This week in Afghanistan the NATO General in charge of training the new Afghan Army, Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, said he would like to see all Afghan National Army soldiers reading at the First Grade Elementary School level by October of 2011.

Think about that statement for a moment and be very amazed.

Things are so bad in the Afghan National Army that only about 15% of its soldiers can read at the Grade Three Elementary School level. Grade Three is the baseline for declaring someone literate.

The importance of being able to read in any army, or military force of any other kind for that matter, is paramount.

If you cannot read and you have never seen a Claymore Land Mine before then you are going to miss the significance of the words embossed onto the front of the thing, “Front Toward Enemy”

If you are given a map and told to get to a particular village that you have never heard of before in order to be saved from annihilation you will be challenged to the point of death in finding it.

For generations Afghanistan has raised many thousands of fierce and competent warriors but their effectiveness in anything more complicated than a platoon sized action has always been problematic.

Yet there is another problem. A lot of Afghans cannot see well, particularly the middle aged.

Through a combination of poor diet, disease, and the natural aging process many Afghans wouldn’t be able to see the words in the Cat in the Hat even if they could read. Add also the inability to see great distances and you end up with a severely handicapped soldier.

During my time in Afghanistan after the Taliban ran away, and for several years since, it has been difficult and expensive for Afghans to get proper glasses. And for some reason, the wearing of glasses, unless you are a cleric, intellectual, or a greybeard, is considered unmanly.

The lack of glasses not only causes real problems for recruits in the national army and the national police but also for the many thousands of former members of the dozens of warlord armies left over after the ouster of the Taliban. The international community implemented a disarmament program for them together with financial support and training in whatever field they wanted.

If you couldn’t and wouldn’t read, needed glasses, and had no education it really didn’t matter as long as all you wanted to do was to go back to farming. But if you wanted to become a small shop owner you needed literacy and you likely would need glasses. For the many hundreds who wanted to become tailors, (it’s inside and warm work) and you couldn’t see well then glasses would be as necessary as a needle.

It’s not generally known but Afghanistan had a not bad army and air force during the Soviet occupation and through the Taliban regime. It all fell apart during the final months following September 11th.

In my travels through the country it was not unusual to meet former tank battalion commanders, fight pilots, jet engine mechanics and other trained professionals who were unable to find any kind of work even remotely as skilled as what they had been trained for.

When the U-S Military, together with NATO, announced they were going to rebuild the army and national police a lot of their veterans got their hopes up.

It quickly became clear that unless you had serious pull with a government minister and were willing to hand over a very large chunk of money, none of the former armed forces personnel would be taken on as recruits, and even if they were it would be at a level very far below what they were trained for.

The situation lead to a series of demonstrations, some of which turned violent and sometimes fatal. So, the Afghan Government came up with a scheme that would see all of these former Commissioned Officers and Non-Commissioned Officers write examinations to test their knowledge.

I oversaw several of these as an international observer.

It was heartbreaking.

As you can see from the pictures a lot of the men were well past the nominal maximum age of 35 to qualify as recruits. But if they scored high enough, and bribed the right people, there was a chance of an exception.

The examinations were held in unlit and dark former factory buildings, abandoned schools, and bombed out barracks. The examination questions were poorly printed and in a very small font. Anyone with any kind of need for reading glasses simply had zero chance.

It was terrible to hear them whispering in desperate tones to their neighbors for help with the questions. They begged piteously and unsuccessfully to be allowed to stand outside in the light where they might have a chance to read the exams.

A few could speak english and were brave enough to ask me for help. At first I refused but the suffering was too intense so I started to quietly help them. Here I was aided greatly by my Afghan staff who were also acting as observers. I got them to help the poor buggers as well but I knew that there wasn’t a chance in hell.

Many months later I ran across a soldier with a rank of what might have been sergeant but I am not sure about that. He recognized me from one of the examinations and just about smothered me in hugs while thanking me for helping him.

He was a former regimental commander but was lucky enough to be taken on as a raw recruit and had risen in rank to Sergeant because he could read and was not too proud to wear glasses. It wasn’t all my doing. He’d found a deputy minister who had taken what amounted to a lifetime mortgage on his military salary in return for getting him accepted as a recruit.

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant

A few years ago I was splitting a bottle of Dewar’s Scotch with one of the most senior drug control police officers in the Afghan government, (drinking is an activity more common than you would think in that Islamic nation,) when the conversation turned to torture.

There had just been a sensational case involving the return of a Kabuli from many months in Guantanamo Bay. He had been hauled off the streets of Kabul, tortured by Americans at their

Bagram airbase north of the city, flown to Cuba, subjected to who knows what abuse, and then returned with no charges having been laid, and no apologies. This happened before we learned the true horrors of torture inflicted as U-S Government policy and before the reek of its contamination forever rotted American prestige. But even then you couldn’t be in Afghanistan more than a day before you learned that torture is built into the very fabric of the culture.

On the very first day I was in the country I met a linguist working for the NATO military command trying to maintain peace in Kabul. He offered to give me a Dari phrasebook, Dari being an offshoot of Persian or Farsi and the language of the new Afghan government.

We went to get it at his office in a crumbling ruin of a three storey building in the middle of the NATO base downtown. It had to have dated from the earliest part of the 20th century and had probably never seen a new coat of paint. When we walked into the main room I could see long streaks of dark that had dripped or run down the walls from just above head height. There were also misshapen blobs of darkness on the stone floor.

He saw me looking. “This used to be an interrogation centre during the Soviet occupation.”

“You mean, that’s blood?”

He nodded.

This wasn’t my first sight of a torture chamber. On my second trip to Albania, during the Kosovo War, I’d met with a senior security official of the Albanian secret police. The meeting was held in an unheated, unpainted, and foul smelling room in the downtown Tirana secret police headquarters. Apart from the filthy stench of the room it was a typical Albanian government office. There was the padded chair for the official, two hard backed chairs for myself and my interpreter, a computer that was only one step above a lump of rock, a phone that didn’t connect to anything, and two large ringbolts on each end of the desk. On the floor, just where I had my feet, were two more ringbolts.

This explained why I hadn’t had a lot of help from my translator during the interview. He knew exactly where he was.

“Mr Rick. That bad place. Very bad things happen there.”

No kidding. The whole floor, it turned out was a series of, not to put too fine a point on it, torture chambers. It also explained the smell.

I told that story to my police friend over the scotch. He grunted knowingly. “Same thing here. Anybody arrested by the police will get knocked around. Even I do it. But the secret police, they are the real monsters.”

That’s when I learned about the made in hell pact between some seriously sick American security people and the Afghan secret police.

If the holding cells at Bagram airbase were too full of suspected terrorists, or the waiting time for a torture chamber was too long, the Americans would hand over whomever they wanted questioned to the Afghan Security people who were conveniently located in a four storey white building just across the street from the American Embassy.

Now the curious thing about these Afghan torturers, and I met one a couple of years later when I was with the UN, was that they were not very good at their job. Oh sure, they could rip out fingernails, clamp electrical cords to testicles, and do awful things with body orifices, but they had a terrible record of actually learning anything from their victims. My drunken drug trafficker hunter put it this way.

“They like what they do too much.”

And sadists, as we know well from the endless and ongoing research into the lack of effectiveness of torture make really crummy information gatherers.

As a job, torturing is about as good as being a tenured professor or carpet bagging politician, in other words it is a job for life.

The black leather coated pain merchants in the Kabul white building working with the Americans were the same ones who worked for the Taliban. They also worked for their predecessors the Soviets and probably all the way back to when the British Army ruled the place.

In Albania torturers had survived a certifiably insane dictator, the fall of communism, the bankruptcy of Albania when it got caught in a Make-Money-Now internet scam, and a succession of not very able governments.

So called advanced nations won’t have anything to do with torture. Even the United States government twists syntax, logic, decency, and common sense into uncommon and rather startling sexual positions in order to deny what goes on.

Canada and the United Kingdom face political scandals over whether their troops have willing handed over prisoners to the Afghan government knowing that they would be tortured. The government denials are no less farcical than the American denials.

Remember what I said about not having to be in the country a day to know what was going on.

The really odd thing about the torture culture as I saw it in Afghanistan, Albania/Kosovo, and to a lesser degree in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kenya, is that every professional intelligence officer will tell you that torture does not work, results in absolutely crap information, and weakens the justice of your cause.

But politicians really like it a lot.

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant

Northern Pakistan was hit by a 6.1 or possibly 6.4 earthquake this afternoon. The shaking was also felt throughout southern Afghanistan including Kabul.

There’s nothing unusual about this and indeed earthquakes are pretty common in the region.  They’re caused by the ongoing collision of the Indian subcontinent with the under belly of Asia.  It’s a collision that’s been going on for a few million years and the crumple zone is the where the Himalayas and Hindu Kush are, indeed they are the wreckage of the collision.

So much for the geology lesson. 

Today’s quake reminded me of yet another of the strange nights I spent in Kabul over my two long stays in the city.  There were a lot of strange nights but the one I’m thinking of was in early 2005.

I was living in the Tower at the Assa Guest House on Muslim Street.  It’s quite a nice place as these things go and even had a swimming pool but few ever used it.  At the time there was no chlorine and I don’t think the pumps worked anyway.  So every few days, at least once a week, the pool would be drained of the sick looking green water and refilled with fresh.  Since there was no heater for the pool either it was really like having our own ice fed mountain tarn to ourselves.  I only ever saw one person use it and that for only a few minutes until his core temperature started to plummet.

But it was nice.  There was a flower garden around it, some pet ducks, and a recently roofed patio at the main entrance to the guesthouse.

The roofing job had involved a week’s worth of welding by a couple of guys who didn’t bother too much with welding goggles.  I think that most of the steel structure for the roof came from nearby demolition projects because it all had a distinctly bent and twisted look to it.  The design called for an open grid of steel supports on top of which were placed large paving stones, about four feet by four feet.  The idea was that the second floor residents would be able to stroll out onto their own private patio overlooking the pool and garden.

And of course there were no permits or inspections or planning permission.  This was Kabul where you could do anything you liked and if anyone objected you could either exercise your armed guards to make your point or just pay them off.  This system is not unique to Kabul of course and has much to recommend itself.  Things get done quickly.  Perhaps not well or safely, but they get done which is more than I can say for where I live.

So, sometime in the early hours of  February 12  I was startled awake and instantly into reactive danger mode by heavy thumping at my door in the Tower.  (In war zones you learn to come awake, fully vibrating switched on alert awake, at the slightest thing out of the ordinary)

"Mister Rick, Mister Rick.  Hurry!  Is earthquake.  Big earthquake, quick come."

I hadn’t felt anything but I was not about to argue so I was into my clothes and out the door in seconds, fully aware of the fact that I lived in a building made out of cement mixed in what amounted to a mud puddle and put together by a couple of guys whose only idea about construction came from the house next door they were trying to copy.  Jericho needed trumpets, this place wouldn’t stand up to loud humming.

As I rushed down the stairs with the house manager I tried to get an idea of what was going on.  "How bad is it?  Has anybody been hurt?

"No, is coming.  Is coming soon. Very bad."

Not much was making sense but when someone is yelling fire you don’t start asking a bunch of questions, you just get out.

As I went through the door to the outside we were joined by an American mapping consultant who lived on the same floor as me.

"Do you know anything?" I said.

"No way man," he was very much still in his Vietnam years, "No way I felt anything."

"Please.  You stay here with the others." the house manager said.

The others were about half a dozen of the other expatriates living in the guesthouse and "here" was under the newly constructed patio roof.

"Did anyone feel it? my neighbor asked the others, most of whom at this hour of the morning where still drunk from the usual evening debauch or still deeply sleep lagged.  No one said anything.

"No.  It coming.  Coming from Pakistan.  Soon. Very bad." the house manager said.

This was really confusing us.  "What do you mean it’s coming?"

"Holy man on radio.  In Pakistan.  He said big earthquake coming.  Many many dead soon."

Someone had figured out a way to predict earthquakes?  I didn’t think so at all. 

Then we all started to hear the same thing at once, traffic, lots of car traffic on the other side of the compound walls.  At this hour of the night there shouldn’t be any traffic at all other than the ever roaming Taliban looking for Russian or Kazakh hookers on the next street over.  It sounded like midday, a constant rise and fall of badly adjusted engines and misused gear boxes punctuated by every kind of car and truck horn made in south Asia.

"What the hell is going on?"  No answer and we just looked at each other as if there was an answer in our faces.

The house manager kept on babbling about this giant earthquake that was going to come from Pakistan and "kill millions" and there could be no doubt about the truth of it because a cleric had said so on some Pakistani radio station.

It was a full blown panic fueled by mobile phone calls and texts from Peshawar and Jalalabad.

Panic is contagious and its presence nearby can ignite odd feelings in even the most rational and under control person.  I think we all felt the same dread while the roaring traffic streamed by as people fled the city and the staff of the guesthouse curled up at the side of the building like frightened dogs. 

For a split second I think we all felt the same way.

We stayed that way for perhaps a quarter of an hour, not speaking much at all, and all wondering whether this so called holy man did have something going after all.

And then my arrested development hippy neighbor raised his hand and pointed.  "Do you see how they supported those stone slabs?"

I looked and immediately felt a fright like I had tumbled off a mountain edge.  The blocks were resting their entire weight, their 200 pound weight each, on the very edges of the steel rails forming the roof structure.  You could see the tack welds, the temporary and very insubstantial spot welds, holding the things together.

"Oh jeez.  If there’s any kind of tremor that’s all coming down."

"And we’re under it"

But not for long.  We were out from under in fractions of a second.  The house staff didn’t move and wouldn’t listen.

So, we sat at the edge of the greening swimming pool in the February night and waited for the never to arrive earthquake.  Someone had some Pakistan made scotch which is really just rebottled fuel oil as far as I am concerned, although don’t get me wrong I drank it too, and we waited until without a word we just all gave up and went back to our rooms.

As is often the case in these kind of things, Los Angeles psychics predicting the end of the world, spoon benders claiming fraudulent powers, and dishonest journalists predicting this and that, the failure of the quake to arrive was put down to divine intervention and the fact that it didn’t happen was proof absolute that the original prediction had been true otherwise it wouldn’t have been headed off by the prayers of the faithful.

It made sense to me.  I guess.

Almost a year later when I left Kabul that shoddy jerry-built patio roof was still standing.  Anytime it rained the water would shed in torrential falls into the now glassed in patio and the staff would just shovel it outside and no one seemed to notice. 

The pool still went unused and you could pretty well tell what day of the week it was by the smell.  And for all I knew mad clerics were still delivering their views and predictions by radio and people were still reacting to them by building rumors higher and hotter like bonfires until they swept through everything.  Very much like the lunatic television and radio networks at work in North America today.

But a lot of people were very badly scared that night which is really too bad for a nation that’s had two generations of war and god knows how much still to come.

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant

I see that General McChrystal, the most senior military commander overseeing the NATO operations in Afghanistan, has had to shut down all drinking at his headquarters in Kabul.

According to his daily report of activities released by his staff he decided to ban all drinking by his troops because too many of them couldn’t do their jobs –  they were either drunk or too hung-over.

In imposing the ban General McChrystal has highlighted one of the dirty little secrets of the War in Afghanistan and it will be interesting to see how the troops react.

I’m not yet clear on whether the ban only extends to the seven bars at the Kabul HQ or to all bars at all bases, and there are a lot of them. Some bars are little bigger than a city bus shelter but others  resemble sprawling Oktoberfest beer tents imported from Germany.

But it is not just a problem of bars. There’s also the booze culture that runs through the various army contingents like, well like, beer.

Dozens of countries send troops to help NATO and the ISAF contingent but as far as I know only one, the United States, sends abstaining soldiers.  U-S soldiers are flat out forbidden to drink.  Others such as the Canadians limit consumption to two cans of beer a day, and then only under rather strict conditions of time and place.

For others there doesn’t seem to be any restriction on them at all.

But for everyone working in the downtown headquarters compound there is supposed to be a limit of two cans of beer a night and a complete ban on hard liquor.

I spent a long time in Afghanistan, working first as a communications advisor to NATO/ISAF headquarters and then as the head communications guy for the United Nations disarmament programme, disarming the self-styled warlords and their private armies. So everything I say here is based on personal experience.

Sane people might say that soldiers should never be allowed to drink, especially if they are in a war zone, have a weapon constantly at hand, (even in mess halls and showers,) and have easy access to stuff that can blow cities apart.

But those so-called sane people have no idea how hard an on-duty soldier works under the kind of severe restrictions not seen outside a penitentiary, through months of quite truly life threatening stress, and especially in Afghanistan through a climate that is one of the toughest on the planet.

As far as I am concerned they deserve a beer.

The problem however is that something went wrong with the ISAF operation right from the beginning and boozing became as much a part of military life at headquarters as making up rules, devising acronyms but only afterwards devising projects and programmes to match the acronym, and driving like lunatics just because they can get away with it.

When I first arrived at HQ in the summer of 2003 I was appalled, nay shocked, to discover that I was only going to be able to buy two beers a day at the camp’s main bar.  The heat, the dust, the frustration of working with a military bureaucracy, devised it seemed by some deranged provincial tyrant from one of the crazier “Stans”, and my liking for a drink or a bunch all added up to what looked to be a huge personal crisis.

But that first night we had four or five beer and learned very quickly that no one but the Canadians located at Camp Warehouse to the east adhered to the two beer rule.  At HQ, and I learned later at all the camps except of course for the poor bloody Americans who weren’t allowed to even smell the stuff, the two beer rule was only for show to satisfy the politicians and local media back home.

It’s not that everyone got to be falling down drunk.  No, I’m saying that only a few were falling down drunk, the rest were, well, tipsy a lot of the time. A lot of aspirin was sold at the PX’s or military shops on base.

At ISAF headquarters in Kabul, just down the street from the American Embassy and close to where the Afghan secret police practice their unmentionable arts on prisoners, Thursday night is the biggest drinking night of the week, as it is for all the international aid workers and so on elsewhere in the city. But unlike aid workers, soldiers in a combat area are pretty well expected to be ready to respond to armed attacks.

Come midnight at headquarters and about the only people sober enough to fight would be the soldiers on active guard duty at the gates and on the walls. Places such as Camp Warehouse out on the Jalalabad Road became nothing less than seething masses of drunken soldiers passed out in the dust or throwing up on each other.

Friday mornings echoed to the moans of the hung-over.

You might ask where all the beer came from?  Well like everything else it was flown in at immense cost on chartered cargo jets along with  more beer, wine, and hard liquor for the three main civilian PX’s in the city.

The three main ones when I was there were Blue, Supreme and Ciano’s.  Only diplomats, UN (non Afghan) workers and other relief workers were allowed to shop in them.  And so of course was the military although by rights they weren’t supposed to and were in fact forbidden to buy alcohol off base.

It was so common as to be beyond comment to see patrolling combat teams roll into the PX compounds with guns bristling, armored cars belching exhaust in dense clouds, command radios blaring.  In minutes the soldiers would load up their war wagons with scotch, rum, gin, wine, and of course wine.  More than once I saw soldiers struggling to get back into their vehicles because too much booze had been loaded inside.

Since no liquor taxes were paid to the Afghan government the cost of this stuff was remarkably cheap.  My regular trips to the PX’s for my own booze supplies typically yielded three bottles of scotch for the cost of one back in Canada.

Afghans were not allowed in these international stores but that was hardly a problem.  My drivers and my staff were not shy about asking me to buy alcohol for them and I was happy to oblige.  For those without that international connection there was no end of Afghan merchants dealing in alcohol, sometimes quite openly.  It was common to see stacks of canned Heineken beer prominently displayed by the side of the road wherever a merchant had set up shop.

I have no doubt that the alcohol ban will fail.  Those who need the alcohol will find their own private supplies and quiet places to drink it.  Others will find ways of visiting neighboring bases where there is no ban, and others will find excuses to attend some of the truly hedonistic drinking parties put on by relief workers most nights of the week.

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant

The news from Afghanistan since the election hasn’t been good.  More bombings and general uneasiness.  conditions remind me of the late summer a few years ago when I wrote the following dispatch for a newsletter I had going called “The Kabul Papers”

I haven’t written a “Kabul Papers” for a long time now and it is because this place has become as dull and boring a place as Wa’kaw Saskatchewan, or Fargo, or any rainy Tuesday morning in Vancouver or Seattle.

Oh, don’t get me wrong.  We still have the daily threats, the warnings, the alerts, and the roads are still full of menacing men whose beards are just a touch too long and ragged for fashion’s taste and who drive Toyota Surf’s with every imaginable chrome gewgaw festooned front and back and fully blacked out windows.

There is the occasional explosion in the distance at night as some terrorist gets his red and white wires mixed up while working through the do-it-yourself bomb making kit, and most nights you can hear the high off scream of US Air Force jets plunging down on the mountains east of here as they continue the bad guy hunt.  So all of that is still here.  But the trouble is, it has become normal, routine, unremarkable, and boring.

So, just as a story without a plot, or a sentence without a verb, is meaningless so too has been any rationale I might have had for writing up a Boy’s Own Thrilling Tale of life in the Hindu Kush amid the Panshirs, surrounded by Pashtuns and Tajiks, menaced by Taliban, and bemused by a military bureaucracy which doesn’t seem to realize that there are real people with guns out there.

The other problem is that as this place becomes more psychologically routine and its reality appears increasingly normal to me, the whole lot of you are becoming rather insubstantial, drifting ghosts in another dimension who may or may not exist.

Metaphysics from Kabul, you say.  Well, it goes with the territory.  There is something about desert countries that triggers alternate views of reality,  I cannot imagine the Quran, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or any of Thessinger’s works ever being conceived of, let alone being written, under the rain showers of the British Columbia coast, surrounded by the flames of a Vermont autumn leaf explosion, or beside the shores of a mountain tarn in the Pallisers.  I think that deserts, whether here or in the High Arctic, or wherever they may be, are a form of physical meditation.  The mind travels to strange realms when freed of visual stimuli and that is what happens in Afghanistan.

If the things that go boom in the night are no longer of interest then what is?  The oddest things I assure you.  One day last week there was a change in the weekly menu at the Global Guesthouse.  

The Afghan chef introduced scalloped potatoes instead of roasted potatoes to go with the under cooked fatty-tailed sheep.  This resulted in equal amounts of violated conservative values and liberated food adventurers.  The discussion went on for two days and we still haven’t restored peace at the table.

Fatty-Tailed Sheep, imitation scotch made in Pakistan and sold in bottles with misspelled labels, jars of Canadian ketchup (fiery chili sauce only we five Canadians will touch), and cans of Pringles that have been crushed flat in shipping and are priced for next to nothing are the highlights of our diets.

I honestly believe that if we did not have access to the Canadian mess hall at Camp Warehouse we  would all have come down with those ugly diseases that only ever seem to exist in the pages of medical text books, the books that feature photographs of long annelid creatures and weeping sores and refer the reader to the exhibits in the London School of Tropical Diseases Museum, Restricted, Special Admission Required, Section.

The only food I have found here to rival the Canadian food is at Camp Souter, the British Camp just down the road by the airport.  Most of their troops are Ghurkhas but the food is cosmic international fine cuisine.  I’ve been told that the British Army used to serve food worse than the Germans, ( I shudder at the thought), but over the past few years there has been a deliberate effort to improve the food and morale along with it.  I would have thought that when Caesar was a young centurion this would have been an aged adage even then but apparently not and quite a number of nations serve their deservedly disgruntled troops crappy food.  And at the head of that list have to be the unfortunate Germans and the even more unfortunate Americans whose Meals Ready to Eat are out and out dog food.

At Camp Souter there are always three hot meal choices.  Each is displayed behind a Red, Yellow, or Green card.  If you want the greasy unhealthy vitamin-less but really good tasting choice you take it from the Red.  If you have a conscience but cannot quite enter into holy orders about your food you can take the Yellow.  And of course for the Vegan, dainty eater, k. d. laing, crowd there is the genetically perfect Green choice.  And so it goes through the desserts and other food groups.  It is amazingly good food.

Earlier I talked about increasing security problems in the Kabul area.  It is getting a little Wild Westish but nothing like most of the other places I have been.  Still, I hate having to drive a vehicle around that has NATO ISAF plates and markings on it because of all the attention it draws.  We live downtown and the key to a quiet life when there are guys around who don’t like to shave is to be as unobtrusive as possible.   Until rather recently this was not a problem because we simply removed the plates and stickers and only displayed the plates when we entered a camp.

But a directive has come down from some minion or other of Mars and we are forbidden to drive without the markings.

The answer of course is to get civilian vehicles and that is what is going to happen but it has been a long struggle to get approval, in fact it went right up to the Chief of Staff for ISAF.  The COS (that’s mil-talk for the likes of you) is a pretty busy guy who really shouldn’t have to bother himself with the doings of people like us.

Anyway, after much to’ing and fro’ing during which I established that precedents had been set by allowing the Spooks (Intel guys — more mil-talk) to drive civilian vehicles, and allowing the Canadian military to take the plates and markings off their white 4×4′s he changed his policy.

There has been a delay in delivering the three new vehicles because the Transportation Section forgot to order them.  How one could forget an approval that came down from the stratospheric heights of the Chief of Staff is beyond me but when a military bureaucracy decides to be inefficient the absurdities can take your breath away.

So you see?  It is all rather mundane these days, one sunny Afghan day drifting into another, the afternoons passing with their parade of wind djinns, the evenings sinking into a sick yellow blaze of sunset through the billows of dust, the dawns starting like jewels then tarnishing as the smoke from cooking fires rises, and the mornings brisk and breathless as the temperatures climb astonishingly from below 0 to above 20 or 25.

If I get around to it I’ll get someone to take my picture as I wear my Massoud Tajik hat and with my djellaba across my face.  I look quite menacing if I say so myself.  All I need is a midnight black Toyota Surf with four extra hi beam headlights, a truck horn, and an insistence on passing every car on the road on the wrong side and I will fit right in, talk about being unobtrusive.

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant

I don’t know who took these pictures but the story is that they were taken in 1968 by a British diplomat.

If anyone knows who I can contact to see whether I can display these with permission I would appreciate the contact info.  And should the owner of these pictures want them taken down I will do so instantly.

They are truly something amazing, amazing that is for anyone who is familiar with the hell on earth of Afghanistan these days.

The picture below (click on any of them for a larger version) looks like it was taken from the cemetery hill near where the Intercontinental Hotel stands today.

It is indeed strange to see so many buildings intact and undamaged.

I don’t have any pictures taken in the same direction from 2004 but the one below shows how living space in Kabul has become so scarce that people have built up the steep slopes of the hills that ring the city.

 Like much else in Afghanistan these houses are built of what amounts to mud brick.  Although it rains here the houses are surprisingly sturdy and can easily last a generation or more before needing more attention.  Nevertheless they aren’t comfortable places in which to live and heating is a tremendous problem, along with water and sewage when you live on the side of a mountain.

The one on right I took in 2005 or 06.  It is the same stretch of hillside in downtown Kabul.  It’s a good illustration of how the city has been growing.  There are not too may useable hillsides left for “condo” development.  I knew several people who lived in these kinds of things and once when I mentioned how it is must be nice to have such a panoramic view one of them pointed out that everything runs downhill, including your uphill neighbor’s toilet waste.

This next shot is interesting because it shows the Kabul River full of water.  These days there is next to no water flow and for much of the year the river is nothing more than a series of unconnected stagnant and stinking pools of deep brown sludge.  But of course, in a city where there is no reliable water or sewage system people use what they can.  It is not unusual to see people drawing water from the pools for drinking while others are dumping waste and washing clothes.

The lack of water has been caused by changes in climate and by pretty heavy deforestation.  Without trees to hold the water in the watershed it soon all runs away into Pakistan.

 In the late sixties and through the 70’s Kabul was on the “Hippy Trail” a route that extended up out of India and Pakistan into the poppy growing areas of Afghanistan.  The place was famous for a particularly nice Hashish.  And one of the places you could buy it was Chicken Street in Kabul.

This furniture and carpet store pictured here in 1968 is still with us in the 21st century.  I cannot be sure but I am pretty certain that I bought a carpet here myself in 2005, very much like the one hanging to the left of the picture.

Anyway, if there is any hashish being sold on Chicken Street these days I would be greatly surprised.  The country has a slack and corrupt police force but drugs are not tolerated.  Justice would consist of tossing you into an overcrowded cell with no toilets or fresh water and leaving you there pretty much on your own for the next dozen years.  People never come out of an Afghan prison the same way they went in.

Chicken Street, not its Afghan name by any means, got its name because it was once one of the great centres of cock-fighting in Central Asia.  As the tales go, people would travel hundreds of miles at the beginning of the 20th century to try their hand betting on cock-fights.

These days trade goes on much like it has for hundreds of years. Small shops selling whatever you want and if they don’t have it you can be sure that their “cousin” one street over will have it or their “uncle” can make it by tomorrow.  It’s a good system, infinitely more enjoyable and useful than trekking through Wal-Mart or some plastic shopping mall in the middle of a bleak city.  Just don’t expect a quick purchase, you always have to talk and chat and bargain, that is part of the system.

I found this old picture interesting because it shows one of the most strategic and dangerous places in the country.  This is the road to the Salang Tunnel from the north.  It was through this tunnel that so many Soviet forces invaded.  You’d think they had that in mind when their built it for the Afghans in 1964.

During the Afghan war against the Soviets convoys were prime picking on this road for the mujahedin.  More than a hundred Soviet soldiers died in the tunnel in 1984 when a tanker truck exploded.  The tunnel is more than 2.5 kilometres long and I believe at the time there were no emergency exits.

I went through the tunnel in the depth of winter,  during a howling blizzard.   You have no idea of how closed in you feel knowing that there is an entire mountain range on top of you and if anything goes wrong, if any of the hundreds of trucks ahead and behind you catches fire, and they do, there is no way out. 

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant

Travelers, even the type that heads for a cosseted resort in a first world country, know to be careful about the local water.  But what do you do when you are in a country where there is no safe water?

Buy bottled water you’d say.

Most of the time that would be a good idea, but not always.

Shortly after the rout of the Taliban in Afghanistan I arrived to work as a communications adviser to the NATO force stationed in Kabul.  For the military, clean water is of prime importance because sick soldiers don’t fight well.

The NATO force in Afghanistan went by the acronym ISAF, (International Security Assistance Force). 

During my entire time in Afghanistan spanning several assignments, ISAF flew in every ounce of water for its 5,000 troops.  You can just imagine the cost of flying water from Germany and Dubai.

The rest of bottled water made its way to Kabul by truck from Pakistan, ostensibly made by Naya of Canada and bottled in the subcontinent.

The caps of plastic water bottles are sealed with shrink wrapped plastic; the idea being that any attempt to tamper would result in broken plastic. 

That’s fine but central Asia is home to entire villages that copy weapons right down to the serial numbers, factories that turn out pirated software which comes with its own pirate toll free support numbers, and ersatz scotch manufacturers who speak Gaelic with Pakistani accents.

And so it is with bottled water.  You have to be very wary about buying water from a roadside stall in Kabul.

The Bulgarian Embassy found that out shortly after they opened their new offices.   Located as it is in what passes for the upscale diplomatic centre of Kabul, where roadside stalls charge the foreigners far more than their countrymen elsewhere in the city get charged,a certain misplaced sense of trust in the local merchants can be deceiving.

When the embassy buyer, a Bulgarian therefore open to swindle, bought a box of 12 one and a half litre bottles of water, he checked to make sure that all the plastic shrink wraps were intact.  They were too, all the way back to the embassy where the first was opened and poured into glasses for the meal.  The reek of sewage killed all appetites.

Some enterprising bottler had found to make sweet money out off rank sewage.

This article comes from The Disaster Tourist and is copyright by Rick Grant