Challenge Coins

I don't fully understand the obsession with "challenge coins," and that part of it I do understand isn't worth the time it would take to explain.  Plus, a large part of their purpose is to get free drinks, and since all the US military in theater are under General Order Number One, which prohibits their drinking, they seem superfluous here.  But everybody and their uncle goes around handing out and collecting challenge coins.  I always say thanks, then give it to somebody who does collect them.  But I got one yesterday that's pretty funny.  It's the official coin of the Regional Headquarters - South, which means mostly Kandahar Province (actually, also Zabul and Uruzgan and Daikundi, but all you ever hear about is Kandahar).  Well, besides the usual scheme of a bunch of family crest-type logos, along the bottom of the coin, kind of where you'd expect to see something like "In God We Trust" or "Veni Vidi Vici" or something, is the acronym "YCMTSU."  This carefully chosen line reveals a profound truth about not just Kandahar but also Afghanistan.
YCMTSU stands for:  "You Can't Make This Shit Up."

One Way to Lose Your Job

Helmand sacking over female singers without headscarves (BBC News)

Bilal Sarwary

March 28, 2011

The deputy governor of Helmand province has been sacked for organising a concert that featured female performers without headscarves.

Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai took the action against Abdul Satar Mirzakwal after tribal elders complained that it was inappropriate.

The concert attracted about 12,000 people and was hailed as a success by local authorities.

Helmand is one of Afghanistan's most volatile provinces.

Correspondents say that simply staging the concert in Helmand was a sign of the extent to which security has improved in the province after a sustained coalition offensive against Taliban militants in the area.

The concert featured two female singers - Farzana Naz and Rita Wagma - who appeared on stage without headscarves.

But officials in the country's Supreme Court said that Mr Karzai took action after hearing complaints from tribal elders.

"Women do not appear in public without wearing a burka and niqab in an Islamic country like Afghanistan," one official, who wished to remain unnamed, said.

"Mirzakwal should have ensured respect for Islamic traditions."

The Independent Directorate for Local Governance (IDLG), which recommends the appointment and dismissal of governors and deputy governors, says it was not consulted by President Karzai before he fired Mr Mirzakwal.

"We were not consulted about it. We didn't know about it," an IDLG official said.

Uh-Oh

It's one thing to not be doing very well in the overall campaign, but to be trying your hardest.  It's another when some people are jerks and go out of their way to make things worse.  And it doesn't help when it's in the press.  The article below has the potential to be an Abu Ghraib-like moment.

 The Kill Team (Rolling Stone)

Cpl. Jeremy Morlock with Staff Sgt. David Bram

March 27, 2011

 

How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon

Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.

Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging "savages" and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.

Bravo Company had been stationed in the area since summer, struggling, with little success, to root out the Taliban and establish an American presence in one of the most violent and lawless regions of the country. On the morning of January 15th, the company's 3rd Platoon – part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based out of Tacoma, Washington – left the mini-metropolis of tents and trailers at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in a convoy of armored Stryker troop carriers. The massive, eight-wheeled trucks surged across wide, vacant stretches of desert, until they came to La Mohammad Kalay, an isolated farming village tucked away behind a few poppy fields.

To provide perimeter security, the soldiers parked the Strykers at the outskirts of the settlement, which was nothing more than a warren of mud-and-straw compounds. Then they set out on foot. Local villagers were suspected of supporting the Taliban, providing a safe haven for strikes against U.S. troops. But as the soldiers of 3rd Platoon walked through the alleys of La Mohammad Kalay, they saw no armed fighters, no evidence of enemy positions. Instead, they were greeted by a frustratingly familiar sight: destitute Afghan farmers living without electricity or running water; bearded men with poor teeth in tattered traditional clothes; young kids eager for candy and money. It was impossible to tell which, if any, of the villagers were sympathetic to the Taliban. The insurgents, for their part, preferred to stay hidden from American troops, striking from a distance with IEDs.

While the officers of 3rd Platoon peeled off to talk to a village elder inside a compound, two soldiers walked away from the unit until they reached the far edge of the village. There, in a nearby poppy field, they began looking for someone to kill. "The general consensus was, if we are going to do something that fucking crazy, no one wanted anybody around to witness it," one of the men later told Army investigators.

The poppy plants were still low to the ground at that time of year. The two soldiers, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes, saw a young farmer who was working by himself among the spiky shoots. Off in the distance, a few other soldiers stood sentry. But the farmer was the only Afghan in sight. With no one around to witness, the timing was right. And just like that, they picked him for execution.

He was a smooth-faced kid, about 15 years old. Not much younger than they were: Morlock was 21, Holmes was 19. His name, they would later learn, was Gul Mudin, a common name in Afghanistan. He was wearing a little cap and a Western-style green jacket. He held nothing in his hand that could be interpreted as a weapon, not even a shovel. The expression on his face was welcoming. "He was not a threat," Morlock later confessed.

Morlock and Holmes called to him in Pashto as he walked toward them, ordering him to stop. The boy did as he was told. He stood still.

The soldiers knelt down behind a mud-brick wall. Then Morlock tossed a grenade toward Mudin, using the wall as cover. As the grenade exploded, he and Holmes opened fire, shooting the boy repeatedly at close range with an M4 carbine and a machine gun.

Mudin buckled, went down face first onto the ground. His cap toppled off. A pool of blood congealed by his head.

The loud retort of the guns echoed all around the sleepy farming village. The sound of such unexpected gunfire typically triggers an emergency response in other soldiers, sending them into full battle mode. Yet when the shots rang out, some soldiers didn't seem especially alarmed, even when the radio began to squawk. It was Morlock, agitated, screaming that he had come under attack. On a nearby hill, Spc. Adam Winfield turned to his friend, Pfc. Ashton Moore, and explained that it probably wasn't a real combat situation. It was more likely a staged killing, he said – a plan the guys had hatched to take out an unarmed Afghan without getting caught.

Back at the wall, soldiers arriving on the scene found the body and the bloodstains on the ground. Morlock and Holmes were crouched by the wall, looking excited. When a staff sergeant asked them what had happened, Morlock said the boy had been about to attack them with a grenade. "We had to shoot the guy," he said.

It was an unlikely story: a lone Taliban fighter, armed with only a grenade, attempting to ambush a platoon in broad daylight, let alone in an area that offered no cover or concealment. Even the top officer on the scene, Capt. Patrick Mitchell, thought there was something strange about Morlock's story. "I just thought it was weird that someone would come up and throw a grenade at us," Mitchell later told investigators.

But Mitchell did not order his men to render aid to Mudin, whom he believed might still be alive, and possibly a threat. Instead, he ordered Staff Sgt. Kris Sprague to "make sure" the boy was dead. Sprague raised his rifle and fired twice.

As the soldiers milled around the body, a local elder who had been working in the poppy field came forward and accused Morlock and Holmes of murder. Pointing to Morlock, he said that the soldier, not the boy, had thrown the grenade. Morlock and the other soldiers ignored him.

To identify the body, the soldiers fetched the village elder who had been speaking to the officers that morning. But by tragic coincidence, the elder turned out to be the father of the slain boy. His moment of grief-stricken recognition, when he saw his son lying in a pool of blood, was later recounted in the flat prose of an official Army report. "The father was very upset," the report noted.

The article keeps going, but you've got the gist.  Check out the Rolling Stone site for the full story.

Another Fun Way to Say WTF

Since I can't write about ongoing security-related developments, and that's about the only thing really going on, I will write about something else.  We have hundreds of incomprehensible acronyms, courtesy of the military and the people who are trying to be like the military.  But every once in a while, someone turns the usual military language back in a typically civilian way.  So at a meeting a couple of days ago, someone who will remain unidentified said something absurd.  And someone else who will remain unidentified replied, "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?"

A Little More Rocking

I didn't even feel this one because I was outside walking, but Jody says her hooch was shaking perceptibly.  I think this makes four since we've been here, four that we could feel.

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/afghanistan/article/957149--usgs-strong-quake-hits-northeasters-afghanistan

Kuchi Coup

Having learned that we were in town and not going anywhere anytime soon, the Badgis governor very courteously invited a group of us to his place for dinner.  It was the usual elaborate spread - heaping plates of rice with nuts and raisins, lentils, yogurt, lamb, chicken, some other bird, squash, tea, fruit,even Mountain Dew.  But what was most interesting were his stories of his trip to the US.  He had been to Utah, but the city that most impressed him was Atlanta, he said.  What a coincidence - I have a daughter living in Atlanta, I told him.  That was great news, because perhaps she could find out something for him.  Of course, I replied.  He remembered that when he was in Atlanta, they went for a short drive and then stood on a hill overlooking the ocean.  It was the first time he had ever seen the ocean, and it overwhelmed him.  He gazed for what seemed like at hours at the seven rivers flowing together into the great bay and the ocean.  What, he wondered, were the names of the seven rivers?  Well, I was beginning to think that maybe it wasn't Atlanta, unless "short drive" means something different to Afghans, but I couldn't for the life of me think of anywhere on the southern east coast where seven rivers merged, and nobody else in our group could, either.  Then he remarked that one thought he had while gazing at the ocean was the realization that, if he followed the sea long enough, far beyond the horizon, there was Japan.  That sealed it for me; I knew he had to be talking about Seattle, though I don't know if there are seven rivers there or what their names are.  But I wasn't going to correct an understandable mistake - hey, let's face it, "Atlanta" and "Seattle" sound similar, their football teams are both named after birds, and it so happens that I have daughters living in each one, so I'm covered either way on the whole rivers research thing. But I was the only one in our group who had come to this conclusion at this point.  But not for long.  Among the other things that impressed him about Satleanttle was an account told to him of this fish - a sort of Kuchi fish, he said.  (The Kuchi are the nomads of Afghanistan; they wander across the country with herds of goats or sheep. They even have a sort of mobile voting booth to let them participate in elections, since it's not like they have fixed addresses.)  This Kuchi fish, he told us, traveled up and down the rivers all its life, forever wandering.  I have decided henceforth that whenever I order salmon in a restaurant, I will call it Kuchi fish.

What We Did in Qal-i-Naw

Lots of things, actually; meetings on some governance programs, a dinner with the governor at his house, and of course serious discussions with our Spanish counterparts which happened to take place in the cantina.  But every day we packed our stuff, went to the airport, listened to the plane circle overhead and then get farther and farther away, and go back and unpack our stuff.  The first photo doesn't really show you how low the clouds and mist were; most days you couldn't even see these hills from the PRT, and it was quite cold, barely above freezing, with a constant drizzle.  Mostly we just tramped around in the mud.

In Comparison, Our Layover Wasn't That Bad

This gentleman works for the Education Ministry.  We met him at the airport on the day when we finally got out and headed back to Kabul.  So we asked him his story.  Turns out, he's supposed to take the teachers' pay, three months worth of it, to the Murghab district.  Murghab is extremely isolated; we met another group of people who had been stranded there for 21 days.  They couldn't take a land route out because the last convoy took, literally, 18 days (it's less than a hundred km) and at least 3 trucks were destroyed by the insurgents.  Anyway, like most places outside the major cities, Murghab has no banks, much less electronic banking, so teachers and everybody else get paid, when they get paid, in cash.  In his bags he is carrying several million afghanis.  This was his 25th consecutive day at the airport, waiting for a flight to Murghab.  Every day he goes there, and is told there are no seats available for him (even though there are flights), and he's told to come back again tomorrow.  He didn't get out yesterday either, so I assume he's there again today, waiting to see if his luck will change, or if the coalition will realize that not paying teachers is not a good way to build support for the government to counter the insurgency, and so maybe they should give the man a ride.

More of Qal-i-Naw from the Air

Aerial Views of QaliNaw

This was as we were taking off and heading back to Kabul.  These hills, many of them anyway, were actually terraced for agriculture, though each ledge couldn't have been more than a few feet wide, and it's too cold there for rice, and it doesn't seem worth it for wheat.  Maybe that is where they grow the cabbages and carrots and so forth.  Our agriculture guy didn't know.  He did say, though, that lots of Badghis Province is covered by native wild pistachio forests - and that the pistachios are actually a decent source of income for local insurgents, since they can get upwards of $5 a kilo for them.

The Weird and Windy Hills of Badghis

North of the Hindu Kush

 All the mountains we passed over as we headed northwest from Kabul were completely snow covered.  The riverbeds were still visible, but also filled with snow, and the towns were just occasional dark rectangles where the tops of the walls  didn't always have snow on them.

A Kabul Interlude

 I will load more photos from the Spanish PRT later.  In the meantime, here was a rug fair held on the Embassy compound grounds last week.  This is an excellent idea, and I, too, am going to start profusely carpeting my lawn, if I ever have a lawn.  This will keep people from getting my grass dirty.  We didn't buy any of these rugs.  For starters, the prices were too high.  Only in the back of my mind did I remember that these carpets were lying out all day on the Embassy lawn that is watered by what is politely called "brown water," and whose aroma in the mornings or evenings when the sprinklers are turned on is quite distinct.

More Day in the Life from QaliNaw

 Near - but not too near - the guys washing their motorcycle in the river, which is pretty muddy, were three women doing their laundry in the river.  But it seemed too intrusive of me to take a photo of them, so you're stuck with these.

Regular Day in QaliNaw

 Wandering around off the airport - which, as I mentioned earlier, basically just blends into the town itself, since people and vehicles routinely cross back and forth the runway - this is I guess what people do on a regular day here.  Note the woman in the burka on the back of the motorcycle.

The Hills When It's Clear

QaliNaw Airport

 The day we left, the skies were mostly clear, and even the helicopters were flying, taking newly arrived Italian troops to Bala Murghab and elsewhere.  That was encouraging as we waited by the runway for our plane to land.

Something Completely Different

Let's say you desperately need to spell "Pringles" in Dari but can't remember how.  Feel free to use this as a cheat sheet.  Take care to write from right to left.

When QaliNaw is Mostly Clear

 It's actually quite stunning topographically.  Three views of the hills from the vantage point of the PRT, which sits on a wide hill overlooking the town.

Characteristics of a Spanish PRT

 This was the 27th rotation of Spanish troops through the PRT.  This particular contingent is largely from Asturias and Galicia. The most striking aspect of the PRT to me was how Spanish it was.  At the tables in the bar - yes, the Spanish have a large bar, and I believe every soldier and civilian posted there was in there either for an after-lunch coffee or glass of wine, or a few glasses of wine or beer in the evening - you see what is probably the most indicative feature that shows how Spaniards and Americans are different: social vs individual.  In US coffee shops and food places, tables are in short supply.  Often you see one person at a table, with two or three vacant chairs.  But it's hard to find an empty table.  In Spain, tables are plentiful - what are hard to come by are chairs.  You will see one table overloaded with a dozen or more chairs, and every Spaniard who comes late, but comes, would never think of sitting at a different table by himself - he just pulls up another chair to join the group.  I saw the same pattern at the PRT.  What was also Spanish was the food, and I believe it's the best food I've had at a PRT.  Besides the wine - and they had Rioja, Ribera, Albarino, Rueda, etc - at the canteen itself, the meals included trout, monkfish, roast lamb, paella, salpicon de mariscos, alubias, roast mushrooms, various estofados, solomillo, flan, chorizo, ensalada con anchoas, sardinas a la plancha, Fanta limon y naranja....  At the bar we had tortilla, pulpo gallego, jamon serrano, manchego, etc.  Plus, they give you real silverware, including sharp knives!  In Kabul you get the plastic cutlery, even flimsier than the stuff on airplanes.  But in Badghis, real knives and real glassware.  And for breakfast - strong cafe con leche, tostados, and galletas Maria, the breakfast of champions.

Why We Were Stuck

 No, not for the Rioja and the tapas, not officially, anyway.  That was just a perk.  Qalinaw is in Badghis province.  Badghis, I am told, is a Farsi-derived word that means "land where the winds arise" or "birthplace of the winds" or something like that.  So it's got all these little hills, weirdly eroded by the winds, that look like the burial mounds out of The Hobbit, just a bit higher.  Anyway, once the mists settle in, the city is completely blanketed in fog, and since there is no functioning radar, the planes have to land by visual, and if they can't see through the cloud cover, they don't risk it.  Later I will post photos of the hills when the skies were clearer.

View of the Spanish PRT After Several Cups of Coffee

 Take your pick.  This was actually unusual - not the sign itself, though I admit I've never seen one like it, but the fact that the stalls (one each, in the same room) were marked for men or women.  The rest of the bathrooms were unisex, as were the showers.  So this makes two times I've taken photos of bathrooms.  I'm not proud of this development, but sometimes you have to break the rules to make great art.

First Views of the Spanish PRT

 So on Sunday morning I left for a quick trip to the Spanish-led PRT in Qal-i-Naw, which is pronounced, more or less, "call-ee now."  I got back Thursday evening.  Turns out that the weather is a bit unpredictable there.  Back in 2009 when we learned we were coming here, we gave Afghan province names as the backup names for our cats.  The rotund Niebla was given Jalalabad, since the word reminds me of Jabba the Hut.  Tiger, who tends to bang his head against doors for no apparent reason, we called Wardak, since that sounded like a barbarian warrior a little short on brain power.  And Qalinaw was the name we gave Parsley, since it sounded cute and delicate.  Well, it seems I should have researched the weather a bit more, or at least taken a few more changes of clothes.  It was cold, misty and foggy for four straight days, and the cloud cover wouldn't lift to let the planes land.  Every day they sent a plane for us; every morning we heard it circling overhead for 30 or 45 minutes, then it would fly back to Herat, wait for a couple of hours on the off-chance the sky would lift, then fly back to Kabul.  Not until Thursday morning did it get in.  That was lucky, too; there was a snow storm moving in that would have trapped us there for another three to five days.  In the bottom photo you get a view of the city itself, and the mosque stands out.  What's of note, though, is the long strip of pavement running left to right, with some people walking along it.  That's actually the airport landing strip.  It's right in the middle of town, and in fact people regularly walk and drive across it and kids play soccer on it.  When aircraft are due in, Spanish troops set up a perimeter along the runway and shoo the kids away and yell at the trucks to wait until the plane lands and taxis out of the way.

Fair Skies Right Now

Which is good for today's trip out west to Qalinaw in Badghis Province, to visit the Spanish PRT.  Bad weather in Kabul means we won't get over the Hindu Kush; in Herat it means I will be spending the night.  I am packing a backpack just in case.  At least there might be paella and Rioja.

Hilltop

Here we are, and here are the guys forming the perimeter that lets us stand here without getting shot.  I notice that my name tag on my armor is crooked.  I also notice that my sweater is sticking to the velcro flap.

Left and Right

From the hilltop, if you look left, that is, to the north, you see a collection of residential compounds and one factory, a gravel plant.  To the right, near the foot of the hill, is this cemetery.  It's common for the graves to be decorated with streamers and pennants.  This was one of two cemeteries we saw that had a wall around them.  During one part of the ride, we passed through a poorer-than-usual stretch where people gathered branches to sell as firewood, and there was a cemetery in the road itself.  The convoy had to slow down and veer sharply to the left in order to avoid running over any of the above-ground graves.  That cemetery had no pennants or streamers at all, just mounds of rocks over the bodies.

View of the Hilltop

And this is the hill we climbed, pretty much nothing except loose sliding jagged rocks.  Once you get to the top, you're welcomed by the concertina wire.

View from a Hilltop

Near one of the small police precincts in the district, we climbed a hill to get a better view of the layout.  You can see where we parked in the second photo, in between two rows of blast barriers.  You can also see a woman in a dark burka with her two kids.  They were coming from the building in the foreground of the last photo, a recently built health clinic.  As you can see by the crowd in front, there's a high demand for its services.