four continents

Modern mercenaries

2011-05-15T08:48:00.005+04:30

Eric Prince, founder of Blackwater, is once again up to no good. The New York Times reports that he is working to build an 800-man battalion of predominately Colombian troops for the United Arab Emirates.

Having just completed Sarah Sewall's fantastic course on American Warfare and the Humanitarian Ethic, I've come to appreciate how much of the "how" we fight is determined by public opinion and the body politic. Military hierarchy doesn't always accommodate ethical considerations effectively, even when it means to - outside pressure and vigilance help ensure that our troops fight according to our values.

This is already a problematic notion to apply to autocratic countries, where militaries serve a central authority other than their fellow citizens. However, recent events in Egypt demonstrated some more fundamental accountability - when the time came to either fire on protesters or accommodate them, Egyptian soldiers avoided large-scale violence and protected their protesting compatriots.

But if the army is not made up of the neighbors, relatives, and countrymen of protesters, is there any chance of a similar outcome? Not all armies abandon their leaders - see Libya for a prime example - but when revolution does come peacefully, is it a result of common humanity or some closer bond? And what will it mean if Colombians become responsible for the Emirs' authority? Modern mercenaries raise a number of legal and technical questions, but I worry also that the entire logic of when and how to fight becomes distorted when legitimacy and politics no longer play a role and any rentier state with enough cash can raise as many troops as they like, the citizenry be damned.

What a time to be busy

2011-01-28T08:05:00.003+04:30

Tunisia is still far from sorted out, Lebanon's teetering on the brink, and Egypt has no internet. I'd love to be a full-time news junkie (or actually take off for the Middle East), but of course a new semester is starting and a thesis needs drafting.

The one thing I can follow and justify as work is, of course, Afghanistan. Martine van Bijlert asks many of the questions I'd post here if I had the time to write. We're pouring so much into Afghanistan right now that the conventional wisdom about the trade-offs between "quickly, cheaply, and well" allowing only two of the three have broken down - things are happening quickly, but they are neither cheap nor quality, it seems. Van Bijlert asks what the end goal is, but I'm afraid the answer might be that no one has it - everyone is so operationally busy working towards 2014 that they just don't see the strategic picture.

Radio Kabul

2011-01-09T16:15:00.003+04:30

This summer, the radio station Hossein liked to play on the way to work used 50 Cent's "Candy Shop" as inter-program filler. Even realizing that almost no one listening could understand the lyrics, I was still a bit shocked at the song's popularity. Some weeks later, one of my usual taxi drivers proudly showed off a small video screen he'd installed, complete with looping footage of the Pussycat Dolls.

So I shouldn't really have been surprised to learn that Rihanna's latest album is quite the craze here. I hadn't heard it yet, though, so climbing into a taxi yesterday to hear "sticks and stones may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me," still felt completely surreal. Oh, Kabul, where no woman bares her elbows, but where a girl can sing about S&M to her heart's content (in English at least).

Pomegranate!

2011-01-07T15:01:00.002+04:30

So I'm back in Kabul on a 9-day research trip for my Policy Analysis Exercise (or PAE - effectively a capstone project/thesis). Expat Kabul is nearly dead, with everyone taking long or belated holiday breaks, making my project of interviewing people about development sustainability, infrastructure building, and community engagement a bit challenging.

For the moment, however, I'm actually enjoying the wintry day holed up in a favorite French restaurant reading through my literature review pile. The coziness of the electric heaters seems destined to end after the fourth power outage in 90 minutes - I think we keep overloading the fuse. The usual dusty smog in the streets is thickened with smoke from a city of bukhari stoves burning God-knows-what as heating fuel, but hey, pomegranate season can't possibly be all bad. Mmm, pomegranate...

Earthquake

2010-09-18T02:05:00.002+04:30

By the time the United States goes to sleep tonight, polls will be opening in Afghanistan. However, all the security and other complications already noted, the fact that an earthquake hit Badakhshan Province in the northeast certainly can't help matters any.

On Afghanistan, in Cambridge

2010-09-16T03:39:00.005+04:30

The Kennedy School has a way of taking up as much time as you'll allow it to - the return to classes has proven no exception to that rule. I haven't forgotten the summer, however, and I still have posts drafted on Mazar-i Sharif, my final days in Kabul, and on the bigger lessons learned. For the moment, however, the student newspaper wanted to present a point-counterpoint on the U.S. mission in Afghanistan in its first issue. The resulting op-ed is now on the Citizen website.

The Kite Sellers

2010-09-05T02:24:00.014+04:30

To her credit, Natalie found the kite shop first. Over dinner one evening, she told the group about Phalawan Kareem's shop in the old city and described the kites, from incredibly simple sheets of plastic molded into flying shape by a pair of crossed sticks to the elaborate tissue-paper affairs he had supplied as props in The Kite Runner. I took a copy of his business card and made plans with my roommate Solmaz to visit a few days later.

The "Kite Runner shop" sits among a city block of kite-sellers in the neighborhood of Jadeh Maiwand, the city center for flying paper toys, as they are called in Dari. As Solmaz and I said our "salaams," I noticed the framed photographs and newspaper articles perched above the spools of string and stacks of delicate finished kites both small and large. The edges of the open storefront and the low ceiling displayed oversized, elaborately-decorated but eminently airworthy models each marked with a scorpion logo - the mark of Noor Agha. Profiled in Time and written about by Reuters, Noor Agha designs and makes the most beautiful - and the most responsive - fighting kites in Afghanistan today.

Though these flying canvasses decorate the shop, its primary sales are in small children's models made of simpler tissue-paper patterns and even plastic models. They hang along the awning alongside wooden spools decorated with CDs and Bollywood stars.

I selected a mix of medium flying kites and larger Noor Agha designs while Phalawan Kareem told stories of his friends in NATO, his clients the movie producers, and the difficult Taliban years, when no kites could be flown. After helping load my delicate stack of purchases into a garbage bag, he threw in ten of the small paper kites as a gift, demonstrating how to tie the kite-string to the body for maximum flying control. Solmaz and I offered our thanks and returned home to test our new toys.

The reign of the Corolla

2010-08-27T22:28:00.005+04:30

Ha! As I noted in a postscripted comment on "The Kabul Commute", the Toyota Corolla is the king of the Afghan road. Clearly imported as used vehicles, they still display bumper stickers from their previous lives, ranging from Wall Drug to "In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned". I've seen contributor stickers for the South Carolina Policemen's Association for 2007 and the Missouri Firefighters' Association for 2006, as well as any number of added-in-Kabul slogans in wacky English - "Don't cry Girls - Ill Be Back" being a personal favorite.

Now the Washington Post is writing about the overwhelming popularity of Toyotas, too. It must be a slow news day in Kabul?

Anyway, my personal collection of sayings and decorative car stickers as seen by my friends and roommates over the summer:

"Love is Killer" - on a public bus
"Don't Follow Me" - also, often, "Don't Fallow Me"
"Baby Don't Cry, I'll Be Back"
"Danger Doesn't Give Meaning"
"My Toyota is Awesome" - on a Toyota, naturally
"No Girl, No Tension"
"When Nothing Goes Right, Go Left"
"Son of Panjshir" - next to a lady-in-a-martini-glass decal
"Can't touch this"
"My father said no friends, only girlfriend"
"In God We Turst" - on another bus
"Land craoser" (sic)
"24: Jack Bower" (sic)

The Afghan National Gallery

2010-08-24T20:17:00.008+04:30

After the Uzbekistan trek fell through, I used my unexpected additional days in Kabul to play the tourist about town. The Lonely Planet guide recommended the Afghan National Gallery as a collection worth seeing if only to pay respect to the efforts of its administrators to protect their art from the Taliban. A display case on the first floor shows samples of less-lucky paintings:

The memorial of shredded canvass is far from the only unique feature of the museum. The building is drastically undersized, and well over half the collection sits stacked against the walls - through rooms and down the hallways. While no longer threatened with destruction, most of the art still isn't actually on display, unless you're willing to shuffle large frames about very, very carefully.

One entire room held portraits of Afghan and international leaders, though the remainder of the museum suggested no other pattern. I saw a British pheasant-hunt hanging in the stairwell, and this portrait of an Afghan patriot, but these were a few of my other favorite pieces:

Home sweet Colorado

2010-08-13T06:21:00.005+04:30

Sure, I'm home now, and after spending the better part of the past 24 hours sleeping off a nasty head cold, I even have downtime. I really do intend to finish up Afghanistan stories soon, but in the meantime, I really don't think you can expect the blog to compete with this:

Catch you once I've gotten my fill of mountain sunrises.

Humanitarians in war

2010-08-10T16:12:00.004+04:30

The International Assistance Mission killings in Badakhshan are rattling. The province, a high-mountain area in the far northeast, has long been moderately secured by geography alone, though this situation had been deteriorating recently. The group were far from novices - most spoke Dari, and their leaders had lived and worked in Afghanistan through the Taliban years. Michael Semple, in remembering Dan Terry, also explains why the killings are an especially-worrying sign of social breakdown.

In more recent worrisome news, a suicide attack killed two drivers for a security company located in my Kabul neighborhood. Targeting security contractors is a long-standing practice and carries less weight of surprise, but the proximity to my house (about eight blocks, possibly ten) leaves me feeling very grateful to be posting this from half a world away.

Dubai Airport fun fact

2010-08-09T15:10:00.001+04:30

Customs agents will detain you for 30 minutes and serve you coffee while inspecting your antique (and non-functional) souvenir firearms before letting you out; on the other hand, airport security will scan your bag, completely ignore the monitor, and slap an "inspected" tag on them while welcoming you in.

Goodbye, Kabul

2010-08-07T19:26:00.003+04:30

I don't actually fly until tomorrow evening, but because I anticipate last-minute errands and goodbyes will take up most of the day, I'm signing off from Afghanistan tonight. The blog isn't finished - there are tours of the National Gallery, further political updates, a fortunate chance encounter with a student leadership program, a day in Mazar, and some final thoughts on the big picture still to write - but these will be posted from home, where I'll be spending a few days decompressing, first in Cambridge and then Colorado.

Tonight is subdued, due both to normal pre-travel reflection and the news of ten aid workers killed in Badakhshan. As security deteriorates in the provinces, those working beyond the secured city boundaries are taking ever-greater risks.

On a lighter note, a photo for the day - previewing the National Gallery collection:

There's nowhere quite like Afghanistan...

A Friday in Panjshir

2010-08-05T22:49:00.004+04:30

On an otherwise quiet Friday, Afreen, Rory, N and I hired a car and set out for the Panjshir Valley. Over the course of the day, Rory played soccer with some local boys until fascination with us girls broke up the match, the whole group toured Ahmed Shah Massoud's tomb, and Afreen and I took photos of the many rusting tanks stacked haphazardly along the river at various points. The slideshow linked below also includes a highway sign papered over with campaign posters, the wreckage of a helicopter near one bridge, and the daily catch as gathered by some local fishermen we found walking through the valley.

24 hours in Mazar-i Sharif

2010-08-04T20:34:00.002+04:30

Apologies for the radio silence; with the end of my time at the Commission, I've been playing the tourist a bit in Kabul, visiting the National Gallery and enjoying time with friends. Tomorrow, I'll travel to Mazar-i Sharif with two new friends, so photos of the shrine of Hazrat Ali (along with a belated slideshow from Friday's trip to the Panjshir) are coming soon.

The "safe and sound" tour is also coming soon to a time zone near you - I depart Kabul on August 8, and land in Boston the next afternoon. What comes next is still unclear, but it will involve some decompression time in either Missouri or Colorado before a long weekend at Mom's place in Montana, a jaunt to DC to meet with one of the State Department's innovation-and-tech geeks, and then finally the start of classes. I can't believe I'm out of here in only four days...

Flying Commercial

2010-08-02T14:21:00.005+04:30

Domestic air travel in Afghanistan resembles the American practice only in the most casual comparison. Over a round trip to Herat, my flights ran a combined four hours late, I walked through four metal detectors (of which none were functional), and I received five separate pat-down searches from bored women (of whom two obviously felt zero regard for my silly sense of dignity). The planes smell deeply human on 90-degree days, and even my knees nearly brushed the seat ahead.

The trip began with a crazy man screaming and lunging after me outside the departure gate, pulled away by his guardian while a crowd gawked, then apologized to the clearly-shaken foreign girl. It ended in a quiet office with the chief of Herat airport security, drinking tea and chatting about India.

I get ahead of myself. Other than the deranged man, the departure from Kabul was mostly normal. We waited two and a half hours at the sole gate for domestic departures - I argued with a zealous steward who scolded me for putting a bag under the seat - but we arrived in Herat with no major incidents.

If the Bamiyan airport reminded me of a small-town gravel strip in the Rockies, Herat's lacks a similarly apt comparison. There's a two-room terminal serving departing travelers only. Arriving, we walked off the plane, past a waving portrait of President Karzai, and straight into a dusty parking lot where small boys ferried luggage in wheelbarrows.

Returning for the flight to Kabul, our taxi pulled onto the shoulder of a major road, depositing us seemingly several hundred yards from the main airport entrance (as marked by an old MiG mounted on a pedastal). Walking in that direction, however, we heard shouts from a small police checkpoint across the road - the real departure entrance passed instead between rows of sandbags into a dusty courtyard a quarter-mile from the terminal. Once there, we were shuffled into a shipping-container room for the first security check, then shuttled across to check in at a desk with two men and one laptop tethered to a SIM-card modem. Thus approved, we settled in to wait.

A policeman approached and asked to see our bags, accompanied by the woman who had patted us down just moments before. I handed him my backpack as Afreen explained that we had already been checked. He ignored her and then picked up my other bag, carrying two copper plates I'd bought from Sultan Hamidi, consulting all the while with the woman. He looked over them carefully, then asked me where I'd gotten them. I had a business card for the shop, and as I handed it over, I asked what the problem was. He replied "mushkil nist!" and handed me my bags. As they left, an Afghan-American sitting nearby quietly translated that the woman had suggested I might attack the pilots with the plate, hitting someone on the head.

Eventually, a gate opened at the other end of the courtyard, and we joined the line to file through and trek across the parking lot to the terminal. Once there, we went through another security checkpoint, where the woman ignored the plates entirely, and then to an x-ray machine, where the technician took them and insisted I put Sultan Hamidi on the telephone. After long haggling, an older guard stepped over and eventually returned my souvenirs.

Afreen and I had barely settled in to the women's waiting area when a man walked up and asked, "Farsi gap mezanid?" "Kam kam," I replied, pinching my fingers in the air to demonstrate just how little. Dread settled in as I sank into the office couch - these plates were obviously never going to make it home with me. Thankfully, the security chief had found a translator, who first asked where we were from, then spoke for several fond minutes about his time in Hyderabad after Afreen claimed it as her home. Finally, the issue of my apparent contraband came up, and our translator assured us that his chief was truly sorry for any inconvenience the search had caused. Would we like any tea before our flight?

(Postscript: upon returning to Kabul, we found that our traveling companions had shared a similar experience the day before - the guards had required them to check the glassware, some of which was then broken in transit, but allowed Francisco to board the plane with a switchblade.)

The Herat Citadel

2010-08-01T22:12:00.004+04:30

The final tourist stop in Herat is its fortress, built on a site originally chosen by Alexander the Great, now in the center of the city and overlooking the mosques and minarets it once protected. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture is in the process of excavating and restoring the Citadel, and Afreen and I were lucky enough to encounter some of the engineering team on our visit. One pointed out fragments of old tile mixed in with the debris the construction team carted about busily, roughly dating it based on its use of multiple colors under a single glaze. Climbing the towers and peering down on life below, we caught pictures both birds-eye Herat and the fort itself - the photo below links to a brief slideshow.

Shrines of Herat

2010-08-01T15:26:00.005+04:30

Herat is a city of shrines - over three days, I visited the mausoleums of two princes, two religious poets, and one Sufi saint known for traveling by rolling on the ground. Photos of Afreen befriending one pilgrim, Kufic script in blue tile, a pomegranate-tree fresco, and several peaceful pistachio-treed tombs tell the full story - click on the photo below to see the rest.

A WikiLeaks roundup

2010-07-31T11:37:00.008+04:30

As with many an explosive headline, the real meaning of the WikiLeaks release didn't really become clear until the second day's story - and each day has brought some new perspective. Having followed the releases, the responses, and the discussions, I'll offer a brief summary for those with less free time:

Possible revelations

Pakistan maintains close ties to the Taliban, and ISI seems to cooperate directly with the insurgency.
Special Operations forces keep expanding - which the McChrystal profile also revealed, though this detail was drowned out by the political story.
Civilian casualties, often unreported except after large-scale accidents, are in fact a regular tragedy, as the non-fatal shooting of a deaf man and many other leaked reports illustrate.
Our allies are often part of the problem, with many strategically-placed profiteers taking advantage.

A debate about what the documents really add to our understanding of Afghanistan soon began. None of the reports contained anything that was both revelatory and verifiable - some of the RUMINT reports delve into wild territory, but most of the wilder speculation they contain vanished into the database unsubstantiated and likely ignored. Professional Afghanistan-watchers soon noted the consistency of the documents with public information on the war, disputing the Pentagon Papers analogy. Others pointed to the difference between day-to-day reporting and the sort of big-picture coverage the WikiLeaks trove had inspired, as well as reminding the pundit class that not everyone follows Afghanistan coverage in all its detail, and that the bold headlines could still surprise casual news readers.

The best reporting using the WikiLeaks documents put the reports in context, incorporating other sources to weave a complete narrative out of these incredibly narrow snapshots. C.J. Chivers used the documents to add very-human detail to the already-known tragedy of Combat Outpost Keating, while Noah Shachtman described his embed last summer in order to illustrate the gaps left by a situation-report view of the war.

And finally, retaliation against Afghan informants appears increasingly likely. Their identities are carelessly redacted, and the Taliban have issued threats against them. If (for the most part) the content of these reports is mundane and hardly worth its Secret classification, the WikiLeaks staff's lack of concern for non-military identities is one glaring exception.

The true value - and costs - of the leak remain undefined. The sheer quantity of information here is a researcher's dream, and valuable work could yet come from the repository. The possibility that a series of WikiLeaks murders take place in Taliban-controlled areas also looms large, however. Sometimes even the sixth-day story doesn't bring a full conclusion.

Photos for the day: kite season

2010-07-30T20:00:00.006+04:30

Each time I think I've had enough of the dust and the stress, Afghanistan has a way of charming me back to sanity. For the moment, it's the kites that began to invade the late-summer sky this week. Less than a week left in Kabul, and suddenly I'm not sure I'm ready to leave...

Happiness to scale

2010-07-28T17:22:00.003+04:30

My current Amélian pleasures:

Children flying kites out along the streets
A burqa with a red sequined skirt underneath
My colleague whose fingernails always match her headscarf
The dust-free cool blown in after a recent rainstorm
Finding all three volumes of The Venture of Islam for sale in a Kabul bookstore

The Musalla complex

2010-07-28T15:26:00.009+04:30

The first period of neglect and decline for the Friday Mosque came with the construction of the Musalla complex early in the 15th century. Queen Gawhar Shad's architectural legacy once included not only a mosque but also a madrassa, and the complex was adorned with 20 minarets.

Unfortunately, time and fortune have been far less kind to the buildings at Musalla - in 1885, in anticipation of a Russian invasion that never came, the British dynamited most of the complex to clear the line of their artillery defenses of Herat. Minarets were toppled by earthquakes, and later wars brought further destruction.

The mausoleum of Gawhar Shad herself still stands, as do five minarets. Stopping by on a quiet Saturday afternoon, Afreen and I were able to wait for the guardian to unlock the building. Inside, UNESCO restoration plans sit among the handful of tombstones. At the very back of the complex, part of a sixth minaret marks the former mosque, with the remains of a Soviet tank standing watch. A paired reminder, these two remnants of war each commemorate the former grandeur of the area and its sadly strategic location.

(Musalla complex - album link)

A market for war rugs

2010-07-27T15:25:00.003+04:30

Catching up on my RSS feeds post-Herat, I find a report from Wired's Danger Room blog on a consulting contract to rebuild the export market for Afghan carpets. The article is illustrated with, of course, a pretty awesome war rug.

Sultan Hamidi

2010-07-27T11:04:00.011+04:30

Across from the Friday Mosque stands a glorious junk-shop full of relics and nonsense, the purview of a charismatic performer and true vaudevillian. In the course of an hour in his store, he served our group tea, strummed every stringed instrument among his wares, and told stories of his two wives and 18 children - including a son who was shot in the mosque and a daughter killed by a missile-strike.

In Farouk, Sultan Hamidi found a kindred spirit. Our official group negotiator soon claimed Afreen as his zan (wife) and swore his father's name was also Sultan, striking his most outrageous bargaining stance and proving himself an equal showman. Hamidi clearly delighted in the sparring, and so loud debate soon filled the shop.

Ameel fiddled with a tabla while Francisco sorted through the rifles to admire a broken pistol inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Alyza searched the painted glassware for a carafe labeled in Arabic, rather than English, characters. Afreen and I debated the value of antique copper plates engraved (strangely enough) with women's faces, and soon we all accepted Sultan Hamidi's invitation to visit the glassblowing workshop down the street.

Pedestrians hurried past the workshop with hardly a glance at the furnace or the hunchbacked man working molten vases, but we visitors with cameras soon drew a curious crowd. Herat's streets were secure, but the population clearly lacks Kabul's bored familiarity with foreigners - it usually took mere minutes for our group to acquire an entourage after setting out on foot.

Returning to final negotiations, Sultan Hamidi pulled out a karakol and traditional Kandahari jacket, costuming the boys for photos in turn. He solemnly presented Farouk with an additional glass vase as a gift, but made him buy a silk-embroidered cap, tacked onto our pile as a final impulse purchase. We left with several carafe-and-cup sets, a long-handled switchblade, three copper plates, miscellaneous small gifts and the satisfaction of long bargaining successfully concluded. Cracking open a battered copy of the Lonely Planet guide on the table, Sultan Hamidi showed off his photo on page 5 - somehow I suspect he exercised similar charms on the author.

Candidate killed in Khost

2010-07-26T13:42:00.004+04:30

The explosion at a campaign rally I linked to on Saturday killed the candidate, Maulvi Saeedullah Saeed. Another candidate, Najibullah Gulistani of Ghazni province, became the second politician abducted by the Taliban this cycle. As elections near (scheduled for Saturday, September 18, they are now less than eight weeks away), expect increasing attacks and disruptions.

Even when violence doesn't mar the competition, the campaign season manages plenty of drama. One male candidate spoke out against a female opponent by calling her a "scarlet pagan" and warned that she would turn the women of the province to her vices if elected, for example. Reading the American political press, I'm sure I can find statements at least as ludicrous, but the degree to which ad hominem attacks on women are accepted here is troubling.

Friday Mosque

2010-07-26T12:02:00.009+04:30

A Ghorid king built the first Friday Mosque in Herat in 1200. It survived damages from the Mongol invasion, an earthquake, and royal neglect as a later mosque usurped its place as the primary place of worship in the city. Over the years, it has been built over considerably, sometimes in the name of restoration and sometimes with new elements entirely.

Over the centuries, however, periods of investment and rebuilding have turned the mosque to a monument in tiled mosaics. The open vestibules off the main courtyard (iwan) have simple whitewashed walls, but every other surface boasts rich detail.

Our group (classmates Afreen and Francisco, plus new friends Ameel, Alyza and Farouk) slipped in on a quiet Saturday morning to photograph and explore. Slipping off our shoes before stepping out into a courtyard of white marble, we padded quietly among the arches with their sprawling geometric patterns and lilting calligraphy before rejoining for a moment together in the shade.

A workshop hidden in one corner of the complex houses the craftsmen who design new patterns and restore the old. Wandering past the sign for the "International Project for Preservation of Historical Monuments," we watch this team chip at tiles, stencil templates, and lay out new pieces, entirely unperturbed by their audience and its cameras.

Though prayers remain several hours off, our driver is impatient and many shrines remain on the day's agenda. And so, after expressing sincere admiration for the work underway, we exit through a different façade, snap a few additional photos, and continue on to see more of Herat.

(As usual, the photos link to a full slideshow of the Friday Mosque)

The logs of war

2010-07-26T09:00:00.003+04:30

I'm back in Kabul and working on travel stories from Herat for your enjoyment, but they may be postponed if the New York Times' coverage of the Wikileaks flood sucks me in for a full day of reading. I'll write soon, but for the moment, this story is really what you should be reading, anyway.

Herat: photos for the day

2010-07-25T00:09:00.004+04:30

In campaign news, violence against candidates continues: an explosion injured 17 people. Actual Herat travel-blogging and campaign news to follow soon, I promise.

Off to Herat

2010-07-22T11:37:00.004+04:30

I'm flying to Herat, former Silk Road nexus and pearl of ancient Khorasan, tomorrow morning. Updates could be sparse until Monday, when photos of the Friday Mosque, citadel, old city and assorted touristalia will liven up the political coverage.

Kidnapping candidates

2010-07-21T11:35:00.005+04:30

Pajhwok News covers the kidnapping of a parliamentary candidate in Herat province. Arbab Yusuf was campaigning in Gulran district when he was abducted by the Taliban yesterday.

Running for office is a very different game here. Night letters demanding that candidates withdraw (often threatening violence against those who remain in the race) also menace would-be parliamentarians. Women are especially targeted, and the threats often extend to the candidates' families and children. A report from the Free and Fair Elections Foundation details the extent of this intimidation:

Attacks on individuals involved in the electoral process were reported by observers in Badghis, Farah, Helmand, Nangarhar, and Paktika during the challenge period. The attacks, several of them resulting in fatalities, included physical assaults, suicide attacks, and bombings directed at candidates and election workers.
Night letters were reported through direct and indirect observation in 9 provinces, with the general population, election workers, candidates, government employees and Afghan security forces designated as targets. In Zabul, government employees received threatening phone calls warning them not to participate in the electoral process.

When the risks of campaigning include violent death, it's almost natural that the rewards include kick-backs and bribes - salaries for the Wolesi Jirga (the lower house of Parliament and those currently running for election) just aren't high enough to justify running otherwise. It also affects candidates without ties to existing power-brokers disproportionately - for all the messy rounds of candidate vetting, even a perfect process could not eliminate everyone with questionable connections, so those afforded the security of warlord protection run with the additional advantages of armed support.

This certainly isn't the sole reason democracy struggles in Afghanistan, but insecurity is quite possibly the greatest current obstacle to good elections. If you're a praying sort, Arbab Yusuf - and his fellow candidates under siege - could probably use one right now.

Kabul Conference

2010-07-21T09:28:00.004+04:30

(written in a 'net-less house yesterday, an account of the Kabul Conference as it appeared to residents of the city, rather than foreign diplomats).

The house today takes on the character of a hospital waiting room - the tense boredom permeating every thought, the paralysis of endless sitting, the vigil unknowing whether the patient will pull through, whether the security will hold. I remember this same toe-tapping quiet from four years ago, thoughts pacing over and over the wish that my mother's surgeon would walk through the door to tell he'd repaired her spine and that I could see her soon. Those worn prayers brought good news, and so today I return to habit, repeating a mantra of "let the conference end soon; let the city remain peaceful," with every helicopter passing overhead.

My roommate's Collected Stories of Richard Yates pass the time, as does forcing myself to make tomato sauce from scratch for a simple pasta lunch. By mid-afternoon, even the steady rhythm of washing my scarves feels like escape from the stifling nothingness in the shaded salon - and the prospect of another roommate's Lindsey Lohan DVD (the only thing at the corner shop not dubbed in Hindi) begins to seem more like entertainment than torment.

Finally, the periodic droning becomes a steady procession until one chopper passes so low the windows all rattle. Wishing the departing dignitaries their own safe travels, the knot in my solar plexus begins to unwind - it will be a quiet night.

(The New York Times suggests sightseeing the conference participants missed and details security procedures - including blocking pedestrian access - in the city.)

Afghanistan in black and white

2010-07-19T16:55:00.008+04:30

One good thing about the security lockdown surrounding the Kabul Conference is that I have enforced quiet, punctuated only by the arrival of fresh iced coffees, in which to write. Expect a pileup of posts on Wednesday, as tomorrow all my usual haunts will be closed and I'll have to settle for chilled Nescafe in my own shaded-but-internet-free garden.

I've been reading good articles on Afghanistan in quantity of late, following current developments but also discovering older studies that just didn't fit into a busy academic schedule. For the moment, though, I'd like to express my annoyance with the Wall Street Journal, who this past week took an important story in Helmand Province and framed it very one-sidedly. The article's title, U.S. Rebuilds Power Plant, Taliban Reap a Windfall, demonstrates all the depth of analysis to appear in the article.

Believe me, there are plenty of stories to be written about the United States inadvertently supporting the opposition. I've noted before that logistics sub-contracting has created a self-sustaining protection racket, encouraging local leaders to manufacture instability along major roads and funnel bribes to the Taliban, for example. But building and maintaining power plants in provinces with insurgency is not as uniformly bad as the article, and subsequent blogs about it, appear.

The brief "on the other hand" pivot in the article acknowledges as much:

U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials acknowledge that the insurgents benefit from Kajaki's electricity. Yet, they say, winning over the South's population centers - Kandahar city and the Helmand provincial capital of Lashkar Gah - is the overwhelming priority, and providing them with more power for industries and homes furthers that aim.

"Electricity is changing people's lives. Whatever industry we have in Helmand is booming" since the Kajaki turbine was repaired in October, says Rory Donohoe, the U.S. Agency for International Development field program officer for Helmand.

Like most aspects of security and development work here, there are tradeoffs involved in the project - and exactly how they measure on the balance isn't necessarily clear. However, the author makes no attempt to do so. Reading between the lines of the next paragraph: "American civilian and military officials in Afghanistan have been arguing for months over whether further investment is warranted in Kajaki. Civilian officials point to the hydropower plant's sustainability and long-term potential, while military commanders are pressing to remedy the rolling blackouts that strike Kandahar and Lashkar Gah through a quick fix of installing diesel-fuelled generators in the two cities." It appears that the debate is over how best to extend electricity production, not whether to do so. If this many officials agree on one thing, I think the positives outweigh the negatives, at least in assessments by people on the ground.

Development projects often help both the population at large and insurgents living among them - part of the tricky nature of insurgency is its embeddedness among a much larger group of innocents. The fact that the Taliban are able to collect electricity fees is problematic, but it's not the entire story. Questions I've have liked to see answered: What are the estimates of the populations living in both areas? Is the Taliban able to take credit for providing this electricity, or do residents even in insurgent-held districts know that a Western development project powers their lights? How many jobs rely on the Kajaki plant? Is there any sign that electricity provision and development could reduce public dependence on Taliban governance in these districts? (okay, so the last question may be over-optimistic, but the point stands.)

"Counterinsurgency is complex" is a common trope, and "Afghanistan is complex" isn't a new statement even on this blog. Still, is it so hard to offer some balance in telling what seems to be on the whole a moderately successful development project with a notable downside?

Carpet diplomacy, or, a photo for the day

2010-07-19T15:52:00.003+04:30

Yes, it's an Obama carpet, as found in a Bamiyan shop. Not quite a war rug, but almost as ridiculous.

Suicide bombers on bicycles

2010-07-18T13:33:00.002+04:30

No one knows much yet, but a suicide bombing did just hit Kabul. Microyan is across town from where I work, so I saw this flit across my facebook feed - all is fine here.

Still. It's been a week of mid-90s temperatures, moderately empty workdays, and reports of night letters and other threats against parliamentary candidates, and I'm starting to feel ready for home. First, another security lockdown day (or two) as the Kabul Conference brings high-level targets (Secretary Clinton! Ban Ki-Moon!) into the city.

A photo/question for the day

2010-07-18T11:20:00.002+04:30

19th-century engraved weaponry: completely inappropriate, or moderately awesome souvenir?

Bamiyan wrap-up

2010-07-17T14:49:00.004+04:30

...almost one week back in Kabul, and just in time to begin planning for Herat, here's a quick round-up of Bamiyan photos that didn't make it in to previous albums. Catch Soviet tanks 'planted' in potato fields, converted into checkpoints and broken down into speed bumps; a remote auto-repair station; the old city market (destroyed in the civil war); and a schoolgirl who asked me to take her photo on my last afternoon there. And, as you might expect, a few more mountain views. Enjoy!

Kabul Fried Chicken, Part II

2010-07-17T14:15:00.003+04:30

The sequel to the graffiti-advertising shown previously - the actual storefront of one restaurant calling itself KFC (the other, with at least two locations, uses a large chicken as its mascot rather than appropriating Col. Sanders). Near Shar-e Now Park, AFC (Afghan Fried Chicken) provides additional competition.

Elections and Illegal Armed Groups, Cont.

2010-07-17T14:04:00.005+04:30

The wiser, learned hands of the Afghanistan Analysts Network are following the candidate vetting process I wrote about, and to my surprise, they have almost as much difficulty understanding what's going on as I did.

A Thursday in the garden in Kabul

2010-07-15T14:34:00.004+04:30

Thursday afternoon begins the weekend - the office closes at one and everyone goes to prepare for the coming day of rest. Waking for the morning commute six days each week seems disproportionately exhausting than a mere five, and so Thursday afternoons take on additional luxury for their still quiet. Hossain drops me at the Flower Street Café, notable for never having been located on the actual Flower Street the one neighborhood over.

The occasional helicopter flyover interrupts a soundtrack of Beatles and Ella Fitzgerald piped into the garden. A determined kitten begs for scraps of my chicken salad as I sprawl in my usual mini-salon relishing an iced coffee made all the more heavenly by a week of hot-tea-drinking. The day is hot but not unbearably so, especially now that my scarf is crumpled atop my backpack rather than trapping cool breezes away from the back of my neck.

Having traded Thucydides for John Le Carré's latest, I disappear into Turkish Hamburg and forget for a time my true location. This evening brings an art exhibition at Babur's Gardens, tomorrow a mix of housework and social events, and Saturday morning back to the office - for these few hours absolutely nothing pressing invades the peace of my shaded divan and its sunny rose garden view.

Election law, alphabet soup, and illegal armed groups

2010-07-15T10:43:00.015+04:30

I began writing about Afghan election management in order to provide some context for when actual campaign stories began to appear. However, the principal actors remain unintroduced even as their decisions have begun to stir controversy.

The Independent Election Commission (IEC) serves as the technocratic body responsible for administering elections. Founded in 2004 as a domestic successor to the Joint Elections Management Body (JEMB), an internationally-run institution, the IEC registers candidates, voters, polling places and election monitors.

The Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) remains a mixed secretariat, with three Afghan and two international commissioners. It is established under Afghan electoral law as an enforcement body responsible for monitoring and investigating possible violations.

Though chaired by the IEC, the vetting group responsible for reviewing candidate ties to illegal armed groups is a separate (third!) election body. Lists it produces are given to the ECC, which then records the complaints against these candidates and passes them to the IEC for a final decision on inclusion or removal on the voter rolls. Different readings of Article 12 of the Afghan Election Law empower both the ECC and IEC to review or amend these lists, though in practice only the IEC does so.

The work of the two commissions is tightly intertwined, and as we can already see, often confusingly interdependent. Try and follow this one:

On June 22, the IEC released a press statement titled "Publication of final list of candidates for Wolesi Jirga Elections 2010 and commencement of electoral campaign" [PDF] explaining the process by which the preliminary candidate list had been thoroughly reviewed and culled. With regards to possible ties to illegal armed groups, the IEC explained, "It is mentionable that after ECC investigation for the submitted complains for 8 candidates who have been challenged, here IEC provide them the opportunity of 5 working days till 24 June to submit their advocacy documents. As result the final list of (Kabul, Jowzjan, Ghor, Badakhshan, Ghazni and Takhar) provinces will announce until mentioned date. It is worth to mention that if the candidates provide sufficient reasons, they can be included in the final list of WJ elections." [multiply sic]

The candidate lottery completed, symbols assigned and ballot order determined, campaign season officially opened and posters began to crop up overnight.

On June 30, staff at the Free and Fair Elections Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA) received complaints from a number of candidates who had received notification from the IEC that they were under suspicion of holding ties to illegal armed groups. Each was given 48 hours to travel to Kabul and present documentation signed by three relevant government ministers in order to remain on the candidate list. Given long travel times over Afghan roads and the fact that much of this 48-hour period fell on Friday, this effectively gave the 32 affected candidates no opportunity to respond.

On July 1, FEFA called a stakeholders' meeting to determine why candidates were being threatened with exclusion after the official list had been closed. Because I'm not certain whether the meeting was on or off the record, you'll have to make do with my summary of its findings rather than a complete transcript of the proceedings.

The critical detail revealed in the meeting is that the ECC has to sign off on the IEC's final candidate list before it is legally closed to further amendment. Though this should happen before the ballot-symbol-and-order lotteries, the ECC had not, in fact, given its official approval to the IEC's list as released the week prior. The IEC, in keeping with its official published election schedule, had released the list without this ECC sign-off. The crisis moment then came when, after the IEC's announcement of what we will now call the "final list", the vetting group had handed over to the ECC its fourth list of candidates with ties to illegal armed groups.

(Some back story: the first list consisted of 85 names. With no written procedure in place, the ECC requested that the IEC give each five-day period in which to clear their names via signed letters from the Ministry of the Interior. At the end of the five days, all 85 were able to produce such declarations of innocence, so a second list re-affirmed some of their cases in order to force at least a few from the ballot. This cycle between the vetting commission and the elections commissions continued, such that the fourth list consisted of 16 candidates who had already been accused on lists 1-3 and 16 new names.)

Given that its ballot list was already released, the IEC shortened the response time available for their defense in order to speed the process. In the end, 31 names were removed [PDF] from the ballot on July 7 and a "final, final" list [PDF] came out, with no changes to the lotteries already conducted.

Predictably, this looked like the Commissions joining together to re-open a legally-closed list to evict 16 opposition candidates under the guise of late-breaking discoveries. Yes, there's electoral infrastructure in place, governed by written law. It's just that not even watchdogs like FEFA know each intricacy, and the commissions themselves don't necessarily help clarify. Transparency, comprehensibility, and perceived fairness all have some way to go.

City of dust

2010-07-14T13:38:00.006+04:30

(It's a multi-post afternoon as work grinds to a post-lunch lull in the face of afternoon sunshine. Please do scroll down for further Bamiyan photos.)

Even the rain in Kabul smells of dust. As the first drops fall onto the evening streets, damping the alleyways and eventually running through the open gutters, an unmistakably mineral, earthy smell drifts back up into the air.

Dust pervades the city, defying weak human attempts to control its advances. Street-dirtied shoes might be left at the door, but the enemy drifts through open windows on teasingly cool summer breezes instead. It invades my breathing, prompting vigorous allergic reactions from my nose and lungs. Bicyclists in the city wrap scarves over their faces to filter the air, but I remain stupidly stubborn in leaving uncovered these few inches of socially-acceptable skin.

The frantic road-paving projects will certainly go unremarked by the diplomats at the Kabul Conference next week (though it is for these dignitaries that every street is currently half-destroyed), but the fervent hope protecting my sanity through every creeping construction-related traffic jam is that just maybe the morning commute will become clearer after all these thoroughfares are hard-topped.

This passing evening storm will temporarily tame the air, turning the streets into puddled mud-clay for a few hours all too brief. Then a dry breeze will pick up, bringing the finest, lightest particles to dust my room once again.

Shahr-e Gholghola

2010-07-14T11:38:00.009+04:30

"The city of noises" or "the city of screams" - like Shahr-e Zohak, this original city of Bamiyan was destroyed by Genghis Khan (and later mined during the civil war). A story I've found only in my Lonely Planet guide, however, suggests that a surprise betrayal may have caused this fortress considerably greater anguish than its red-stone neighbor.

The ruins of Shahr-e Gholghola have deteriorated more than those of Shahr-e Zohak, and their plain stones lack the beauty of red brick, but the hilltop view of Bamiyan city and the Buddhas below made the climb very much worthwhile.

Overlooking modern Bamiyan, these ruins commemorate the city's history while serving as an eerie reminder of even this remote valley's susceptibility to invasion. Homes destroyed several hundred years previously interspersed with recent mine-clearing markers mar the idyll of green, green fields below. Afghan National Police sprawled in their watch post atop the hill have little to do, but stand watch over the ruins nonetheless. A skinny dog wagged hello and came to have me scratch its ears - Arif translated to the policemen as I greeted the animal, and they laughed when I asked if it had a name.

Reaching the top, I looked up into the southern peaks and out along the valley toward Kabul. The Buddha-holes seemed much smaller in their cliff from this height, as did the communications tower perched by the airport. Even the New Zealand PRT base appeared to vanish into the shadow of the surrounding hills. After enjoying a few moments' quiet atop the fort, it was time to return to the town below - we had an early dinner invitation from Afghan friends and packing left to be done - though after a month in Bamiyan, Afreen was ready to return to the big city, the departure came all too quickly for me.

(small album link)

Against Postponing Elections

2010-07-13T15:00:00.012+04:30

In Sunday's Washington Post, Candace Rondeaux argues for postponing parliamentary elections. Her main points are:

Security is still deteriorating
Known flaws in the elections process haven't been fixed since last year
The international community isn't sufficiently involved

I don't actually take issue with any of these arguments, but I don't think that they add up to postponing the elections...

Security is a huge unknown, and it could just as easily deteriorate as improve over the next six months. If we postpone in the hope of a free campaign environment, we could find ourselves waiting quite some time (at least in certain districts). If the security situation is too bad for elections now, then any postponement would become indefinite.

The elections process is indeed terribly flawed. In explaining the quirks of the voting system, I've only scratched the surface. The process of removing candidates with ties to illegal armed groups functions even more poorly than she described - but given the relevant government ministries' refusal to thoroughly vet would-be parliamentarians, it's near-impossible for outside bodies to even begin researching all 2500 candidates. The institutions we helped form are opaque and dysfunctional, but we're losing leverage to reform them. This is a question worth addressing, but unless we can spell out a new framework for electoral management, halting campaigns already underway hurts many legitimate candidates without changing the underlying deficiencies.

Finally, the international community is deliberate in its distance. In the presidential election, their involvement was able to highlight flaws without being able to prevent fraud or solve the crisis. Again, without the leverage to change how these elections are carried out, the international community is quite possibly better off not associating itself with the process. But the solution still shouldn't be postponement or cancellation now that campaigns are underway, candidates are already printing posters and hosting rallies and spending both their hard-raised funds and taking well-calculated risks. An election clearly stolen by supporters of the president would be a disaster, but a suspension of elections could create just as much public disillusionment.

The solution, such as it is, should be harder behind-the-scenes work for effective administration, combined with a highly concerted effort to ensure election-day security and plenty of training and support for organizations like the Free and Fair Elections Foundation and the Commission, who are playing an active advocacy role. Elections are much harder to carry out here, due not only to security and administration but also because of questions of media, geography, and the near-total loss of social trust over years of conflict.

The word "solution" makes these problems sound addressable, though some of them may not be. But we've begun holding elections here and to halt this one step towards democratic governance doesn't even begin to fix all these other issues - it's just a concrete action that feels like a solution in the face of a tangle of challenges too complex for any easy proposals.

Shahr-e Zohak

2010-07-12T15:10:00.013+04:30

For those of you keeping score at home, I'm now back in Kabul, so elections-intrigue posts will resume shortly. However, several posts' worth of Bamiyan photos remain. Continuing the travel-blogging:

Having already seen the most spectacular of Bamiyan's natural wonders, Afreen and I set out to explore some of its historical curiosities. Shahr-e Zohak, a 6th-century fortress built up into a 12th century city only to be destroyed by Ghengis Khan, offered a perfect afternoon of mountain-climbing and picture-taking.

The red-brick ruins sit perched over a green valley of potato fields about 12 miles outside of Bamiyan along the road to Kabul. As Afreen scrambled up the steep hill, Arif turned to check on me as I stumbled, winded and gasping, behind. "She's part mountain goat," I told him, but even as he nodded I realized he hadn't understood. Pointing my index fingers from my temples like small horns, I clarified my previous statement: "baaaa..." His laughter made Afreen stop long enough for me to catch my breath.

At over 8,000 feet, Bamiyan is enough higher than Kabul that my lungs noticed the lack of oxygen - at least when hiking. Pausing for another "please stop; I can't breathe" break, I looked back out on the valley from which we were climbing. Though the New York Times' reporting on mineral wealth in Afghanistan started a debate on whether this story was or was not a revelation, a simple glance at the bright bands of color streaked through these hills certainly hint at riches beneath.

Along the hillside, scattered white-painted stones mark a clear route safe from landmines, while a handful of warning markers appear to protect unsuspecting tourists from the few remaining threats. The hillside served a defensive role even as the Taliban came into Hazarajat, so the ancient fortress also serves as home to piles of scrap metal and more recent remains of war as well.

Most spectacularly, the highest turret still contains a battered green anti-aircraft gun, pointing out over the town below. Bamiyan today is one of the quietest, most stable provinces in all Afghanistan, but the memory of conflict is recent enough that certain scars still show.

(Additional photos of Shahr-e Zohak)

Band-e Amir

2010-07-10T11:17:00.012+04:30

In Kabul, it's easy to forget that the tenseness between one's shoulder blades is not normal, that heightened awareness and perpetual caution are a deviation from some calmer norm. It's not that I feel threatened in the city - my life putters along far more normally than might be expected - but that the knowledge that everything will be okay right up until the moment it isn't has a way of weighing on the subconscious.

In that sense, Bamiyan is paradise, as it is a place worthy of superlatives even were it not an escape from the dusty chaos of a city in conflict. Imagine setting out in a dusty 4-Runner and bumping along surprisingly good gravel roads for two hours to discover this view at the end of the journey:

Sitting for kebabs at a tiny house in Band-e Amir with Afreen, the sheer absurdity of our location - one of the world's most beautiful lakes, several thousand miles from home, ostensibly in a failed state/war zone and yet outrageously serene - struck in a way that laughed away any remaining stress built up by the previous six weeks.

Anything else that can be said about Band-e Amir is best said in photographs - it is a series of lakes, after all, tucked into a high-altitude plain about two hours' drive outside Bamiyan city. Minerals in the water give them an unnaturally blue shade, and a man at a picnic table outside the mosque built into the cliff along Band-e Haibat rents swan-shaped paddleboats for $6/hour. The words "any color but..." had barely escaped my lips when Afreen asked the man for the pale pink. What protest would be worth it here? Pink it was:

A crowd along the shore gathered to stare as we navigated clumsily out into the middle of the lake, until we disappeared around a curve into a shaded cove. Scarves off, fingers trailing in the turquoise chill, we pedaled only when necessary to reverse our slow drift back out into the bright sunshine.

(As with the Buddhas, a full album is linked from each of the photos above. Enjoy!)

"Waging war on stones"

2010-07-08T21:02:00.007+04:30

A pockmarked cliff stands protectively over Bamiyan city, visible throughout the town. For some millennium and a half, two large Buddhas - paired bookends to a network of shrines and temples carved out of the sandstone - overlooked this valley in central Afghanistan. Now, fragments of a third smaller statue and patches of fresco scattered throughout the caves hint at their ancient glories while children herd goats past the potato fields at their base.

After lunch at the New Zealand Provincial Reconstruction Team ("Kiwi Base") with a new friend of Afreen's and a short nap for my travel-weary eyes, it was time to pay a proper visit to these most famous victims of Taliban destruction. After a brief walk through the potato fields and past the large niches, we bought handwritten entry tickets from a small house before passing through a gate warning us of falling rock.

Climbing steep stairwells between rooms and balconies carved into the sheer cliff-face, we reached the full height of the smaller niche. A complete fresco of a serene, meditating Buddha adorned the archway of one entry, while a blue-sky panorama of snow-dusted mountains competed for my attention looking outward.

Alcoves behind the larger niche are filled with fragments of the exploded statue, patiently awaiting whatever fate may come. For all of Mullah Omar's declaration that "we are only waging war on stones," these particular rocks retain a powerful hold on both Afghan and international imagination. Though plans to reconstruct the statues are currently on hold, their traces live on in great fame.

(I took many, many photos while climbing the Buddhas. All images above link to a slideshow of my favorites for those who would like a more complete tour).

Bamiyan bound

2010-07-07T22:01:00.014+04:30

Alternate title: initiate travel-blogging

My friend and classmate Afreen has been in Bamiyan for several weeks now, conducting surveys on women's rights and development progress in the province. She's interviewed the governor and received a sheep, and for real news on the province you should definitely see her blog.

As Afreen prepared to return to Kabul, I contrived to plan a visit to this place she'd brought so vividly to life online. On Monday afternoon, the liaison's office at the Commission confirmed that they'd reserved a seat on the UN Humanitarian Air Service flight the next morning, and so I packed my bags. Arriving at the Kabul International Airport at 5:30am, I received a thorough pat-down from a bored female guard (good morning!) and fell in behind a group of men wearing Electoral Complaint Commission badges after I heard them ask for directions to the UN terminal.

I had no weapons to unload, so after a brief passport check, I found myself pacing a small waiting room with Al-Jazeera English playing on the television. The man in the ECC badge introduced himself - their group was returning home to Daikundi Province from a training in Kabul. He was a physician chosen to serve as the Election Complaints Coordinator for the province as a respected but apolitical figure. Daikundi is a twelve hour drive from Bamiyan, but the half-hour flight saved them at least part of the 48 hours it would take to drive from Kabul.

After boarding the turboprop and buckling in, I pulled out my camera to catch some of the scenery we'd be flying over. The newly-lit sky promised a clear blue journey.

Between dusty peaks of strangely mineral red and gold, valleys kept green by snow runoff and human determination widened to accommodate small house-clusters below. Looking over meandering dirt paths, I wondered at the thought of surviving winter snowed in to one of these villages.

As the high hills gave way to true mountains and I began to see snow on their peaks, the attendant announced our descent into Bamiyan.

The airport has a gravel strip, a tiny outbuilding/"terminal", and an all-NGO clientele. No fewer than four separate UN vehicles waited outside for arrivals.

Afreen had walked from the hotel to the airport, and so we began the return trip down a tree-lined road, the famous Buddha niches already visible in the distance. I had only just landed, but the simple ability to go walking, the sense of having left Kabul and mysteriously landed in Colorado, and a serious dose of exhaustion conspired to form a curious euphoria. This would be a good week.

Some things are universal

2010-07-06T20:33:00.005+04:30

The styles and vows may change from one time zone to the next, but the fundamental act of celebrating a new marriage is the same the world over. Everyone gets dressed up, they eat, they dance, and they take excessive photographs. The major differences here are that there's no alcohol to ease into the dancing, and the men and women party in separate rooms.

I was aware of this final detail even before receiving Ateeq's email inviting N and myself to join him at a friend's wedding that same night. It's just that in the rush of excitement - a wedding? tonight? definitely! - the logistics of two foreign girls in a room of strange women were a secondary consideration after "but what do I wear?"

As Atta drove past a row of wedding halls lit with nearly as much neon as the Vegas Strip, Ateeq jokingly asked us to be on the lookout for pretty girls. While N tried to pin down his tastes, I remembered crashing another stranger's wedding with a twinge of Morocco nostalgia. It was only as Qasim, the groom, led the two of us into the bright glare of a videographer's light to meet a long line of cousins that I began to wonder about what N and I were going to do for the next few hours by ourselves...

I needn't have worried. One niece welcomed us in English and seated us in the front of the room, while a gaggle of small children crowded around to stare and yell "hi!" The girls shied away when I began to ask them "nom-e-tu chist?", but one boy answered me "Elham!" and began to introduce the rest. The boys mugged for my camera while a procession of other kids shuffled over to mumble "salam" and run back away. After waiting a suitable period to avoid seeming overeager, the older girls began to wander over to chat while members of the bride's and groom's families exchanged jewelry on a platform at the front of the room. Eventually the couple entered and led a candlelit procession to the platform, where everyone cycled through for photos.

As dancing began, N and I took to dress-watching: with no men present, the younger women wore outfits best described as slightly deranged prom dresses - one was in a green sequined affair with peacock feathers embroidered on, while another wore a full tulle skirt gathered with giant fake roses. Two cousins had matched their red-and-black dresses and gave the appearance of twin flamenco dancers wandering in from Madrid. Though fitted t-shirts had been added to sleeveless or strapless numbers, other rules of modesty were suspended for the night, and so glitter, curls, and elaborate eye makeup reigned supreme. Having broken the ice with what awkward small talk could be made between our Dari and their English, we posed for pictures with the other girls until dinner arrived.

After eating quickly, we slipped out - N had work the next morning, while I had laundry to wash and packing to finish before catching a 7am flight. We excused ourselves with great regret and left our new friends to continue their festivities.

Traveling again

2010-07-05T15:36:00.003+04:30

So it turns out I'll be leaving very early tomorrow morning for a short trip out of Kabul. Updates will almost certainly be reduced while I'm gone - look for my next post to be from Bamiyan!

Wonkery, continued

2010-07-05T14:06:00.007+04:30

To recap: the Afghan election system is both simple and screwy, with straightforward rules that can produce counter-intuitive (and possibly counter-the-public-will) outcomes. At least it makes voting easy, right?

Well...first, imagine a ballot several pages long. At least in Kabul (664 candidates) or Nangarhar (160 candidates), and probably also Kandahar (50 candidates), the list simply doesn't fit on a single page. Thankfully, the ballot order lottery takes place when the final candidate list is released, months before the election. Ballot order numbers appear on most campaign posters to simplify the process of finding the right name on election day.

(A ballot for last year's provincial council race in Kabul - courtesy of Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images)

Next, imagine you have to find your candidate without being able to read. The most recent estimate in the CIA World Factbook gives Afghanistan a 28.1% literacy rate. As a result, the ballot paper includes not only a candidate's name but also a photograph and a small symbol, which also appears on campaign posters and other materials as a way of branding the candidate with the image.

For fairness's sake, the symbols are all provided by the Independent Election Commission and are distributed in a lottery system akin to the one that determines ballot order. They are relatively ordinary objects - apples, airplanes, butterflies and books all appear. It's an ingenious system for managing candidate identification in the face of high illiteracy, all in all.

vote for this lovely young woman - look for the desk

The symbols do have their flaws, though. The most obvious is that there aren't enough distinct objects, so a candidate symbolized by one cherry is running against a candidate symbolized by two cherries, and possibly another with three. This muddles their clarity somewhat and provides another necessary element for voters to remember (unless the candidate photographs then help make the final distinction).

What's more, candidates are assigned new symbols at each election. If you ran for a parliamentary seat as an ear of corn and lost, this time you might be running as a bicycle. Incumbents, too, have to re-brand themselves with the symbol of the cycle, which might be hard enough given the completely apolitical nature of most of these images, but which takes on new challenges when the symbol I use today belonged to a very different candidate in, say, last year's district council race. Because these images serve to identify candidates among an electorate who can't read, it's almost like running under a different name each elections, at least in some parts of the country.

this guy must be worth a vote - he's got three laptops!

Alrighty, if you've borne with me thus far, you've got a pretty good idea of the electoral mechanics in place. I'll try and move into political intrigue and current events as campaign season heats up. There have been some episodes of violence surrounding rallies already, and there's something of a legal debate underway as to whether or not it was correct to remove 32 candidates from the voter rolls after the final list was published or not (okay, so that story will also involve more electoral management office introductions). Anyway, for now I'm off to finish up work and head to a wedding, so my next post will almost assuredly be more colorful.

Soccer-riot diplomacy

2010-07-04T11:06:00.006+04:30

The World Cup goes on in Kabul as it does elsewhere - though people here watch with less public passion than my friends in Accra or even Dhaka describe, I did nearly get into a traffic accident riding with a driver too distracted by Spain versus Switzerland to watch the road. However, the pundits' favorite sporting event (well, possibly second to the Olympics) should not go unmentioned on a blog devoted to armchair diplomacy, and so I offer my thanks to my friend SV for this guest post:

It’s a staple of the Cold War-era sports drama—a cheap shot by the villain. The East German hockey player who hacks the Minnesota farmboy’s knee on a breakaway play. The Soviet boxer who rabbit punches the Philadelphia southpaw after the bell. The Chinese martial artist who blinds the square-jawed Yankee soldier with quicklime powder in the final round of the kumite. Yet the fair player overcomes treachery for the win, mooting the more interesting question.

The limited diplomatic value of this metaphor has always been the same—that the hero can afford not merely to be just, and deliver a proportional response. But further, drawing on greater personal resource and greater strength of will, can afford to do more than win: to win cleanly and indisputably. To avoid, at all costs, the messier work of protest and diplomacy within a body of laws that may well turn out imperfect.

Nowhere is this limitation clearer today than in the public profile of Uruguayan striker Luis Suárez, who catalyzed his nation’s first FIFA World Cup semifinal berth in forty years—at the expense of Ghana’s (and, indeed, Africa’s) first semifinal berth ever. In the closing moments of the quarterfinal, Suárez committed a handball block of Ghana’s point blank header on an open net. Though Suárez drew an immediate red card to leave the game, Asamoah Gyan of Ghana then missed the penalty kick, hitting the crossbar and taking the drawn match to a shootout. Uruguay won 4-2.

The prompt and shrill response to the “Hand of Suárez” and his standard one-game disqualification (meaning he could return for the final if Uruguay defeats the Netherlands) has been indignant. John Leicester’s AP editorial pretty well sums up the sentiment: FIFA should have banned him from the entire tournament, run him out of Johannesburg on a rail, and so on.

As with any system of many variables, what made this fiasco illustrative were the many that were controlled for. The score was tied 1-1. There was no time left in regulation-plus-stoppage for any subsequent plays. Both nations had finished second in their respective group stage matches, then defeated first seeds by 2-1 to reach the quarterfinal. The winning scorer in Uruguay-Korea had been Suárez; in Ghana-U.S., Gyan. The clearly-superior-hero narrative was as inapt as the David-and-Goliath. Because the teams were so well matched, any breach could, indeed, decide the outcome. Thus, there was no principled way to tell hero from villain, only by picking a gut-satisfying outcome and working backwards.

Under the circumstances, then, Suárez excelled as both a tactician and a strategist. Leicester himself admits (which is to say, accuses) that Suárez took a calculated risk, choosing to violate the most elemental law of the game and face swift and certain punishment rather than concede immutable defeat. He put his trust in the settled rule-punishment calculus, accepting the prescribed one-game disqualification. And he put his trust in his teammates, who took the opportunity to rally and win. What he didn’t do was go quietly into the night.

For its part, FIFA did well not to extend the disqualification to the finals as an act of deterrence, smacking as it would have of moving the goal-posts after the fact. Where any political decision will be decried anyway, simple expediency leads (ironically enough) back to principled application of the rules.

There is some weight to the counterargument that Ghana had the last clear chance and still blew it. More fundamentally, though, the animus against Suárez is that it was Ghana’s turn to win, that the rules of zero-sum diplomacy are simply not enough to right that injustice. And that’s the crazy part of the argument. There aren’t any turns.

(Chile versus Switzerland at the Kabul Health Club)

SNTV - how we got here

2010-07-03T19:12:00.006+04:30

After my episode wonking out, the natural question from those who tolerate my professorial mode was "well, how did such a system come into place?"

The single, non-transferable vote (SNTV) was implemented in the 2004 election law. At the time, the apparent benefits were that 1) it's easy to vote (there's really nothing simpler than checking the box for an individual candidate), 2) it's easy to count (same), and 3) province-wide districts minimize the distortion effect of population-guessing in the absence of a complete census.

Finally, it discourages the formation of strong political parties. The Afghan Constitution bans all political parties formed around ethnic, linguistic, regional or religious ties (which is to say, the most natural fractures) in the hope that the central government can function as a unifying, rather than dividing, force. Selecting an election system that discourages party formation extends this goal.

The irony, then, is that by producing a relatively unpredictable parliament (and by leaving the parliament constitutionally weak to begin with), this greatly raises the stakes for presidential elections, where only one candidate can win the office.

War rugs

2010-07-03T11:46:00.011+04:30

On my very first day in Kabul, I saw a carpet for sale at the Serena Hotel gift shop that struck me as gaudy and comic: a knotted depiction of tanks and grenades carefully labeled in English. I assumed it was some kind of touristy nonsense and dismissed it.

Tagging along with carpet-shopping friends yesterday, I learned that not only is that (admittedly kitschy example) a relatively common souvenir, it's also part of a far richer history of war rugs dating to the 1980s. Until recently, there was a War Rug gallery in New York, and even a show in Chelsea. There's even a Rugs of War blog.

Soviet-era war rugs have become rather valuable artifacts as both art and anthropology, and the tradition has continued in styles both weirdly beautiful and frightfully tacky. Some samples I saw yesterday (please forgive the photos; the thought of writing about these didn't occur to me until later, so I didn't even attempt to take blog-worthy pictures).

A Soviet-period rug Natalie put on hold; this carpet's war imagery is subtle - the pattern in the center is Kalashnikovs shooting at snakes, and yet the design is symmetrical and not particularly violent.

A modern rug detailing various weapons in surprising detail.

Another less-obvious war rug, this a recent sample - the pattern is of urban life, with roads and buildings, but also helicopters and tanks running along the lower border, just outside the city.

And the blatant - 9/11 and the "war on terror", woven by someone who clearly reversed the pattern (enlarge the image and you'll see the English labels are all backwards).

Photos for the day

2010-07-01T19:45:00.004+04:30

Call today's pictures "a view from TV mountain" - while most of Kabul sits in a valley, one large hill is perched in the middle of the city. On days when traffic is too backed-up along the main road between my home and office, Hossein goes up and over the hill instead. Under the many antennas and communications towers that give TV Mountain its name, life goes on normally, if a bit more vertically. (and yes, that's a cemetery in the foreground of the lower photo).

Stepping back

2010-07-01T11:39:00.008+04:30

Today, news outside of Afghanistan deserves mention. A brief roundup:

One of the accused Russian spies was a Kennedy School mid-career MPA in the same class as Felipe Calderón. Bets are already underway as to which member of the MPP '11 class is most likely to be arrested in similar fashion ten years hence.

Also, a friend of mine coordinated a research project combing the major newspapers' coverage of waterboarding. Their report, released by the Shorenstein Center, has picked up significant press in the blogosphere: Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, and the Huffington Post all wrote about it yesterday. Having read a few early drafts, I'm very proud to see it make an impact.

Finally, more locally, a UN driver was killed in Kabul on Tuesday. There are no official reports yet, but rumor here was that it was a mistake rather than an attack, and I'm not sure which outcome is more worrisome. In either case, it's a tragedy.

Wonking out

2010-06-30T17:38:00.011+04:30

Campaign season officially opened a few days ago, but the initial trickle of small candidate posters exploded into a forest of billboards just last night. Demazang Circle near my office had only one campaign advertisement yesterday; this morning there were five.

The art of political messaging is still pretty simple here - the pattern across the posters and billboards I've seen is candidate photo + name + party affiliation (99% say "independent") + ballot order + ballot symbol. Some include a slogan, but many do not. The name of the game seems to be simple recognition, which is logical enough given that there are over 600 candidates running for 33 open and 9 women's seats in Kabul province.

As the title indicates, this post exists solely to indulge my own interest in the technicalities of the election process. If voting systems bore you, please feel free to skim the photos and move along... but actually, the Afghan electoral system's quirks make for more compelling reading than you might otherwise guess.

As mentioned above, there are over 600 total candidates running for 42 seats across the whole of Kabul province (estimated population 4 million). Unlike U.S. House districts, though, the province is not subdivided into single-member districts - all 42 will be elected at-large from the province. What's more, each voter can choose only one candidate on his or her ballot. As a resident of Kabul, therefore, I get a say in only one of the 42 people who will represent me - and with hundreds of choices, the probability that the person I select will lose is quite high. The system is called the single, non-transferable vote (SNTV), and while it's simple enough to use, it's incredibly strategically complicated for both candidates and voters to navigate.

First, from a voter perspective, it's very important to choose my candidate carefully. If I vote for someone who's already very popular, I waste my voice on a shoo-in; but if I choose a nobody running in 643rd place, I waste my ballot on a hopeless cause. The trick is to vote for my preferred candidate from among the middle of the pack, hoping to nudge someone from 43rd place into 39th - even if this person is perhaps only my 3rd choice - these are the seats are decided by a tiny number of votes. The fun part is that there's no polling information, so even guessing which candidates are safe and which are competitive is a game of information-gathering.

Adding to the fun, the Afghan Constitution sets aside a fixed number of seats for women, but does not hold a separate election for these seats. When the votes are counted, the top 9 women will receive seats, even if the 9th is actually in 253rd place. Perversely, this reduces the incentive to vote for a female candidate, because the electoral bar is so much more easily cleared.

From a candidate perspective, if I want to form a political party around my shared views with others in the race, it's incredibly difficult to do so. If some few of us were to band together on a common platform and pool our efforts to gain votes over the other several hundred, we'd need first to guess at how many supporters would back our group, then nominate exactly the right number of candidates to take advantage of that voting pool - too many, and our votes get divided too thin and we win no seats. Too few, and all our candidates win, but we'll have sacrificed additional seats we could have gotten. Then we have to work to divide our supporters' votes evenly among the candidates (in Taiwan, back when SNTV was in use there, political parties would print ads telling supporters which candidate to vote for based on their birthday - their politicians split the vote into calendar-segments).

In reality, what happens is that political parties don't really form, and the provinces break into small parochial constituencies rather than uniting behind more national platforms. Single, non-transferable voting systems are rare enough, and watching elections play out here, it's easy to see why.

Coming soon: a related post on adapting campaigning and balloting for a country with a low literacy rate, translating campaign billboards, and other elections fun.

Photos for the day

2010-06-29T15:45:00.002+04:30

The schoolgirls walking home at the end of the day always clump together in gaggles of black-and-white, while the boys usually scatter. I was especially surprised to catch two classmates (siblings?) mingling on the walk home.

Adventures in Bamiyan

2010-06-29T13:19:00.005+04:30

With any luck, I'll be traveling this weekend to Bamiyan province, home of Afghanistan's only female governor, two empty niches where gigantic Buddha statues stood until Taliban forces destroyed them, and a series of deep turquoise lakes called Band-e-Amir. While mine will be a short tourist's visit, however, my friend Afreen has been in Bamiyan for two weeks touring schools and development projects in villages far outside the provincial capital. Reading her account of local hospitality has made me sad that I won't be staying longer myself - I don't imagine I'll be on the receiving end of a sheep here in Kabul.

Photos for the day

2010-06-28T14:53:00.002+04:30

Many of the trucks found hauling goods about Kabul are intricately decorated - these are just two samples of the many detailed paint jobs I've seen. I have no idea why anyone goes to this level of effort (the work appears to be hand-done), nor how it's become so widely popular.

Afghan Model

2010-06-28T11:35:00.002+04:30

This morning, a colleague from the logistics section wandered in to my office carrying two scrapbooks. He addressed Wakeel, who then translated as he placed one of the albums in my hands: "these are photographs of his son, in traditional Afghan clothes."

The first few were postcard-like prints, each featuring several different outfits and printed with "Maseeh Ur Rahman Popalzai," the name of our young model. Later photographs show him posed in a rose garden; petting a goat; holding a shovel over his shoulder in front of a display of summer wheat; and endless close-ups of a serious face with an even more serious handlebar mustache.

He is wearing clothes from all over Afghanistan, and as I thumb through the pages, my colleague provides narration: "Herat... Kandahar... Kabul." Wakeel explains that Maseeh Rahman competed on a television show called Afghan Model - then corrects himself - he won Afghan Model. The second scrapbook, it turns out, is a collection of congratulations. I am asked to contribute, so I pen a brief note and sign my name. After prompting me to add "USA" next to my entry, the man asks me if I have a photograph of myself. Surely enough, it appears that most of these fan messages are accompanied by passport-sized images.

We made a deal - I'll bring a photo tomorrow for the fan book, and I get copies of a couple of the postcard photos in exchange. Handlebar mustaches are far from dreamy in my book, but I can't pass up this kind of brush with fame...

A photo for the day

2010-06-26T17:22:00.004+04:30

I think I like posting pictures individually - it's much simpler to pick one for the day than to prepare a full album (also, it means more new things for the handful of people I know are checking in regularly). Thoughts?

This one amuses me doubly - first, it was taken on a paved (!) street in a quiet neighborhood of wealthy residences and NGO offices in Karte Se - not where I usually see goatherders. Secondly, there really is a Kabul Fried Chicken, which has seen fit to appropriate the image of Colonel Sanders on its storefront (I've yet to get a photo of that; apologies). Strangely, the name isn't actually translated into Dari underneath - just transliterated. "Kabul Fraid Chikn" - Happy Saturday!

"Something that we've lost"

2010-06-26T11:36:00.013+04:30

"I was standing on a busy interjunction in New Delhi with the traffic and the din and the scooters and the bikes and the elephants and the cows, and I remember thinking: These people have got something that we’ve lost. Our traffic rules and sanitation and systems make life easier and more convenient, ensure longer lifespans and perhaps a fairer society. But these things come at a cost, and the cost is what I felt there. There’s a velocity and density of life there that you don’t get in the West, and that I found oxygenating."
--David Mitchell

First, I love this quote. There is a certain heightening of the senses sparked by the seemingly patternless hubbub found in poor, distant cities. Without familiar rules and structures, life flows along according to some complex, unwritten code entirely alien to foreign spectators; and so we stand mutely appreciative of the colors and the sounds and feel all the more alive for the experience. I certainly fell under that spell on my first visit to old-city Fes.

And yet, with "velocity and density..." Mitchell also turns this exotic, romanticised image into a critique of modern conveniences that are only tangential to the chaos he finds so beautiful. Traffic rules eliminate some of the din and the bustle, but they aren't the reason our roads back home don't have elephants or cows. The character of a new place comes from much deeper factors than the presence or absence of sanitation systems, after all. For all that I loved the Coca-Cola donkey, I was more than happy to return to the world of air conditioning when I got back to the States. The moments of wonder I find here are not at things lost in the course of Western progress - they are from a cultural history we simply never had.

While I'm still finding plenty to love about Kabul, I'm less charmed by its quirks than I was by Fes. Part of this is the lack of novelty (the traffic in Kabul was "predictably anarchic," according to my initial impressions), and part of it is that the unfamiliarities of life here come with a vague foreboding that you are in a place where the knowledge you haven't got, if you had it, could save you. Though after a month of watching and listening and settling in, I don't feel this threat as explicitly, it made the introduction less magical.

A friend once noted, "whether one is a returning child of the motherland or a nascent orientophile, there is little that sums up the difference in residential comforts, east by west, as the utter utterness of the power going out... in this regard, the municipal electric grid is indistinguishable from rain, or wind, or any force of nature whose fundamental uncertainty is irreconcilable except by améliean finger-crossing." Despite the beauty of traditional Persian calligraphy, despite the warm hospitality extended to me, despite the small joy of watching the schoolgirls clump around the ice-cream men each afternoon in their black uniforms and white scarves, ordinary life here requires much greater effort than at home. The power is more consistent than I'd have predicted, but taking a morning shower involves a trip out into the garden to plug in the water pump so as to build up adequate pressure, then another trip ten minutes later to unplug it before the overflow floods the roses. Laundry is a two-buckets-in-the-bathtub affair, and while by now I'm fairly adept at this, whatever I came here seeking is not going to be found in my Friday washing routine.

I believe it's possible to embrace the traffic and the din without mourning the ease and convenience of home. At least, I'm trying to strike that balance here: there is much to love about life in Afghanistan, from the dry walnut bars Wakeel just brought in to go with our morning tea to the proliferation of glittery headscarves I see on the street and the implicit hope I find in outlandish fashions here. I don't intend to celebrate the poverty or the inconveniences, however, as my wildest hopes entail retaining the unique and the beautiful of this place even as traffic rules and washing machines invade. Whatever their cost, it's certainly not too high.

A photo for the day

2010-06-25T13:00:00.005+04:30

In honor of watermelon season, which is in full swing here. Watermelon juice might just be my new favorite beverage...

A photo for the day

2010-06-24T11:09:00.002+04:30

Inside baseball

2010-06-23T10:06:00.007+04:30

(postscript 6/24, 8:30am - the powers that be are obviously in agreement - that was a fast response.)

So the Rolling Stone article on General McChrystal is the talk of the expat community here - and the wonks in D.C. as well. Yes, an aide calls Vice President Biden "Bite me". Yes, McChrystal ignores Ambassador Holbrooke's emails.

The inner circle is "shocked and dismayed" at the portrayal, while some say these comments "put the whole war in jeopardy." Possible "fire McChrystal" scenarios are floating about, while the finger-pointing game has already expanded to include "it would be a travesty if we fired McChrystal and kept Eikenberry." (Small Wars Journal does its usual fantastically thorough round-up of the press and punditry.)

Around the office? Well, McChrystal is respected, so there's some concern as to what this means. I think Foreign Policy has summed that angle up with its usual skill.

And still, understanding how critical it is that the military commanders actually respects the civilian leadership, and knowing that unity of effort is foundational to successful implementation, I feel like all this outcry is even more counterproductive than the initial scandalous remarks (even acknowledging that they're clearly in violation of the Uniform Code). Long speculation and "fate in limbo" headlines compound the damage exponentially. Quite frankly, I can envision resolutions that end in McChrystal's resignations and others that return him to Kabul, but all I'm really hoping for is that the decision comes quickly. This is the kind of inside baseball that destroys real efforts in the service of personal grudges.

The Essence of Confusion

2010-06-22T17:43:00.003+04:30

(apologies to Graham Allison)

After (nearly) four weeks in Kabul, I've now gotten into enough conversations about current events to make some tentative generalizations. This is anecdote, not data; if nothing else, the sample is limited to Anglophones with the patience to explain very simple things to the American girl who obviously doesn't get it.

The most common reaction to news about American military strategy is bafflement. They dump more funds than can be spent effectively into unstable districts but provide minimal development assistance to peaceful areas that remain loyal to the central administration even despite their own complaints with its governance. ("Bamiyan will start an 'insurgency' just to get aid," one person remarked offhand.) They take advice from former and current warlords. They offer huge contracts for logistics and transport and then express surprise that the companies who take them pass a protection cut along to enemy forces. Trying to make sense of this, the main question I get is, are they stupid, or is there some secret plan - and, really, what's the secret plan?

Cut to Professor Allison: in The Esence of Decision, he proposes three models of analysis and applies each to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The first depicts the state as a unitary, rational actor - it evaluates courses of action and selects the value-maximizing option. The second considers a government instead as a bureaurcracy, dependent on defined organizational roles and responding to new situations using existing patterns of action. The third considers leaders as political beings and evaluates actions as opportunities for exchange between these many players, with external decisions reflecting internal competition and bargaining.

So when I open the New York Times Sunday Magazine and read "I asked Jones one morning how he could square his fondness for Shirzai with his new task of establishing good government. 'I guess I hadn't thought about it that much,' Jones said, transparent to a fault. 'The people probably did view him as the thug. But what else could we have done?'" I see the organizational model at work - the same article notes that Shirzai "may have been loathed by the people but could be counted on to deliver American war materiel to anywhere in the region for only $5,000 a truckload." It isn't a case of the American military deliberately promoting Shirzai as a model leader, it's a case of using the guy who has the power to wield it on your behalf. It's probably similar institutionalizing of the simplest method that leads to articles like Dexter Filkins's latest, revealing that a portion U.S. transportation logistics dollars are almost certainly being passed along to the Taliban as protection money.

But I'm not talking to experts in American politics, or political scientists with coursework in game theory or Graham Allison. The simplest model, rational actor analysis, treats the United States as a single player led by the will of President Obama - and this assessment yields utter bewilderment. Why would President Obama have met with Shirzai on a visit to Afghanistan back when he was still a Senator? For that matter, why is Shirzai the governor of Nangarhar, seeing that he was so unpopular he had to be removed from Kandahar? The New York Times didn't even mention Shirzai in its initial account of the visit, as it simply wasn't a critical element of the story among an American audience. Here, on the other hand, it led to rampant rumors that Shirzai was invited to the inauguration. As far as public diplomacy goes, it doesn't even matter that this is patently false - it's widely believed, and the perception is damaging. If the United States is working with these kinds of people, dark ulterior interests must be at work. No one can possibly claim ignorance of his reputation, and the "I hadn't thought about it much" defense seems dangerously implausible coming from the representative of a superpower.

What's more, it stems from the fact that the U.S. does have a working relationship with the man Sarah Chayes described as a "source of insecurity" in 2003. I count among my friends an Army officer who has worked in Nangarhar: he, too, found Shirzai to be a valuable political partner despite his past and his personal shortcomings. I also count among my new friends a colleague who tells stories of Shirzai's violent dog-fights and tyrannical leadership.

This is a difficult balance - while it's possible that working with Shirzai (who is really a sample case for many similar choices the U.S. makes regularly here) is absolutely critical for success, and that those who despise him are not so passionately opposed as to expand the insurgency, that's simply not an equation I can calculate. I'm not certain if anyone can.

As another example, when Andrew Exum writes, "For a variety of reasons - some good, some less good, some having to do with massive oil spills that didn't exist in 2009 and a financial crisis that didn't exist in 2007 - the United States and its allies will likely not provide the resources necessary for a long-term counterinsurgency effort," I hear a political model at work, assessing just what agenda the President and Congress can successfully balance for both the good of the country and the goodwill of the population. It's my own government, after all, and I've spent long enough following the twists and turns of politics to know just how complex the process is. What comes across here is that we don't care about the Afghan people, and given that their desires really don't play a direct role in the policy evaluation process, that's a hard claim to rebut. Of course we care; but that's not why we're here, and empathetic concern alone isn't going to keep a large American aid presence.

There's still some chance all this will succeed, and that by pursuing the American national security interest we'll manage to offer Afghans the leadership and development they fervently hope for. But in the meantime we certainly can't teach all of Afghanistan Graham Allison, and so these choices, and analyses, look pretty damning to their eyes.

(postscript: On an analytical level, nothing expressed here is novel, let alone revolutionary, but I do think it's important to keep in mind. Furthermore, there's a clear lack of implied action stemming from these observations - an obvious flaw from my policy-wonk perspective. We'll see if I can come up with anything in the weeks to come.)

Back to the daily grind

2010-06-21T08:37:00.003+04:30

After a quiet Sunday evening checking in with family, I put in some quality time with Photoshop and have added new photos chronicling the daily commute. I don't have Afreen's DSLR or editing abilities, but the updates include schoolgirls, goats, billboard posters of Karzai and Masoud, mountains, mosques, a body-builder gym ad, and possibly the coolest safety goggles reminder ever. Enjoy!

click for the full album

Kabul Dreams

2010-06-19T09:26:00.003+04:30

Last night, I attended an album release party for Kabul Dreams, an indie trio who bill themselves as "Afghanistan's only rock band." Stopping by after dinner with a friend, I missed the main set but caught an encore performed for the BBC film crew who had come to document the big event. The songs were fine, but the novelty of being a groupie won out over any cynicism about the artistry of our performers. Here's to Kabul Dreams soon billing itself the first, rather than the only, Afghan rock band.

The story of three kids from different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds joining to record music in English has already proven irresistible to the foreign press - these guys have been covered on CNN, the Guardian, the Boston Globe's Big Picture, and of course my favorite folks at Foreign Policy.

Meet and greet

2010-06-18T12:38:00.005+04:30

I ate at a colleague's home Wednesday evening. The meal itself was generous and excellently prepared - rice, stewed okra with tomato, spinach, roast chicken, meat dumplings called mantu, mixed raw vegetable plates, yogurt, and fresh watermelon for dessert. This was all prepared by Mariam, a university student and the youngest child in the family, and two friends who were curious to meet the American girls.

Our fellow guests, however, were what made dinner an experience worth sharing. First, the head of the household: his father was elected to the first Afghan parliament in 1964, under Mohammed Zahir Shah. This made the family political targets after the Soviet invasion, so at 14, he was married off to an 11-year-old neighbor and sent from Daikundi province to Pakistan. They later settled in Iran, where they raised 6 children (another 7 died in infancy). A widower, he now lives with four of his children here in Kabul.

A cousin visiting from Daikundi is running for the Wolesi Jirga (the lower house of the Afghan parliament, and the only one directly elected). She's already served four years on the provincial council, having first been elected at 22. She has received death threats but still campaigns as one of six women competing for one reserved seat ("we are friends and competitors," she says of the other female candidates) because she is determined to improve opportunities for women.

The newly-married sister-in-law, still settling in with her new family after only a month in the household, smiles shyly and tries out a bit of English she has learned. She agreed before the wedding that she would not work or study, but hopes that her husband will change his mind. She's been thinking about the psychology program at Kabul University, where she passed the entrance exam last year, but not with a high enough score for the psychology department.

And Mariam, the youngest daughter and our evening's chef, who is engaged to an Afghan-American in the U.S. Army. She'll be moving to the States sometime next year to join him, and she seems far more excited than nervous about this prospect. For the moment, though, she's enjoying her political science studies and her friends - the three girls pull off their scarves in the kitchen and ask their guests questions about how women dress in the States and what Lea's Chilean fiancé looks like (which leads to a computer slide show). The 16-year-old tells me I wear my scarf too conservatively and asks if I'm Muslim. I try and explain that when I wear it draped loosely as she does, it falls off. She laughs at me, but I've seen the little schoolgirls wearing scarves that are sewn so they will stay put and I know that learning to keep a flimsy bit of fabric artfully draped so as to reveal just enough hair to be stylish but not so much as to be scandalous is decidedly a learned skill, and one I'm unlikely to master in my short time here.

Re-scarving and returning to the living room to eat, we find the others - a television sports producer, a teacher who plays on the national indoor soccer team, an uncle transfixed by the Spain-Switzerland game on the television. They have stories as well, but the clock soon reaches 10 and we leave reluctantly to catch some sleep before the next day's work. After two weeks enmeshed in the internationals' bubble, this brief escape into an Afghan home has been a welcome escape from routine.

Images not my own

2010-06-17T10:05:00.004+04:30

Foreign Policy continues to offer a surprising range of coverage on Afghanistan beyond the twists and turns of political intrigue and military policy. Today they've posted photographs taken by students in Kabul as part of an exchange project with a Philadelphia high school.

Give them a look

In the footsteps of [insert name here]

2010-06-16T18:10:00.004+04:30

In his introduction to the latest edition of Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana, Rory Stewart writes of walking through Herat and then sitting to describe the city on paper: the image of the European-uniformed traffic officers seemed the perfect vignette, if somehow too familiar. He recalled cracking open Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and finding a description of exactly these traffic police, and yet the language felt unfamiliar. Opening Byron's text, he found that someone else had indeed already put in print exactly what he had hoped to say.

Kabul feels this way some days - each of us who comes here indulges a sense of novelty, of seeking the exotic and pioneering the unfamiliar in a place that even today feels very far from home. And yet, even preparatory reading for such a journey reveals this adventurer's path to be quite well-trodden indeed. There is nothing new under the sun for the would-be wanderer: wherever you go, some young Brit probably got there more than a century before, caught some exotic disease doing so, and got a Geographic Society medal for his efforts. What fun is it to repeat the trek with modern vaccines and easy air travel? As Rory found, they probably documented it more eloquently, to boot.

The colonialists of the Great Game weren't even the first to beat me here, despite the unusual flair with which they did so. Last summer, I visited an exhibition of Afghan National Museum pieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first room displayed relics from Ay Khanum - a Greek city built by Alexander the Great on the Oxus River. The Oxus is now the Amu Darya, but somehow the idea of a pagan temple in Afghanistan seems even more incredible thing from contemporary Kabul than when I marveled at its ruins in New York. Other exhibits offered scraps of Silk Road riches - Venetian glass, Indian furnishings, Egyptian idols. I write as one seeing something new and yet undiscovered, and still try to remember that all I see is familiar to many others. I have much to see for myself, but what I write here is but a pale imitation of the many who have already told this tale.

The Excellent Educational Center

2010-06-13T08:21:00.003+04:30

...or, on my budding second career in public speaking...

On my very first day at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, I met Reza. He stopped into Safi's office specifically to say hello, requested my email, and immediately sent me a welcome detailing his own contact information in case I needed anything. He proceeded to introduce me to many others over the days that followed - always as the intern from Harward. I love Reza, so when he told me his cousin runs an English school, and that he'd like for Lea and me to visit sometime, I happily agreed.

We went Friday afternoon. As we sat in the director's office, he explained that there would be a speech competition that afternoon, and that Lea and I would be introduced as guests of honor and invited to speak for 5 minutes apiece, with time for questions to follow. Then we walked across the street to another classroom building. The room had nearly 200 people, but seats were reserved in the front row for our little troupe.

The competition began with the elementary students, 8 and 10-year-olds who spoke on the question: "is it difficult to govern an uneducated country?" One said yes; without money, there is no education, and without education, we learn only from our fathers and grandfathers and never change. The winner called leadership without education "a bird without wings."

The intermediate class tackled the prompt "our culture must survive." All contrasted Islamic culture with competing forces - one of the three didn't even mention a distinct Afghan culture within the religious tradition. Another called Afghan culture "the best culture" and called for national unity in respecting diverse traditions in order to protect them from outside influences.

Finally, the most advanced students grappled with "do humans deserve to be called supreme creatures?" One girl humbly declared that we were so only because God had given us this title. The boy who followed commmented that "man is a great yet careless creature," while the winning girl discussed the social sciences and our tendency to study our own flaws rather than celebrate the essential goodness of humanity. She declined to pass a verdict: "as we are the jury, we are uncertain of our choice."

Lea and I were introduced, and she then spoke about how many opportunities her own education had given her, while Reza translated for the many parents in the room. I then stepped forward and asked how many of the students had traveled to other countries, and a few hands went up. I asked how many had been to Europe, the Middle East, or the Americas, and a very few hands stayed up. I told them that I hadn't traveled very far when I was young, but that I had read a great deal about other places and studied languages - and that eventually these studies allowed me to see the countries I had learned about through books. I finished with a silly line about how pleasing it was to see their dedication and progress, and we opened the floor.

One speech contestant asked if the students' English was actually any good, and what we liked about Afghanistan so far. A younger girl wanted to know what we thought of the weather - and the government (we evaded the latter question). Lea asked one mother about her thoughts on education and she spelled out her hopes for her children in some detail.

We beamed at the over-generous applause and sat back down as the director announced class awards and handed out end-of-term certificates. Only then did I realize that we'd been the graduation speakers, essentially. I felt ashamed - some foreign dignitaries. I hadn't even practiced remarks properly! In any case, the welcome was warm, and I've now been invited home for dinner by Reza's father, who has also promised to find me a nice Afghan boy to marry... a productive Friday indeed.

The daily grind - a Kabul commute

2010-06-10T12:23:00.011+04:30

(new photos added 6pm, 6/10/10)

I've spent some part of the last week snapping photos out the car window on the way to and from the office. Most of them are blurred by the motion, or marred by traffic driving through the shot, but the handful I've collected here offer some view of the Kabul I see day-to-day. Enjoy!

click for the full album

Joking around

2010-06-08T21:09:00.001+04:30

My colleagues love to tease and are quick to laugh. Sometimes I don't really get what's so funny, and at other times I join in the fun. Some jokes I've been told over the last few days:

On marriage:
A wealthy Pakistani man returns after a time in America. Stopping in to make a small purchase, he tells the shopkeeper that he's looking for a wife, and where should he begin the search? The shopkeeper returns home and tells his young daughter that a rich man - with a green card - is looking for a wife, and would she maybe want to marry him and go to the US? The daughter agrees, and so wedding planning begins.

After the party, the newlyweds return to the groom's hotel, where he first peels off a toupee, then pulls out his false teeth... and then leans down to unscrew his artificial leg. The bride runs screaming back to her father's house, where she storms in to yell at him: "You didn't tell me he was falling apart!"

On Afghans and Arabs:
Two Afghan men traveled to Jordan. Arriving in the airport, they became separated briefly. One of them stumbled across two Jordanian men arguing - their voices raised, gesturing wildly. The Afghan watched, baffled, for a moment, but soon wandered on and found his friend again. He told him: "Jordanians are strange! You'd never believe what I saw - these two meen were fighting, and even then all they do is yell from the Qur'an!"

(this because most Afghans would encounter Arabic primarily, or exclusively, via readings of the Qur'an, but wouldn't necessarily understand enough to recognize non-religious conversations or arguments from these formal readings.)

Updates from the AIHRC

2010-06-07T11:04:00.003+04:30

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission was founded eight years ago yesterday - June 6, 2002. Staff here commemorated the day with tea, cake, and a brief speech from Dr. Sima Samar, the chair of the commission. She noted that 8 years old is equivalent to a third-grade student, with much already learned and yet much more to do, and then spoke directly to a number of different programs within the Commission.

I was proud because the election-monitoring team, formed that very day, received a brief mention. As hoped, I will be spending my summer receiving data from AIHRC field offices on political rights and violations complaints, then helping to write reports and regular press releases. Coming soon - a primer on the electoral system and possibly some of the candidates involved in September's elections, which will choose the Wolesi Jirga (the lower house of the legislature - the upper house, or Meshrano Jirga, is an appointed body).

It was also an opportunity to meet Dr. Samar. She was reportedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year (nominations and deliberations are not made public for 50 years), and some commentators mentioned her as a superior candidate to President Obama. She served as the first Minister of Women's Affairs and founded a women's rights organization called Shuhada (where Afreen is working for the summer). More recently, she was also appointed the UN special reporter on Darfur and named one of Forbes's 100 Most Powerful Women.

The days remain quiet as work plans remain in the formative stage, but as voter registration begins on June 12, it's certain to get busier quite soon.

and it's a strange condition...

2010-06-04T16:31:00.008+04:30

So day three of the peace jirga is underway with no further incident, and after 60 hours mostly confined to the guesthouse, I'm very much ready to return to the office tomorrow. Today, the Japanese restaurant down the block reopened, providing a pleasant (if minor) change in scenery in which to sit and feel confined.

This restaurant, like every place that caters to the international set, is completely unmarked outside. A friend of a friend told us to look for the orange door just across the street from our guesthouse, and surely enough there was a rose-garden cafe and local handicrafts shop tucked behind it. Staff in the guesthouse pointed us to the coffeeshop just a few steps further down the street. Another expat's dining guide provides plenty of recommendations and helpful directions to each.

Thankfully, there's also a private taxi service (or three) that serve the foreigners as well - the dispatcher answers in English, and the drivers know all the usual hangouts, including many private houses, by name. (This is exceedingly helpful in a city where building numbers are rare and not all streets are named). For $4, they'll drop you off at the unmarked door of your choice, in their equally unmarked Corollas.

Then it's a matter of knocking and stepping into a small alcove to be searched. Afreen draws curious looks from the guards who check her backpack - Afghans aren't allowed in many of these places, so she looks suspicious until beginning to speak. Bags approved, the armed guards open a second door into a world completely removed from any exterior reality. The Taverna du Liban has a four-foot tall brass teapot decorating one corner and serves hookah; the Gandamack Lodge contains a reasonable approximation of a British pub, with the exception of the official government permit requesting that they not serve alcohol to "Afghan citizens or muslims" and a very American "Mad River Glen: ski it if you can" sticker over the bar.

This second, secretive Kabul provides escape from the chaos and possible threats found in the first. Still, its isolation from the greater city is total, and it would be quite easy to live here and never interact with a local except to order dinner. At the end of a day in my office, where I am the only foreigner in the building and one of a mere handful in the organization, it is strange to return to a world my colleagues simply don't know. I eat cafeteria Afghan lunches and participate in spirited half-translated discussions on politics, world affairs, and comparative sociology, only to vanish back into home comforts and English in these separate evening spaces. My desire to escape the speakeasy-bubble is kept in check by uncertainty, however - in an unfamiliar place, who am I to break with habit and test the risks? It's a deeply restrictive little world, and yet it is comfortably so.

Safe, sound, and stir-crazy already

2010-06-02T12:41:00.003+04:30

So a peace jirga began this morning, and as a result, pretty much everything in Kabul is closed down, including my office and any restaurant catering to the expat crowd. I'd planned to post later today to break the lock-down boredom, but given that news reports are now talking of rockets, suicide bombers, and the evacuation of some delegates, I'm just posting briefly to note that our guesthouse is far enough away that I'm also following this online, having not heard any of the explosions, and everything remains calm. I'm going to be pretty supremely bored by the time everything is back to normal on Saturday, so do email links, stories, and other distractions...

AIHRC in the news

2010-06-01T07:17:00.002+04:30

In January, a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old girl ran away from their much older, abusive husbands. Authorities in Herat, rather than taking them to women's shelters or prosecuting the illegal marriages, returned them home to be beaten. The local leadership beat them - 40 lashes apiece - and filmed the process.

The video made it to the AIHRC, which pushed national authorities to respond. When they did nothing, the Commission released the video. A New York Times article on the case made the front page yesterday.

It's a sad recognition of just how far there is to go, but I'm encouraged that there is a watchdog making these things public - and I'm glad to work with them for even this short time. It should be an interesting summer...

History and Perspective

2010-05-31T10:17:00.003+04:30

So it's a quiet day at the office - nothing new to report. However, three different people have now shared an article at Foreign Policy on Afghanistan in the 1950s that I have to admit is fascinating to see through the lens of Kabul today. Check out the photo below - I can't imagine that being the same city I now wander... click it for more, similarly incredible, images of Kabul past.

1,001 cups of tea: or, meet the AIHRC

2010-05-30T16:51:00.005+04:30

Arranging an internship through personal channels has its benefits and its drawbacks - though one of the Commissioners extended his welcome for me to spend the summer with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in early March, relevant details never quite made it to the human resources staff. As a result, I arrived yesterday morning with no appointment, the name of a woman I'd gleaned from a single, near-accidental email, and absolutely no idea what the day might hold.

I'd caught her by surprise, too - my "I've arrived in the country; when can I start work?" message having arrived on her day off. I'd introduced myself to the guard as Kathryn, which only furthered confusion as somehow HR had me scrawled on a dry-erase board as Katy (complete with " - ???", exactly like two of the other four interns listed there). I sat for half an hour while she sorted out other priorities, then for another after she retrieved a copy of my CV and set out to consult with colleagues as to what to do with me.

Finally, an official pronouncement came - I'd spend a week with Monitoring and Investigations, primarily crafting a grant proposal for monitoring activities associated with refugee return. After that, maybe a week with the security team? It seems my summer will be made up as it goes along, one week at a time. For the moment, this means the love-seat and coffee table in the M&I office have become my temporary desk, and that a smiling man named Safi will be my supervisor for the week. So far, so good.

The oddities of crafting a work plan for a program I know nothing about, on the other hand, are many. The project consists mostly of asking Safi endless questions, leading him to call assorted offices and request piles of documents. In between answers, I sip tea and read from The History of the Peloponnesian War. In two days in the office, I've read about 60 pages and consumed approximately 17 cups of tea. We're two drafts in, and I've at least begun to understand where the project seems to be going. Not at all bad for the second day...

(as promised, the rose garden back at the guest house, from which I'll be composing most of these updates...)

A Moroccan interlude

2010-05-30T14:20:00.004+04:30

...courtesy of Foreign Policy - apparently the PJD is trying to score political points dissing Elton John? Morocco can't feel the love tonight - Passport blog

To his credit, my Moroccan teacher did use "mithli" when telling dirty jokes in class...

Welcome to wherever you are

2010-05-28T19:30:00.019+04:30

Arriving in Kabul yesterday afternoon, Afreen and I met Attaullah, the friend of a friend who took us from the airport to our guesthouse. That evening, we got cell phones and SIM cards, but soon succumbed to exhaustion, partly fueled by three room changes in a matter of hours (one was not actually a double, in the second the A/C unit blew the fuse even if all the lights were off, but the third finally worked out beautifully).

(image courtesy of Afreen; click to see her full collection)

This morning, however, we set out with a driver to see some of the city I'll be calling home for the next couple of months. Fawad took us down Flower Street (as implied, it's lined with florists and strangely-adorned Corollas), then to the neighborhood of Murad Kahne to see the restorations done by the Turquoise Mountain Foundation. We wandered out to Kabul University, walked its campus with more trees than buildings, and even found the policy research center.

(Afreen and her camera, immediately popular in the market)

Traffic was predictably anarchic, but while the city displays poverty and division (concrete walls and barbed wire surround not only the government ministries and UN properties, but also private residences of any level of luxury), the violence I'd read so much about feels remote amid the chaos of ordinary life nonetheless.

(for sale at the Serena hotel)

Stopping in to ogle the Serena hotel over lunch, the usual surrealities found in walled-off luxury struck me walking across a marble lobby full of men wearing Kevlar. The gift shop offerings of traditional rugs interspersed with weavings of tanks and grenades provided comic relief from the fantasy world, and we soon wandered back out for another brief errand before collapsing back into the walled guesthouse garden to review Dari phrasebooks in preparation for the first day of work.

(A view from our room; photos of the rose garden to follow)

In memoriam E.J.S.

2010-05-27T14:36:00.005+04:30

I grew up with three sets of de facto grandparents: my dad's parents; my mom's mother, father, and later stepmother; and Jack and Julie. Family friends, they had no grandchildren and so made a habit of adopting and spoiling a mishmash of neighbor children and colleagues' kids. My sister Pam and I had the good fortune of falling into this family during our prime spoiling years - Julie cooked generous italian dinners, while we taught her to rollerblade. Jack spun endless yarns, shaping my lifelong love of a story well-told, and I'd like to believe we gave him valuable raw material in our silly younger years.

I remember long nights of conversation and card games, though after moving away from home I saw them less and less. Returning from Morocco, however, one of my first acts of culinary diplomacy was a full feast of couscous and pastilla aimed squarely at winning Julie's gourmet seal of approval.

Calling home in March, I found out that Jack was in poor health, though diagnostic tests had not yet returned. Dad asked if I wanted to try and stop home before leaving for the summer, though by the time I finished the academic year and made the trip, Jack was disoriented, hospice visits had begun, and Julie had banned visitors from disturbing the quiet. It was with great sadness but no surprise, then, when Pam called on Monday with news of his death.

Still, Jack was very much an adventurer and a master storyteller, and I'd have hoped to return to Missouri with tales to make him proud. I suppose I still do hope for this, and so in some sense this summer's posts remain dedicated to him.

What do I hear when I say I hear the call of the road?

2010-05-26T09:03:00.001+04:30

The most recent stamp on my passport is July 13, 2007 - returning from Fez via Paris, processed at Washington Dulles just before George arrived to pick me up. George himself had arrived the previous day from a year in Masan, South Korea, and so we spent the weekend catching up with one another and our host David before going our respective ways once again.

At the time, I expected to return to Morocco that fall. I had accepted a teaching contract with Amideast, to begin after Eid, and was home only to check in, recharge, and repack for another year in a place I loved. Instead, an unexpected call from New York took me to the UN, and then a welcome letter from Cambridge invited me to the Kennedy School, and suddenly three years had passed in which I traveled little but hardly noticed, given the pace of a full and happy quotidian existence.

Nonetheless, I'm hardly one to sit still, and so the summer break brought the promise of another escape to somewhere new. When the opportunity to participate in the Afghan parliamentary campaign season arose, I broke the news to my parents that I planned to take an internship in Kabul and then shared the cost of Rosetta Stone farsi with a friend, herself Bamiyan-bound. In all truth, the details remain undefined - I will be with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, but I have no plan of work; I have a room in a guesthouse for the first week, but no summer-long housing. I will be depending on an abundant hospitality already outpouring in full force for some weeks now in the form of emailed introductions to what seems like half the international community in Kabul.

And so a new adventure begins once over, and I find myself wondering in a quiet moment after the initial rush of boarding a transcontinental flight whence this impulse always to pick up and depart.

Postscript

2010-02-07T03:52:00.003+04:30

A sad follow-up to the old Morocco blogging: the Journal Hebdo, a plucky newsweekly Scarlett made me start reading, has closed, finally losing a defamation case against the king to the tune of being bankrupted by the government. Funny how bad things happen to investigative journalism in some parts of the world...

Mass Av, Rainy Day

2009-04-15T20:07:00.002+04:30

SAIS morning sessions

Deans' Panel
Student question - "What is the difference between Russian and 'Political Russian'?"
Dean Einhorn - "When you go into a restaurant, you can order ballistic missiles."
Serious answer - language courses have different practical emphasis to polish vocab, etc.

Some core classes can be audited (just pass exam for requirement), frees up elective credits.
If you want academic freedom, go with IR - it's broadest, so your core requirements are very flexible.

Bonnie Wilson, on financial aid: "...but I don't think we've ever let anyone starve *pause* to death..."

Determined students can take up to 2 classes elsewhere in Hopkins. The Business school is also in DC, as are some elements of the A&S grad program, so these are more convenient than the Baltimore schools.

Faculty Panel
Mandelbaum
"why SAIS?"
four kinds of skills - concentration (am for policy, for example), language, economics (some w ill end up in econ fields, all will become familiar with the language), and analytical thinking.
three differences with others in APSIA -
faculty (some self-praise...): lack of undergrads, minimal PhDs - complete focus on MA candidates, experience of faculty in government, private sector, etc.
location: DC ("in international affairs, the most important city in the world")
students: relationships form here/networks get started/SAIS Mafia, community of peers, "SAIS students are nice people."

Wedgewood
"I came in 2001 and wasn't sure I was going to stay, but I found it so delicious I decided to stick around"
We study history, culture, language as well as rational choice and economic assets - a more holistic view than other peer schools. Not about speaking only to other specialists, but one that can translate policy into English.
That conceit, that you can't be an intelligent person if you speak to the public - that's for journalists and tradesmen - that doesn't exist here.
Int'l student body brings contextual immediacy & richness to current affairs and academic topics.
Your temptation will be abstinence, to focus on your classes in the midst of the bouillabaise of seminars and internships.
"Tim Geithner learned his economics here. Be prayerful; we'll hope it was good."
Puns Putin with the French "putain," keeps slipping in French and German.
"Even those of us who are liberal internationalists acknowedge state power," realistic focus.
I think I love this woman.

Jones (Bologna faculty)
Well, I wandered into Bologna on my way to law school, and then I never made it to law school.
SAIS is where you really discover what an international career looks like (since only the children of diplomats ever really grow up knowing it)
The SAIS Mafia - "we imported it from Italy." Discussion of network power, "if you spend a year in Bologna, you will leave with a place to crash in pretty much any city in Europe, and many in Latin America and other places - we have 40 different countries represented."
We're not an academic institution in the stodgy, traditional sense. "Now my mom reads the stuff I write, unlike the stuff I wrote when I was a proper academic. I can bring my students into my research. For example, let's say the international economy melted down over the summer... my class focused their papers on different aspects of this and we're putting it together as a book."

Fukuyama
"I didn't realize I wrote poetry, Ruth."
"It always happens that I'll be in some country and finish my presentation and sit down at dinner and have the American ambassador or the project head sit down to tell me 'I went to SAIS.'" Story of one prof running into Chinese colonel SAIS grad at a meeting with Chinese defense ministry.
~250 events per academic year - vitality of intellectual life here. Upcoming 2-day conference on impact of economic crisis on ideas about development - where will the new consensus be? Keynotes: Larry Summers & Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Lists all the walkable think-tanks and institutions (Carnegie is across the street), "It is true the Council on Foriegn Relations moved closer to GW, but you can't win them all."
If you're just an economist or just a political scientist, you just can't get your mind around these current issues.

Sobol
Spent nearly 30 years at the NY Fed, came to SAIS in 2006.
Emerging markets specialization - what happens when you want to end up in the financial sector in an area where emerging markets are a central question? (we hope these sorts of jobs will catch up to us soon...)
Most do regional concentrations - 2 courses from the concentration on markets, 2 of the econ credits go to emerging-market-specific classes.
2 years go very, very quickly. You really need to plan your courses carefully, especially to do economic specializations.

Krishna
Why Economics?
Because when you're standing in an unemployment line, you'll at least know how you got there.
Seriously, the discourse of International Relations is more and more a discussion of international economics, or at least questions in which economics runs strongly. Economic theory is the grammar that you need in order to conduct these conversations.
Why Economics at SAIS?
Very policy-oriented. Multi-tiered structure including specialized courses at essentially a PhD level for those who already have the background. 50 courses in various economic topics - plenty of customization available.
For those of you who have not had a lot of economics before coming to SAIS, we have a very special welcome for you...
I am often tempted to quit my job here and come back as a student.

Student-prof relationships? Research involvement?
Fukuyama - there are quite a lot of opportunities. Everybody in my program has a research assistant or two. I hire a number of my own students. In each program, we have positions for round-table coordinators, who work very closely with faculty in selecting speakers.
Wedgewood - it depends a little on how forward you are - demand your airtime. The beauty of this place is that we're already here (not flying in) and pepole are around and available. We all have our offices right here.
Jones - two student-run journals as excellent opportunities for learning writing and production.

Capstone?
Oral exams are our tradition - no real thesis or workshop required. However, you can craft your own area of expertise, delve deeply into one specific class or work out a project to do a thesis-like exercise for credit and find an adviser. If you want to develop that area of expertise, it'll be possible - just not part of our core.

Fletcher Sketches

2009-04-15T18:37:00.002+04:30

Cross-registering: 4 course limit on classes outside Fletcher (both elsewhere at Tufts and at other universities)
Most audit language classes instead of using these units

Thesis process
Some do it as a class paper, some do it independently, some use the summer internship for data/research/writing - graduation requirement, but length, format & style vary greatly. Many are posted online.

Michael Klein - Int'l Macroecon
Half-semester courses, modular courses
In two years you don't have the time to cover everything you'd like
Empirical Topics in Globalization - "economics for smarties"
2 or 3 econ tracks - courses for students who focus on econ & courses for students who don't yet know they want to focus on econ. Quant methods, quant reasoning

Leila Fawaz - Modern (18th-19th cent) Middle Eastern history
currently working on social history of Mideast around WWI
Diplomacy field "practices interdisciplinarity" - history, politics, environment, communications
Success is about perserverance - get to know faculty, we're available, but it's on you to take advantage.

Joel Trachtman - Int'l Law
Inderdisciplinarity! the only way for int'l lawyers to understand their field.
Seminar w/Drezner on Int'l law & int'l relations to understand legal rules via social science.
Fields in Int'l law: public, business & econ law, int'l orgs, human rights

Dan Drezner - int'l politics
"I tried working in the real world; it didn't really take. It's so nice here."
Economic power in global governance (sovereign wealth funds, macroecon of balance of wealth questions, future of global governance are his interests right now)
Security, Int'l Political Economy, Comparative politics - three major areas offered here.
"We start with Thucydides. We read ALL of Thucydidies. It's a small course..."

Workloads?
200-250 pages/week, one long paper or a series of policy memos depending on the course - Drezner
100 pages/week, exam or exam & paper - Trachtman
200 pages/week "skimming is part of the art" - Fawaz
20 pages, but you'll need to go line-by-line - articles, textbooks - Klein

Student involvement in research centers?
Yes, as admin assts, minor writing, also research - get in there and ask lots of questions.

How to get involved in research?
Stalking profs is a good idea. It varies from prof to prof - do they have research funds? Is the student interested in publishing, and where? Very much a question of fit.
MALD thesis definitely forms a close research relationship & offers opportunity for this.
These things often stem from coursework first. Remember that research assistantships and TA offers also come from the undergrad college here.

I also sat in on Political Economy of Development, which was working on a case study on Mauritania; Classics of IR, which discussed The Great Transformation; and Counterterrorism, where the session focused on Af-Pak. I'd have registered for all three.

Impression: The K School

2009-04-11T08:34:00.002+04:30

This is sketchy because it was typed after-the-fact from handwritten notes. All quotes are approximate.

MPP Presentation
"[The Kennedy School has] a nasty habit of radically changing people's directions..."
"You meet people who have been practicing pediatric dentistry in camps... and then you realize they're not superhuman and begin to think, 'I could do that too...'"
"We want to give you the ability to invade other peoples' institutions and analyze them with confidence."

Fall - 4/5 courses are core (micro, ethics, stats, management) - use #5 to "test your hunch" re: policy concentration
Spring 3.5/5 are core (politics, econ2, stats2, spring exercise)
2nd year is for PAC; no more core
18 credits total required, max 6 per term, max 4 total outside K school - no preferential bidding on that 6th class, so it had better not be anything very popular.

Advisers are assigned, though with regard to academic interests and background

K school is going on the common calendar, January session will be available.
No language courses at the K school - get them from the Yard.

How involved do students get to be with faculty research/interests? As involved as you want - go get research assistantships, course assistantships - get in touch, volunteer yourself. There are 120 course assistants needed any given semester, and while many more go to 2nd years (because nearly all CAs have to have taken and done well in the course first), there are still plenty, plenty of options.

Class sizes? Ethics has five sections, so about 40 each. Quant has four sections of about 50 each. Management has 5, but they vary from 20-60 apiece because of the relative popularity of their "flavors." There is one course with 90 students, but 60 is an informal cap.

Work? Sure, but 10, maybe 15 hours/week max.

Ethics debate
Developing criteria for decision-making
Joke about drinking and throwing darts to choose school - "complex algorithm" for selection
Look at where your school options will put you in two years.

Student Panel
PAE - 40 pages, "no spacing rules"
sometimes what the school wants and what the client wants aren't the same, and one guy is writing two versions of the exercise to address this. The client focus keeps it practical, but then again it's still an academic exercise, and this can be a fine/difficult balance.
TA, CA, RA - lots of options, CA pays $15.75/hr, good way to build relationships with profs. The handful who work at the Yard make more money ($7000/semester) but have more stress.
"We're all trying to save the world in our own little way." Much more a collaborative environment than a competitive one.
"We get away with a lot of things because of the Harvard name. It's a personal choice whether you want to have that branding on you."
"The best and the brightest" was used unironically, though only once.

Political Advocacy and Leadership
"PAL 110 isn't designed so that if I hold you up in a dark alleyway and demand to know the differnce between a one-member district and a multi-member district, you know the answer. It's so if you get parachuted into some other country and asked to draft a constitution, you can be like, 'This is nothing!'"

News Update

2008-04-09T08:07:00.002+04:30

Nothing from Zimbabwe yet, but Andrew Sullivan is tracking the decline and preservation of the semicolon. Save our punctuation!

Free and fair, not so much

2008-03-29T20:20:00.002+04:30

Okay, so I know just enough history to have already been skeptical about genuine elections in Zimbabwe, but the Sokwanele blog is posting an interactive map to illustrate just how many obstacles stand between today's vote and true democracy. Oh, and Foreign Policy points out that there are 3 million extra ballots just waiting for abuse.

Election-watching

2008-03-29T06:35:00.002+04:30

Okay, so Pennsylvania doesn't vote until April 22 and we're all sick of replayed Wright sermons and Bosnia footage. In Zimbabwe, on the other hand, the big vote is tomorrow and the result could range from violent to jubilant. I find myself skeptical that Mugabe will ever leave willingly, but I'll take whatever glimmer of hope I can cling to.

Here's to watching results come in from Harare.

while we're still on the subject...

2008-03-29T05:27:00.001+04:30

Camel!

Beautiful Camels

2008-03-18T04:47:00.003+04:30

If you need insight to classical Bedouin poetry, or just an escape from all things ordinary, enjoy today's NYT feature on the camel markets of Saudi Arabia. Because, well, it's more fun to read about than to ride...

Chasing the Flame

2008-03-15T23:57:00.003+04:30

Today would have been Sergio Vieira de Mello's 60th birthday. I just finished reading Samantha Power's biography, Chasing the Flame, last week. It makes me feel hopeful about the future - despite his tragic death, Mr. Vieira de Mello managed to leave the world a better place for his contributions. Now all I want to know is how I can go do the same, I suppose.

As a side note, it was an interesting book to carry around at work: I met a man who had been one of SVDM's bodyguards in East Timor, a doctor who once sat next to him on a UN flight, and found at least one familiar name in the list of those interviewed. I have a much better sense of institutional memory for having read it...not to imply that everyone else shouldn't read it also. For all its inside-the-UN stories, the book isn't limited by them. Power addresses the challenges and triumphs of the international community in humanitarian and political crises - good reading for anyone interested in helping to address all the problems left in the world.

Sharia in the modern world

2008-03-15T23:55:00.002+04:30

Noah Feldman teaches a brief history of sharia in an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine, then addresses its role in current politics. And I think he gets it mostly right.

If you value free speech...

2008-02-24T03:06:00.003+04:30

...then check this out and then pass on the news. Facebook-impersonation shouldn't be a crime.

Also, Le Journal Hebdo has its website blocked again and is facing more fines for something they published about Western Sahara. I don't have details, but Scarlett's been in touch with them and I'll link to details if she posts any.

Patterns

2008-02-19T03:15:00.012+04:30

A friend mentioned she was looking for quilting ideas from islamic art, and I don't have server space for full-res pictures anywhere else, so everyone checking in gets subjected to more Morocco pictures. Click to enlarge to full size. Enjoy, or ignore, at your pleasure :)

A victory for low culture

2008-01-24T02:55:00.001+04:30

Today I got my boss hooked on icanhascheezburger.com. He's a computer geek, but apparently not of the low-culture-internet-addict variety. Lolcats win another fan :)

February

2008-01-23T06:56:00.000+04:30

The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
In Fes, I froze. I found that the warmest spot in the house was in my bed, well tucked-in under heavy woolen blankets, and so much of my non-class time was spent cocooned in a cross-legged hunch, reading. Hesse's alternate Europe of scholars appealed, and the game distracted me from the surrounding chill. I'm jealous that girls don't get into academic utopia, and I found that reading it made me want to pick up a chessman again. Still, I get the feeling something got lost either in time or translation.

Blindness by José Saramago
Wow. The world goes blind and society falls apart - beautifully. A man at a red light loses his vision, and this milky white blindness spreads as a contagion. He haunted me, and I devoured the novel whole in two days.

The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
"To survive, we must tell stories." A man sent to spy on the secrets of a ship seeking the solution to longitude finds himself stranded in a cove far, far from home and decides he's discovered the antipodal meridian. He ponders the strange island on the other side of this invisible line, across the date change, an island permanently stranded in the day before. It's classic Eco and therefore automatically a favorite. Unfortunately, I lent it to a classmate who in turn lent it to a stranger and now I doubt my copy will ever return. I hate people who don't return books (and people who lend books that aren't theirs to lend.)

The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid
Jamaica Kincaid specializes in a sort of angry poetry. I read "Girl" in AP English and "A Small Place" for Carribean Literature, and while The Autobiography of My Mother left me unnerved at times, it also made me pull out my notebook to scribble down quotes:

"A human being, a person, many people, a people, will say that their surroundings, their physical surroundings, form their consciousness, their very being; they will get up every morning and look at green hills, white cliffs, silver mountains, fields of golden grain, rivers of blue-glinting water, and in the beauty of this - and it is beautiful, they cannot help but find it beautiful - the invisibly, magically, conquer the distance that is between them and the beauty they are beholding, and they feel themselves become one with it, they draw strength from it, they are inspired by it to sing songs, to compose verse; they invent themselves and reinvent themselves and they are inspired (again), but this time to commit small actions, small deeds, and eventually large actions, large deeds, and each success brings a validation of the original idea, the original feeling, the meeting of people and place, you and the place you are from are not a chance encounter; it is something beyond destiny, it is something so meant to be that it is beyond words."

"The present is always perfect. No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I live. The future I never long for, it will come or it will not; one day it will not. But it does not loom up before me, I am never in a state of anticipation, The future is not even like the black space above the sky, with an intermittent spark of light; it is more like a room with no ceiling or floor or walls, it is the present that gives it such a shape, it is the present that encloses it. The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them."

January

2008-01-20T05:01:00.001+04:30

The first of the year gave me plenty to do and little to read. After New Year's in Paris, my traveling band went to Grenoble, Geneva and Barcelona before I found myself back at Sarah's apartment half-dead with the flu. Recovering, I unpacked some of the must-reads with which I had weighted down my suitcase and opened an older book by an author I had only recently discovered.

Open Secrets by Alice Munro
I love Alice Munro. I love her Canadians and her sparse prose. My favorite remains Runaway, but in truth I haven't disliked anything I've read by her. She feels like family, telling the stories my mother's mother never passed on about Dakota schoolteachers and Montana isolation. Open Secrets got me through a quiet convalescence and then converted Sarah into a Munro devotee as well.

L'immoraliste by André Gide
I read Symphonie pastorale for the French senior seminar and found myself wanting to turn his commentary on religion and morality into a dialogue. L'immoraliste was interesting, but didn't catch me in the same way. Les faux-monnayeurs is still on my to-read list, but Gide is not yet among my all-time favorite authors. Nonetheless, it made calm train reading that didn't scream "American tourist!" on my visit to Aix.

Switch Bitch by Roald Dahl
I felt homesick for Aix from the moment I left. Once back in France, I had to return to Provence, but Sarah's work schedule meant I had to travel solo. I visited old teachers and old haunts, but only Dahl kept me company at quiet dinners in my favorite quiet restaurants. If you've only read his children's stories, prepare to be surprised by his fiction for grown-ups - it's wonderful and dark and very much adult. The "My Uncle Oswald" stories are vulgar and horrifically funny, and it was the perfect antidote to the Nobel literature I'd just finished.

Carry Me Down by MJ Hyland
One of my favorite bookstores anywhere in the world is Book in Bar just off the Cours Mirabeau in Aix. I went there one evening to buy a tea and browse the inventory. As it happened, the shop was holding a reading by an author I'd never heard of but who had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, so I picked up an Ian McEwan novel off the used-books shelf and settled in to wait. The reading was tiny - a group of about six older Brits and then me in the corner - and Ms. Hyland seemed a bit eager to name-drop on Salman Rushdie and J.M. Coetzee - but it was a fun quiet evening and I bought a book if only because it seemed cool to have a signed copy. Reading it on the trip back to Grenoble, I did get sucked into the story of a boy who realizes that he knows when people are lying and the slow disintegration of his family life as it unfolds around this realization. Nonetheless, I'm with the Booker committee, who gave the 2006 prize to Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss.

El amor en los tiempos del cólera by Gabriel García Márquez
Departing for Morocco, I decided that I might as well embrace my upcoming linguistic confusion and throw everything imaginable into the mix. Settling in with my host family, Sidi Mohammed smiled and showed off his Spanish, while dear Gabriel spun his magic once again. He joins Munro on my always-favorites list.