Jody in Garmsir

 On a walk through the bazaar in Garmsir district, in Helmand province, during her latest congressional delegation visit.  I will let her write more details about it and the boy she gave a dollar to.

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.

To and From the Airport

This time when we drove out to the airport, it took no time at all, maybe 6 or 7 minutes.  There was no traffic at all because it's Eid, a big feast holiday.  Interestingly, on the way to the Kabul airport in the early morning, there were hundreds of goats and sheep and even a few oxen and cows being driven along Airport Road.  On the way back, there was still no traffic to speak of, but there were substantially fewer animals.  Coincidentally, Afghans eat a lot of lamb and goat and the occasional beef when they can get it during Eid.  So yeah, nearly every animal we saw on Tuesday morning had been slaughtered by Wednesday evening.

Usually it's dark when I come back from the airport on trips outside Kabul.  What's freaky is that if you're driving back right around sunset, it coincides with the call to prayer.  The streets in Kabul are totally unlit.  Unless there's a shop, a bonfire, or headlights of an oncoming vehicle, it is pitch black.  And at sunset, frequently, our car will swerve violently or slam on the brakes to avoid hitting men - it's always and only men - literally in the middle of the street who have gotten out of their cars, carts, taxis or buses, put their prayer rugs down in the street, and are doing their prayers.

And Yet More Mountain Views

 I take a lot of pictures from the window of the airplane.  There isn't much else to do, and even though the terrain is similar, I guess, I still find it fascinating.  These pictures are in sequence from about 45 minutes NE of Kandahar to closer to Kabul, though still 15 minutes or so west of the city.  The flight from Kabul to Kandahar takes just over an hour, but the return flight takes well more than 90 minutes, closer to two hours.  I have no idea why this is.  All I know is, for the first time since I have been in Afghanistan, I traveled somewhere and wasn't delayed hours and/or days by dust storms or dark or something else.  Also, a traveling companion, who up to now had been mortared on every single trip, and thus who is clearly bad luck (I have been shelled outside Kabul only three times), also broke his streak, as no incoming at all occurred.  This probably means that when I go back to Helmand, as I must next week, I'm due for a double whammy.

Arghandab River

Here you can see the stretch of vegetation, in this case irrigated orchards, along the river - the Arghandab, near Kandahar city, an area hotly contested over the past few months between US Marines and the insurgency.  As mentioned previously, it's just past harvest season, so the leaves have turned and many of the fields are already denuded, but you can see the grids of each farming plot.  This is a fairly populated and prosperous part of Afghanistan.

Rocks

 Before we came here, we were told that Afghanistan would be phenomenally wealthy if rocks were riches.  It's hard to sufficiently stress just how mountainous, and barren, and rocky and dusty the land is.  These are comparatively small rocky upcroppings near Kandahar city.  They are typical of what you see in much of Afghanistan, at least south of the Hindu Kush.  Suddenly rocky narrow ridges will rise up like the spine on a prickly-backed fish, like in the last photo.

Dry Mud and Dirt

 The first is a typical view from the air.  Most villages are composed of low mud walls forming more or less rectangular shapes, within which is the family farming plot and the one-story mud house.  The only green comes near the river or near the irrigation canals.  Outside the villages - sometimes not very far outside - often the earth is so parched that it is scarred with long cracks.  The last three photos show a pattern I hadn't seen before.  I don't know what caused this.  The river isn't very close; it's clearly not caused by water erosion.  But maybe this has something to do with groundwater being removed, and then the earth collapsing.  I don't know.  Whatever the cause, I thought it was worth posting the photos.