Human Terrain

A dying blog is a sad and bathetic spectacle. I have abandoned blogs before, better blogs than you, current blog. Nevertheless I would like to push on and transition this space into a more permanent home for the things I’m working on and interested in.

Right now I am traveling in China. There is nothing happening in Beijing that you have not read about in the past six-month explosion of attention paid to the city. Yes, it’s changing at a furious pace. The built environment is futuristic. There are many amazing shopping centers! Traditional architecture is beautiful while the new projects are daring! Will traditional spaces be swept away in the rush to modernize? All around the martial authority of the state is an unseen but potent force! There are websites I can’t access here! All poverty and vice has been shipped out of the city and dissent is invisible!

I have not been able to penetrate this superficial level of common knowledge; I suspect really knowing China is a challenge for a lifetime. I will def. let you know if I achieve that in the next week or so. But I think I’ll save my photos of the temple of heaven for slideshows at home.

Meanwhile, here are some links.

There is a great article in September’s Harper’s about Human Terrain Teams.

Also of note, Dexter Filkins’ magazine piece about Pakistan’s double-dealing and the problem of the resurgent Taliban.

Faces make a strong impression but in memory fade the fastest. A few portraits from Kabul:

Opium addicts, Kabul

Grandson and grandfather, near the yellow mosque

A boy tending a birdseed stand, near yellow mosque

I’m in Beijing at a Starbucks; it’s a bit of a change of pace. I’m mising Kabul and wondering if I was ever really there.

Today is the last time I will be posting from Kabul– I think this may obviate the necessity of this blog, but keep checking for the next few weeks as I have time to put up more posts. THANK YOU to everyone for reading. And for giving me really supportive comments that helped keep me focused.

I have 10-12 hours of footage which I think is just barely enough to produce a short 15-25 minute film. A meditation. I am leaving Afghanistan a lot sooner than I would really like, but actually my feelings are a little mixed about this. I will not miss the paranoia and tension. While it provides a needed dose of adrenaline to counterbalance the altitude-induced deficiencies in my osmotic pressure, I don’t like feeling like every moment has to be worth the risk I’m taking to live it– it’s tiresome. I hate fearing my own countrymen as they rumble through the streets in armored convoys sighting bystanders with their 50-calibers… though last time I said fuck it and tried to film them anyway. But I didn’t come here to observe the war, opium production, or Taliban extremism. Those phenomena are vitally important but covered by very talented journalists already. I neither have the skills nor the logistics to make a dent where they tread. And for my part I knew a lot about those things from reading the news at home. But there is a lot I didn’t know– hadn’t seen– about Afghanistan “beyond the conflict.” That phrase from Michael Bhatia was my lodestar for this trip. I know I didn’t leave the Kabul bubble but I hope I at least got a start understanding the dizzying vastness of this country and this culture. And I know that I’ve started something that I will have to return to finish at some point.

The destinies of America and Afghanistan are intertwined. I came here very much as an American. I feel a measure of responsibility that it is my nation fielding its lethal powers here on the other side of the earth. That so many have bled here and died in this conflict– young Americans like the people I went to high school with. Michael Bhatia. Just last week, 60 children near Herat in a mistaken American airstrike.

There is a serious fight happening here, and none of the international actors currently on the scene are devoting the energies and resources that are necessary to face the challenge. This is a generational struggle. In the past thirty years outsiders have not been innocent in the internecine war that has caused such vast damage here. First the Russians and their capital crime of invasion and a million killed. The Americans and their happy proxies– religious zealots with C.I.A. financed SAM’s downing Russian choppers so the cold war could be won. But when the Russians withdrew those men and the arms and powers we provided them remained. The Afghan people were abandoned to the carnage that ensued, far from our concerns. But blowback was a bitch; Osama Bin Laden found his helpmeets here and America was attacked.

America returned to Afghanistan on a mission of imperial vindication. As we blew away the Taliban regime, and took the international community with us on the adventure, we once again have failed to really concern ourselves with the Afghan people. There has been a criminal level of unseriousness– as always, not among the professional military men whose real work is wiping out the enemies they face with unsparing force– but among the planners and the polity. Iraq was a distraction. But this war never stopped, and nowadays looks trickier than ever.

Afghanistan is at a crossroads again. Signs of progress are everywhere, and I’ve been documenting them. But the Taliban believe themselves to be the rightful rulers here, and are gaining in ferocity as the Afghan people are drawn to their strength in the face of international weakness and Afghan government inadequacy.

My basic thrust here is, this place is important. It deserves the effort and the money. We can’t abandon it again.

More later.

Kabul home of fashion…

I will admit to feeling depressed at how much better I am at tourism and picnics than journalism, aka telling stories with verifiable facts. Or filmmaking, aka mastering the technical bedevilments of cameras under the pressure of dust storms and chaotic environments to capture good footage with a steady hand. Or photography. Or writing. Maybe I’m trying to do too much at once, when really I just like to chill in the Afghan style and watch the stand up comedy competition on Tolo TV.

Yet there is too much that is too serious here for me to be entirely comfortable being my flaneur self. So I go try to visit hospitals and refugee camps and “get a story” but I’m not really too solid on all the details, so things slip and I return to being a tourist, except I’m a disaster tourist.

Prosthetics at an Orthopedic center

Children from Helmand, refugees in Kabul

I’m sure I’ll get it down at some point.

All I ever wanted to do in life was to come to Afghanistan and go on many picnics, and now I am living my dream. Here are the dudes on the Salang river after an awesome picnic yesterday. Parwan province and various patches north of Kabul have a good security situation for now, perfect for picnics.

Jamsheed and Hafizullah

I ended up drinking a lot of water from the Salang river which I’m assured is direct from the Himalayas and fresher than any bottled water. So far so good. We ate the best kabobs procurable by the river. There was a lot of good food to pick up on the road home, too: crazy ice cream, gooey fried bread with green onions called “buloni”, and a sour milk/cucumber drink to refresh and revive.

The day before that I was allowed a rare hike to the top of the Bala Hissar fort with the aforementioned British altruists. It was a strange place; its strategic value was obvious, as the view encompassed the city all around. In fact the Afghan army intelligence school is located up there, and I met some retired military good ol’ boys who are contractors now and who teach there. There are supposedly still mines and other hazards off the beaten path, but everyone was careful. UXO (unexploded ordinance) and blown-out tanks from the last battle (the taking of Kabul in 2001) littered the grounds.

We then descended the hill and took photos of the fort from below, where a graveyard strewn with the green flags of the martyrs creeps up the embankment towards the fort’s walls.

Later that evening, a garden party and a speech from the British ambassador. It was completely surreal.

Hello– I am fine but working on some things and hence, no update. Thank you for reading and for the kind comments. Only 4 more days left here…

Today (Saturday) we went to visit shrines in the old city and the Kabul Museum. Along the way we passed the ruins of Darul Aman Palace. It was built in the 20s as the abode of King Amanullah Khan, and has been destroyed like clockwork during important moments in recent Afghan history– the communist coup in 1978 and the civil war of the 90s. It is slated to be restored by a European firm.

Darul Aman Palace

Right next door is the restored Kabul Museum. There were a lot of beautiful antiquities there. A few examples:

Bodhisattva. Tepe Maranjan. 3rd-4th Century A.D.

Iron bracelets (Bactrian? It was unclear-- something B.C.)

I was really swept away by a room full of artifacts from Nuristan (land of light), in northeast Afghanistan. Known as Kafiristan (land of infidels) until its conquest in the late 19th century, it was home to a distinctive ethinic group which practiced shamanism and polytheism. In legend the Nuris owe their distinctive appearance to descendance from Alexander the Great’s army, but they were probably a group indigenous to Afghanistan before the arrival of its current dominant tribes. (Thanks Wikipedia!) IN ANY CASE, the carved wooden statues were strangely affecting and reminded me of west African traditional art.

Later we went to visit a camp of refugees who have fled to Kabul from southern Afghanistan, trapped as they were there between the bombardments of coalition forces and the exactments of the Taliban. R. took pictures while I filmed so I am going to hold off on publishing his amazing pictures. Coming soon to a something something somewhere something, once I can sort myself out.

Tomorrow: Bala Hissar with Sandy Gall’s Afghanistan Appeal (SGAA, click though to find out more)– hiking up to the fort where the British army was defeated in the Anglo-Afghan war to raise money for Sandy’s medical charity. I’m gonna be struggling keeping up the power sources for my various devices– which are hard to juggle between– while following along with 25 British ladies and gentlemen from the old mold.

Photos from the aforementioned picnic spot for Kabul residents, Lake Qargha.

R. at Qargha

It’s a man-made reservoir near the Kabul Golf Club where you can get a drink and rent a pedal boat or a horse to ride.

A boy came up and passed over me with the smoke of burning espan, a kind of incense from a desert plant. It serves to ward off the evil eye.

In the evening I came home and was very embarassed to fall asleep during a meeting in the sitting room with a Waziri emissary. He expressed confidence in U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and I expressed my face into my lap; pinching myself didn’t work.