Letter #3 to Friends and Family: Getting there is hardly all of the fun

Kabulistan—from the inside.

Inside of what remains the over-riding distinction. In this case, the U.S. Embassy compound in AfghanLand. Only the Embassy in Baghdad – college campus that it is – exceeds to the chaotic compound in Kabul. More of that later; first the trip over to Afghanistan since there really is not much to tell about the briefings, most of which were sensitive.

The flight over: non-stop Washington to Dubai. About a dozen of us left on the twenty-eighth of December, representing the United States Agency for International Development, the Department of State and the Department of Agriculture. In fact the USDA (Agriculture) has its own foreign service and is deploying almost as many experts as USAID is dispatching generalists. My lovely sister, Clairey-bug, gave me a ride to D.C.’s international airport, not so affectionately known as Washington-Dullest. Since I was a preferred something or other, I got to use the airline’s déclassé lounge where, as a freshly minted development officer, I attended to weighty matters of state like yelling at T-Mobile to cease billing me automatically for a service I ended a long time ago. United Airlines over-booked my flight and so United honoured me with a “special” up-grade to business class to extricate itself from its predicament. Once aloft, I made fast friends with the flight attendants and we chatted up a storm or coffee and mini-Kit Kat bars.

Sixteen hours in Purgatory: welcome to Dubai. After eighteen hours on boarding flying, writhing and disembarking, the dirty dozen (i.e., we) received attentive service from the hotel, which was beautiful, sleek and almost chic. Since we checked in late at night, Dubai-time, we were unable to take advantage of the amenities. What struck me as darkly ironic about this ‘’ hotel, however, was the presence of all of these Christmas decorations, complete with festooned trees, in a city that funnels at least some of the funds to the Taliban terrorizing so many Afghans. The hotel itself was wide and spacious in the lobby and very “upper glass”; that is to say: the best of neo-sixties kitsch and so I hardly felt homesick. Next day, we departed for Kabul on a two hour-plus-change flight. Safi Airways had no leg-room or freebies nor, thank God, did it feature a G.I. Joe movie.

Arrival in Kabul: a city that has grown as many fifty times over in forty years. At first blush, Kabul seemed safe enough. We hung out in front of the new international terminal – out in the open. The only disturbance arising from being wide open was the complaining by self-appointed security experts doing just a fine job of informing twelve bedraggled people the many gruesome manners in which they could be murdered. Some men are seduced by sirens and others by scenarios. The largest threat facing us, however, was not jihad but jet-lag. The new terminal was constructed through the reconstruction aid of the Japanese and thus remained clean and modern and thoroughly unremarkable throughout.

The U.S. Embassy Compound is a massive complex in of Kabul proper, near the Great (General Ahmed Shah) Massoud Circle. In the center of that round-about stands a twenty to thirty foot monument that likely dates from the era of Soviet domination. It is a granite brown vaguely conical stele crowned by what looks like a globe resting on wheat fronds. Very ugly; very last millennium. Since the fall of the Taliban, however, this unsightly phallic symbol has assumed a new role – not one of virile domination ushered in by a vanguard of grain-growing, flame-throwing revolutionaries – but one giant flip of the bird to the fallen fanatics of Mullah Omar and his anything but gregarious gangsters.

General Ahmed Shah Massoud, a moderate Tajik and national hero against the Red Army, quickly came to oppose the Pashtun warlords and, eventually, the Taliban to the South. General Massoud died fighting the Taliban until the end; that is, until a suicide assassin blew him up just before the 11th of September 2001. A genius himself, General Massoud understood well that Republics of Virtue do not fare too well. Unfortunately, al Qaeda realized this fact, too, and assassinated him. The day of his death is celebrated in Afghanistan today, reminiscent of similar venerations of saints past in the West.

Arrival Shanty-La, or the U.S. Embassy complex. The Embassy consists of a new building of yellowish stone and colored glass, calculated to be the least aesthetically appealing target imaginable. This ‘new’ building flanks the predecessor, the Old Embassy Building, which resembles Stalingrad’s answer to Lincoln Center in New York. Grey with multi-story arches that just don’t work. But the stolid structure has lasted during forty years of Hell quite intact. Other than the larger office buildings are three storey apartment buildings showcased from downtown Bucharest and a few remaining hardened structures. ‘Hardened structures’ absorb the impact of rockets and mortars, not that I am dying to be “myth-buster” on this count. Otherwise there are rows of containerized housing units used as offices or dormitories.

Toughening up the recruits. Most of the briefings, however, took place at the CAFE, an acronym for Compound across from the Embassy. This sprawling complex of tin belly-crawlers represents USAID’s operating headquarters in Kabul. Again, the buildings were grey temporary structures; initially white but around long enough to be discoloured by Kabul’s smog. The air pollution was much worse than anything I had ever encountered in Baghdad, Calcutta or even inside the steel mills of Pittsburgh. In the morning, the mountains were majestic in their snow bestowed ruggedness. The Hindu-Kush Mountains spill over from the Himalayas and exhibit the austere post-card beauty to prove it. Yet by four o’clock in the afternoon, shrouded by smog, those mountains had left for the day. Perhaps Mother Nature keeps bankers’ hours with the help of millions of people burning tires or animal droppings (for central heating) and in the absence of catalytic converters. With the exception of four briefs interspersed over two days, these ‘sensitive’ presentations paralleled Kabul’s air quality in being full of smoke, barely tolerable and always around.

FINALLY, after ten days, up North we go. The people in the Embassy and in USAID were uniformly helpful, dedicated and professional. In all seriousness, I left Kabul for Kunduz as fully prepared as one could be, given the time constraints imposed by the civilian surge, except for my unrivalled gift of misplacing business cards. About eight people converged on the USAID airstrip adjacent to the Kabul Airport very early on Monday morning, at 0’dark-thirty. We soon boarded a small prop plane and flew up to Kunduz. The Kunduz airfield is small, Spartan and likely Soviet. The flight up was spectacular, though photographs cannot do justice to the mountains that encircled us. One sobering note, however, was the lack of snow. These are high mountains, some exceeding 10,000 feet but the snow-cap was more like a yarmulke; that means too little water in the spring-time. While the Kunduz valley is well irrigated thanks to the public works of the U.S.S.R. twenty years ago, water issues loom large here like everywhere else. More of that to follow in future letters.