Another Minor Incident

This one not in Kabul; a mortar hit our office in Jalalabad.  Luckily it didn't hit until 1130 pm, so no one was there.  I talked today to one of the guys posted there; he is heading out on leave today.  He wasn't too upset by it, though he says it completely took out his desk and computer and phone.  He said he was there about ten minutes earlier, and knows he was lucky.  So that's one more place I need to go see how our people are doing; I'm trying for a bit later in March, but I need to get to a couple of other places first.  I'm starting to fall behind on these types of necessary visits.
On the Kabul rockets on Friday morning, the news is that they hit on the Defense Ministry compound, maybe a bit more than half a mile south of us, and adjacent to the presidential palace.  It had been quite a while, maybe four months or so, since the last indirect fire had hit Kabul, so this surprised some people.
Completely unrelated note: on the trip to Kandahar on Thursday, I bought a T-shirt that I think will fit my son-in-law.

Minor Incident

Three rounds of indirect fire hit within hearing distance of the Embassy this morning around 6:30.  After the first boom, the "duck and cover" alarm sounded for about 15 minutes.  Luckily, since it's Saturday, we were already up anyway getting ready for work, and we weren't outside, so we didn't have to scramble into a bunker and sit around for half an hour freezing our butts off.  No reports yet whether there was any damage or casualties.

Kandahar Again

So another quick day trip to Kandahar, starting at 4 am and back by 5 pm.  Stayed on the air base the whole time.  Lots and lots of Predators and Reapers lined up to take off when we landed - the weird thing about them is how wide they are, in terms of wingspan, yet you walk by them and you're taller than them (well, I am, anyway; I don't know about everyone).  Also, the most helicopters today I've ever seen; there must have been at least twenty in the sky at any given moment with another half-dozen taking off, helos of all types, Chinooks and Blackhawks, the little Hueys and the big Sikorskis.  Also, the fighters were quite active, many more zooming overhead with accompanying sonic booms than I've seen before.  Basically I was just there for meetings and to field complaints.  Tried to sample the famous Horton's Canadian donuts, but they were all out by the time I got there at 0830, though I did get to eat at the pizza place for lunch.  This is the third straight trip there's been a suicide bombing where I've gone, though this time it wasn't close; it was just in the same province, in Spin Boldak, one of the border posts.  The weather was beautiful, and the skies were clear during the whole flight, and the mountains below are completely covered in snow.

Kabooms

Well, the insurgents are stepping up the attacks during what is normally a quieter time, well outside the fighting season.  Today it was in Kunduz to the north, with at least 30 killed.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/21/us-afghanistan-bomb-idUSTRE71K19220110221
 On Sunday it was a bank in Jalalabad; reports vary, but there are somewhere between 40 and 70 dead.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/02/20/afghanistan.attack/?hpt=T2

Before that, the suicide car in Khost killing ten, and the attack in Kandahar on the police station, killing quite a few more.
http://waronterrornews.typepad.com/home/2011/02/taliban-explode-10-afghan-muslims-wound-40.html

The attacks are, unfortunately, cleverly targeted.  The bank attack came as Afghan soldiers and policemen were cashing their paychecks - and so they not only killed a number of people who had volunteered for the security forces, they discouraged untold more.  Today's hit where people have to get their government ID cards in order to enlist for the police or army - again, not only taking out volunteers but certainly discouraging would-be volunteers.  The insurgency in Afghanistan is cruel and vicious, but it is not stupid.

Snowy Mountains toward Khost

 Yes, we got some snow.  These are the mountains south of Kabul toward the Pakistani border in the province of Khost.  Check out the snow completely covering the mud-walled grids in the third picture; those of the houses of an isolated village of a few dozen families up in the mountains.  The last picture shows what I've posted previously - lots more vegetation in the mountains as you move toward the Pakistani border in the SE.  No vegetation, of course, in the central and western south; that's desert.  Lots of green up north, but it's impossible to fly there right now.  Next month I'm due in Baghlan; later this month in Badghis, along the northern border; I'll see if I can get some shots of the terrain there, if the fog allows.  Of course, if there's fog, I'm either grounded or about to crash into the side of a mountain.

Khost - Home of the West Virginia Mountaineers

 Well, bad weather in the mountain passes meant I stayed a day and a half longer in Khost than I had anticipated.  There was a pretty bad suicide bombing there on Friday, killing ten or so people at last count, so I had to go down Saturday morning to see how our people were doing.  The weather was fine on the way down; it's about an hour by helicopter.  But the snows came in - not at the base in Khost where I was, but in the mountains that surround it like a bowl - and all flights were canceled for the rest of the day.  All today, they kept telling us, maybe in an hour or so, maybe by noon, maybe by 2, but on the hill just to the east of Khost, there was 40 cm of snow and everything was completely socked in.  There was fog in Bagram and Kabul and they couldn't get a flight out.  So I wandered around the base in Khost, where the skies were mostly blue.  Khost is where, a couple of years ago, a suicide bomber killed quite a number of CIA agents.  It's right on the border with Pakistan, and the insurgency there is linked to the Haqqani network, which has been particularly prolific with the suicide attacks.  So anyway, I stumbled across this next to the Med Unit.  I'm not sure which sign is the official sign of the place, and which one has been put up by the troops, but anyway, here it is for the West Virginians.  At the end, they couldn't bring in a fixed wing because the runway was too soft, but they did manage to bring in an Mi-8 helicopter, one of the sturdy Russian ones that fly well in the Afghan mountains.

And We're Back

 Minor odyssey coming back, as our flight as delayed in reaching Mauritius for six hours.  This meant we got into Dubai after our flight for Kabul had left.  There are not many flights to Kabul.  It's almost as if it's not a popular tourist destination or something.  So anyway, we had to kill about 8 hours in the Dubai airport again.  We finally got back into Kabul around 4 pm.  We're a bit tired, but we have the rest of the evening to recuperate before back to work tomorrow.  For me the day starts early - I have a trip to Khost starting at 0630. 
These pictures are of Jody studying the menu for our Valentine's Day dinner; our last supper on the beach with fresh lobster, and waiting for our boat ride. We also have cool souvenirs, including spice-flavored dodo-shaped chocolates.

We're on a Boat

At least we were when I took this photo.  There are lots of craggy dramatic peaks behind Port Louis and along the NW coast.  This was on a glass bottom boat going out to see the coral.  We saw it.  There were fish there, too, mostly just dark gray or black, but a few brightly colored striped ones.  There's only so long you can stare through the glass bottom on a boat being tossed by the waves before you decide it's time to look up from the coral and scan the skyline.

Throwing in the Towel

 They are starting to freak us out with the towel folding thing, as now we're finding Babar look-alikes.  Our own towel-folding has progressed only modestly beyond the more or less rectangle, the impressionistic heap, and the Jackson Pollock effect.  These people have seriously too much time on their hands.

Views from the Nirvana Area

 That's what they call this part of the hotel.  There's a special "Nirvana pool," which is built in such a way that you can be at the edge of it and look off and see the waters of the pool merge with the ocean.

Subtle Signs We're Not in Afghanistan

Top is one of the airport bar/restaurants in Dubai.  As a general rule, you don't find a high number of bars when you visit sites in Afghanistan.  We stayed in this particular one about six hours, since we had a fair amount of time to kill between flights.

The second photo is from the hotel lobby in Mauritius.  As a general rule, you don't find large numbers of paintings of voluptuous women as you travel about Afghanistan.  It's this sort of extraordinary attention to detail that lets me be such a talented diplomat, or spy, or Fuller brush salesman, or whatever the heck it is that I'm supposedly doing when I'm not lounging on the beach here.

Sunset in Mauritius

 Except for one half-day of rain, which we spent in Port Louis inside a shopping gallery anyway, the weather has been spectacular and the ocean has been perfect for swimming.  There is a fair amount of broken coral along the surf line, and if you walk into the sea you're on hard, sometimes sharp, always irregular and slippery rocks.  But if you just float, it carries you out toward the line marked by red buoys where the undertow starts.  It gets dramatically more shallow, barely coming up to your calves, and that's where the first line of waves is.  After that the map lists it as "dangerous sea."  Jody got scratched on the rocks, and I got two weird pierce marks on my foot that are too circular and regular to be rocks.  Only two possibilities I can think of - I got stuck, twice, by a hypodermic needle, or some sort of sea vampire attacked me. 

Strange Bedfellows

 You may remember that in December, whiling away the time in Dubai during an 18 hour layover, we bought a book on "Towel Origami."  OK, so we haven't actually read it yet, much less attempted to fold a towel in any way more complicated than over the shower stall, but still, we have the book, and thus the potential to create frightening animal shapes out of towels.  Turns out at least one maid in Mauritius has the same book, and she's the one working our room.  First thing we see when we open the closet to throw in our clothes is this hanging monkey towel.  Then, two days later, just as we've recovered from the shock, we walk into our room and find this swan towel on the nightstand.  Apparently her artistry is limited to yellow towels, but still, I'm a bit trepidatious as to what we'll find this afternoon.  If it's a dodo, I will be mildly freaked out.

Dodo Is As Dodo Does

I saw a man who had a T-shirt with the insignia, "Le paradis de dodo."  Then I saw a man who had no shirt at all.  But I did not weep for him, but rather for myself, because he was a fat hairy German tourist floating like a sunburned whale in the middle of the Nirvana pool.  But, returning to the point, I bought a Mauritius T-shirt.  I couldn't find one that said Dodo Paradise in any language, but I did find one that says, "The Dodo Legend."  It's a bold move for a country to market itself as the place where an animal went extinct, and then expect the tourists to come flocking in.  But as a teaser, here's some Dodo lore:

The Dutch called it "walghvogel," meaning "loathsome bird."  That was a reference to its taste, though, to be fair, as far as I know it refers to the inept manner in which the Dutch cooked it.  The Dodo was about a yard tall and weighed 40 pounds.  It had no wings.  Why is it called the dodo and not the walghvogel, you ask?  Some accounts say it comes from dodoor, which is Dutch for "sluggard" - obviously, the Dutch were not very kind toward the Dodo - but others say it comes from dodaars, "referring to the knot of feathers on its hind end," and which apparently literally means "knot-ass," which is now one of my favorite insults which I expect to have opportunity to use upon return to the embassy.  Anyway, Dodo paradise came to an end no later than 1700, probably some years before that.  The species lasted about a century from its discovery by man to its extinction.  But at least I got this T-shirt.

Mo' Ritius

OK, some more on island culture.  The number one souvenir theme appears to be the dodo.  You can get dodo T-shirts, towels, wooden carvings, porcelain multi-colored ones, notepads, scarves, wall hangings, aprons....  So far we have not decided which dodo-related merchandise to buy.  For me, that's because I'm carefully weighing all the options.  For Jody, that's because she really doesn't like the dodo.  It's people like her that probably caused the damn thing to go extinct.

Some People Call Me Maurice

Ile Maurice, that is.  Mauritius has some distinguishing characteristics.  For starters, that was the slowest damn immigration entry line I've ever been in.  It took well over an hour and there were only like 7 people in line ahead of us.  There were 20 other lines, all moving at the same glacial speed.  It was raining a little when we got in the cab.  The airport is in the SE part of the island; our hotel is on Turtle Bay in the NW.  It takes about an hour.  So I was worried we would have rain all the time.  But by the time we got there, the skies were clearing, and we spent the whole afternoon by the pool or walking along the beach, with temperatures in the mid 80s.  The beach is kind of rough to walk along; there's a lot of broken coral.  The waves break maybe 50-70 yards from the shore, so it looks like it gets deep very quickly and then shallows out; maybe there's a sand bar out there or something.  We'll find out tomorrow.  The clouds wisped away by nightfall, so we spent time on the dock pondering the ocean, then explored the restaurants.  The food has been delicious so far: dinner was tuna and seafood cassoulet, with a dessert of coconut creme brulee and fruit with passion fruit sherbet.

Our taxi driver today gave us the brief overview of Mauritius' economy.  Tourism is number one, followed by sugar cane  - the entire highway from the airport to the top tip of the island is lined by sugar cane plants.  They grow two meters tall - 1.5 meters for the stalk, another 0.5 meters for the leaves.  Harvest season starts in June.  Also, there's a Sugar Museum where you can go on "l'aventure de sucre."  Not for diabetics, I'm guessing.  After that comes textiles - they import wool and cotton from Africa and India and make clothing; then services such as banking, and then fishing.  Now you know what we know about the island's economy.

It started raining hard in the middle of the night and kept raining hard until about noon.  Apparently the last few months have been drier than normal, though we're in cyclone season.  (We're told there are two seasons: cyclone and anti-cyclone.  As best I can tell, the only difference is the direction the thunderstorm comes in from.)  Someone had spray painted on a wall, "God forgive us our sins, and give us rain."  Well, apparently the Mauritian God, a combination of Christian, Hindu, Muslim and whatnot, doesn't take kindly to spiritual vandalism, so last night kind of flooded out all the roads.

Up on the Roof

 The snow of the past two days has already melted in Kabul, but it has temporarily made the higher mountains surrounding Kabul white. These are from the rooftop of our building.  The air was, for a couple of days, cleared out as well.  That is no longer the case; already the shust has rolled back in during the day and the haze blocks any view of the mountains.  Tonight will again be one of those with Dickensian fog -except it's not fog, just particulate matter suspended thick in the air.

Weather Update

Snow is coming down fairly hard, in big wet flakes, this evening.  It's just melting on the pavement, but it's accumulating in the grass and on top of the vehicles and benches.  It's very pretty.  No cats in sight.  We'll see what it looks like in the morning.  Since tomorrow morning, our time, is the Super Bowl, there's an off chance I'll get up at 4 am to see the kickoff.  If so, I'll poke my head outside and see if the snow is still there.  I took one photo today of snow starting to stick on the sand bags protecting the outside walls of the aluminum hooches from indirect fire.  If I get another photo, I'll upload them.
I also checked the weather forecast for our upcoming travel.  There's not supposed to be precipitation in Kabul the day we leave, which is good, since flights were grounded today and we have to make a connection in Dubai.  In Mauritius, the ten-day forecast calls for daily highs in the mid to upper 80s, lows in the mid to upper 70s.

Safety First

We stumbled upon an interesting maintenance control panel in the apartment building today.  It has been beeping for several days.  At first we figured it was probably related to the elevators, since they are frequently out of commission.  But now it appears it has something to do with the security doors, or at a minimum is something the security guards check.  There was a beeping sound and a yellow light flashing over a button that said "Trouble."  That struck me as helpful.  That's the sort of invaluable information you need.  It's like when you try to start the car, and there's a problem, and the helpful indicator on the dashboard says, "Check engine," since normally when your car doesn't start your first assumption is that there's a problem with the trunk or the rear view mirror.  Thanks to the dashboard light, you've pinpointed the problem.  Modern cars are miraculous.

Anyway, there's another button on the control panel, but since the light wasn't flashing, I can't be sure what happens when this situation arises.  But the button is labeled "Audible Silence."  I've got to figure out a way to trigger this alarm, just to see what happens.

Weather Report

It is snowing this morning in Kabul.  That means, among other things, that the trip to Kunar is almost certainly not going to happen, since anything going over the mountains is almost certainly fogged in.  It might mean that the air will be relatively OK today, since the moisture helps.  We actually have several field sites that routinely get trapped in the winter months.  Last year in Ghor, there were no flights for 42 straight days.  Badakhshan has been snowed in about 50% of the time this winter, and the people there haven't been able to get out to catch their flights in Kabul for their vacations.  In the south it's different; it doesn't snow in Kandahar or Helmand and the moisture is actually great for keeping the dust down.  But when the weather gets a bit drier, those sites will have frequent flight disruptions because of the sand and dust storms.  So, anyway, no travel today, so nothing planned until after we get back from Mauritius, when I need to go to Sangin, Khost, Murqab and Jalalabad.

Places Off the List of R&R Candidates

Not that I'm admitting anything, but just to play it safe, Malawi is NOT going to be one of the countries we visit on R&R.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1351174/African-country-set-make-breaking-wind-crime.html

I Once Caught a Fish That was THIS BIG

This is from Helmand.  There isn't a lot of water in Helmand, to begin with, so there aren't a lot of fishing holes.  But if you do want to go fishing in Helmand, it's probably a good idea to have two of your buddies heavily armed and ready to shoot anything, including the fish, that moves.

Blog Statistics

I found out that there's a page here that tracks statistics of page views.  I should have been paying attention earlier; I would have pandered to the international community more effectively.  There's also a place for reader comments.  Sorry to all those who posted comments back in July and August.  Anyway, given that this started as a blog to signal to family members that we hadn't been killed or kidnapped yet, as expected, the US accounts for the overwhelming majority of visitors.  Stop hogging all the visits, Americans.  There's a tie for second place between Canada and the UK.  Germany and Spain follow in a neck and neck race for third and fourth.  Then there's a handful of countries mired in fifth through tenth place - Czech Republic, Argentina, Afghanistan, Russia, etc - you know who you are.  And then there are the collection of countries with only 1 or 2 visits.  Whatever I wrote to piss you off, I'm sorry, and I apologize, unless you deserved it. (You know you did, Etrusca and the Bactrian Empire!  Man up!)

On a completely unrelated note, boy, am I glad I didn't plan next week's R&R in Egypt.

DHS Color Warnings

I have created a color-coded status chart to explain our current inventory of essential items.  This is the Detailed Household Supplies chart.  Currently, the DHS chart stands at ORANGE overall, after adjusting for the relative priority importance of items.  I now know our departure date.  We have 5.3 months remaining.

RED   This signifies that supplies are critically low or exhausted.  We are actively stealing toilet paper from Embassy rest rooms and looting neighbors' unlocked apartments.

ORANGE  Supplies are insufficient to last even close to the duration of our stay.  We are taking medicinal supplements to alter metabolic rhythms that may reduce need somewhat, but we anticipate going RED within two months.

YELLOW  Supplies are worryingly modest.  We are making immediate plans to reduce consumption with reasonable hopes that we can avoid RED status, but with the expectation that we will go to ORANGE no later than May.

GREEN  Supplies are sufficient to last past our anticipated departure date.  We are considering giving away excess items, taking them to Panama, or bartering in exchange for category RED supplies.