Shust and Insurgents

I was overly optimistic in the last post.  There was no clearing up at all.  Instead, we have been blanketed by the shust for the past four days.  You can't even seen the little hill behind the presidential palace, which is less than a mile from here.  Even the buildings on the compound are hazy, and people are sneezing and coughing left and right.  Meanwhile, the insurgents keep trying, and are increasingly directing attacks against soft civilian targets.  In the worst attack, they killed several dozen at a clinic in Logar, the province just to the south of Kabul.  Last night, they tried to stage a Mumbai-style attack against a hotel in Kabul.  We have nine days to go.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/28/afghanistan-kabul-hotel-attack-taliban

Shust Storm

Yesterday morning was extraordinarily hot, close to 90 Fahrenheit by the time we were eating breakfast, and well over 100 for the day.  But what made the day especially weird was the shust storm that blew in just before sunset.  The air was almost granular in its thickness, and instead of breathing, it was as if you were swallowing it.  As always with the shust storms, buildings any distance away just blur into vague shapes; even trees are indistinct. This morning, just after dawn, it's still hazy, though it looks like it's cleared up some.

Two of Us

We have two weeks to go.  This picture of us sitting at a street-side cafe is not from Afghanistan. 

Wingman

I managed to lean forward once without completely falling out to take a photo of the second Huey, the one that was flying a couple of seconds ahead of us.

Huey Close-Ups

 As I mentioned, Hueys fly low, and I had nothing else to do.  I have no idea what the first thing is, some sort of semi-destroyed kiln maybe.   The second is over a junk yard; I tried to get a shot of what must have been over a thousand rusted-out car shells, but the helicopter kept bouncing.  Finally, a bunch of trucks at a container depot.

More on Walls

 Here was another thing I don't believe I've seen before.  In a handful of the rectangular plots people had set up tents.  I don't know if this was because it was their plot but they weren't able to build the house yet, so the family was living in a tent; or perhaps these were squatters or nomads.  Did I mention Afghanistan was extremely poor?

First You Build a Wall

This was about as high as got, after we cleared the mountains; the land dropped below us and we didn't immediately adjust altitude.  This is something you see nearly everywhere here with Afghan rural residences.  First, you build the wall.  You always see these painstakingly laid out rectangles where the family compound will eventually be.  People build the walls before they even have the building materials or the money for the house.  So you find these empty rectangles lined by mud walls all over the country.  In the case of this village, given the complete absence of any buildings and the fact that there was nothing anywhere near it, I don't think it's a new settlement; I think it's an abandoned one.  The river bed looks completely dried out and filled with stones, too, so agricultural failure may have driven the entire village to re-locate.