here are things that don't go with photos, which means I can post this entry more quickly.  It is Ramadan now - I think it started Tuesday night, but since no one knows until the moon is sighted, and sometimes it's cloudy, it's hard to say.  What is clear is that most of the local employees are NOT around.

On Sunday I went to Bagram for a conference of a dozen or so Afghan governors from the eastern part of the country.  I am told that it is the eighth busiest airport in the world, though I am skeptical.  I took no pictures because it's an airbase, and if you've seen one military base, you've seen most.  Plus I didn't want to get shot.  I will note that the USO recreation lounge there is called the Pat Tillman Memorial Lounge.  It takes three hours to drive from Kabul to Bagram.  It took about five minutes to fly.

What I will eventually get photos of are the kites.  I'd seen several before, but the past couple of days there have been lots.  Today at the airport, standing around on the tarmac waiting for our ride, I saw five kites flying in the neighborhood near the gate.  Two of the kites were dueling, many hundreds of feet in the sky.  They were still swirling and dancing about each other when we drove off.

I have now been at work for 39 of the past 48 hours.  I'm going to bed.  Tomorrow is Friday, our day off.  I have one meeting at 1000, another at 1230, and then a conference from 1700 to 2000.  Days off here suck.  I should do laundry, but Plan B is to keep wearing the same clothes until the people in my office volunteer to do it for me.

Nicer Views

It is not always dusty, especially if you get high enough, and the views from the plane when the air is clear are striking.  These photos don't do it justice, which is due principally to the fact that I'm a crappy photographer.

Dust

It is very dry and dusty here.  See Exhibits A, B, C, and refer to the previous post on the height of the mountains.  You will note that the layer of dusty smog is well over the mountains themselves.  Now you know why I needed the saline drops.

Helmand Terrain

These are some photos from the Beechcraft.  They would have been about midway between Kabul and Helmand.  Throughout the middle of Afghanistan runs a broad and very high and very barren range of mountains, from northeast to southwest, petering out a bit before the desert area that is the west of Afghanistan and the east of Iran.  Basically, this is the Hindu Kush stretching southwestward from the Himalayas and then gradually lowering and disappearing as they run west.  At their height they reach 22,000 feet.  Kabul itself is 6,000 feet, though the mountains around it reach 14-16,000 ft.  The ones pictured here are probably around 10-12,000 ft high.

Ospreys

We took a fixed wing plane from Kabul to Helmand base, called Bastion (on the Royal Marines side) and Leatherneck (US Marines).  It was a Beech 1900, which apparently refers to the year it was built and the wood it is crafted from and/or the chewing gum that holds it together.  The seats didn't even recline, which was probably a good idea since we were wearing 40 pounds or so of body armor.  But to get to the British PRT in Lashkar Gah, you have to either drive in a military convoy or take to the air.  We went in an Osprey.  I had never been in one before.  It's a tilt-rotary plane, which means it takes off like a helicopter, with the blades horizontal, but once it has some altitude, the rotors tilt forward until they are like a propeller airplane's.  It's kind of a roller coastery ride, especially when the rotors are changing their axis.  In the second photo you can see the way you get on - the tail opens up into a ramp.  During flight the ramp comes partly up, but there is always a tailgunner ready there.  When the Osprey starts to descend - and especially as we flew over a city in a region with fairly high insurgent activity - the gunner was at the ready with the 50 caliber, sweeping left and right looking for something he needed to shoot.
Also, as you can infer from the pictures, it's pretty dry down there.  I came back home and made extensive use of the nasal saline and eye drops.  But then again, my sex life is none of your damn business.

British PRT

ar


Today I flew down to Helmand, one of the "kinetic" provinces. We saw nothing dangerous or violent where we were, though lots of people were moving around on operations. Part of the visit was to the British-led PRT in Lashkar Gar. Several items of interest: amid the unit flags flapping over tents - the Royal Scots, Royal Marines, the "Black Rats," etc, was the skull and crossbones. That was probably the human resources office. We ate lunch at the British canteen (insert obligatory English food jokes here). It was fine, actually.

But then came dessert - "Yorkie," and hence two of the three photos. I don't often take photos of the food, especially when I'm sitting with people I'm supposed to impress as a serious, work-minded individual. But you find yourself in this situation, you make an exception. This is probably the most misogynistic candy bar since Mr. Goodbar had that disturbing Diane Keaton movie made about it. Yes, "Yorkie" is apparently not edible by girls, at least those carrying purses and prancing about hand on hip as depicted.

Epilogue: I brought it home, but we were outside in the 100+ degree desert for several hours, and now it's melted, though still contained within the manly Yorkie wrapper. If I can re-build it, much like the Six Million Dollar Man, I will mail it to one lucky family member.

More Views from the Helicopter to Panjshir

The last shot of the river is where the helo landing zone is; this was taken just as we were taking off.

Panjshir - Things on Poles

A windfarm on the top of one of the mountains overlooking the river valley, and the US and Afghan flags at the PRT. OK, so this isn't the most Dickensian entry I've done. It's just a hook for the pictures, dammit.

Lunch in Panjshir

The photo on the right is before they brought out the rest of the food : cucumbers, tomatoes, yogurt, tea and candies, etc. One bowl had ground cumin and curry to sprinkle over the rice. The meat on skewers was lamb, as was the meat mingled in with raisins and nuts in the rice. However, a word of warning to would-be extravagant travelers: this cost an outrageous 300 afghanis, which is damn near six dollars. As you can infer from the bottom photo, the restaurant itself sits on stilts over a river, shaded by what appeared to be very young eucalyptus trees except that the leaves didn't have that panda-bear aroma. (However, you take off your shoes before you sit on the rugs, and there was definitely some sort of bear-like aroma wafting its way around. It couldn't have been me; I've showered this month.)
The first photo is for my tree-hugging environmentalist daughter, so if you don't notice this, expect never to get a special photo just for you again. Notice - in this remote village of maybe a few hundred people, the riverside restaurant uses low energy light bulbs.

Massoud's Tomb

Massoud is the hero of the Tajiks and of many Afghans for his heroic role in the resistance against the Soviet invasion. He was also no friend of the Taliban. Of significance at least as important as 9/11 in Afghanistan was 9/9/01, when Al Qaeda assassinated Massoud and crippled the leadership of the Tajik part of the Northern Alliance. Two men posing as journalists blew up a bomb hidden in a video camera; he died a few days later. Since 2003 the locals in the Panjshir valley near his home have been building a monument where his tomb is located. Here are views inside the still-unfinished monument, shots of the valley below it (it is on a very high hill in terrain that ranges from 8,000 to 14,000+ feet above sea level), proving that Afghanistan is not all brown and gray, and a shot of some of the destroyed Soviet equipment that litters the Panjshir valley to this day, left there as a memorial and as a boast of Afghan victory over the invaders.

Trip to Panjshir

Today we flew to Panjshir, just north of Kabul, maybe 30 minutes by the helicopter you see here. It's a Mi-8, a Russian model. I liked it. It seemed dubious for about twenty seconds whether it would actually get off the ground, but once it did, it was a very smooth ride, much less choppy than a Blackhawk. It takes off unlike other helicopters I've been on. It doesn't ascend vertically into the sky; it scoots off horizontally building up speed for 6-8 seconds and gradually ascends, more like a plane.
You'll notice the porthole window behind me is open. That was in case they needed to throw me out to reduce ballast.
Actually, I'm the one who opened it; I wanted the breeze. And to throw out the person sitting just out of camera range.
We visited PRT Panjshir, whose mascot is nominally the lion but I believe is really the Expedia gnome pictured here, since he's the one welcoming you at the door.
Panjshir is by all measures the safest province in Afghanistan. It is famous as the valley where the Soviets were defeated for years by Massoud, the leader of the Tajik mujahadin, and the one part of Afghanistan the Taliban did not successfully conquer.

Cats on the Compound

At the dinner, I am given the background on several of the cats that live on the compound. First is "Bob." People love Bob. Bob is a she. Bob likes to run alongside a person walking between the hooches, then Bob jumps up on the sandbags and runs along the top of those to escort visitors to whatever building they are heading to. Bob is popular. Heidi is confused why Bob has a man's name when she's a girl.

Then there is "Mr. Winkie," who is universally hated for his spiteful and violent demeanor. "Which one is Mr. Winkie?" Heidi asks. Ed closes one eye in an exaggerated manner and says, "The one with one eye."

Then there is the beloved Spot, who tends to lounge in the sun all day long. "Which one is Spot?" Heidi asks. Ed looks at a loss for words before finally answering, "The one with spots."

I am going to try to get a picture of Mr. Winkie.

The Kabubble

That's what they call it if you never get off the compound and your view of the country is filtered through the Embassy perspective - you live in the Kabul Bubble.
Last night again we left the bubble to go through the city. One street was lit with garish colored neon lights and all the shop windows were filled with colorful, slinky women's dresses. They looked like they were ready for a slew of high schoolers to descend upon them for prom dresses. Just off Butcher Street there was an endless row of stalls with men grilling whole chickens, grocery stores with stacks of luscious-looking fresh fruit (we don't get a lot of that on the compound). More potholes and unpaved streets, and then finally we got to a restaurant to meet with some Afghan partners. The power fluctuated all evening long and the lights kept flickering. Finally they went out, and something funny happened.
Two of the people there are married - let's call them "Heidi" and "Ed," though don't assume those are their real names. Ed also has a permanent twinkle in his eye that dirty old men everywhere have, though I'm not necessarily saying Ed is a dirty old man, though I'm sure as hell not betting a paycheck that he isn't. They are sitting next to each other at one end of a long table where the dozen of us are. Lights go off, and room is plunged into total darkness. After the "ohs," there is a brief silence, and then Ed's voice: "Heidi, stop that - not at the table."
Lights come back on and everyone chuckles, though Heidi, not so much.
A few minutes later, the power goes off again. This time a male voice from the other end of the table: "Ed, stop that - not at the table." Lights come back on, and a smiling Ed, placid in his seat, says," I bet you didn't realize I could get back here that quick."