For anyone reading this who hasn’t been visiting the site from the beginning, here is a list of the major posts I’ve done on my travels in Afghanistan.
Well, as I probably should have known, I’ve become swamped with many things since getting home and have not been getting my posts up here as quickly as I should be. This will likely be my second-last photo post.
Near the end of my stay in Kabul, I had a meeting at the Flower Street Cafe. It’s one of the many coffee shops and restaurants in Kabul that caters to the foreigners in the city, and hardly differs from any coffee shop in Vancouver.
I got a little adventurous, and instead of taking a cab I decided to walk the 20 blocks or so it would take to get there. I plotted out how to get there using the map in my Lonely Planet guide book–which is harder than it sounds because as I’ve mentioned before, there are barely any street signs in Kabul. You have to memorize the main streets and squares, and then count out the smaller streets in between.
I took photos with my Blackberry along the way to give you a sense of what it’s like to just go for a walk in Kabul.
This is a police checkpoint, seen from the back. There are police checkpoints everywhere, with signs that say “Ring of Steel” as you pull up to them.
I’ve said this a few times now, but it has never felt unsafe walking around alone. I’m sure there are others who have said something like this just before getting killed or abducted, but all I can do is relate my experience. Kabul does not feel dangerous. Most residents smile when they see you, especially because they want you to come into their shop and spend money.
Remember how I said I was following a Lonely Planet guide book to get to the cafe? Well, here’s the thing. I followed my planned route perfectly, and got to where I was going with no problem. But the guide book is from 2007, and as I found out later, the Flower Street Cafe has moved since then! So I was alone in a residential neighbourhood, with absolutely no street signs or any landmarks to identify where I was.
I called my contact, who was waiting for me at the cafe. There wasn’t much he could do to help me, since I couldn’t explain where I was. So I wandered around aimlessly for about five minutes.
Then an Afghan woman came up and started waving at me to follow her. Not really knowing what else to do, I went with her.
She brought me down a lane, and then to the front gate of her house (most houses in Kabul, including hers, are surrounded by thick compound walls.) Suddenly there were five young faces peering out through the gate at me, very shy. I waved at them, and they laughed and ducked back inside, and then shyly peered out again.
Then a young guy, pretty close to my age actually, came out and greeted me. He had been in an English course for 10 months, and was able to converse with me effectively enough. Once he understood what the problem was, he used my phone to call the cafe and get directions to where it was.
As it turned out, it had only moved five blocks away. He walked there with me, and we talked about Canada and America and what his plans for the future are. When we made it to the cafe, I offered him a bit of money out of gratitude. He refused it, smiling. We shook hands and he left.
This is the side of Afghanistan that I wish more people could see, and that you only can see if you’re on the streets without being surrounded by intimidating security protection. I understand why most of our journalists, diplomats, politicians and aid workers need to keep bulletproof windows and burly men with guns in between them and the Afghan streets. But it horribly distorts our understanding of the people of this country.
A friend passes along a recent story from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting:
According to official figures, there are over stray 100,000 dogs in Kabul, and health workers say they have become a real menace to public health. Meanwhile, the government says it lacks the resources to roll out an effective programme of extermination or sterilisation.
Yousouf, the doctor responsible for administering rabies vaccines at Kabul’s central public clinic, said 190 women, 234 men and 426 children were treated for dog bites there during the first four months of this year. Last year, the total number of people treated at his clinic came to 3,700, most of them children. He added that many other bite victims had sought treatment at private hospitals, or else had not received medical attention at all.
It’s an in interesting endnote to my post on the dogs. And notice this bit:
The leafy grounds of Kabul university also has its own problem with stray animals, which can be seen roaming the grounds or resting in the shade of trees and bushes.
I actually found one of those dogs, a little puppy that was wondering around the campus. He was feral and wouldn’t come near me, but I followed him and took a picture. You can see him here trying to get through a fence.
It’s very strange to come across a puppy that is essentially a wild animal.
Photos coming up soon, but first I’d like to highlight this statement that Bob Rae, the Liberal Party’s foreign affairs critic, just posted on his website. If only Canada had more politicians who had the courage to say this sort of thing–and especially when it’s unpopular to do so.
In particular, it’s this paragraph that sticks out for me: “It’s called doing what you think is right, talking to the public about it, and worrying less about who gets credit. There’s something almost pathological about the state of our politics, to say nothing of political commentary, if we can’t have that kind of conversation.”
……
The notion that all is fair in politics and war, and that every situation is only about tactics, partisan advantage and endless games of gotcha, seems to have seized the imagination of some commentators about the decision to allow military trainers to stay behind the wire in Afghanistan.
“Liberals played for suckers” seems to sum up this view.
I guess if you think politics is all about holding a wet finger to the wind that would be true. But it’s worth remembering that the most popular politician in the western world in 1938 was Neville Chamberlain, whose placating of public opinion was best summarised when he told the world it wasn’t worth getting all worked up about an argument in a small far away country about which people knew very little.
No doubt there might be short term partisan advantage in playing to the gallery about its fatigue with the Afghanistan engagement. It is a difficult, frustrating, costly, and painful military and political conflict. It is hard to see a road to success, and hard as well to see much progress in the life and condition of the people. “Troops out now” would win much applause.
We went into Afghanistan with our NATO partners, with the full approval of the United Nations. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, ravaged by 30 years of civil war. Al Qaeda and other extremist groups have found a haven in the south of the country and the north of Pakistan.
Of course all issues are about politics. But some issues can transcend partisanship. In every other country in the NATO alliance there is multipartisan support for efforts in Afghanistan, a willingness to discuss options, in a climate of public candour.
Why should Canada be any different ? Our political culture is now all about trench warfare. Everything is supposed to seen through a partisan lens, and everything played to short term advantage. Anyone who asks “what’s best for Afghanistan?”, or “what’s best for Canada, our role as a reliable member of NATO and the UN?” is portrayed as some kind of poor sap who doesn’t “get” politics.
It’s called doing what you think is right, talking to the public about it, and worrying less about who gets credit. There’s something almost pathological about the state of our politics, to say nothing of political commentary, if we can’t have that kind of conversation.
There should continue to be a debate about Afghanistan, Pakistan, and how to deal with the range of failed and fragile states that are emerging across the world. But enough with the nonsense about who played the partisan game better.
I am quite busy with school work until Thursday, after which I’ll hopefully have a new photo post up here.
In the meantime, Paul Watson has written a very good article for The Toronto Star on the Afghan Canadian Community Centre, one of the places I wrote about in my previous post.
Although I should say that I disagree with his use of the term “Taliban heartland.” I understand what he means–the Taliban movement first took hold here–but it implies that the population has broad support for the Taliban. Every single poll ever taken in Kandahar has disproven that.
The real reason behind the Taliban’s grip on power is shown a few paragraphs down, when Watson refers to the targeted assassination of a secular educator (a trend which I also wrote about in the previous post.) The Taliban coerce the cooperation of Kandaharis through acts of terror.
An Afghan girl must be strong to reach for a book instead of a broom.
She will suffer for wanting to learn.
Dare to walk to school here in the Taliban heartland and a girl must endure the cruel taunts of neighbours. Not wild-eyed terrorists, just ordinary folk who think a young lady’s proper place is hidden in the home.
They question her morals, call her venomous names, do all they can to make life difficult for the whole family.
When the Talibs punish aspiring females, the pain is much worse. Sometimes insurgents throw acid to burn schoolgirls’ faces. They poison classes with noxious gas. Gunmen shoot students and their teachers in cold blood.
In one of their latest attacks on education, insurgents murdered Kandahar province’s deputy director for literacy, Ustad Abdullah, with a burst of AK-47 fire as he walked to the mosque for morning prayers on Nov. 4.
And if you read on, you’ll learn something that I knew about but didn’t cover in the post: the absolutely shameful development that CIDA is, at the moment, not planning to continue the relatively paltry cost of funding the ACCC. Could there be anything else in Kandahar City, or in the entire country, that is more worthy of the $8,000 a month the school has been getting from our government? Out of the millions and millions of dollars we are spending there, we can’t afford this?
On November 2, Lauryn and I got up at 4:30 am to head to the Kabul airport. We booked a roundtrip flight to Kandahar that left early in the morning and returned the next day. It cost $200. Gate-to-gate, I’d say the flight lasts about 45 minutes.
As we were getting ready to board the plane, one of the Afghans in the line struck up a conversation with me. He’s been working with the Canadian Forces for five years and told me about his passion for fighting the Taliban. It’s certainly earned him enough trouble; his brother has already been killed, and he’s under constant death threats. He’s hoping to eventually get relocated, either within Afghanistan or to Canada. Our government has a program to do this, although we were shamefully late in getting it going.
During the landing of the flight, two Afghan women a few rows up starting arguing loudly with each other. It kept going and going, and soon the men around them were on their feet, trying to get them to stop fighting. It really started to escalate, and as the plane was taxiing down the runway there were about six people clustered around, all shouting at each other. Eventually a policeman came on to the plane to calm things down. I looked over at Lauryn. “Welcome to Kandahar,” she said.
The airport was built in the 1960s by the Americans. It’s been upgraded since 2001 and is a surprisingly nice place today. Here is an overhead shot of the terminal that I found on Wikipedia.
The airport is situated right beside the sprawling Kandahar Airfield military base that has been the centre of the Canadian military involvement since 2006, and also houses soldiers from many other NATO countries. Today it’s dominated by the Americans, as they’ve surged thousands of soldiers into the province over the past two years.
As we were walking off the plane and toward the terminal, I heard a very loud, low-pitched engine noise. “That’s no civilian plane,” I said to Lauryn, and turned around to see what was happening. Then, no more than two football fields away from me, two fighter jets screamed down the runway and took off. The force of their takeoff rumbles through your chest; I’ve never felt anything like it.
I tried to keep track of how many military planes I saw while I was the airport, both on my arrival and my depature. In a total of about 90 minutes there, 7 F-16s and 2 F-15s took off down the runway. (I’m not 100% on these planes, but in consultation with my dad, who knows a lot more about them than I do, this seems the most likely match for what I saw.) The number of helicopters coming and going was so many that I stopped counting.
I also saw one drone take off and one drone land while I was there. They are curious aircraft to see; long, sleek, and skinny. I assume they were a version of the Reaper or Predator, but knowledgeable readers might correct me on that. Both are armed with Hellfire missiles and have given the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan a ferocious beating recently. The drones are controlled from an air force base in Nevada. (Stop and think about that for a second. It’s incredible.)
As we were driving away from the airfield, I saw a convoy coming down the road toward us. I knew it wasn’t a good idea to take photos, but I clandestinely snapped one with my Blackberry when it was far away. Our driver told us that for propaganda purposes, the Taliban will often try to videotape convoys right before an IED goes off. If I was seen with my phone out we’d likely get pulled over, interrogated, and searched.
During barely 24 hours in the province, and perhaps 2 hours of that spent on the road, I saw 3 such convoys, and one mine-clearance convoy (featuring the awesome-looking Husky vehicle.) After seeing almost no NATO presence in Kabul, it was impossible to miss in Kandahar.
We were picked up by a cousin of the family we were staying with. He worked with the American Special Forces for a few years. As he weaved all over the highway, he said the Americans loved driving when they first got here because of the complete lack of rules on the roads.
I found this out later, but our driver had a prosthetic leg (I still can’t believe I didn’t notice.) At one point his unit was ambushed by the Taliban and he was shot up quite badly. His vehicle got hit with an RPG and his leg was pinned down underneath. The only reason he’s alive is because he played dead when the Taliban came to inspect their work. These are the sorts of stories you encounter when you talk to Afghans.
Here are photos of the drive in from Kandahar Airfield toward the city.
We didn’t go straight into the city itself, however. We stayed in a secure community on the outskirts. The entrances are protected by police checkpoints. Almost everyone who lives there does so because of death threats.
Before we made the trip, I was in contact with a few Canadian soldiers posted in Kandahar. They all told me something along these lines when I said I was coming: “You probably already know this, and I’m sure it won’t stop you from coming. But if you’re moving around without security, be EXTREMELY careful. This place is dangerous enough for Afghans, let alone foreigners. In Kabul, they’ll kidnap you for ransom. In Kandahar, they’ll cut your head off and upload the video to youtube.”
The day before we came to Kandahar, Lauryn received a security alert that two Afghan women had been decapitated in Helmand province, right next door. What was their crime? “Collaboration.” They had accepted a microfinance loan from an international bank to start a tailoring service. Incidents like this are why most Afghans get furious when we talk as if the Taliban get their rural support from sympathy rather than fear.
Our host, guide, and friend for the duration of our Kandahar trip was Ehsanullah Omer. He runs the Afghan Canadian Community Centre, which is essentially a community college in downtown Kandahar City. He speaks perfect English and can give you long speeches on how Shakespeare has affected Pashtun literature. During the Taliban era when he lived in Pakistan, he constantly got in trouble for reading poetry books on his bus trips back to Kandahar. One time he punched a Taliban member who was harassing him in the face and broke his nose.
Ehsan rocks.
After a long morning spent talking and drinking tea at Ehsan’s house, we drove into Kandahar City.
This is only photo I have of our drive within the city. Parts of it were much greener than Kabul.
I didn’t see much of the city at all. Unfortunately, as a foreigner it is hard to relax even while driving there. All it would take is one phone call from a bystander to alert the wrong people that there are unprotected Canadian civilians driving around, and we could be in big trouble. Ehsan told us he switches cars often and never follows the same routine to and from work.
Here is the courtyard of the Afghan Canadian Community Centre. It is, of course, protected by walls and many security guards.
Some of the plaques on the walls.
“Sharing our wealth and love with the people of Afghanistan — George Elliot Secondary School, Winfield BC.”
The ACCC has a partnership with the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary. Here is a photo of Ehsan speaking there.
The entirety of the school’s library.
Here is Ehsan speaking with one of the students. While we were in this room, we heard one student speaking with a professor in Calgary over Skype.
A classroom.
Ehsan also arranged it so we could be there for a graduation ceremony of a course in business management. The class was all girls, but a few guys from another course were also receiving certificates. This is Lauryn giving an address, with Ehsan and a few instructors sitting on the stage.
Ehsan gave a rousing speech on what it means for this class to receive their certificates. “You have proved a lot of people wrong who think that women are second-class citizens. You are fighting for enlightenment. You are fighting for civilization. You are citizens of the world.”
I was asked to help hand out some of the certificates. I still think Lauryn framed this picture on purpose to make me have wings coming out of my head.
The school is, by mandatory order, gender segregated. So the afternoon is the girls shift. They were very friendly and spoke English thanks to the classes offered by the ACCC. But they were also far more socially conservative than the girls in Kabul. Girls in Kandahar have been trained since birth to be very wary of spending time around unrelated men. Often I could see them looking at me out of the corner of my eye…but as soon as I looked toward them, they’d turn their heads away.
That being said, there were girls who were openly overjoyed to see Lauryn and I, and brought us a steady flow of presents. One of them talked so quickly about all the things she wanted to do with her life that I could hardly keep up.
At the end of their shift, I saw a few girls putting on their burkas to go back out into the city. This was very hard to watch. Why on earth would anyone force them to cover themselves like that? To become moving tents with eyeholes? I’ll never understand it.
At this point I ducked inside a room to write a few emails. I came out a half-hour later to a transformed school. The guys shift had begun, and the back yard was now jammed with at least 150 motorcycles. The atmosphere felt like a tailgate party before a football game; everyone hanging out, laughing, calling out to each other. It was pretty funny to watch.
We drove home after sunset. I commented to Lauryn on how lively the streets felt. There were people out all over the sidewalks, shops were busy, cars and bikes were everywhere. “Yeah, but no women,” Lauryn responded.
I looked around, astounded. She was right. Not a single female presence. At night, Kandahar becomes a city of men. This gave me a sense of what it must have been like everywhere in Afghanistan during the Taliban regime. Half the population was just removed from civil society.
We got back and had a huge homecooked meal of Afghan food. We spent the night talking with Ehsan and a good friend of his, a journalist and candidate for parliament. The results weren’t in yet, although they didn’t feel too optimistic about it.
We awoke at six the next morning and drove back to the airport. After waiting an absurdly long time for stragglers to get onto the plane, we flew back to Kabul.
I’m publishing this post on November 11. It’s dedicated, in my own small way, to the 152 Canadians killed in Afghanistan since 2002. They have been a crucial part of Afghanistan’s fight for enlightenment and civilization, and have done our country proud.
I’ve written a wrap-up piece that ran in the print edition of the Ubyssey. Here is the first paragraph; you can read the whole thing here.
At some point during my trip through Afghanistan, it fully dawned on me what a unique opportunity this was. Unlike most Canadian journalists, diplomats, aid workers and soldiers who go over, I had absolutely no restrictions on my movement. I could, and often did, just hang out in the streets of Kabul. Alongside my many planned meetings with local residents, I also had plenty of random encounters. One day I spent an hour just window shopping on Chicken Street, a collection of shops and bazaars that was a must-see for travelling hippies in the 60s.
Sorry for the delay in new posts. I’m back on Canadian soil and am almost recovered from the jet lag. But I still have a ton of pictures and stories to put up, so don’t stop checking in!
In the meantime, Harper’s government has leaked a few trial balloons to the press about keeping Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan as trainers. The Afghan government, NATO, the United Nations, and even the Liberals have been calling on Harper to do this for the past year, so it’s nice to see that he’s finally ready to listen. I don’t think Harper has ever really believed in this mission.
It won’t be anything like what we’ve been doing in Kandahar, where a full battle group is out in the field conducting combat operations. I’m not so sure that it’s a good idea to pull out our battle group, given that they have only now been given responsibility for an area proportional to their size (as opposed to the past four years, where they were responsible for the entire province of Kandahar.) But I’ve long ago accepted that there was zero chance of those soldiers staying.
Here is my post on the ANA Staff College, in case you missed it.
I spent a bit of time on Monday wandering around the grounds of Kabul University. I was very pleased to find it had a similar feeling to any campus I’ve ever been to. The young Afghans there were entirely unfazed to see a white face walking around, and I would guess a high percentage of them speak English.
In fact, the campus was a total enclave, even though it’s in the middle of Kabul. It was probably the most serene place I visited in the country.
During Ashraf Ghani’s time as Chancellor, walls were built around the campus to keep the students safer. All the gates are now controlled by police checkpoints.
KU stayed opened during the Taliban time, but it obviously wasn’t a very fun place to be. I met with one guy in Kandahar who attended during this period, and he remembered sneaking off to watch movies in the basement of a friend’s place. If they had been caught, they would certainly have been hauled off to jail and beaten severely.
He also said the year after the Taliban’s fall was quite bad because the Northern Alliance thugs dominated the place and made things really uncomfortable for students. The situation today is much better, although the quality of the teaching will not be very high for years to come still.
There are USAID (the American aid agency) signs up everywhere, announcing the construction of new paths and facilities.
Some of the faculty signs:
The Social Sciences building was brand new. Pakistan built it at a cost of $10 million. The guys at the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit were a bit critical of this use of resources, as what Afghanistan really needs right now are engineers and accountants and so on.
I see where they’re coming from, but hey: I’m a history/philosophy major. I gotta defend the liberal arts!
There was even a stadium on the campus grounds, built by Turkey.
My travelling partner Lauryn (without whom my experiences in Kabul would never have been possible) does a lot of writing of her own. From her latest essay:
With the possibility that the Taliban will return to power in whole or in part, humanitarian and social justice organizations are being counseled in some cases to be “neutral” towards the Taliban.
Here is why neutrality on the part of aid workers and aid organizations is impossible: