I Feel the Earth Move

Just before midnight last night we had a mild earthquake.   We're on the fifth floor, so we could really feel the building sway.  It lasted maybe 45 seconds or so.  It was nothing compared to what we felt several times in Chile.  And that's about all there is to say about that.

Today is election day.  There have been several attacks across the country trying to disrupt things.  According to the news this morning, at about 4 a.m. a rocket landed in the yard where the state television building is, maybe a bit more than half a mile from us.  We didn't hear or feel anything from that.  So we'll see how the rest of the day goes.

Update: I read that it measured 6.3, which is decent, but it was well to the north in Badakhshan, maybe 150 miles or so away.

Kandahar Air Base

Kandahar is the largest city in the south, and the south is where the main fight is right now.  I was scheduled to stay at the airfield for a few hours and then hop a helicopter to the city to visit the Canadian-US PRT.  If weather had allowed it, I was even going to zip out to see a district team just set up in Zari, described as "a beautiful, gorgeous site - pity about all the people trying to kill you."  But the dust storms rolled in by early morning.  It wasn't so much sand and dust flying around, though there was a bit of that; it was more like an all-pervasive winter fog that enveloped everything.  It was already dicey when we landed, and within an hour they had grounded all flights, so I got stuck at the airfield, which is a big honking sea of dust with a lot of aircraft of all types, a lot of tents and b-huts and containerized housing units and latrines.  The bad weather did lower the temperature, since instead of the usual 100+, it was upper 70s.  But it also meant I had an extra evening at the air base, so I wandered around.  The whole place has a disturbing smell - not egregious like a cesspool, though there was a hint of that, more like someone who hasn't bathed in weeks and has body odor issues to begin with, then tries to cover it up with really bad cologne.  (I was fortunate to get an actual room to myself to spend the night; most of the others were in a barracks referred to as "the one next to the poop pool.")  The sand was suspended in the air; it felt like walking through a room that has just been fumigated, and you can feel all the tiny particles clinging to your skin and forming a tangible layer of dirt caking your body.

Anyway, I wandered down to the boardwalk, which is an actual rectangular boardwalk with a TGIFriday's, KFC, "Yankee Kabob" shop, rugs and jewelry shops, a pizza house, a sign for "Your Harley Davidson Dealer in Afghanistan," a dozen Canadian soldiers playing street hockey on an enclosed rink, and one American soldier forlornly trying to shoot hoops with a mostly-deflated basketball that wouldn't even dribble.

The next morning you still couldn't see the sky or the mountains ringing the airfield, but you could sort of see the sun, and it did indeed appear better than the day before when, I was told, visibility was under 500 feet and that's why they canceled all the air ops.  Helos still couldn't fly, but fixed wing were starting to, and I saw several fighter jets taking off.  Also saw the Predator drones taking off and circling to gain altitude.  They are much larger than I had expected, with very long wings like a glider.

Kandahar

We got rocketed last night around 9:30 or so.  I never saw or heard anything other than the warning siren that forced you to put your boots back on, trudge through the thick sand-dune dust out to the bunker, wait 20 or 30 minutes for the all clear, and then you got to go back into the quarters.  This was among the least uncomfortable aspects of the day.

Mountains on the Way to Kandahar

The striking thing is how extraordinarily narrow the slice of habitation and cultivation is amid the expense of the mountainous barrenness.  Pretty much any direction you fly from Kabul - this time it was southwest - this is what impresses me, and the view is powerful and somehow different every time.  I will have more to say about Kandahar in a moment, because I got stuck there for two days.

Street Views

No need to be profound or verbose here - photos from the car as we were driving around in Mazar.  Note the white burqa of the woman on the motorcycle.  Blue is Kabul and the south, black chador is when you're close to the Iranian border, white is typical of north of the Hindu Kush.

Cracks

It is a very dry land.  Narrow strips with vegetation and a village are swallowed up in vast stretching dry dusty baked landscapes.  And usually even where there is a village, the great cracks in the earth come right up to the houses, sometimes overtaking the houses.  These are not river valleys or ravines or gullies where the rain runoff goes - there isn't any rain here.  These are places where the land is so clay-baked dry that it cracks.

Graffiti

There is graffiti to be found and analyzed.  The first two are pretty much self-explanatory, so I'll just let you read them yourselves.  The third might be confusing unless I explain.  Where it says "Long Live Amireca," the writer meant to spell "America."  The Dari has no misspellings, so no need to clarify. 

Buzkashi

The famous national sport is buzkashi, where the carcass of a goat is dragged around by riders on horseback.  The winner is the guy who finally has the goat carcass.  OK, so there are probably some subtleties I'm missing here.  Story is that this sport is used not only to claim and demonstrate political dominance, but also is a metaphor for Afghan politics through the ages.  Parts of this are probably applicable to U.S. politics as well, though I'm not sure which.  Still, it would be fun to force our leaders to drag a dead goat around all day in the desert sun.  This is a monument to Buzkashi outside Mazar.  My main interest is not this particular match, which by the way was won by the Fighting Irish 27-24 thanks to a debatable late clipping penalty.  Notice the sheep grazing in the first photo (OK, statues of sheep; you get my point).  Perhaps you can't tell, but their rear ends are, well, robust.  This is apparently a breed of sheep particular to parts of Afghanistan.  I've seen the kuchi, the nomadic tribe here, bring herds of goats and fat-bottomed sheep along the creek bed near the airport, and before I knew they were anything other than fat-assed sheep, I saw a bunch of them in Panjshir but didn't bother to take a photo.  Anyway, here's the point: these sheep, thanks to their prominent posteriors, are called by U.S. service members in the countryside "J-Lo's."  I think Jennifer Lopez should be proud of her lasting cultural impact on Afghanistan.  I think I also have hit upon an advertising idea for when I return to the U.S.

Blue Mosque in Mazar-e-Sharif

Mazar is the main city of the north, though centuries ago the most important city north of the Hindu Kush was Balkh.  It's not that big, but it does have an impressive mosque, the Blue Mosque, reputed to be the burial place of Hazrat Ali, son-in-law of Mohammed.  We were there on a Friday, and as the first photo shows, lots of people were going to Friday prayers, or at least hanging around the mosque.  Notice that some of the burkas are white, not blue; white is actually the most common color in the north.