Travel Day

 Today I spend all day on Blackhawks, leaving from the compound a few minutes' walk from the Embassy, where the two choppers land in a barren field and blow dust on everybody.  Then we go to Parwan, where we fly over an almost completely barren terrain, pockmarked by the occasional mortar crater.  We fly over a concentrated stretch of thick, tall smokestacks from kilns, used, I'm guessing, to make bricks.  We're in Parwan for quite a while, but I have no photos from there for various reasons.  After that, we fly down to Logar Province to two places there, and then a stop in Wardak, and then back to Kabul.  It's a cold day.  We weren't flying very high, so I had a good view.  The streams and rivulets that run down from the mountains are either completely empty or lined by white ice.  The larger riverbeds themselves are completely dry and are just beds of rubble.  All the irrigation channels - and there are irrigation channels everywhere in Afghanistan - are frozen over.  The snows haven't come this year; the entire country is suffering from a drought, and so the mountains don't have much white.  All the rivers, all the streams, all the irrigation channels are fed by snowmelt.  If the snows don't come in the next six or eight weeks, there will be no rivers and no water in the irrigation channels, and the country will have a disastrous agricultural year.