155 words: by way of explanation.

The goal is a hundred words a day, roughly one decent-sized paragraph.  And I'm not actually bothering to use a word count feature, so I'm eyeballing it.  But the rule is this: once something get's written, I hit the publish button.  I need, I suppose, some sort of creative outlet, some means of self expression, but the even the thought of editing is stymieing me and nothing gets written.  So I can revisit -- copy and paste into a new post and touch up later -- but once the words hit the page, once they've been given a brief once-over, they get published.

I will probably regret this decision later.  I blanch at the thought of allowing other people to read bad prose, and when I revisit something I've written and find errors or poor sentence structure or bad flow, my embarrassment borders on shame.  But a hundred words a day seems like a manageable minimum threshold. 

Oh Hey Jerusalem

I got accosted by a vaguely crazy Israeli woman while I sat in a park, trying to finish the book I had nearly finished over lunch. “Can I talk to you?” she asked. “I don’t want sex -- not every girl who talks to a man wants sex. It’s not like that.” Sex hadn’t occurred to me as an option. I waved to the bench next to me. “Please,” I said. “This park is named for George W. Bush,” she told me. “He was the best man ever. If he was Jewish, I would totally marry him. But he’s not Jewish so it’s not going to happen. You have this celebrity in America -- Ellen Dangerous, something like that -- on television, very funny lady? She once called him, and he was so sweet and also he loves Israel and I thought -- I could marry this man. Do you still want to talk to me? If you don’t want to talk to me, I can go.” “Actually,” I told her, “I’ve got to go. I have to meet my friends. And, uh, my wife.” “Ok,” she said. “Well. In Hebrew we’d normally say ‘I wish you good health,’ but good health is nothing if you’re depressed -- I was depressed for years, tried to kill myself a few times, I know all about it, my parents wouldn’t even talk to me” (here she choked up a little) -- “so instead of good health, I’ll say, ‘I hope you’re happy.’ Just remember -- God is always watching you. He’s watching you, and he’s probably got his arms crossed in front of him, because God is like a bitchy girl. He’s like your bitchy girlfriend who’s probably pissed off, but wants to have a relationship with you, so talk to him. Ask him what you did wrong. Because if things aren’t going your way, it’s probably because God is pissed off at you, and you need to figure out what you did and fix it. You’re not perfect. God is perfect, but you’re not, so if something’s wrong, It’s probably something you did and God is pissed off about it, and you need to fix it.” “All right,” I said. “Well, peaceful Shabbat to you.” I always seem to attract the crazy ones.

The opening chapter is the hardest, right?

Everyone who talked about Afghanistan would stud their speech with exclamation points. “Afghanistan!” we were told, “has seen remarkable! progress! in the last decade!”  

They had the numbers to back it up, which they presented with all the zeal of a late night infomercial: “You name a metric, it’s gone through the roof.  Children in schools?  Up from 800,000 in 2002 -- 800,000, in a country of 25 million people! -- up to almost 8 million at present.  And most of them are in real schools now, real schools with real teachers, and not just a “school” (emphatic air quotes), sitting under a tree with a cracked blackboard and an illiterate teacher who’s covered in flies.

“And girls!  Used to be exactly zero percent girls in school.  Zero.  You had pockets of illegal schools here and there, some hardcore mother from a literate family would take in one or two neighborhood girls and teach them to read -- but that was under pain of death, so for most of the population it was a no go.  Taliban just wouldn’t allow it.  Obviously that won’t fly -- can’t have economic development if you’re overlooking the earning potential of half your citizens -- and now we’re up to 40% of the kids in schools being girls.  It’s not perfect yet, plenty of room for improvement, but now compared to then?  Way better.”

He was just getting warmed up.  “And speaking of girls, or women rather, look at maternal mortality.  Afghanistan used to be the most dangerous place on earth to have a baby.  It was worse than Somalia.  Consider that, for a moment -- Somalia, which has no government to speak of, much less any sort of functioning medical system, was doing a better job of keeping its child-bearing women alive than Afghanistan was.  Maternal mortality -- that’s deaths per 100,000 births -- used to be 1,600.  That’s sixteen per thousand, more than one out of a hundred.  And the average Afghan woman gave birth to 7.6 children in the course of her lifetime, so the chance of dying in childbirth was something like one in eight.  We’ve cut that number in half.  Obviously there’s still work to do -- the numbers still aren’t great, but we’ve come a long way and we’re going to keep working.”

The list of accomplishments and concurrent exclamation points went on and on: infrastructure (built or rehabilitated 2,000 kilometers of road!), schools (over 560 of ‘em!), wells (3,000, mostly in rural Afghanistan!), cell phones (almost 90 percent of the population has a cell phones, thanks to U.S. seed money to cell phone companies!).  And the burgeoning number of clinics (over 600!) means that access to medical care -- that is, some sort of medical professional within a one-hour walk -- has skyrocketed from nine percent to almost 60 percent, which in turn has nearly doubled life expectancy.  Doubled!

“There is almost no field of human endeavor where Afghanistan, with international assistance, has not made unbelievable progress,” they told us.  “All of this is why you’re going to Afghanistan.  We have to maintain the gains we’ve already made and continue moving forward, so that Afghanistan…” (dramatic pause) “can never again become a safe haven for international terrorists.”  

I took notes on the numbers but I didn’t need the pep talk: I was already a true believer.  “The United States has an obligation to the people of Afghanistan,” I was fond of saying.  “Let’s be real here: if you break it, you buy it.”  

I had been vaguely obsessed with Afghanistan since I was an undergraduate.  As a nineteen year old, in August of 2001 -- armed with a backpack and a limitless feeling of invincibility -- I had hatched a fool-brained plan to sneak into Afghanistan by land from neighboring Turkmenistan, not yet knowing that September 11th of that same year would spark a U.S. invasion followed by the longest war in our history.  The internet, which was still somewhat nascent in 2001, said I could depart on foot from a border town in Turkmenistan and walk 45 minutes or so through no-man’s-land in the east Turkmen desert into Afghan territory; you had to carry a compass and walk in a perfectly straight line or else risk blowing off a leg on a Soviet-era landmine which, if it didn’t kill you outright would certainly leave you to bleed to death in the desert.  If you survived that, you could hitchhike in and make it to Mazar-e Sharif in Northern Alliance controlled territory.  The thought of landmines upped the adventure factor for me.  I was set on going.  

I emailed my plan to a few friends at home and got an immediate and stark all-caps response (“DO NOT GO TO AFGHANISTAN”), but I laughed them off as overly cautious.  But I was ultimately thwarted by the vagaries of visa law, unable to get into Turkmenistan even with a crispy $20 bill as a bribe.  I was, by extension, barred from the desert that was to be my launching pad into Afghanistan which, in retrospect, probably saved my life.

I joined the State Department in 2004, mostly because I wanted someone else to buy my plane tickets and because living overseas, like landmines, had the appeal of adventure to me.  I asked to go to Afghanistan for my first overseas tours and was repeatedly denied; it took seven years of employment for the Department to finally send me.  I went to Pakistan for my first tour, stamping visas in Islamabad, and then on to China to do “political analysis,” a vaguely defined job in an overstaffed embassy.  “Mostly I’m there to unjam the Xerox machine,” I’d say when people asked what I was doing.  Bored and restless by the end, I wanted more thrill and less bureaucracy in my next assignment, something I thought Afghanistan would offer in spades.  

I decided against jobs at the Embassy because the security situation -- coupled with the proximity of our over-zealous security team -- meant trips off compound, even for official business, were rare; colleagues called the Embassy “Medium Security Prison Kabul.”  I opted instead for a position on a Provincial Reconstruction Team, or PRT, where I would be one of just four civilians embedded with the military and acting as an advisor on How To Make The Province Function Again.  I wasn’t sure what that would entail and spent my time in training waiting for someone to notice my lack of expertise (or experience of any kind) in civil reconstruction, but the State Department was mostly just looking for bodies, anyone willing to go to the desert.  There weren’t that many of us.

“Someone, someday, is going to scream out that the Emperor has no clothes,” I said to one of my friends.

“You’re kidding, right?” he responded.  “Clothes, no clothes, it doesn’t matter -- no one cares what the cannon fodder is wearing.”

My friends had questioned why I would go to Afghanistan when there were spots in Europe available.  My mother felt the same way.  “Is there something wrong with Paris that I don’t know about?” she wrote.  

But I was not to be deterred.  “I want to be out there, you know?  In the dirt, hanging out with the boys in the muck, sleeves rolled up and actually getting work done,” I told my friends.  “We can fix this place.”  

I was a true believer, and that was good, because the place I was heading tended to erode the enthusiasm of all but the most fervent: Farah Province, in the rocky desert of southwest Afghanistan.  Farah (that’s “fur-RAH,” not “FAIR-uh”) is obscure even by Afghan standards, and the only people who routinely pass through it are smugglers, humping opium to Iran.  It’s home to about a million people, almost all of whom are farmers.  On paper, they grow wheat and lentil-like commodity called vech -- a variety of mung beans -- but in reality they plant opium poppies and little else.  Literacy rates are in the single digits and most families survive on $50 dollars a month or less.  Average temperatures stay above 100 for most of the year.  Aside from a few scattered, crumbling mud-brick fortresses said to date from the 4th century, there’s nothing there but hot dust and wide open spaces, punctuated by occasional mountains -- sharp and unexpected -- that do nothing to stop the sandstorms that roll in from the desert.  There is little reason to visit.  

I called it the Mississippi of Afghanistan: the kind of place you’re not particularly likely to drive through, but if you do, you probably won’t stop.

I got sick in India, laid low by dengue fever and its concurrent 10 days of misery.  I had been making fairly good progress on the book, having set a goal of 5,000 words a week and hit it three times.  But I got stuck in Varanasi, in no small part because I couldn't find a place with actual tables and chairs to work in, rather than low tables and cushions on the floor, which I can't stand.  And then dengue hit, and made me so sick that at one point I had to lay down outside a train station (in the dirt, surrounded by cow shit and maimed beggars) because I couldn't take a single step more.

I put down the laptop when I got sick, as you might expect, and did little more than sleep and slowly drink water for ten straight days.  I didn't realize I had dengue and kept moving between cities, staring out the window of moving trains, wrapped in a puffy coat and shivering with fever chills despite the blistering heat of India in August.  I went to the Himalayas briefly but in short order returned to Varanasi, where I stayed in bed for days, leaving only to drink sugary Indian milk tea and use the bathroom.

When I finally snapped out of it, I sat down at my laptop and took a gallop through the 15,000 words I written.  I had been referring to them as "my 15,000 mediocre words," but hitting the goal had felt right, and I -- always a compulsive editor -- assumed that getting things down on paper, at least in the beginning, was more important than having it be perfect.  But when I went back and re-read it, with post-dengue fresh eyes, I found that above all else I was bored: intensely and overwhelmingly bored.  It's not so much that it wasn't fixable -- I could've cut half of it, and tweaked the prose of the remainder and maybe perhaps started to make lemonade out of wretched, wretched lemons -- but I found that I lacked the desire to do it.  I wanted to be done with the book, and not in the sense of having it finished. I just didn't want to write about Afghanistan any more.

"Maybe it's a sign," a friend told me.  "Maybe it means you should just be done with that chapter of your life."  She took the fact that I lost my beloved military-issue fleece as a further indication that I should sweep Afghanistan from my life and finally -- finally -- start moving forward.

But I wasn't quite ready to toss in the towel, just yet.  I put down the laptop and bought a bus ticket to Nepal, intending to take another break, this time by choice, rather than by illness.  I bought a second backpack, shoved my laptop and most of my clothes into it, and left it in a guesthouse in Pokhara.  I hiked for 25 days, largely cut off from internet and thoughts of the broader world, and I ignored the book and focused on the mountains.  It was the right thing to do.

I finished hiking and flew from Nepal to Mumbai and hung out with an old Foreign Service friend for a few days, eating excellent food and playing with her dog and making excellent use of her hot shower.  And then I flew to Thailand, which feels like cheating because I've spent so much time here.  But there's an island in the south with a trapeze rig and a crossfit gym and a few yoga studios, and I've decided to plunk myself down for a while and try again on the book.

I realized, during my month long sabbatical-within-a-sabbatical, that this book as a work of non-fiction just can't happen: I don't care enough.  It might be interesting, it might not be interesting -- but I myself am so bored with the subject that I am unwilling to try to separate out what's worth keeping and what's not.  It's time to let go.

And instead, I'm revisiting the book as a work of fiction.

I have always been a fiction person.  Every time I purchase non-fiction, it languishes on my kindle and mocks me for my inability to focus and get through it.  But fiction I love.

I've never written fiction, though, and I am struggling with basic questions like whether the book should be in first person or if there should be an omniscient narrator, or if I should switch between the two.  And, within that vein, whether I should attempt to write from the Afghan point of view, or just parse what I think their experience may have been, on the other side.

I am done with the outline, and no longer writing in chronological order is liberating, allowing me to re-arrange the timeline to suit what I see as my purpose, per se, in writing this novel.  And today I actually sat down and wrote for the first time in forever -- not outlining, but actual writing.  It feels good to be back -- like I'm finally doing the work that I should be and not shirking.

I didn't write much -- maybe 250 words -- but after weeks of not writing, 250 words feels so much better than zero.

Tomorrow is Monday, and for the first time in forever I am setting an alarm.  I will get up at 5:30, like I used to, and I will set aside distractions, and sit on the porch of my tiny island bungalow, and I will write.

It's good to be back.

Oh Vishnu.

I don't fully understand cows in Hinduism -- something about them being Shiva'a vehicle, or the incarnation of Vishnu or something. It's surprisingly hard to research: everything is either too simplified ("Cows are sacred in India!") or too in-depth ("The cow is the apparition of the goddess Parvathi, the avatar of Shiva as per the eighth Rig Veda and known by the name Ashanthana...").

But regardless of backstory, cows are everywhere on the streets, sometimes munching on leftover banana leaves that were used as plates or, more commonly, nosing through piles of trash and picking out edible bits or delicious plastic bags to chew on. You learn to ignore them -- they're not cuddly, and they're large and slow moving and not the brightest of animals, so they're fairly easy to just walk around.

I met an Oklahoman (bushy beard; broad, flat drawl) at my hotel and we went to dinner, passing by several cows along the way. One had his head down in the trash and for whatever reason as I passed, he took a disliking to me, and brought his head up sharply between my legs, lifting me a few inches off the ground by the seat of my pants.

The Oklahoman grabbed my arm and pulled me forward. "Jesus," I said. "I really wasn't expecting Vishnu there to, uh..."

"GIT TA THIRD BASE?!?" he cackled.

"Exactly," I said.

The Assassination of Mohammad Gul

The Georgians had a combat outpost -- a COP -- in Gulistan, a rough and Taliban-filled district in eastern Farah. They had two COPs, actually -- COP Snow in the district capital, and COP Ice on a desolate stretch of highway deemed strategically important enough to keep soldiers there, though just barely. In late summer of 2010, two weeks after I arrived in Farah, the Georgians on COP Snow called in a report that a civil disturbance of some kind had rippled through the local police, undermining law and order. The Governor of the province had heard similar things, and we flew to Gulistan to figure out what was going on.

The PRT didn’t have helicopters or other air assets, but the military could request them from other bases. For this trip, one of the Marine units south of us sent up a pair of Ospreys, a helicopter-airplane hybrid. They start with the rotors up, like a helicopter, and then once they’re high enough and moving fast enough, the rotors swing down to face forward, turning the aircraft into a propeller plane. In helicopter mode, the two rotors work independent of one another, so the plane jerks perceptibly from left to right; when the rotors swing down and the Osprey turns into an airplane, the whole thing plunges from the sky for a few seconds during the transition.

It’s pretty nauseating. They’re known for crashing.

We flew on Ospreys and didn’t crash, and landed slightly greener but otherwise no worse for the wear despite the somewhat terrifying dip that happens when the rotors shift. The Georgian commander in Gulistan sat us down, and told is (in Georgian, through a junior soldier acting as his interpreter), what they understood to have happened.

Listen, he said: in August of 2010, a man named Mohammad Gul was assassinated in the Gulistan marketplace. He was a local powerbroker who held the official position of district census taker, tasked with recording births and deaths and little else. His records, which the police in Gulistan later showed us, were all handwritten. Power broker or not, he was the definition of a minor official.

The man who killed Mohammad Gul did so in broad daylight, shooting him four times in the presence of multiple witnesses. He rode pillion on a motorcycle, and when the driver sped off, the shooter acidentally dropped his AK-47 and left it at the murder site. The Georgians assumed him to be either a member of the Taliban or in their employ, and since then, they told us, things had deteriorated further and the entire police squad was threatening to quit.

In Afghanistan, official business requires holding a shura, a meeting of elders who sit on the ground in a circle, drink tea from collective cups, and discuss the matter at hand. The Governor called a shura and the elders there told us what they knew. Mohammad Gul, they said, was killed as the result of some personal grievance, probably involving money. Or it was possible that another power broker, who lived two hours north of Farah in Herat province, had ordered the killing because the power broker’s son was running for Parliament, and Mohammad Gul had backed another candidate, hurting his chances. Either way, the Taliban likely had a hand in the plan’s execution.

The gun the assailant left behind at the murder site was a Hungarian-made AK-47, and the only people who carry that particularly weapon are members of the Afghan National Police, or ANP. Mohammad Gul’s son was also a member of the ANP, and he connected the dots to a fellow policeman named Yahya, who was the grandson of the Herat-based power broker. Two days after his father’s assassination, Mohammad Gul’s son walked into the Gulistan police station and shot Yahya in revenge for his father’s death.

Mohammad Gul and his son were from the Jalalzai tribe. Yahya and his powerbroker grandfather in Herat were from the Hilalzai tribe. Once Yahya was shot, all the Hilalzais and all the Jalalzais in the Gulistan police force put down their weapons and refused to come to work, for fear of being asked to take sides in the dispute and by extension courting retribution. With all the Hilalzais and Jalalzais gone, a scant 15 officers were left to police the entirety of Gulistan, the second largest district in Farah and home to some 50,000 residents.

The ANP in Gulistan were already in dire straits before the revenge killing caused most of them to quit. The district chief of police lamented their supply issues: every officer had an AK-47, but there was only enough ammunition for each to have a single magazine, and there were no additional bullets once they ran out. The police lacked radios and all four of their vehicles were inoperable, with missing or destroyed tires and engines that wouldn’t run. “We don’t have enough bullets to shoot at the Taliban,” the police chief told us, “and with no radios and no cars, we can neither call for help nor get away when they attack us.”

The chief of police had 135 police officers on his official roster, but 80 of those were stationed in Farah City; the 15 left after the departure of the Jalalzai and Hilalzai tribesmen were under-supplied, under-armed and generally outnumbered -- certainly neither manned nor equipped to deal with a mounting insurgency where the Taliban murdered local officials in broad daylight. Those 15 officers, seeing their meeting with the Governor as their only hope for change in Gulistan, threatened to quit on the spot unless additional supplies and reinforcements were immediately sent their way.

The Governor was a rational man and immediately gave in to their demands, promising that additional soldiers would be sent from Farah city, and that additional equipment would be sent as well. He gave them each of the poliemen 1,000 Afghani in cash so they could hold an Iftar dinner for their families during the at the end of Ramadan. Cash disbursement notwithstanding, the meeting was tense. The men took the money -- 1,000 Afghani is 20 bucks, almost half a month’s wages, and far too much to walk away from on principal -- but some of them were literally shaking with rage at Kabul’s lack of attention up to this point. “Send reinforcements!” they shouted in fury as the Governor walked away. “Send reinforcements IMMEDIATELY, or you’ll have NO POLICE in Gulistan ever again!”

For a brief moment, I honestly thought we were going to get shot by the police, despite their ostensibly being on our side.

The problems in Gulistan ran deeper than just a scant and ill-prepared police force threatening to quit. For one, multiple witnesses told the Georgians that ANP officers were actually present at the time of the killing, but that they had run away as soon as the shooting started. Those same witnesses were unwilling to give statements to the police or prosecutors, for fear of then becoming the target of revenge killing or tribal retribution. Tribe is everything in Afghanistan, and when the chief of police and district governor (both Khwajazais and thus uninvolved in the Hilalzai-Jalalzai beef) indicated that Gul Mohammad’s son should be jailed for his role in all of this, the chief prosecutor (like Gul Mohammad, a Jalalzai) said: “you’ll have to kill me and 100 people from my village first.” It wasn’t really hyperbole. And regardless, since the chief prosecutor would have to be involved with the jailing process, an equitable solution through the normal judicial process wasn’t exactly on the horizon.

“There was nothing we could do at that point except let them all cool off a bit,” the Governor told us later. “Any sudden actions or snap judgments would’ve just made the whole thing worse.” And so he asked for written statements, to be taken from all parties involved and sent to Kabul, who would review them and concatenate them into a whole for later action. I later wondered who actually wrote their stories down; very few people in Gulistan can read.

We flew back to Kabul. The Governor would later ask our help with air transport for the reinforcement police officers, so that much, at least, did get accomplished, though their arrival did little to stem Gulistan’s steady descent, over the course of the next year, into lawlessness and Taliban control. That descent was hastened by the departure of the Georgians, who had a reputation as ferocious soldiers, and who were ordered to other provinces in the south to join the effort with the British forces and the U.S. Marines. They were replaced by Italian soldiers who rarely left base and mostly just held down the fort -- that was the expression that they would use -- and later the death of several Italian soldiers in Farah from errant IEDs would bolster that disinclination to leave base. Gulistan, whose name means “the place of flowers,” would be thought of as a problem district for the rest of my time in Farah. I never went back.

Mohammad Gul’s son remained free. To the best of my knowledge, there was no further investigation beyond the written statements taken from the district elders, no trial or judicial process. Despite killing a fellow police officer in cold blood in the district police station, he never served a day in jail.

Here's where we are.

I am in India to have a midlife crisis. This mid-life crisis has been brewing for some time in the form of a desire to write a book, the completion of which will theoretically banish the feeling that I haven’t accomplished anything in 35 -- and rapidly approaching 36 -- years of life.

The problem, of course, is that books don’t write themselves, and I spent the better half of the morning staring at half a page of words and wrestling with the notion that perhaps I don’t, after all, have a book in me. I had decided, on my year-long sojourn from work, to choose a city to plunk myself down in to write and, knowing myself to be an antsy traveler, I would allow myself to move to a new city only with the conclusion of each chapter. In Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu, I wrote the introduction, chapter zero: a boring recount of the process of getting to Afghanistan, from assignment to arrival. It needs revision and the addition of details which, one hopes, will maybe make it vaguely interesting.

I fear that I will be stuck in city two, Hampi in Karnataka state, for the foreseeable future.

I tried to cull from my blog (“When the flight from Kabul breaks through the clouds over Farah, it does so over a vast expanse of nothingness…”), but found myself silently chanting “no one cares, no one cares, no one cares.”

When I lived in Afghanistan, I blogged about life -- about life with the military on a remote military base and everything that went along with it, with the exception of anything related to work. I couldn’t write about work, really -- the Embassy would’ve lost their mind, and if any of the Afghans I worked with ever found out that I was slowly broadcasting their lives to an anonymous audience on the internet, they would have never spoken to me again. And, in the worst possible scenario, the Taliban could have found it and slowly killed off everyone I wrote about, even if I changed their names.

But I am now separated from Farah by almost half a decade, hard to believe though that be, and I feel that enough time has passed to make it safe to write about both work and Afghans, changing names for all parties just in case. And so, instead of dwelling on the red mud nothingness of the Farah landscape, I tried to charge in and write about the First Big Work Experience of my time in Farah -- the assassination of a government official that led to a breakdown in rule of law in a remote district in the hills of Farah.

I am still struggling to make it interesting.

This whole midlife crisis thing would be much easier if it just involved purchasing a fancy car and getting a couple of ill-advised tattoos.

I bought a fresh coconut from an old woman in Hampi to reconfirm that I don't like the taste of fresh coconut.  She hacked off the top with a blunt hook knife, a process that took some effort, and I drank the coconut water through a straw.

I finished it and handed the coconut back to her so she could split it in half. She sliced off a chunk of the bottom to serve as a spoon, and then hit it once with the knife on the side.  She turned the coconut over to whack it from the other side, and I stopped her to ask in polite Hindi if I could do it for her.  She looked at me like I was crazy, closed her eyes, and shook her head.  

I still don't like the taste of fresh coconut. 

I met an Australian in a cowboy hat in Chennai. "Nice hat!" I said.

"Thanks!" he replied. "It's my adventure hat!"

I want an adventure hat. I will settle for this blog, though.