Kaboom Kabul

You know what's weird.  Watching mortars go off and listening to gunfire in some far off country on CNN, and realizing that you're sitting right in the middle of it all.  Insurgents launched a coordinated attack against a number of targets in Kabul, including NATO headquarters, where I am, to kick off the spring fighting season.  Mostly small arms fire RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and mortars.  Heck, in Kandahar province that would barely rate stopping a gym workout.  It must have been a slow news day, or the middle of the night back home, because there was lots of coverage on CNN, an BBC and Al-Jazeera.  I don't know how many times I've seen similar footage in Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Iraq.  But this time it was like "Hey, there's the market I go to."

CNN was pretty breathless about the whole thing.  You'd think the Taliban had taken Kabul.  But from a military perspective, it was an abysmal effort.  The objective of the mission wasn't really military though.  The insurgents—including primarily the Taliban and the Haqqani network—are basically trying to carry off "spectacular attacks" in Kabul as a propaganda tool.  It's to try to convince people that they are more effective than they actually are, and to degrade the Afghan people's tenuous notion of stability. 

Afghan security forces dealt with the attack and ISAF (NATO) quick reaction forces were not needed.

A big thank you to all those who contacted me to see if I was OK. 

A couple of days earlier myself and a couple of friends were wandering down Chicken Street and Flower Street—the main shopping district in downtown Kabul, and what used to be a tourist hub.  It was  a nice day and I thought there'd be lots of folks perhaps from the embassies and the various non-governmental organizations doing the tourist thing, but we were the only ones.  I think a lot of the Afghans were kind of shocked to see us moseying about actually.  They just stared at us.  Except the kids. We had a gaggle of them dancing around us half the time. 

Anyways, I managed to snap off a couple of shots, but they are quite leery of cameras here.   I put it away after an Afghan soldier got a little irate with me, and counted myself lucky to still have a  camera. 

Chicken Street, Downtown Kabul

Chicken Street Again. 

At the Kabul Bookstore.

Typical "subdivision" in Kabul.

Only a month to go to R&R back in Canada, in mid-May, so I'm looking forward immensely to seeing my family, playing some soccer, and having a beer or three with my mates.  Counting the days.

Hitler and Satan: Separated at Birth?

I am part of those forces which ceaselessly plot evil and eternally create good.

     -- the Archdemon Mephsitopholes, to Faust

A couple of hot news items on the Evil Personified front this week. 

The first is the impact of the Kony 2012 video.  I haven't seen it myself, as the internet is kind of sketchy over here.  Kony is the head of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army who have been busy killing, raping and pillaging in Central Africa for a good 25 years now.  He's one of your more colorful warlords, given to making children hack their parents to death, and claiming magical powers. 

He's in the Idi Amin school of warlords.  Most ruthless dictators like to maintain a veneer of civility and  moderation--Assad, Mao.  When asked to stop torturing people, the response will be "Me?  Torture people? Noooooo."  But Idi Amin was all "But I like torturing people!  Almost as much as I enjoy eating them. "

Also in the news:  the Norwegian subhuman who killed some 77 kids in cold blood was charged last week.  You may recall that he dressed up as a cop and went to an island filled with kids at some summer camp for liberals and pretty much hunted them all down.  Stupid looking fellow.  Apparently used to protect the weaker kids in his school from bullies.  Go figure.  I expect his last words will be "The horror! The horror!"

I apologize in advance if I am not giving Evil Personified its solemn due.  I really have to learn to be more serious when discussing Evil.  I'm bad for Hitler jokes too.

When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban were Evil Incarnate.  They liked to kill civilians, enslave women and burn schools.  Still do.  They gave Osama bin Laden a place from which to run his terrorist activities, including launching his horrific attack on civilians in New York.  But we've been in Afghanistan over ten years now.  And Evil continues its relentless march with or without the Taliban.  F-15s do not seem to kill it.

The Taliban here in Afghanistan have not died like Absolute Evil should--that is with a big boom and 10,000 Bonus Points.  They are just lying there. Very still.   Playing possum with us. The West is bored.  Meanwhile there is new and interesting Evil running around in Iran and Uganda.

I don't really understand the Dark Continent.  I guess I see it as a place of suffering and starvation and plague.  Life consists mostly of trying to get enough to eat and fleeing marauding hordes.  It fills me with a sense of helplessness because it never changes.  One of earliest memories is listening to George Harrison's  1973 Concert for Bangladesh. (Yeah, my parents were big-time hippies.  Had Jesus Christ Superstar racked on the turntable all the time, too.  I still know every word.)  Then there was Bob Geldoff's LiveAid in 1985.  And here we are twenty-five years later.  Having a receptacle in which to put all the Evil of Africa fulfills a need for us, but eliminating Kony will not extinguish evil from Africa.

That's not to say I begrudge the effort.  It would be pretty cynical to ride a guy who wants something done about a sadist who victimizes children with such impunity. 

The only thing that bothers me is that we, by all this attention, exalt Kony to some apotheosis of Evil.  Deify him.  When a wasp stung my daughter a couple of summers ago, I squished it. I didn't torture it, or handcuff it and asked it why it went around stinging cute little girls who never did it any harm.  I just killed it so it wouldn't sting again, and then went back to my book.

Evil is banal. You never learn anything from its perpetrators when you ask them "Why?  Why?  Why?"  They never have an answer.  No insight into the nature of their wickedness.  They seem as perplexed as the one asking the question.  I've always found that quite odd.   And the perpetrators never seem equal to the chaos and misery they've caused.

Voltaire said Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer.  "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." (Hey, we're bilingual over here at Mindfingers!)  The same, it seems, applies to the devil.  We have a need to personify evil.  The Christians at least admit as much.   All their evil is in one convenient package--Lucifer, the Fallen Angel. 

Secular types talk a big game about moral relativity, but when their moral sensitivities are outraged, they want to package and personify evil too, albeit in human form, instead of divine. 

Take Hitler for instance.

Hitler has become that invented, secular Satan.  it's impolite to even mention his name in civil company.  Express any sympathy with his ideas and you'll wind up in legal hot water--shades of the old blasphemy laws.

But when we vest all the vileness of Nazi Germany in Adolf Hitler, we forget the true lesson of the Holocaust--that it was brought about by a million smaller evils, from guard at Dachau who was "just following orders" to the woman who quietly closed her blinds when the Gestapo came for her neighbor.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer imprisoned for eight years in  Stalin gulag, knew something about evil.  He said the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Fear and Loathing in Afghanistan

Well things are pretty torqued up around here, as you can imagine.

First of all, there was the inadvertent burning of some holy Qur'ans a couple of weeks back.  There were, as I'm sure you've heard, a number of protests killing an estimated thirty Afghan civilians, and some reprisal shootings, including the so-called "blue-on-green" attacks where members of the ostensibly allied Afghan national forces turned their guns on ISAF forces.

Then there was the mass murder of a number of civilians, including a number of children, by an American soldier in Kandahar province.  Curiously, the Qur'an incident seems to have sparked more outrage.  Perhaps the Afghans are still digesting the murders, and the fury has yet to come.  Are we wiating fo rthe "other shoe to drop" or was the defilement of the Qur'ans, perhaps, considered the bigger sin?

People back home were probably trying to wrap their heads around the sheer scale and violence of the response to the Qur'an incident.  There was a lot of speculation that this was "trigger event" that tapped into a simmering Afghan discontent with the length of occupation of their country, and the failure of the occupying forces to deliver on prosperity and change.

This may well have some truth to it.  But one thing you learn living here is that first and foremost:  Afghans are a very, very religious people, and they have been for 1200 years.  99% of Afghans are Muslims.  Muslims are famously devout, but even among them it is known that Afghans are particularly pious.  Islam is woven into every aspect of their lives.  We, in the west, have difficulty perceiving this because we've been brought up to separate our religious inclinations from the rest of our lives.  The idea of a separation between Islam and the state is completely alien to a typical Afghan Muslim.  It's not merely that they don't like the idea; they can't even imagine it.

The overall purpose of education is to produce good Muslims. Most Afghans attend a mosque school from when they are four or five years old.  Even the "general education schools" (those which are not mosque schools or madrassas) contain several hours a week of Islamic education.  Everything else is secondary.  To learn to read is to learn to read the Qur'an. 

Seen through this lens, it is understandable that any insult to their religion would cause profound discontent.  Of course, that's not to say that cynical mullahs aren't exploiting the opportunity to cause mischief.

Obama apologized for the incident.  Apparently, it was suspected that the Qur'ans in question were from a detainment facility and were being used to transmit messages between inmates.   But this points out another difference between the Afghanistan and Western mindset.  The fact that this was, by all accounts (even Afghan witnesses) completely inadvertent, does not carry the same weight as it would in Canada or the US.  Intent and motive are key to Western law.  In the US, the difference between murder with intent and inadvertent homicide can be life an death (for the accused, that is; we assume the victim has already gone to his Great Reward).  In practice in Afghanistan, Islamic law does not attach the same significance to intent, at least for certain huddud crimes such as blasphemy and illegal sexual intercourse.  Which is why if you are a girl unfortunate enough to get raped, you may find yourself on trial for adultery or fornication.

Another profound difference in world views is encompassed by the term Inshallah-- "God Willing" or "If God wishes." For instance, yesterday, as part of my work here, I was reading a report by the Civil-MIlitary Fusion Center (warning: pdf) on illness and death due to contaminated water in Afghanistan.  It is likely that thousands of Afghans die prematurely every year due to contaminated water.  

Sediq Azizi, spokesman of the Samangan governor, Khairullah Anush, told IWPR that "every year we present our problems to the ministries in Kabul, but they have not taken any action yet." He concluded, “these deaths are the will of Allah. " 

Inshallah is not intended to be pessimistic or dismissive, but humble and passive.  Muslims submit to the will Allah in a way that we may not comprehend.  Things unfold according to Allah's will. Or, to quote Robert Burns, . 

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:


The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men


Gang aft agley,


An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,


For promis'd joy!

Or maybe I could do just as well to quote the Kansas classic Dust in the Wind:

Same old song

Just a drop of water in an endless sea

All we do

Crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see

Dust in the Wind

All we are is dust in the wind

Inshallah is the antithesis of the American "Can-Do" mindset.  American mythology is replete with figures who, as individuals, triumph over an unjust system.  I mean, will Hollywood movie makers ever tire of the line "I've got a great idea for a movie. It's about a cop who bucks the system and saves the world."

Curiously, the term Inshallah has become quite popular with the military folks over here.

"So, do you think the Afghanistan government will be able to keep the Taliban at bay when we pull out of here in 2014."

"Inshallah."

There is a joke going around that we are pulling out of Afghanistan but driving through Iran on the way home.  Thing is, when you tell that joke, nobody laughs.

Welcome to Afghanistan

OK, first off today, folks, it's "bated breath," not "baited breath" ... As in phrases such as "I await your response with bated breath."  It's a shortened form of "abate," which means to lessen or lower.  Like so many other words, it's first use can be traced to Shakespeare.  Normally I'm not that much of a stickler for these things.  It's just that every time I read "baited breath" the picture I get is "I've just eaten a bunch of nightcrawlers, so my breath may not be the freshest."

It's the coldest winter here in 15 year.  Most nights get down somewhere between -10 and -20 deg C, and it only warms up to snow.  We've got easily a foot in the last 36 hours and it's still coming down hard.The bad news is that at least 24 children have frozen to death in the refuge camps around Kabul.  Deforestation is a big environmental challenge here, and wood for fires is a rare commodity, made all the rarer by a spike in demand due to the cold.   I read one heart-breaking story about a baby who died, and the mother related that they have lost eight of their nine children to disease and cold.  One ten-year old girl left.  Welcome to Afghanistan.

Not quite dressed for the weather

However, this record snowfall means no drought this year. The snowpack in the mountains should ensure a good spring and early summer run-off.

Kabul used t be a green city, famous for its orchards, just a few decades ago.  I gather the main culprit was the Soviets who cut down the trees to deny insurgents cover (shades of Agent Orange).  There was a tree-planting aid coming in by I'm told that one of the higher-ups was selling the trees and they never got planted.

In a similar story, I lugged two duffle bags full of soccer stuff and girls' toiletries for the local orphanage here, but I'm told we can't give stuff to them any more because the lady running the place would take all the stuff back from the girls and sell it.  Even the blankets they needed to stay warm at night.  Welcome to Afghanistan.

Well, I'm given to understand that the situation will shortly be rectified and they're getting a new director in, so n the meantime I wait with bated breath.

Pictures of Kabul

A little late with this blog posting. I blame it on my roomie moving out, giving me some blessed solitude--something very rare on a highly dense military base. My roommate and friend Master Sergeant Ronnie R is headed back to Germany to see his wife and little ones. I hope I do as well with my next roomie. I immediately proceeded to abuse my newfound privacy by staying up late surfing the web, playing video games and watching movies. This is probably one of the reasons that it's wise to double up the rooms. It prevents a sort of natural withdrawal that is natural in such a crowded place. It won't be a problem for long though; any day now I'll get a new roomie. Hope he's as good as the last one.

It's snowing very heavily right now. We're in this nasty cycle of snow/thaw/freeze that leaves the entire place like an ice rink and plays hell with the engineering, cracking the concrete and loading the roofs and structures with ice. It got down to almost -20°C here a few days ago. Who knew it got that cold here? Just another reason why Kabul is such an international tourist mecca I guess. 

Speaking of Mecca, we discovered that toilets used by the Afghan locals have to be oriented so that they don't face Mecca. When this was announced, one of the sharper engineers offered "so which way do they orient the toilets in Mecca?"

In this next four month stint in Kabul, I'm determined to get out and about a little more to see Kabul. The first few months, I stayed close to home, as I felt I lacked the situational awareness to go wandering about Kabul. Also, there's military mindset here (not surprising for a military base, I suppose), that treats the city proper as a battle space. But the reality is that there are thousands of European and North American civilians living in Kabul, usually associated with some type of non-governmental association or another.

That said, you always have to keep your wits and eyes sharp when you're out and about. The biggest danger isn't insurgents, but kidnappers, since the average white guy here is tremendously wealthy compared to your rank-and-file Afghan. So, for example, you don't just hop into anyone's car who claims to be a cab driver. (The taxis here are just regular older-model Toyotas like 90% of the vehicles here.) Some of the guys here have grown beards and wear the scarves and ... so that they blend right in, weather because their job requires them to do so, or they just don't want to stand out. I'm 46 and I still can't grow a beard, plus I'm very white and tall compared to the locals, so I have a gaggle of kids gawking at me wherever I go.

The restaurant was a Lebanese bistro where I was meeting some Afghan friends for lunch. The food was excellent. It was a little uncomfortable having three waiters standing around the table the whole time, sublimely attuned to my most innocuous body language, even to, for example, rearranging the plates on the table so the dish I was reaching for was more conveniently located for me. At times, I felt like a Brit in 19th century India. "Bring me a plate of your finest meats and cheeses. And you-- dance for my amusement."

Afghan people, apart from the occasionally stinkeye, are very friendly. The kids clamor around you where ever you go. When I couldn't find the restaurant and wandered into an alley, these little alley rats offered, in very limited English, to be my bodyguards. To their credit, they somehow took me right where I wanted to go, so I greased their palms with a Yankee dollar and took their picture. 

My Afghan Bodyguards

The Afghan men and children love to have their picture taken. However, it's strictly taboo to take a picture of older girls or women. I've been told I shouldn't even acknowledge them unless I've a reason too.

Oh--and a humorous military logistics anecdote to relate. My friend Bill is the Warehouse guy--you know, keeping the office supplied with pens and paper. So anyway, a couple of days ago, he filled out the form for some stuff including one box of paper clips. I went with him to pick up the stuff, and the Warehouse guy dutifully loads up boxes of paper and a crate of binders, a few packages of pens, etc. And a paperclip. One. I guess the guy took the form pretty literally, where, for paperclips, it requested a Quantity of "1."

"Actually," said Bill, showing immense patience learned oly from years of exposure to military logistics, "I meant one box of paperclips."

"Ohhhhhhhhh."

Or how about this one: one of the Afghan locals working here was turned away from the base recently when he tried to bring a sheep in. There's a lot of locals working here, and the idea was that he was going to slaughter the sheep at lunch time and cook it up. The guard asked him why he didn’t just slaughter it at home or at the butcher, to which the guy replied (with impeccable logic, I might add) that then he would have to carry it here, rather than have lunch walk itself.

As I was clearing up our shared drive the other day, I came across a slideshow put together, I believe, but one of the German engineers that used to work here. There's some fantastic shots here that really portray what it's like here in Kabul. There's some fantastic shots.  Have a look!

From Disneyland to Kabul in One Week

Well a belated Happy New Year to you.  I'm currently sitting in a lounge in Dubai Airport enjoying what will probably be my last beer for a few months and preparing to fly out to Kabul at four in the morning.  It's eight at night now.  So there might actually be a couple more beers.  It's back to the war so that means back to the blog!

Dubai Airport.  Fannnnn-cy.

Meh.  It's a blend.

My R&R was awesome.  Alice, my six year old, wouldn't let go of me for days after I got back.  Oscar, 8, wanted to play soccer with me everyday.  Even Helen, my wife, was happy to see me.  We had a fantastic Christmas and New Years with friends and family.  The highlight of the trip (apart from seeing my family of course) was the trip to Disneyland in California, the Happiest Place on Earth. 

The weather was fantastic and we had five days of sun, swimming and exploring Disneyland and that other park right next door, the name of which currently eludes me.  When you walk into Disneyland the first the thing you hit is Main Street.  Not just any Main Street but the apotheosis of Main Street.  Main Street USA.  I suppose you could get all cynical and point out that Main Street is just a ruse for extracting money from tourists' pockets on the way to the rides, but I found it strangely moving after four months in Kabul.  City Hall, the movie theatre, the ice cream store, the parades, the olde-style trams and horse-drawn buggies, and a hundred-foot tall, gloriously decorated Christmas Tree and the Magic Castle in the distance. 

Main Street, USA, Disneyland

The kids were climbing over themselves getting autographs from all the Disney characters (especially Alice!), ogling the mouth-watering candy, and figuring out which direction to go exploring. 

Everyone is always smiling in Disneyland. The best thing is that, if a child starts crying for some reason, he is immediately cordoned off by a bevy of dapperly-dressed dandies in orange and white striped suits and hats who turn and face the crowd forming a human wall that we might not be subjected to the sight of human misery.  They slowly back up, and, if the child does not cease his wailing then the family are backed through a gate and pushed behind the grand façade amongst the empty palettes, garbage bins and forklifts and expunged from the Magic Kingdom.  Such is their dedication to a happy experience for all. 

Smile ... Or Else!

There's  a lot of wheelchairs at Disneyland.  I think you must get some kind of line bypass or something, because the place is crawling with folks pushing around wheelchairs occupied by people who were forever getting up out of the wheelchair.  There was also a lot of strollers (they have designated stroller parking at Disneyland) filled with kids who were, frankly, too big to be in a stroller.  The wheelchairs and strollers are excellent for navigating crowds.  Just point your wheeled device and push to clear the way in front of you.

Another cultural observation is that those Tap Out brand T-shirts they make only come in in three sizes:  XXL, XXXL and muu-muu. 

I was, of course, very interested in the engineering aspect.  Actually Walt Disney called his design team Imagineers, a moniker that might seem pretentious unless you take into account the grand scale of the place and exquisite attention to detail.  Even the garbage bins in the different parts of the park were designed to fit the theme (how can you tell I'm an environmental engineer).  They could have easily put in painted plastic fences around the rides, but opted instead for beautifully realized wrought iron creations.

We need a mountian for this ride?  No prob, we'll just build one.  Let's call it Bear Mountain.
Oh--and let's make it shaped like a giant bear.

And the animatronics!  Splash Mountain was my favourite.  I don't even know what Disney movie it's based on. Brer Rabbit?  It's probably an old movie that has some politically incorrect component to it so they don’t show it anymore, but the singing wolves and rabbits were really a wonder to behold.  The best part was that Helen always situated herself in the seat she thought would get the least wet and inevitably got more soaked than the rest of us. That was revenge for Helen making me go on the California Screamin' roller coaster.  That is some roller coaster.  And the Ferris wheel scared the crap out of me too.  Your car shifts suddenly as it moves around the track.

Scary Roller Coaster and Ferris Wheel.  Look closely and you can
see how the cars in the Ferris Wheel shift as they turn.

Oscar was oddly fascinated by the empty, little movie cinema on Main Street that showed the original Mickey Mouse movie, Steamboat Willie, from 1928 over and over again.  Every might, on the way home, the kids would stop and watch it and laugh all the way through.  Hats off to Walt Disney is all I can say.  As far as our family was concerned that place really is magic.

Where I'm headed, big booms in the sky at night mean somehting completely different. 

So now I'm on my third pint after saying good-bye to my family, flying to LA, a four-hour stop-over, a 17-hour flight to Dubai, an eight-hour stopover, and an upcoming flight to Kabul, arriving Monday morning.  When I walk out of Kabul Airport there will be machine guns trained on me and I'll know I'm back to the war.

That said, I've got friends there, and I'm looking forward to seeing them.  Back to Canada House BBQs, working out at the gym, reading and writing, and doing some important work.

It was hard leaving though.  Harder than the first time.  Helen and I try to gloss over the fact that I'm heading for a war zone, but the kids sense it.  They know.  They've got it tougher than me.  Helen has to manage the family by herself, and the kids have to make do without a father.

Well, now I'm on my fourth pint and getting all maudlin and having to rely on spellchecker more and more so I'll sign off here.  Talk to you soon.

Epilogue

Arrived safe and sound in Kabul as advertised.  I knew I as in Afghanistan, because we were stuck on the plane for the better part of an hour while they tried to find some steps so we could get off the plane.  Then the power went out in Customs...twice. A gorgeous sunset as we flew in.  The picture from the through the airplane window doesn't really do it justice.

Sunrise over Afghanistan

Mountains south of Kabul from the air.