“The donkey with an unbalanced load will not finish its journey” (Pashtun proverb)
March Afghan Greetings!I type this just as I prepare to go on my first R&R – wow has 3 months gone fast! In Iraq we used to say that the days were long but the weeks go fast. Here, everything seems fast – which is probably because I’m having such a good time.
I know it seems like I send a lot of “Lou Gehrig” type messages – but I really do feel exceptionally fortunate at the moment. Helping the Afghans try to beat opium and the Taliban and build a better nation state along the way is a great privilege. For most of the time when I was in Iraq I used to think that I wouldn’t trade places with Tom Brady and that is exactly how I feel at the moment. I really, really enjoy the Afghans I work with and I’m going to miss them tremendously over the next weeks of break. (Not that I don’t need the break – this place wears a guy down. Maybe I’m getting old, but I find it mentally more difficult here than Iraq.)
The thing I probably miss most versus Iraq is that because this is a UK military area of operation I don’t get to work too much with American troops. I enjoy the Brits, but I miss the leadership, talent and, most of all, the steadfast determination, of the Americans in uniform I used to work with in Iraq. (Not to mention that if this was an American AO, I’m sure that the base I sometimes visit would have a basketball court instead of the volleyball court of the Brits. Volleyball is not my thing.)The fight against opium is having its ups and downs. The Afghans are doing a relatively good job at eradication, but the Taliban protection racket is putting up a good fight. Not surprisingly, drug lords aren’t real keen on having their crop pulled out. For me, counterinsurgency (and that’s what counternarcotics in Afghanistan really is) is more about local capacity development than anything else – can the security forces fight and can the government govern. I think we’re seeing some good pockets of progress on both counts.
As expected, the warming of the weather is worsening the security situation (the Taliban are a bit like bears in that they sort of hibernate for the winter). Helmand is definitely ‘indian country’ and it is very frustrating to me (and everybody else) that there are so many Taliban controlled areas so close to where we operate. The forthcoming US Brigade should help (and I’d sure take a couple of more) but in any event I expect we’ll see a big increase in asymmetric attacks as soon as poppy lancing (harvest) season is over in about 5-6 weeks.
In the past couple of weeks in my neighborhood we’ve had one infiltration and decapitation at the house of a government official, a missed assassination attempt on another that instead killed two little kids and put two more in the hospital, and a bike wired with 20 kg of explosives left at the police station down the street (fortunately spotted and disarmed before it went off). In a separate incident, this morning, a police command station that I frequent had a suicide attack that killed ten. So sad. I was about a mile down the road at the time and the unmistakable boom had me hitting the deck.
Certainly not as bad as Baghdad, but bad enough. (There is also some intel that Iran may step up the same type of mischief (far too kind a word) around here that they do in Iraq – but that is a discussion for another day).
I’d like to recount a short story from the recent “Women’s Day” celebration here in Afghanistan. On the day I had the occasion to have a fascinating discussion with a local female teacher on the situation of women here. I asked her why she thought it was that some Afghan men are so opposed to females being educated here. “Michael, these are the uneducated men and in reality what they don’t like is the idea that if a women has learning then maybe he won’t be able to control her or he will feel bad that she knows more than him. Maybe he won’t feel powerful.”
Later in the discussion I asked her what it was like for women in the Taliban times. “I used to live on the other side of this town during this time and our neighbor was a very big Taliban guy. He was very angry. Some days my friends used to come and we would go into the garden to talk and laugh and sometimes play some Indian music on a hidden tape recorder at very quiet level (music was banned when the Taliban ruled). One day he must have heard us because there was a grenade that came over the wall and exploded on us. Two of my friends were killed and one went hospital. It was very sad.”
“But there was another type of Taliban too. About a year later this man left his house and another Taliban moved in. After some months he learned that I had been educated to be a teacher and he invited me to his house and told me that I would be like his daughter and then he asked me to teach his you daughters in secret each day. I did this. He was a nice man.”
Pray for Peace in Afghanistan and Iraq,
Michael
