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.
Monday, September 14, 2015
Sunday, September 6, 2015
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Saturday, September 5, 2015
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 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.
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