An odd thing is happening to journalism amid the chaos of humanitarian disasters these days.   It’s becoming as managed, influenced, nuanced and manipulated as the worst of government spin controlled journalism.

Over the past years I’ve experienced at first hand a most remarkable change in how the media works  in humanitarian disasters such as Albania, Kosovo, East Timor Afghanistan and as I see now, in Haiti. Amid the hellish dangers of such places there is now in place a formal dance of intricate detail between United Nations officials, aid workers, reporters, and news managers.   It’s a dance that allows a reporter newly parachuted into some vile human emergency to hit the ground running and be filing within hours, if not minutes, direct from the front lines or from the edge of a mass grave.

The days of a foreign correspondent needing to spend huge amounts of time just finding out where to go for information in a disaster area, after spending hours if not days just trying to find accommodation and a filing point are gone.

Instead, there is an mobile world wide army of disaster officials, information officers, spokespersons, and spin doctors that can provide the itinerant reporter with everything they need, including food, lodging and transportation.  Indeed, it is now possible for a lazy reporter, and there are too many of those, to file as though from the circles of hell yet in reality be sitting in the closest five star hotel.

In fact I believe that information flow and control by UN Agencies and relief groups is now so thorough, so complete, that it is possible for a reporter to make a name reporting a humanitarian disaster without leaving Ottawa, Toronto, New York, London, or wherever.

Now, I’ve been on both sides of the fence.  While I advise aid groups on how to handle the media and I have managed information campaigns directed at foreign correspondents, I have also spent time in the back-of-beyond amidst the starving and the murdered with a microphone and taperecorder.  As a result I can bring a unique, if schizoid, perspective of what’s going on.

What I’ve seen over the past years is a disturbing acceleration of news management that started about the time of the Great Ethiopian Famine and the Collapse of Somalia, but then continued to a somewhat greater extent in Bosnia.  I say disturbing from the viewpoint of a former broadcast journalist, yet I am in the thick and heart of that very management.

In places such as Chechnya, East Timor, Bosnia, and a bunch of smaller cesspits of human disaster, and in others to come, there exists a sophisticated world wide media industry managed by aid groups and United Nations agencies.

Every aid group of any significance now has a corps of information people who at the very drop of a starved nomad, the spark of an ethnic cleansing house burning, the wail of a war orphan, will be on an aircraft within hours doing their damndest to race the true foreign and war correspondents to the sharp end, the place where people are dying.

Until a few years ago the only people racing to the nasty sharp end were those journalistic firefighters or Bang Bang Artistes who only come alive during the overture to Armageddon.  They’d get the word out and that would goad the UN and aid groups to mobilize and it would trigger the usual influx of other reporters.

But these days for every hard bitten disaster journalist plunging into the front lines there is a humanitarian spokesperson or media manager right there beside them.

The aim isn’t to necessarily get the name of your organization into the reporters’ stories, although that is nice when it happens, but rather to become a source of information for those who haven’t or won’t leave home base.

The goal is to establish yourself and your organization as a credible source of information, to become an ersatz reporter or news agency that others will turn to as a matter of course.  This results in publicity and sometimes media prominence which pays off hugely in increased government funding and public donations.

The United Nations Office of Humanitarian Affairs, and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees play this game seriously and very well.

Every day in a disaster area now starts the same way.  The local UNHCR spokesperson will hold a morning briefing on latest developments.   If a military force is involved then a senior officer will follow, then a series of lesser briefings will be hosted by the aid groups active in the region.  Throughout the rest of the day an army of aid information officers will chat up, lobby, spin, and befriend reporters and especially the all important news producers with the big television networks.

At the same time, information is being relayed to domestic media back home from the head offices of the aid groups.  News releases tailored for domestic if not local interest flow on a daily basis, op-ed pieces are written, interviews and news conferences are arranged for returning aid workers.

The ease of getting information out of even the most isolated disaster area through internet links, satellite phones, and certainly in the cases of Sudan, Iran, East Timor and Albania/Kosovo, by mobile phone means that outfits such as CARE Canada, WorldVision, the Red Cross, or any of the other biggies, can and do provide domestic news outlets in Canada with information before even their own reporters can.

It’s not just information.  When Albania was overwhelmed by Kosovar refugees I was able to provide video clips over the internet for any agency that wanted them.  Local radio stations which are notoriously understaffed and utterly unable to put anyone into the field were able to connect into the CARE web site and download a 30 second report for use on their newscasts.  It didn’t matter to them that the piece was supplied by a CARE official who mentioned the organization’s name as much as decency allowed and clearly had a point of view if not bias — it was material they could use.

Aid agencies and organizations these days now have elaborate written Communication Strategies every bit as tightly focused and as effective as those in any major corporation.  More and more aid groups are building communications departments which, if you blur your eyes just a bit, look an awful lot like news gathering operations.  In fact, quite a number of these departments are staffed with former journalists.

It is now entirely possible for an unscrupulous reporter to cobble together a mass of first hand material, in word, picture, and sound from aid agency sources and produce a seemingly on the spot report from say, Iran, and yet never have left this country.  I hope to god it hasn’t happened yet but I just know that it will.

In the meantime the true professional disaster reporters will continue putting their lives on the line.  Of the perhaps two or three hundred real Bang Bang Artistes in the world a significant number are Canadian.  Whether they are working for the Globe, , the CBC, the National Post, any of the American networks, or some other global news outlet, they do their job so well and honorably that people like me don’t have to bother worrying about getting their attention.  They decide on their own whether something is a story and that’s the way it really should be.

I wish their tribe long life.

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

I’ve been watching the television coverage out of Haiti since the earthquake earlier this week. No matter who I watch, with the exception of Al Jazeera, the major world networks seem to be driving their correspondents to ever lower forms of journalism in the mad rush for the most sensational of stories. I’d be disgusted except I’ve seen this many times before both as sinning journalist myself and as a Spokesman/communications type for the United Nations and many other relief organizations in wars and disaster areas for more than 15 years.

I’d write about Haiti but this piece from the days of Albania Kosovo that I published in the National Press Club Magazine Scrum really says it all, so here it is.

After six weeks in Albania I’ve come to agree with how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle characterized reporters in his book, "The Lost World"

The term he used is Porcus ex grege diabola — the Devil’s Swineherd.

I suppose the usual and politically correct Canadian disclaimer should be inserted here, "Not all reporters. . .only some. . . a few. . . and certainly no one working for the CBC, the Globe, etc and etc. But the truth is different.

The media scene in Albania is no different from what it always is in disaster areas, indeed in many cases it’s the same people who were in Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia, or any other Bang Bang arena, but it is the most recent.

Here are some excerpts from the SITREPS, or situation reports, that I sent back to the people who sometimes hire me to be a Disaster Tourist.

April 20

“Well, the ravening beast is in full voice.  Reporters from everywhere are tripping over themselves in a desperate attempt to find something to report.

There’s been a lull in the refugee story.  In fact the story is in desperate need of a strong verb.  I’m getting pretty sick of hearing BBC news stories on shortwave that every day start, "In the heaviest night of bombing yet, NATO warplanes. . . . ."   Essentially the 800 or so reporters in this country find themselves in the odd position of having to go out and dig up news themselves.

Let me give you an idea of how the media circus looks in Tirana.

First of all, and as always, the reporters have taken over the main hotels.  The Hotel Tirana International and the Hotel Europark Rogner have been booked solid for the last month.  As a result, the managements have been able to continue jacking up the room rates.  A month ago it would have been possible to get a decent cheap room in either hotel for 50$US.  Today the same room goes for 230$ and the bill must be paid every three days or armed security guards will forcibly evict the unfortunate.

The roofs of both hotels look like NASA space tracking stations and shoving matches have broken out between twee coiffured television anchors trying to use the best standup positions.  I’m beginning to wonder whether hotel rooftops are now the only place where television correspondents can report from.

April 22

Of the several hundred reporters in town there is a significant number who rarely leave the hotels and do all of their reporting by stealing from the BBC and CNN.  This is normal and one sees it worldwide but it’s disgusting none the same.  The true Bang Bang artistes who go up-country every day and get their hands dirty doing real reporting are openly contemptuous of these wretches who for some reason are all male.  They should be presented with white feathers.

They trade rumor for fact and gossip as news.  A lot of stuff is simply made up.

April 23

The hot story possibility at the moment is the end of the millennium equivalent of the avenging archangels, otherwise known as the Apache helicopters.

You wouldn’t believe how excited some of the media are about the silly things.  Despite the fact that there are serious doubts that such behemoths of the air can actually contribute anything of significance to the war effort there are a lot of reporters who think that the arrival of the helicopters will be a defining moment in the history of the century.

The worst offenders are the CNN people.  Despite being universally chided by their colleagues, American and otherwise, for being so relentlessly American centric and toy obsessed, they continue to devote huge resources to a story that may never happen.

An entire team of shooters and producers is on round the clock death watch at the airport.  Another is rooted into the native habitat of CNN, the rooftop of a five star hotel, also 24 hours a day.

Any tiny rumor that the Apaches have landed anywhere in the country will cause grown men and women to vomit with excitement.

The other day, one of the pygmy giants of small J journalism pulled off another in his series of lifetime reporting achievements and garnered predictable derision by announcing the actual arrival of the Apaches.  The problem was that dear old irresponsible Geraldo, standing on the roof of a five star hotel, thought that the regular, bog-standard, milk-run helicopter that passes over Tirana ten times a day was an Apache. 

That’s like confusing a minivan with a  Greyhound bus.

April 24

I now understand what Shakespeare meant when he warned, "Beware yon Casius, he is a lean and hungry man." or words to that effect.

What prompts this is a bizarre and revealing conversation I had with a freelance writer and photographer yesterday evening in the Rogner Hotel which contains the main gathering place, (read boozing place) for the international media in Tirana.

I’ve taken to wearing a CARE armband as a form of identification for getting past the plethora of busybody guards which infest every government and private building of consequence in this town.  Last night I forgot to take it off before entering the "gathering place" and since there was no one I recognized I found myself on my own.  It only dawned on me much later that the reason why no one was inviting me to their table or willing to continue a conversation past a few words was the damned armband.  Wearing it in a crowd of more or less off duty reporters in their private domain has the same effect as the presence of an insurance sales agent at a private party.

So there I was, standing alone at the bar, when this twenty something wanders up wearing the de rigeur multi-pocket vest stuffed with film rolls, pens, scabrous bits of paper, and draped with a shiny new Nikon.  Young freelancer on the make.  He might as well have been wearing a sign.

"Are you with CARE?"

Oh boy, I think.  This will not be a high quality media contact for sure.  "Yes I am."  Introductions follow and. . .

"Any chance of getting out to the refugee camps?"

"You bet.  There’s one just down the road near Dures."

"No.  What about in Kosovo?"

"Nobody is in Kosovo except refugees and Serbs."  I’m puzzled already.

"Well why not?  Why doesn’t CARE have any camps in Kosovo?"

"Because the Serbs control Kosovo, there’s a war on, and no one is allowed in."

"Well I’m an American and I’m sure I can get in.  If CARE is American why aren’t you in Kosovo?"

"It doesn’t matter if you are American, you might as well be from Alpha Centauri, the country is at war and if you did get in you’d be shot because Serbia is at war with the U-S along with the rest of NATO."

"Look.  I’m an American citizen and I pay taxes and I have the right to ask a government agency under the First Amendment to give me the information I need in order to inform the public.  The American People Have the Right to Know buddy."

This guy is a wingnut freshly polished by some minor state second rank journalism school.  "CARE is independent of government.   It is an international organization.  We have no operations in Kosovo.  I can’t help you."

"Don’t you realize that you need the media?  I can cause a lot of trouble in the states for you."

"Just out of curiosity, how long have you been in Albania?"

"Hit the ground running this afternoon, I should get into Kosovo tomorrow if I can get some help out of people like you."

"Well I wish you luck.  Tell you what.  See that guy over there with the cane, the guy in his sixties?  He can help you.  He’s a senior officer with the Kosovo Liberation Army.  I’m sure he can lay on a helicopter for you to Pristina."

With that, the dumb dork went over to the KLA representative who like me, but only when I’m wearing an armband, is shunned by the reporters.

I stripped off the armband and the rest of the evening passed in conviviality.

As for the freelancer.  Look for him being the lead correspondent on your neighborhood weekly shopper newspaper.

May 14

Journalist to Relief Worker.  "Are there any dead kids around?"

"No."

"Why don’t you?  You had some in Somalia."

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

What value can there be to yet another article about Las Vegas and in particular the “Strip”?  Thousands of writers have brought their analytic tools to the Present Arms! position and marched along the Strip through the searing light that can dull lasers and the oxygen-less exhaust heat from Hell that roils in from the Nevada Desert.  Hundreds of Hollywood films, show tunes, probably even poems, have been written about the place and yet it is because of all that staring attention, the stare of a rabbit caught in a headlight, that the place is beyond description.

It took a couple of hours for me to realize that the Las Vegas Strip does not exist.  It is a place that is so far from existentialist reality it might as well be located in Narnia or Erewhon, or Middle Earth.  It is cloaked in so much deliberately fabricated myth and illusion that it exists as a hallucinogenic bubble perched just outside our normal time and space.  But the sheer crushing pressure of its images and myths, by the cloaks of expectations wrapped around its reputation, it has forced a warp in the universe and the only way to experience it is to leave the wheat fields of Kansas behind, to creep like a country mouse into its blaze, to surrender all self and even then you will never be sure that you experienced anything, that you may in fact have been fed the experience through a tube inserted in your spine as you float in a nutrient bath in the midst of the Matrix.

Those first couple of hours in Vegas (one must say Vegas and not Las Vegas if you want to be taken as a Strip insider) hit me like a replayed Deja Vu that simply won’t stop playing out.  Everywhere that I looked as we drove up the lower intestine of the Strip from McCarran Airport looked like a painted  backdrop propped up in a Potemkin Village at the heart of a child’s imaginary country.  I was detached from my sense of place, my Cartesian locked in and geo-coordinated place in the universe.  I was nowhere and everywhere.

Now, had I been feeling this after burrowing deep into the teachings of the Buddha and meditating on the probable and not so probable existence of the Quark I might have been deeply pleased to shuck off the ego.  But this was no eight fold way, this was the Las Vegas Strip and philosophical meaning here had never progressed from “Let it ride!” and “Come on Baby!” so the very concept of transcendence on the Strip could only be thought of as an obscenity.

But that’s just another label that doesn’t work. 

Labels are supposed to be just that for all of us — labels.  They are signposts of meaning to guide us through the chaos of a reality that in itself can have no meaning.

Vegas is so outside reality, so at the edge of acceptability, so divorced from anything that could ever be considered normal that the rituals and processionals of New Guinea tribesmen, Papal aristocrats, and the Shamans of the High Arctic are clean, simple, honest purveyors of human guidance by comparison.

Because the place has been so much a part of our cultural life through the entertainment media, and yes even books, no one can come to it new and fresh the way one can breast a ridgeline in the Hundu Kush and gasp at the wonder of a valley that could only be Shangri La, or sail into the Coral Sea to watch the flying fishes play, and know the wonder of it all.  There can be no wonder in Las Vegas because we have all seen and heard it all before at many removes.  We have been there before – not quite like a past life but perhaps more like a made up life to be.

Still, there were some startling sights and experiences during the four night and five days I spent there.

In no particular order (How can there be order to absurdity?)

The numbers, the swarms, the seething masses of people.  Like screaming gulls at a garbage dump, and about as smelly, they drifted and jostled in fact waves of walking protoplasm.  They waddled and chirped and talked and smoked and moaned and complained and drifted about like zombies in search of fresh eating brains.  It was like the Strip was one over heated and poorly ventilated Petri dish full of slightly damaged RNA molecules churning out malformed DNA to become slightly putrescent mounds of meat that met none of the Darwinian principles of species survivability.

In a nation where today even the Puritan Fathers would be castigated on national television for immoral behavior, where Martin Luther would be sent to Guantanamo Bay as a terrorist, where Torquemada’s torturers would be elected to high office, where the slightest imagined moral impropriety can ruin a politician’s life, the Las Vegas Strip stands tall with a ramrod backbone of hypocrisy. 

Where else can you be pestered for blocks by strung out drug addicts trying to press the calling cards of whores on you, where large trucks cruise up and down past the thousands of slack jawed tourists bearing huge signs advertising “Girls in Your Room in 20 Minutes!”.  Where the very existence of the Strip is designed to claw as much money out of a person’s life using every vice it can get away with, chief of which is gambling of a magnitude that even the most rapacious of governments would be ashamed at the amounts they could collect.

And then there is what the Strip does to the Poor Bloody Planet.  Christ –  people should be lined up in the front of the Bellagio fountains and shot for what they have been doing to the environment.

In a state where the dwindling supply of fresh water is now a major political player, where Lake Mead, the main source of water for all the surrounding states is draining faster than an alcoholics last bottle, we have a place that goes out of its way to waste water.

The Bellagio fountains spew their incredible displays more than two hundred feet into air off and on for twelve hours a day. 

Do you know how much of that sprayed water evaporates in the more than one hundred degree heat?  I don’t either but I will bet you that entire towns could live of that water every day.

Even more of the stuff gets spewed into the face of what has to be an even more chagrined earth god everyday from miles of tubing and nozzles lining stalls, shops, casinos hotels, and vacant lots.  The fine mist coming  from these devices is supposed to cool the heated and fretted brows of the bovine herds of tourists.  Trouble is that most days it is too hot and the mist has long evaporated before it gets anywhere near anybody.

And as bad as any of that is it doesn’t come close to the criminal, criminally insane, practice of cooling the outside.  As daft and cracked as it may seem it is common for sidewalk restaurants, patios and the entrances to casinos and hotels to be cooled by giant air conditioning vents. 

Think about it, think of all the energy it takes to generate the power, to cool the air, to pump the air, and then what . . .  throw it outside into the desert heat?  Does this make any sense?  Of course not.

It can only be put down to a genetically programmed psychopathy among those responsible.  It is as incomprehensible as ritual serial killing, cannibalism, infanticide, and being very very ignorant.

The planet does not have a chance, not one, not even a blind throw chance on double zero at a roulette table.

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

I’m often asked if I worry about getting shot when working in some of the places I go to.

Not really.  I mean, it is something I am always aware of and something I try to be prepared for, but the possibility of getting shot is not nearly the nightmare that people assume it is.

No, the thing I am most afraid of, other than yet another severe digestive upset due to bad water, is stepping on a land mine. That would be followed in close order by being trapped in a minefield. Just being in a country where there are minefields is also bad.

Of all the instruments of war mines have got to be the most obscene, if obscenity can be said to have a scale. Mines are obscene because they kill and maim without any human direction.

While an AK 47 or an F 18 can murder with the best of weapons they still have to be pointed by a human mind. Whether a sane human mind is behind them or not is not an issue, the point is that some thinking, even on a barbaric level is necessary for all other weapons of war to operate.

A landmine though just sulks in the dirt and mud waiting for anything to come along, a goat, a truck, a six year old kid, a general, it really doesn’t matter what.  Its a type of killing that is so detached that it truly is an inhumane way of death.

My first experience with the things was during the civil war in Somalia. So many American and Soviet manufactured mines had been laid in the country that you truly were an idiot to go off wandering through the bush.

Along the border with Northern Somalia and Ethiopia the deposed regime in Mogadishu had laid some million mines in the sand and bush between the two countries. When the civil war hit Hargeisa the refugees only had one direction to flee, to the west and Ethiopia and through the unmarked mine fields.

So many refugees were killed and maimed crossing the minefields that the survivors I met in the Kebrebeyeh Refugee Camp in Ethiopia told tales of following in the tracks of the dead and staying as close as possible to the explosion sites where people had been blown apart.  By deliberately staying to tracks where people had died they were assured of a safer passage to Ethiopia.

In the city of Mostar Bosnia I spent a fascinating if horrific day with a Danish mine removal expert. I learned that the warring sides during the disintegration of Yugoslavia had used some 14 types of mines in the millions.

Some were absolutely innocuous to people because they could only be set off by the weight of a tank, but others were deliberately designed to kill people.

There was one designed to look like a vacuum or Thermos bottle, a type that looked like a child’s toy and deliberately so in order to kill kids, and a type that looked for all the world like a hockey puck; three inches in diameter,black and and about an inch think.

They floated, and the savage killing armies of the Former Yugoslavia would do things like fill a five tonne dump truck with the things and dump them en masse into the rivers so they would be carried downstream to the children of their enemies.

In Tuzla I came across a farmer’s field very close to the town’s center. The whole thing was ringed by scrap panels ripped from shot up vehicles, a metallic fence so bizarre it would pass as post modern art.  But when you looked closely at the fence you could see wires strung out to grenades and land mines. I was told that the farmer had also seeded his fields with anti personnel mines in order to stop people stealing his crops.

In Afghanistan I never walked anywhere unless I was on concrete or I had received iron clad assurances from a United Nations demining expert that the area was clear.  The country is filthy with land mines and like the farmer in Tuzla Afghan farmers, especially the ones with poppy crops, dig them up to plant in their own fields.

I was at the Kabul Airport the day that passengers on Ariana Airlines, the state airline, had a grossly delayed arrival.

The land around and within the Kabul Airport has to be one of the most heavily mined areas in the world.  Even now after years of constant United Nations demining operations.

It had been mined first by the Soviet backed regime that took control of the country after the Soviets made the disastrous mistake of invading the country. When the mujaheddin warlords, one after another, captured the airport they added mines.  Then with the coming of the Taliban they mined it, and mined it some more.  There were so many that in some places they formed layers like sedimentary rock, going down several feet.

Even today when you look out over the taxiways and the main runway you can see hundreds of different colored flags marking out the known mines.

Now, the very first rule to follow if you find yourself in a minefield is Stop Moving, not as much as a centimeter. Wait for rescue. No matter how long it takes.

That Wednesday afternoon when the Ariana flight from, I believe it was Herat, arrived and accidentally, and very slowly, ran its nosewheel off the concrete taxiway and over about 20 feet of dirt.  You could hear the deep sucking sound of people throughout the airport gasping a lung of tense air and waiting for the explosion.

It didn’t happen but it took an army of blue suited mine clearance technicians moving with agonized slowness over the area to clear a safe path for the airline back to the concrete. I  didn’t stay for the end but when I left at sunset about seven that night the aircraft still hadn’t moved.  I heard later that after everyone had been safely removed from the aircraft it took the cleaners a very long time to return it to service. It had taken off from Herat with full toilets because there had been no way to empty them there.  After some eight hours of enforced captivity on top of a minefield the passengers ended up turning the cabin into a cesspool.

So, what do you do if you find yourself in a minefield?

You know the first rule, Do Not Move . Just sit very still and wait for rescue.

If you are in a vehicle and you can clearly see the wheel marks by which you got into trouble you can gamble your way to safety. Climb on top of the vehicle without touching the ground (and God help you if you drop anything out of your pockets as you do so) and climb down the rear of the vehicle and carefully walk, one pace at a time, along the dead center of the tracks.

But keep in mind that some mines are designed to detonate the second time that their trigger is depressed.

Personally I would wait until I was almost dead from hunger and thirst before trying that trick.

That also goes for amateur attempts to clear your own way out by probing the ground slowly and carefully with a long knife or thin piece of steel.

There is a particular technique for making this work but I’m not going to describe it because it is one of those craft type life skills that must be taught to you in person and practiced assiduously.

It’s not fear of lawsuits that prevents me from telling you how to do it because unless you are most unfortunate and you survive horribly maimed, the dead can’t sue. I just don’t want to be responsible for your death.

That said, I will amend what I just said in this way. It would give me great satisfaction to watch any of the people who designed land mines, or those responsible for planning the layout of minefields, to try to walk their way out of a minefield while wearing blindfolds and lead weighted boots.

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