Real Democracy

I went out to a local restaurant for lunch today with a few of my co-workers, and at one point one of them said to me, "Now we have real democracy in Afghanistan." Surprised by this comment, I asked him what he meant. He told me that he was referring to the very open and public display of Muharram/Ashura paraphernalia by Afghanistan's Shia minority. All around Kabul, large gate-like structures are being erected at major intersections and covered in black cloth, and buildings and cars owned by Shias are festooned with huge, garish flags and banners bearing the name of the martyred Imam Hussain. During the Taliban regime, my co-worker told me, such displays would have been punishable by death--the Taliban, being radical Sunnis, didn't take too kindly to Shiite exuberance.

I've been thinking about my co-worker's comment all afternoon. On the one hand, as someone steeped in the Western political tradition, part of me wanted to tell him that while freedom of religion is indeed an important part of a democratic polity, "real" democracy goes far beyond that. And nobody who lives in, studies, or reads about Afghanistan for more than 30 seconds can possibly conclude that Afghan elections are actual examples of a meaningfully democratic process. Demos kratos--people power--requires that your votes actually count when you cast them, something that is too often absent from Afghan voting booths.

And yet I don't think it would be right of me to lecture my Afghan colleagues and friends about how they are wrong to believe that the freedom to display Imam Hussain's name openly constitutes real democracy, or at least an important step on the road thereto. Because the most meaningful types of power, and the most meaningful ways to exercise power, are not always political. The Taliban's religious beliefs are very different from those of the large majority of Afghans, so between the Communist coup in 1978 and the creation of the Karzai government in 2002, Afghans had to endure 24 years without real religious freedom. That must have been a significant hardship for most Afghans, none more so than the Shia population that was so heavily persecuted by the Taliban. The fact that taqiyya, or concealment of one's religious beliefs in order to avoid being persecuted, is explicitly endorsed within Shia Islam does not make it a desirable way to live one's life.

There is a moral to this story, although I'm not entirely sure what it is. Maybe it is simply that even though we have done a lot of things wrong in Afghanistan, and even though there are a lot of problems with the Karzai government in the short and long terms, there are also ways in which life in Afghanistan is simply and undeniably better than it was ten years ago. And some of those ways are very important to the Afghan people.

Lipstick on a Pig

Disclaimer: Yes, I realize that a pig may not be the most culturally-appropriate animal to choose as a metaphor for Kabul. Blame English's idiom inventory, not me.

Anyway.

Driving through the streets of Kabul the other day on my way from the airport to my guesthouse, the city looked extremely familiar to me. Not that I had expected much to change - I was only gone for a little over five months, after all, and things move slowly in Afghanistan. But I saw many of the same traffic jams, the same sad vegetable carts on the roadsides, the same beaten-down-but-determined-looking Afghans waiting for cabs, and too much of the same crushing poverty.

And then we turned onto the main street near my guesthouse. Now, this street is large enough to have a name, which means it is a relatively important roadway. And it does link one of the more bustling business areas of the city with one of the two or three biggest vehicle arteries in town. But it's really not that important in the scheme of things.

So I was quite surprised to see that the street had been paved in my absence--and not just paved, but paved seemingly quite well! With paint markings separating the lanes (even including solid lines and dashed lines to indicate where you could pass other cars). And real, brick sidewalks. And grates to cover the wialas.* And even crosswalks. I pointed this out to my driver (after three flights and two nights spent on airplanes, the best I could manage was "The street is not broken any more!"), and he commented excitedly that he was very happy about this development.

*Wialas are basically open sewers that run along each side of most of Kabul's streets. Not exactly the city's most endearing feature.

Now, one of the things that my time in Afghanistan has taught me is that it's difficult to overestimate how important a functional transportation infrastructure is to the economic development and prosperity of a country. And I'm sure that the paving of the road and the other tasks involved in the project provided much-needed employment and salary to more than a few needy Afghans.

Still, though, I wonder whether the money mightn't have been better spent on a water treatment plant, or a more reliable electric grid, or better healthcare, or even upgrading the road infrastructure on more important roads. The work done on our street strikes me as an excellent example of cosmetic change implemented mostly to be able to say that something was done.** Which is really not what Afghanistan needs right now.

**The choice of location was undoubtedly also influenced by the fact that there are more than a few international organizations in our area.

Third World Problems

Today is the first day of Eid al-Adha, the Muslim festival marking Abraham's non-sacrifice of Ismail (you say Ismail, I say Isaac). The major ritual of the festival is the sacrifice of a cow (or lamb, or sheep, or goat, or breakfast cereal, or orangutan, or fruit bat). So our neighbors here, being good Muslims, brought in a cow last night for the sacrifice.

Problem is that this cow is apparently none too happy about this state of affairs, and it intends to let the world know. Very loudly. And very constantly. While the cow didn't wake me up last night with its lamentations, it did wake up some of my housemates.

For all of our sakes, I hope that the sacrifice occurs on the first day of the festival, and not the second or third...

#thirdworldproblems

Happy Anniversary

5,256,000 minutes
5,256,000 moments so dear
5,256,000 minutes
How do you measure 10 years in the life?

In car bombs, in jailbreaks
In prayer calls and cups of chai
In night raids, in spies and laughter and strife.

5,256,000 minutes
How do you measure 10 years in the life?

Hell if I know.

(for the uninitiated: a hat tip to Jonathan Larson)

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Clemons

I, like Dan Smock, am rather appalled by this series of tweets from a journalist named Steve Clemons (really, just go to his twitter feed and read all of them), who just happened to be in Kabul during the attack on the British Council early Friday morning. Dan does a good job of explaining what's wrong with most of Mr. Clemons' tweets, but he nicely overlooked the one that gets me the most, allowing me to take the ball and run with it.

At 11:49am Friday morning Kabul time, before the fighting at the British Council had even finished, we get this lovely tweet from Mr. Clemons: "Despite bombs & bullets, hope Afghans have great holiday today on National Independence Day. Despite drama had excellent trip to #Kabul." Good lord. Let me start by saying that any time you can make the U.S. Embassy look like it has its finger on the pulse of the city, you are doing something spectacularly oblivious.

But really, this doozy of a tweet from Mr. Clemons embodies much of what is most harmful about the way that the West views Afghanistan and its people. Only someone who comes in on what Dan so aptly terms a "whirlwind parachute tour" could write the above sentences. It all comes down to how you view attacks like Friday's and, more relevantly, Afghans' responses to them. Mr. Clemons tweeted this morning about how impressed he was with the resolve, courage, strength, and determination of the Afghans he was with as the attack was unfolding. He wrote about how they stayed cool under fire, while he was cowering in fear (I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea). All of these things are true. Afghans who still live in-country have to be all of those things, because these attacks do happen, and you have to figure out how to cope with them.

But Mr. Clemons, like so many Westerners before him, is content to simply dust himself off and move on afterwards. And this is the appalling part. You have just witnessed a terrible event, Mr. Clemons. You have been shot at for doing nothing wrong--stupid, yes, but not wrong--and in so doing, you have gotten a surprisingly good glimpse into the life of far too many Afghans. Innocent Afghans are being targeted and killed by the Taliban with increasing frequency, and most of them weren't even stupid enough to stand on rooftops with bullets flying around them. The fact that the overwhelming majority of Afghans manage to remain friendly and hospitable in spite of this madness might seem amazing...until you consider that, well, it's their homeland, and where else would they go?

But back to Mr. Clemons. Having experienced first-hand how horrifically random the Taliban can be, what is his reaction? A desire to come back and do what he can to make things better? Articulate musings on the terror faced by everyday Afghans? Humility and a promise to reconsider his previous opinions about the war? No, no, and no. Instead, he basically says "have a nice time dodging the bombs, guys, and enjoy your holiday!" While jumping on his plane out of the country. With cool pictures of bullets to prove his bad-ass nature to the folks back home. Sigh.

I don't know what Mr. Clemons' intentions were, and I do not want to make it sound like I expect every first-time visitor to Afghanistan to be able to get their bearings immediately. I've also never been shot at, thankfully, and inshallah I won't ever be in Mr. Clemons' position, so take that for what it is worth, too. But even so, with his series of tweets and pictures, Mr. Clemons has reinforced the perception that Afghanistan is less a real country than some kind of twisted, dystopian safari. You hire your guides, go travel around, maybe get scared by a brush with some big, scary animal, and then find a cool souvenir or take some sweet pictures to show everyone back in the States. You speak glowingly about your guides and the natives while you're over there, particularly their ability to persevere under such awful conditions, and then tell them how much you hope they have good lives on your way up the jetway into your modern plane home.

Well, guess what? Afghanistan is real. The war is real. And it's hell for Kabulis, for Kandaharis, for every Afghan. And they can't escape it. Not like we can.

So no, Mr. Clemons, the Afghans won't just "have a great holiday today." Stay a bit longer next time, and you might even figure out why.

Narchitecture

Kabul, in general, does not have terribly interesting architecture. Most of the buildings are the same shade of gray, because if there is one thing Kabul has a lot of, it is concrete.* The Afghan cultural desire for privacy, coupled with those annoying IEDs, leads just about everyone to build blast/privacy (depending on your point of view) walls in front of their houses, which further obscures most buildings, since Afghans don't usually build much higher than two stories.

And then there are the twin neighborhoods of Sherpur and Wazir Akbar Khan (often referred to jointly as "Wazir"), which are the Kabul equivalents of Central Park West or Beacon Hill. Wazir is where many of the richest people in Kabul (and therefore in Afghanistan) live, which means that many of the houses in the area, regardless of who currently occupies them, have been built by Afghan drug lords, and therefore have earned the moniker "poppy palaces."

Before discussing the downright objectionable design choices that go into these monstrosities, it is worthwhile to say a bit about just how wealthy these...businessmen really are. According to the 2010 UNODC Afghanistan Opium Survey, the national average price for one kilogram of dry opium in 2010 was $169, and the national average yield for opium was about 29.2 kg per hectare.** So an average hectare of land (that's about two and a half acres, for the non-metric folks) produced $4,934.80 in opium revenue for its owner in 2010. In that same year, the per capita GDP in Afghanistan was about $900. A farmer growing opium on a single hectare took in revenue equivalent to over five times the per capita GDP. And the drug lords who live in Wazir are probably bringing in revenue from thousands of hectares each. In a city where locally-grown food costs a few dollars a day, these guys are more or less rolling in cash.

Unfortunately for the eyes of those of us with Western architectural sensibilities, the drug lords seem to be substantially less adept at designing buildings than they are at running drugs. The sense you get driving through Wazir is that the builders of these houses cut out a lot of pictures of Western buildings, stuck them on a wall, and then threw darts at them to pick the different sections of the house. It's like architectural Mad Libs. The only way one could come up with houses like these is if, every time one had to make a design choice, one picked the most incongruous thing one could think of, super-sized it, and then added it.

Unfortunately, I did not bring back pictures of many of my favorite houses--drug lords tend to frown upon people snapping photos of their homes, and most of the time I went by the places I was bouncing around in the back seat of a car anyway. So I cannot bedazzle you with the giant Roman colonnade in front of one house, or the masterful clapboard-shingle-and-poured-concrete siding a few houses down. These pictures, though, give you a pretty good idea of the latest fads in Afghan home-building.

Because, really, when you're the kind of person with a lot of enemies, all of whom probably have large quantities of explosives on hand, there's nothing like a house with huge panes of glass facing the street.


*Some of the many things that Kabul does not have a lot of: wood, stone, marble, or money to buy the previous three things

**Damn you, metric system.

The Funny-Sounding Germans

(N.B.: I've decided to resume posting here on an as-often-as-I-can basis, despite not being in Afghanistan for the moment. Please try to contain your glee)

Warning: Afghan geography ahead. Please consult this map liberally, and try to ignore the fact that no two people transliterate from Dari or Pashto the same way.

One of the things that has struck me most in the conversations I've had with people in the U.S. since returning from Afghanistan two and a half months ago is the degree to which most people do not understand the composition of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). This is likely because Americans heard (and gave) so much grief about how the Iraq War was America's personal crusade against [fill in the blank] that they have simply assumed that the war in Afghanistan is the same scenario. After all, they both started shortly after September 11, 2001, right? And they are both wars in Muslim countries, right? And we are, to use one of my favorite military/journalistic euphemisms, "bogged down" in both places, right?

Well, yes to all three of those (admittedly rhetorical) questions. But that does not mean that the wars are being fought the same way. Many, if not most, Americans seem to have forgotten that ISAF is a truly multi-national coalition. And despite the fact that ISAF's commander, Gen. John R. Allen, is an American, that does not mean that ISAF is a monolithic, and monolithically American, entity, especially from the point of view of the average Afghan.

For an Afghan, the most visible unit of international military presence in his country is the Provincial Reconstruction Team, or PRT. Most, but not all, of the provinces in Afghanistan have a PRT, which are grouped into sixregional commands (RCs): RC-North in Mazar-e-Sharif Province, RC-West in Herat Province, RC-Southwest in Helmand Province, RC-South in Kandahar Province, RC-East in Kabul Province, and RC-Capital in Kabul city. As the name suggests, the goal of the PRTs is to support reconstruction work in their respective provinces. This being Afghanistan, however, many PRTs in practice function as military command centers just as much as they do city planners. Tellingly, there has traditionally only been one PRT with a civilian commander: the PRT in Panjshir, which is by far the safest province in Afghanistan. More importantly for the average Afghan, the PRT serves as the place where he can communicate with the international military forces active in his province on his own terms. Personnel from the PRT attend meetings of development councils, advise Afghan political assemblies, and coordinate operations with the Afghan police and army. Each PRT has significant latitude to conduct operations within its jurisdiction as it sees fit.

So what kind of faces do Afghans see at these PRTs? Not just Americans, not by any stretch of the imagination. The US does command a dozen or so PRTs, and no other ISAF country commands more than one; we also command the two largest and most strategically important RCs, RC-South and RC-East. But RC-West, for example, is commanded by the Italians (it also serves as the PRT for Herat Province). RC-North, in Kunduz Province, is led by Germans, and RC-Southwest is British territory. On the PRT level, there is even more variety. As a few examples, there are Lithuanians commanding the PRT in Ghor, Spaniards in Badghis, Koreans in Parwan, Turks in Wardak, Kiwis in Bamiyan, and Hungarians in Baghlan.

The major effect of all of this, of course, is that Afghans' experiences with the foreign militaries in their country really do vary dramatically from place to place. They are not always interacting with Americans, nor always even with Europeans, so they cannot paint the troops with such broad brushes. Instead, the catch-all word used is kharijan--"foreigners" (literally, "people from outside"). When Afghans want to be critical of overarching principles or themes of the war, they cannot always point the finger back at America, or at any other single country. The simple fact that Afghans encounter a whole range of nationalities at the various PRTs makes it more difficult for them to cast blame reflexively. Which can only be a good thing, for everyone involved.

Of course, this plethora of different countries also produces some comic moments, one of which produced the post's title. Let me conclude with two of my favorites:

1. The Italian PRT in Herat is said to have some of the best food, and the best atmosphere, of any restaurant in the country. In true Italian style, the Italian PRT contains what very reliable sources say is a spot-on replica of a traditional Italian trattoria, of the sort that would not look out of place in a small Tuscan village. They also are said to import wine and other staples of Italian cuisine directly from Italy on a near-daily basis. You have to love the Italians.

2.While Afghans are generally an extremely savvy and street-smart people, they sometimes have trouble differentiating the various countries of the world. This is apparently a particular problem in Kunduz Province, which has a large detachment of German troops supported by some Belgians (as well as other nations). According to a colleague who has spent significant time in Kunduz, most locals there have a devil of a time differentiating the Germans and the Belgians. Most Afghans actually have a relatively good knowledge of Germany, as Germany contains a sizable Afghan expatriate population. But most rural Afghans have never encountered Belgium, which, inconveniently enough, has a flag that is easily confused with the German flag (most Afghans identify foreign troops by the flags on their vehicles or the flag patches on their uniforms). The confusion was summed up by one resident of Kunduz, who, in a move that would make most of Belgium seethe, told my colleague during an interview that there were two different foreign forces in his area: "the Germans, and the funny-sounding Germans."

Next time: Narc-itecture!