This is dated, admittedly. I held slowed down on some for OPSEC reasons. Bill's already talked about the Pakis moving into the tribal areas - so OPSEC isn't important any more - but these are still good small windows into the life of a Fobbit, our Sailor in a Strange Land.
So I’m walking to my office and I see an Air Force Captain I used to work with as a contractor. He usually gives part of the morning briefing, and I hadn’t seen him for a few days.
Me, holding out my hand: “Hey Dave I haven’t seen you in about a week, I thought maybe you rotated home.”
Him, shaking my hand: “Oh no, I had a severe case of Viral Meningitis, I was in an isolation ward up in Baghram Air Base for four days with a morphine drip.”
Me thinking: Great, maybe you could have told me that before you shook my hand?”
At the gym the TV deviates between Al Jazeera and an Indian music video channel. Best way to describe them is Al Jazeera is CNN without the Paris Hilton coverage, and the other is like MTV when all they showed was videos. One song (Miraksam) stayed in my mind so much I downloaded it. It’s from a movie called Waqt apparently. A lot of the videos seem to be either by movie stars or have stars in them. Sometimes you can tell by the way the camera switches to someone that you’re supposed to say “Hey! Isn’t that so and so?” Of course I don’t know who any of those people are, but the videos are fun. No angsty Emo bands glowering at the camera in eyeliner or “artistic” use of puppets to show how bad life is when you’re a rich American rock star.
Speaking again about cultural differences, I heard mention this morning that the command was going to start a radio comedy hour to help get their message across. My first thought was “Fighting is easy, comedy is hard.” If they try to write the jokes themselves I don’t think its going to be a success. There is a lot of shared cultural shorthand in a good joke. Anyway, I spent a good couple of minutes after that coming up with names. “Ahkbar and Andy in the Morning”, “Herat Home Companion”, “The Burns and Allah Show”, depends on the format really.
Its starting to look like Pakistan is going to move into the border tribal areas. It’s also starting to look like they don’t want us to be involved. Good news is that Pakistanis, being local, are better able to separate out the wheat from the chaff. Bad news is that the Pakistanis, being local, have some sympathy for the Taliban. We will have to see how this shakes out.
Sun Tzu talked about military force being like water; it avoids the obstacles and seeks the low, easy ground. That’s one of the problems in fighting an insurgency in this terrain. As you attack in one province, they can flow to another where there aren’t any operations going on. On the large scale, that’s what they do by moving into Pakistan. Most likely when the Pakistanis move into Waziristan, the Taliban will try to flow back across the border. That’s a good chance for us to be the anvil to their hammer.
The Father of the Nation is dead. King Zahir Shah is dead at ninety-two and buried in Kabul. He ruled Afghanistan for forty years before being exiled in 1972. He was probably the most popular man here overall. He was king during some generally good ties for Afghanistan, especially considering what happened later. I saw parts of his funeral when I was over visiting my carpet guys. Now it wasn’t as smooth as say the British do it, but they have about a thousand years of experience with burying kings. I do know it was heartfelt, and the Afghans I was with were watching reverently. President Karzai was there of course, a long with some tough looking old guys that were former Mujahaddin. Old men in Afghanistan, with their flowing white beards, look both really tough and really smart. Of course you have to be both tough and smart to be old in Afghanistan.
It rained here a couple of days ago. It cuts the dust and the heat for a while, but brings all sorts of interesting smells. Kabul is in a bowl, so most of the hard stuff falls in the mountains. Of course that brings flooding, and with so many roads here actually being dry stream beds, and can get dangerous. Disaster relief is a big part of the mission here for everyone, the UN, relief agencies, and us. Once winter sets in the insurgency cools down, the ground is too hard to bury IEDs, and the mountain passes fill with snow, so it gets harder for them to move. (That’s why people always talk about the “Spring Offensive”, happens every year.) Also during the winter you get villages that are already isolated by bad roads get eight feet of snow dumped on them. Once they run out of whatever supplies they had, they need help. That snow in the mountains melts at the end of winter, and you get serious flooding in the valleys from all that run off. Add the occasional earthquake, and you have a pretty busy year.
Now everyone here wants to help, and the first instinct is for NATO to rush in with helicopters full of supplies to ease the suffering, but that’s not what we do. Remember, this is their country. If the Afghan government is going to get better, and the people start relying on their government, then they have to do it, not us. We lend a hand where we are able, but any work we do is under the authority of the Afghan government, and it’s the Afghan government, from the Ministry of Disaster Preparedness down to the local cop that the people are going to see in charge.
Three things to remember here:
We are teaching them to fish, not giving them fish.
It’s their country, we are guests here.
It is what it is. (My favourite, deal with the reality on the ground, not with what you wish it was – or as the locals say “Insh’allah” God wills it.)
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