Travel Planning for Afghanistan
How are things going in Afghanistan? The best way to find out is to go see for yourself. I’m doing that this August.
You can tell a lot even before you go. I’m in the planning stages: reserving flights, applying for visas, buying equipment.
“Whatever you do,” a friend emailed me from Kabul, “don’t fly into the Kabul airport.” He wasn’t worried that my flight would get shot down by one of Reagan’s leftover Stinger missiles—although there’s a risk of that. (In order to improve the odds, pilots corkscrew in and out.)
His concern is corrupt cops. “[Afghan president Hamid] Karzai’s policemen are crazy,” my normally taciturn buddy, who works for an NGO, elaborated. “They’ll hold you up at gunpoint right in the airport.”
One option is to hitch a flight on a military transport to the former Soviet airbase north of town at Bagram, now a U.S. torture facility being expanded by the Obama Administration in order to accommodate detainees being transferred from Guantánamo. But I’m an old-fashioned journalist. War reporters shouldn’t tag along with soldiers.
So I’m not flying into Kabul. Which works out, since getting to my destination—Taloqan, in Takhar province near the Tajik border—would have required traveling north toward Mazar-e-Sharif from Kabul. Among the highlights of the Kabul-Mazar road are landslides and a trek through the war-scarred Soviet-era Salong Tunnel. It also offers an assortment of thugs both political (Taliban) and apolitical (bandits).
To avoid corrupt airport cops and the dicey north-south highway, I’ll fly into Dushanbe, the capital of Afghanistan’s northern neighbor, Tajikistan. This means spending an extra $800 on airfare, not to mention chancing travel on one of Tajikistan Airlines’ aging Tupolev 154s. It takes a full day to drive from Dushanbe to the Afghan border on mostly unpaved roads.
But I’ll be stuck in Dushanbe for two or three days waiting for government permits. You can’t travel to the special “security zone” along the border with Afghanistan without a permission document issued by the Tajik Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When I met the minister in 2001, I asked him whether treating the 100-kilometer zone like no-man’s land sent an unfriendly message to the Afghans. He laughed. “Afghanistan,” he said, “is our very difficult neighbor. If they behave better, so will we.” The policy remains in place.
No journalist operating in a war zone is safe without a fixer. Things you can easily do yourself back home can be impossible in the Fourth World. A fixer makes things happen: government permits, cars and drivers, places to stay. I’ve accumulated a set of fixers throughout Central and South Asia over the years.
But it’s hard to arrange a fixer in advance in Afghanistan. There’s hardly any mail, telephone service or electricity outside Kabul, much less email. I’ll probably have to just show up, then hire people as I travel.
Nevertheless, I contacted another Kabul-based Friend of Rall about lining up fixers for the regions I plan to visit: Takhar, which I mentioned above, Kunduz, then northern Afghanistan en route to and around Heart (near the Turkmen and Iranian borders), and finally Nimruz province.
There’s heavy fighting in Kunduz. The Taliban recently beheaded four guards working for U.S. forces near Herat. In Zaranj, the provincial capital of Nimruz, suicide bombers just took out the governor’s compound.
“No one wants to go where you’re going,” my friend informed me.
The average salary in Afghanistan is $30 per month.
“I pay $150 a day,” I replied.
“I know a guy. But he’s a whiner. He’ll complain about it the whole time. And you’ll have to promise a death bonus to his wife if something happens.”
Communications are a challenge. I want to file a daily cartoon blog. I can scan a drawn cartoon into my laptop, assuming it doesn’t get stolen by some greedy border guard. But how will I access the Internet?
I can rent a satellite phone and use dial-up. It won’t be fast; at 9600 bps it takes an hour to send one a simple black and white cartoon. And it won’t be easy. Dial-up lines drop. In 2001, when I paid $7 a minute for satellite service, I cried when that happened. The search for power will be endless. Solar panels, car batteries, renting a generator for an hour, whatever it takes to feed greedy phones and laptops.
I’m not complaining. I’m just saying.
Afghans are allowed to complain. They live there.
Of course, the biggest inconvenience is danger.
Everyone worries about me. “Keep your head down.” “Come back alive.” “Don’t get killed.”
They’re sweet and loving sentiments. But they’re also kind of funny. Most of my friends still think of Afghanistan as the Good War, the one that had something—they’re not sure what—to do with 9/11. They think we’re there to help the Afghans. They think the carnage is in Iraq; actually, it’s more dangerous for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
If the Afghanistan War is going so well, why is everyone so worried?
(Ted Rall is working on a radical political manifesto for publication this fall. His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL
28 Comments.
By all means, keep your head down, and keep your head! I’ve often wondered, what’s with the decapitations, just saving bullets? Sure, it’s a horrifying execution, but when you’re dead you’re dead. Do beheadings have a special significance to fanatical militants?
“If the Afghanistan War is going so well, why is everyone so worried?”
What, personal beliefs should have some kind of internal logic? This is the country where welfare mothers are too lazy to work and middle class mothers who work outside of the home don’t care about their children’s well-being because they won’t stay home.
This is the country where we blame individuals for obesity and create an infrastructure that ensures most poor people don’t have access to healthy food or a safe place to walk.
This is the country where corporations can socialize their risks and privatize their profits, but pointing out this fact will get one branded as anti-American or worse.
In short, it shouldn’t be much of surprise that there is little internal consistency to people’s views. So maybe it will kind of make sense to say I’d be praying for your safety this August if I weren’t an atheist. (I wasn’t raised as an atheist and old habits die hard.)
alyzarin,
Why don’t you get some feel good progressives to open a Jamba Juice and Whole Food Market down at Florence & Normandie?
Hey Ted, sounds like you’re getting just a little overconfident. Not in terms of security but as a high-rolling american tourist set out to see how the other side lives.
Combine publicity and throwing money around you will just get a bunch of ‘entrepreneurs’ jerking your chain. As anywhere in the 3rd world, if you want to see the real deal you have to go poor and go undercover, if it’s possible… (i know, its easy to say…). And forget about the live updates and the techno-toys, if it gets in the way of your own eyes and ears.
Good Luck! Can’t wait to hear how it goes!
Remember, fellow readers. Ted WENT there before. He knows what to expect hands down, unlike heroes like George W. Bush, who could only make ‘surpise visits’ with the full weight of the entire US Militay and Secret Service protecting his useless ass. There’s much to be said about having been there, having done that, having SURVIVED near-death experiences compared to writing about it from a nice, safe keyboard. A quiet man said, “I speak when I have something to say.” The yammerer kept on yammering.
unlike heroes like George W. Bush, who could only make ’surpise visits’ with the full weight of the entire US Militay and Secret Service protecting his useless ass
Here’s a newsflash, the president travels everywhere with a security detail, even your precious President of Kenya,
As I said, Highway, the yammerers keep on yammering. Or, as Joe Pesci yelled to the Home Alone kid throwing bricks from the roof, “Is that all ya got, kid?” Kenya is all the yammerers have, and they’ll fix on that til our American-born, legally-elected President retires from Office. The yammerers will continue to yammer.
You better tell Michelle Obama: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M7Rp_Ghv6k
Here’s a video clip of the smartest man on planet earth making a slip and saying he is a muslim. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMUgNg7aD8M I suppose it’s possible he forgot his faith considering the smartest man on the planet sat in Wright’s church for 20 years and never heard Wright say anything like the quotes we’ve seen.
I hear the same boring WRONG information and lies. Birthers, Swift Boat Veterans, Tea Partiers, Republicans. You can express a lie in as many ways as there are opportunities to take a breath and speak or write a message. Same shit. Obama is OUR President, a born-in-the-USA, real person, warts and all. And all his detractors can do is recycle the same old tired crapola, refer to wingnut websites, as though legitimacy comes with having a website, when all it means is someone of marginal talent can create a website and fill it with all the trash and lies in the world.
It’s like, well, George W. Bush having someone write a book FOR him. Only the DUMBEST jerks in the world will buy a George W. Bush book, then QUOTE from it! Give it a rest. You’re spinning your wheels, beating a dead horse. Obama’s here to stay. He has the Oval Office and you DON’T. Tough pill to swallow, right?
Anon,
YouTube is not a right wing web site. Don’t you want to see Michelle Obama admit her husband is from Kenya, and Barry admit he is a muslim, then quickly deny it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M7Rp_Ghv6k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMUgNg7aD8M
Although there’s a sh-tload of other worries, I too am not so worried about one of bad old Ray-Gun’s stinger missles on you…
This invasion was planned, IMO, right from when the USA “Helped” them against the Russians by providing said Stinger missiles, they just waited (not for this reason alone) to avoid being “Hoist by their own petard) though given the USA’s use of the Osprey and treatment of veterans they don’t care that much.
Simply put, the USA waited until they were:
1. Almost all accounted for as being used/bought back
2. Their software was coded to malfunction, not fire/misfire… after a set time date
3. Even assuming some had the tech know-how to get around this, it’s now well past the munitions functional half-life.
The long and short is if there is still one around, that’s been jury-rigged, it still has about a 1/100 chance of being as deadly as when the CIA and Ray-Gun considered the Taliban the “Moral Equivalent of our Founding Fathers”…
—-Now, I’m no expert on history, but I strongly doubt Ben Franklin walked around with a vial of acid from his lab to throw in the faces of women he deemed “Immoral”…
One thing I’d like some more info on, though don’t go out of your way is the “Djinn” issue. I posted this earlier-and got mocked for it by your usual setup of right wing troll hecklers-so I’ll be brief:
The US troops ended up destroying, vandalizing some not really “Sacred” but more “Taboo” areas, which according to local legend were used by the Djinn. Afghanistan is one of the legendary “Soft Places” where the barriers between this and other worlds are thin, most notably the world the Djinn inhabit. So there are gateways they can enter. Mumbo jumbo, but they believe it.
The long and short, mythology or no, they’d find an ancient dry well, a cave that was just a dead end, etc. The locals would go “No! Don’t go near!”, and the soldiers would comment there was no real use to any enemy, just some well that dried up or a dead end cave. They also might notice there were strange carvings around it, but none that resembled Sumerian or Indian or Bhuddist culture, almost totally alien. Why didn’t the Taliban destroy these when they destroyed every “Graven Image”? Because they were scared of the Djinn.
So, the soldiers didn’t want to blow up a few of these areas, just saying uphill “they are no tactical use, aren’t being used, and the natives won’t like us if we blow them up.” They got orders, almost from the desks of Bush and Cheney, to blow these things up regardless. So a lot of extra ill-will from the natives who fear the wrath of the Djinn on them, including on them and their families long after the troops leave…
>>>Here’s a newsflash, the president travels everywhere with a security detail, even your precious President of Kenya,>>>
Hey, does anybody here at Rall-blog live in Kenya? I’d be interested to know who their president is.
Seriously, US 395, not many people who read the Rall-blog have any real love for Obama. And he’s probably dumber than Bush, because he doesn’t realize just how dangerous things are for him. He’ll take the blame for anything that goes wrong.
And, it might interest you to know that the CEO of Whole Foods is a libertarian, not a “feel good progressive”. And it also might interest you to know that progressives have not felt good in a long, long time.
Susan,
I know progressives haven’t felt good in a long time. Progressives are never happy.
hey us 395,
obama has actually promised very little (instead relying on projection – you know from hey great, he is a community organizer to OH NO SOCIALIST-MUSLIM-NAZI).
since inauguration, he has managed to break every last of even his half-promises, keeps lavishly rewarding the criminals, escalated the wars (and even used the nobel peace address for that), almost bungled us into the greater depression (by not pumping nearly enough stimulus into the economy), did as much about foreclosures as bush did about katrina and had the nerve to brag about not hiring a single person on state money (go google FDR and public works….).
in short, his whole presidency has pretty much been indefensible – even compared to the previous war-criminal who wasn’t even elected properly (which is sort of more problematic than whether he was eligible to run for election in the first place, if you think about it…)
If only Obama was a secret Muslim Kenyan whatever – at least this would have been something new for a change 😉
seriously, why are you guys still so hung up about this – you’re acting as if he actually succeeded as a president (in which case these wild shots would be the only option you have to make him look bad…)
or could it just be that influential spin doctors on the right actually do not want to use real arguments about policy, as hey are a two-edged sword which might just as well be used on them tomorrow… given that they themselves are actually on the same side, only a different outfit?
andreas,
I’d say progressives got exactly what they voted for. A liar with no background in anything except looking slick and reading a TelePrompTer.
>>>Progressives are never happy.>>>
That’s because of the company we are forced to keep, and the fact that we have absolutely no representation in any level of government whatsoever.
And no, we did get what we voted for with Obama. He promised to get rid of NAFTA, for example, but did not. I can go on.
us395
why do you keep at it – there are so many actual reasons and betrayals, why do you make up stuff?
obama is obviously immensely qualified for what he did – he out-Clintoned the Clintons – no small feat.
After Clinton, Blair, Schröder… people were beginning to wake up and smell the coffee that great speakers produce hot air and business as usual behind that smokescreen.
After Bush who didn’t even bother to dress up his naked monstrosities, many more people understood – but some forgot the lessons learned with Clinton.
Obama managed to convince even people who still remembered Clinton that he wasn’t of the Clinton mold. Tens of thousands of salespeople train hard every day – he clearly is among the best of the bunch. Not that it is that important, people are – not their “leaders”…
why do keep up these “obama is nothing, not even a US citizen” line?
andreas, I think the birther movement and its popularity is a mirror image of the “Bush is stupid” meme that a good many liberals (myself included) used from time to time.
It’s an ad hominen attack, that is not really true, that shows off a form of elitist thinking on the critiquer’s part, which supporters of the president under criticism can simply wave off and then declare that people making that critique have no valid arguments.
If the birther movement and their allies in the Tea Party movement who complain about health care being un-Constitutional would give up their false political notions and critique politicians from a valid base, then… I guess they would actually be a political movement worthy of rational discussion, instead of the sideshow they sort of are now.
andreas,
I never said he wasn’t a citizen. Michelle said, twice, that Barry was born in Kenya. BTW the birther movement was started by HRC supporters.
Highway, you’re not amusing. I’m all for prickling leftists when they’re wrong in their convictions, but what the f%ck does your tirade about Obaminable’s birthplace or faith has anything to do with Rall’s trip to Afghanistan or with the stupid war in said country? Which, it’s fair to guess, you support whole-heartedly for no sensible reason, right?
bucephalus,
If you try reading through the posts, you’ll see I was replying to someone else.
By the way, Highway has all the correct info and always the last word. That’s why Highway is hanging out at Ted Rall’s blog like the rest of us losers with crumbs in our keyboards. Ad Hominem, but what else is there when words fail?
Yes I do believe I have “the correct info”. If I don’t show me where.
Where you got it in the first place. Get a large, clean mirror with a long handle. Then, with one hand, hold onto something sturdy so you don’t topple over. Then reach way ’round and LQQk.
Anon,
Focus. Try reading what I wrote. These are youtube videos of Barry and Michelle in their own words.
Try the mirror. Really.
“FOUSHTA!”
— Van Helsing