Stuff I Didn't Take Photos Of

I stayed the night at the Kandahar city PRT.  It's a fairly large base, though nowhere near as big as Helmand, and of course much smaller than the regional platforms.  It's mixed Canadian-American.  Since it's right in the city, they don't light it up at night, since that would just make it easier for the mortars.  So I course I wandered around after sunset trying to figure out where the hell I was, where I was supposed to be, and where the bathroom had wandered off to.  Surprisingly, the night sky was very clear; there was none of the suspended dust that's typical of Kandahar during the day.  I stayed in a hooch left empty by someone on vacation.  Hooches, or containerized housing units, are literally the types of containers you would see on a cargo ship or a train, though a bit smaller.  They tend to be about 8 feet wide, maybe 20 feet deep.  In this space there were two bunk beds, so space for four people.  There was a mini-closet and one shelf for books and toiletries.  These are "dry" hooches, meaning they have no running water, and thus the toilets and showers are located some distance away - maybe 60 yards away in Kandahar, much farther (200+ yards) in other places I've seen.  And it gets very cold in Kandahar at night.  The hooches are also unheated (and uncooled, which matters in the summer), so I brought a thermal sleeping bag.  The next morning, there was a cat hanging around outside my door.  I sat down to pet him, and he immediately climbed into my lap, then tried to climb up onto my shoulder.  When I got up, the cat went over to my hooch door, waiting for me to let him in.

While we were flying back from the PRT to the airbase, we flew VERY low - maybe a few hundred feet, certainly lower than 400 feet.  We flew over a nomad encampment with several camels tethered near the tents.  The helicopters shot off flares as a safety precaution during the flight.  As we were coming in to land at KAF, we saw many, many Predator drones near their sheds, either for maintenance or because they were getting ready to take off.  We also passed Prowlers, a Navy plane, and the A-10 warthogs, the gunships.

The most interesting conversation was the previous evening.  One of the running disputes between some on the military side and some on the civilian side is why is it taking so long to establish some semblance of effective Afghan governance in regions "cleared" (theoretically) of insurgents.  The civilians maintain the continuing security problems are a big deterrent to potential Afghan civil servants unwilling to go to some places for a mere $4 monthly supplement.  The military insists security is perfectly acceptable.  So we asked, How many government officials, or people (like teachers) who could reasonably be seen as government-affiliated, have been killed over the past couple of months for what seem to be political reasons, for reasons of intimidation, as opposed to regular crime?  The answer: a lot.  I can't say the exact number, but it was a lot.  We're not talking two or three here, but dozens.  And one man admitted, in a bit of an understatement, "In Kandahar, we have something of an assassination problem." 

And completely unrelated is this: just because someone with a college education who is writing something on behalf of the US government doesn't mean the resulting document isn't filled with hilarious errors.  Upon my return I saw one that described efforts to work with Americans living and working in Afghanistan.  And what do you call such Americans living overseas?  According to the document: "ex-patriots."
Traitors.