City of dust

(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

"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

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

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

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"

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

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.