Modern mercenaries

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...