Return of the Revenge of the Son of the Friday Bazaar in Kabul, Part XIV

Fridays tend to be slow days in the office for some reason. Something about Muslim fundamentalists being less likely to blow shit up during the Muslim version of Sunday. I don't really know.

Anyway, since it's a slow day in the office, that's when the custodial staff comes in to "clean." The word "clean" doesn't seem to translate very well into any of the local languages. While you or I might take it to mean the removal of dust and dirt and disease-laden filth, the cleaning staff here seems to think of it more like a generalized redistribution of funk.

Take for example the tiled floors. When I've got a hard, non-carpeted floor to clean I figure it needs frequent sweeping and periodic mopping. During the mopping I use bleach and hot water. I take it as my mission in life to kill or destroy anything on that floor that could be seen as unsanitary or unsightly.

The locals hired to clean here have a much different modus operandi. In order to "clean" the tile floor, they pour some dirty water on it, then use a squeegee to squeege the dirt and water and whatever else into all of the grout and seams and cracks and pores.

In the end, their labors net a floor that is not only dirty, but wet too. It's like trading in your day-to-day, household dust for a big puddle of mud spread evenly throughout your home. The goal seems to be to look busy as opposed to actually getting anything done.

I don't understand.

On top of this flawed methodology, the only cleaning product they seem able to procure (apart from dirty water) is the alcohol-based hand sanitizer spray that we stock in the bathrooms here. It has one of the worst, God-awful smells I've ever found tied to the notion of cleanliness and they spray it on everything in the entire camp. During cleaning hours in the morning, I can't even walk into the building I sleep in without gagging.

In fact, the best way I've found to cope with the local version of "cleaning" is to just not be around it. Fortunately when the Friday cleaning crew comes around I have a ready-made escape.

Fridays are when a sanctioned group of merchants are allowed to set up shop on our athletic field and we're allowed to go out and get haggled for money. I usually end up ambling out there with any of the other guys from my office:

Once the bazaar is set up, you can find everything from pirate DVDs to gemstones. There are booths selling rugs and carved stone and woodcrafts and Pashmina silks and antique rifles left behind by the Brits in the 1800's. One of the most intriguing is a booth set up to sell the products made by Afghan women as a part of a SEATTLE-BASED CHARITY PROGRAM. But this week, for no reason I could account for, I decided I needed a nifty hat:

My hat was pretty damned cool, so Major Cheff decided that he too needed a nifty hat:

He failed to find a nifty hat even half as nifty as my nifty hat though, so I lent him one for a photo:

Nifty though they may have been, neither of my nifty hats were nearly as nifty as the nifty hat found by Major Brinkman:

He emailed this picture to his wife with a note to the effect of, "Hey, Honey, a guy at the market had Genghis Khan's original helmet for sale today. He wanted twenty grand for it, but I talked him down to six thousand dollars. Now I just need to ship it home, but the insurance is going to be pretty expensive..."

No word yet on her response.

Even better than hat shopping was watching Vic, one of the nicest guys I've met in a long time, trying to haggle. When I haggle I tend to piss people off. When he does it, he tends to make people happy. That's how I know I'm getting better deals.


I didn't end up getting much this week, but I'll be back next week to pick up more random, dusty things I probably don't need.

With a Little More Practice, I’ll be Able to Nail Jell-O to the Wall

For the past few days my section of the headquarters and I have been deeply mired in our quarterly Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) Conference. This is intended to be an opportunity for senior members of each of the 26 PRTs in theater to meet and exchange ideas and information.

The planning for this conference began at about the same time as I arrived and has been taking up a steadily increasing amount of our time ever since. As the various chores were divvied out, I was thrilled to learn that I would be responsible for coordinating lodging for all of the folks who were unable to find lodging of their own.

The headquarters compound where the conference would be held (and, incidentally, where I live, work, and eat) was built to accommodate 800 personnel. There are currently over 2,300 people stationed there. In the midst of all of this, they've been tearing down some of the housing buildings (don't ask why) and making even less space. Needless to say, the conference guests would have to stay elsewhere.

"Elsewhere" turned out to be Camp Souter, a British base on the other side of town. They too are pretty well crowded, so "accommodations" mostly turned out to be a collection of tents they had sitting empty in the base. Good enough I suppose.

For my part, I was to be at Camp Souter to show folks around once they arrived and arrange transportation to get them from Souter to the HQ compound on the days of the conference. To ensure I was there before any of our new friends arrived, I got dropped off two days before the conference was scheduled to begin.

The Canadian detachment on Camp Souter put me up in one of their few spare rooms and set me up to use their clubhouse as a reception area as folks arrived:

I really wish I'd've thought to take some pictures of the inside of this place. They've got a pretty good setup in there. There's a pool table and a decent sound system with a Wii and a couple of TVs and such. There's also a foosball table, hockey game, darts, a bar, two big grills, and more. Even though I woke up frightfully early and stayed up ridiculously late waiting for people to arrive, I couldn't exactly call it a hardship during my two days there.

Especially since only four people showed up at all in my first day there.

On the second day another sixty or so arrived. Mixed in was a sizeable group that had a meeting at HQ that afternoon. To facilitate this, we’d scheduled an armored bus to come and pick them up. I was expecting the bus at 1400 and told them all where to meet up when the time came around.

The time ended up coming around at 1230 when an Army 2nd Lieutenant in full combat gear walked up, saluted, pointed out the armored bus with four armed and armored gun trucks, and told me they were ready to go but my passengers hadn’t shown up. So I said, “Well, you’re awfully early, so if you guys want, you might as well stand down and grab lunch or whatever. It’ll be a while yet before everyone comes back.”

“Early?” says he, as he pulls a paper out of his pocket and shows it to me. “The order we got from you guys said to be here for a pickup at 1230.”

Oh dear.

I gave him my cellphone number and started rounding up the folks that needed to be on the bus. Since they were all off running around and thinking they had another 90 minutes to do whatever, it took a bit of time. About fifteen minutes into this little quest, my phone rang. It was an angry caller, but in hindsight it was a fun call:

ME: Hello.
CALLER: Is this Lieutenant Thorsson?
ME: Yes it is.
CALLER: This is Captain [garbled], the S-3 over here at Phoenix. I just got off the phone with my convoy commander and he said you didn’t have your people ready to move. I want you to tell me just what the hell is the problem over there.
ME: Okay, Captain, let’s slow down a minute. I realize you’re in the Army and when you’re talking to a lieutenant your used to talking down to someone. But I’m in the Navy, so you can stop acting like you outrank me.*
CALLER: Oh, well you…
ME: Now I was told your guys would be here at 1400. I’m not sure where the wires got crossed, but I’ll take the blame for that and I apologize. For right now I’m trying to track down a busload of lieutenant colonels** to solve our problem and the longer I talk to you, the longer it’s going to take. Is there something else you needed?
CALLER: No, that’s all really.
ME: 'Kay, thanks, buh bye.

This would prove to be the first in a series of Army officers who found me convenient for being unpleasant to. The next was a US Army lieutenant colonel who decided it was my fault that every accomodation facility in Kabul is overcrowded, forcing him to spend the conference sleeping in a tent. I suppose in his mind it was my idea to move tens of thousands of additional troops into the country. I don't really see what the big deal was though.

After all, the tents were heated. Or at least they started that way.

By 1900 two of the five heaters had broken down and refused to restart. These were amazing marvels of Rube Goldberg mechanics that ran on both diesel and electricity. By "ran on both" I mean to say that if there was a shortage of either they would shut down. The startup procedure was simple enough, but after half an hour of troubleshooting I was done raging against the machine.

By 2200 I'd given up on seeing any more people showing up and started moving lieutenant colonels and majors out of the tents and into rooms in real buildings that were set aside for colonels. I saved four empty beds for just in case. For no reason I can think of, three Germans and one Norwegian chose to stay in one of the unheated tents. Six US Army guys and one naval officer chose to stay in another unheated tent. Temperatures were predicted to drop well below freezing and there were at least eighteen empty bunks in the heated tents, but I decided not to push the issue after letting them know about it. Military people are wierd.

By 0130 I was in bed.

On my third day there the conference actually began. For me it began peacefully enough over at Camp Souter when I woke up at 0500:

Once I’d made sure all of the folks camped out with me were loaded onto the buses, I loaded me on the last one. Upon arrival at the HQ compound I took up my post at the front desk of the gym with Major Spilios Tsiros of the Greek Army and Major Adam Wloczewski of the Polish Army. We had a pretty good time with it most of the time:


Others from our outfit were not so lucky, such as Major Cheff (Canadian Army):


My duties there were simple. I was to answer questions for all of the guests who were new to the compound.
“Yes, ma’am, the restroom is down that hall to the left.”
“Yes, sir, there will be more coffee laid out soon.”
“No, sir, we can’t add you to the list of speakers at this point. The agenda has been set for over two weeks now."

Meanwhile, everyone else was inside working to shape the future of a nation:

I was pretty happy with my little contribution to the conference and things were going pretty smoothly. Then, in the midst of this brief moment of well-being, a very irate full colonel*** from the US Army managed to stump me with the first difficult question of the day:

“Why is Deputy Minister So-and-so up on the stage with the rest of the panel?”

“I can’t tell you sir,” says I, “I’m just here to help folks find their way around, the panel members were invited by the Admiral**** there.”

Ignoring my confession of uselessness, he went on. He explained that he was assigned as mentor to this particular Afghan official and that as far as he was told, his charge was invited to observe and would not have a speaking part. He was also expecting to have an interpreter assigned to him as he does not speak English. Now there he was, seated on the stage with a number of other government officials, without an interpreter, and staring into the working end of a microphone. As the panel droned on about their various visions for the future of the nation, this colonel continued to rant about how screwed up our entire organization was.

A good twenty minutes into his blustery review of everything wrong with NATO in general and ISAF in particular (which were now apparently the fault on one lowly US Navy lieutenant), one of my co-workers walked up and asked if I knew anything about the extra guy on the panel. It turns out that he sat down in the front row along with the rest of the Afghan government officials attending the conference, and when the Admiral invited the panel to join him on the platform this extra dude just went along with the crowd. Being attentive, the Admiral noticed that there was someone there who he knew nothing about and he sent my officemate Vic to find out whatever he could about him.

So when Vic asked me if I could find any bio information on the extra minister, I pointed him toward the very heated Army Colonel standing inches away from me and let him get yelled at for a few minutes. After ten minutes of noise about how embarrassing it will be for this poor guy if he's called on to speak and forced to flounder in front of his peers, I decided to interrupt:

"Sir," says I, "If you could hold off being angry about this potential problem for just a moment, Lieutenant Commander Vale here is looking for some information to pass to the Admiral so we can prevent the problem you're worried about. All we need is a few notes on who he is and we'll make sure he gets the word not to ask him to speak."

"Oh," says he, "Well, uh, his name is [Such-and-such], he's the Deputy Minister of [whatever]. Um, he's [XX] years old. He's Pashtun. What else do you need? I don't know."

Vic scribbled all of this down and wrote in bold letters across the top "DO NOT ASK THIS MAN TO SPEAK!" I stood there looking attentive as the Colonel continued to berate me for causing this whole problem. While I waited, looking duly apologetic and saying "yessir" a lot, I watched Vic hand the note to the Admiral and point out the line at the top. Once the Admiral nodded, I excused myself to the Colonel and made myself look busy with some other tidbit of minutia until he went away.

Ten minutes later he found me again.

"So," he spouts, "guess who's at the fucking podium right now!"

I'm still not sure what else I could've done for him. Here in this headquarters we've got a few dozen Generals and Admirals, a few hundred Colonels, Captains, Lieutenant Colonels, and Commanders. If he was really looking to find someone to make a change to the way things are run here, he probably should've looked for someone other than the Navy Lieutenant who was designated to show the guests where the bathrooms were.

I later learned that it was one of the other Afghan ministers who invited this guy up onto the platform and it was this deputy minister himself who ask for an opportunity to speak. So much for his US Army Colonel mentor being on top of things.

After that little bit of angry, the rest of the conference passed without any major headaches. I continued to sort out a handfull of concierge-related things and helped out with making sure that nothing got lost. I'm sure there was a great deal of valuable information traded in the course of the event, but I missed it.

The one portion of one panel that I did sit in on was, in my mind, a microcosm of everything wrong with policy-making in this country. There was an Army Colonel leading a panel discussion on prison reform within Afghanistan. They'd gone over a few things at the outset before opening the discussion to questions from the floor. The first one was precious:

"Colonel," asked the asker, "Are there any plans for the prisons to begin collecting biometric data such as digital fingerprints or retina scans to keep track of the prisoners."

This is precisely the sort of thinking that causes problems with reconstruction efforts here. Biometric data collection in the rest of the world is a great idea. Building scan-able, share-able databases so that law enforcement entities can better identify known criminals is a worthwhile endeavor. But, as the Colonel leading the discussion pointed out, they have more pressing priorities first. For example, many of the prisons in this country don't have electricity. Or sewage systems. Or running water. Or roofs. In fact, I've read reports that a few of them are just big, open pits dug into the ground.

It's pretty hard to manage a biometric database when you don't even have electricity and over half of your staff is illiterate. Needless to say, the Afghan prison system has a ways to go before it catches up with the rest of the world. But I digress.

All in all, it was nice to actually be busy for a few days, but I'm really glad to have this ordeal behind me. Just to celebrate, when it was all over I had myself a tiny little tower of soft-serve ice cream:


Fortunately, the next one of these things won't happen until well after I'm scheduled to depart. The quarterly PRT conference was a success, but it was also such a pain in the ass that the Admiral has decided to make it a semi-annual event from now on.

Awesome.

*An Army captain is the same paygrade as a Navy Lieutenant, so at best this guy was the same rank as me. More likely, I have greater seniority.
**An Army lieutenant colonel outranks a Navy lieutenant (or an Army Captain) by two paygrades. A busload of them who are all interrupted halfway through lunch and told to hurry into their armor and helmets and grab their rifles because someone made a typo are likely to be a bit difficult to keep calm.
***A full Colonel in the Army is equivalent in rank to a Navy Captain or an Air Force Deputy Super-Senior Vice Birdman Commandant. I am not allowed to ignore their problems.
****My boss is a US Navy Commander. His Boss is a Spanish Army one-star General. His boss is a Dutch Navy two-star Admiral. A two-star Admiral can pretty much ignore the hell out of the problems of an Army Colonel. The Air Force calls their flag-level officers "General" as well, but they make them wear hats with lightning bolts on them***** so it's still pretty goofy.
*****I'm totally not kidding about the lightning bolts:

But I should stop making fun of the Air Force. They get enough of that already, those poor goofy-looking bastards...

Now I've Been Officially Quoted...

...and it made me sound a bit dim.

Yesterday the headquarters Public Affairs Office issued the following press release:

OPERATIONAL UPDATE
International Security Assistance Force – Afghanistan
Committed to the security, reconstruction and extension of governance in Afghanistan
2009-203

PRTs exchange ideas at ISAF

KABUL, Afghanistan (February 28) - Afghanistan's 26 Provisional Reconstruction Team (PRT) commanders, along with 400 multi-national representatives attended the quarterly PRT conference held at International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Headquarters, Feb 25-26.

The goal of conference organisers is to host a forum where every PRT commander can see plans simultaneously, have to opportunity to ask questions and then take back their newfound knowledge to their respective province.

An additional benefit of the conference is that it serves as an opportunity to exchange information with counterparts and talk about lessons learned by bringing everyone together providing an invaluable opportunity to network.

"You can communicate a lot of things through e-mail, but there are a lot more items that you don’t think of while you are typing that you think of while you are standing right next to them" said U.S. Navy Lieutenant Shawn Thorsson, a PRT engagement officer for Regional Command-East (RC-E).

More than two-dozen briefings took place over the two-day conference covering a wide spectrum of topics including border security, disaster assistance, counter-narcotics and best practices.

"I think the sessions are good since each one is unique"' said U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Andy Torelli, the Zabul Province PRT Commander. "I was talking with a Czech Republic PRT commander and he mentioned they are doing a hydrology study that peaked my interest because we need to do that in our area, so I asked what they are doing and now I can take his advice back and use it in my province."

Renee Thakali, a U.S. Department of Agriculture advisor who has only been in Afghanistan for a few days said the conference gave her the background information she needs.

"My PRT has 30 different projects going on and this conference gives me the opportunity to network with others. It’s been a great way to start my new job."

Kabul, Afghanistan—Participants in the PRT Conference held at HQ ISAF listen and take notes on the panel discussion. The conference gives all attendees an opportunity to voice best practices and lessons learned from their respective province. (ISAF photo)

Kabul, Afghanistan—ISAF’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Stability, Rear Admiral Mattieu Borsboom, along with other panel members give insight to PRT commanders at the quarterly PRT Conference held at HQ ISAF 25-26 Feb. The conference gives all attendees an opportunity to voice best practices and lessons learned from their respective province. (ISAF photo)

I ended up chatting with the interviewer for quite a while and I'm disappointed that she couldn't find a use for any of the slightly brighter things I said in the interview. I'm also not sure why she didn't get a byline (TSgt Nipper was her name, incidentally) but maybe they're not supposed to do that for a press release. Who knows.

So that was exciting I suppose.

I'll be posting the same story (from my own particularly charming, bitter, little angle) as soon as I get a chance. Stay tuned.

Driving Through the Countryside...

...and I hate it.

My boss decided the other day that he didn't like being limited to only one driver in the office. Apparently he's concerned that asking for other offices to support us with drivers when needed is going to somehow impair our ability to tour the countryside and waste people's time. More on that later.

The other day I made another trip up to Bagram Air Base. It was a clear day after some heavy snow and made for some interesting scenery. Of course, as always, it also meant that there was no shortage of people just sitting or standing around out in the middle of nowhere.







They weren't all just standing around. Some of them had actually found things to do. For example, there were plenty of kids playing in the middle of the highway:

Many of them were also out there with shovels putting dirt into the potholes in the hopes that some passer-by might toss them a few coins or some drinking water for their efforts.

Then there was this group of industrious Afghan roofers:

And these folks carrying or dragging their wares into town:


Along the way we also passed a few construction sites:

All of which were usually in close proximity to ruins:


And while the drive was uneventful enough, I still say that I am not at all comfortable with driving around in Afghanistan:


For some reason I don't think my few months per year spent driving a tiny sports car around Northern California's wine country are quite enough to prepare me for driving an unarmed, top-heavy, up-armored SUV around in a snow-covered, mine-laden, combat zone. Our drivers are all given months of training behind the wheel of a combat vehicle before being deployed here to do this job.

I am increasingly in the wrong damned place.

A Helpful Dating Tool for Men

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine suggested I write this parody of a health pamphlet so that he could "accidentally" leave it someplace conspicuous in his car when he goes to pick up a date.

After we had finished brainstorming, I cranked this out and I'm pretty satisfied with it. After finishing it, I thought it might be useful for more men and I posted it on my old blog for posterity's sake. Since I've decided to neglect the old blog, I'm posting it here too.

I'm posting it as a couple of picture files since that's the only way I can put it here. If you'd like a high resolution version of it for a better printout, let me know and I can email it to you.

Remember, this is a tri-fold brochure, so print it double sided and fold it so that this panel is on the front:

This is the outside of the folded brochure:

And this is the inside:

If you'd like to upload the word file and print out a higher resolution version of the brochure, you can download it BY CLICKING HERE. Just remember to print it in black & white, on brightly colored paper. Then leave it somewhere where it will be noticed and act embarrassed when someone spots it.

Enjoy.