The Global Californian

This blog has moved!

2009-04-26T23:11:00.001+05:30

Come follow me at my new home, scottbohlinger.com. The archives have been transferred as well.

The American Deep State and Conciliation with Iran

2009-03-24T17:55:00.000+05:30

Obama's Nawroz message to Iran marked a serious shift in American policy and attitude towards Iran but also showed the structural weaknesses in the American state that could prevent it from achieving those goals. Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, gave an excellent and well-thought-out reply to that speech the following day, which has been analysed by Juan Cole and Farideh Farhi. When discussing countries like Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, commentators often mention the existence of a 'deep state', a coterie of officials somewhere within the state apparatus who have ultimate control over policy. I don't think this is much the case with Iran, and I'll explain below, but it definitely is a factor with the US, and in a lot of ways it gets to the heart of constraints on nation-states' abilities to act and react.

Although representing an unmistakable improvement in attitude, the American overture revealed serious errors and a general lack of understanding on the part of the US government. The speech started out with a nice amount of ego-stroking and going on about the greatness of the Persian people and nation. Now this represents a good surface-level understanding understanding of Iranian culture, when people greet each other they go on with endless platitudes and compliments, but at some point they get down to business. This tendency to spend lots of time complimenting people, indeed often dialectically and with an almost competitive attention to detail, is known as ta'âruf. Notice the point about 'competitive attention to detail' and then 'getting down to business'; that's what's called zaringî or "cleverness". In how you compliment somebody and what you compliment them on, you are setting the framework for what you want to discuss (or even the relationship more generally), hopefully in your favour. When Americans become familiar with the concepts of ta'âruf and zaringî, they understand them both individually but fail to realise how Iranian culture puts them together so magnificently into the political WMD known as pârtîbâzî. And this extends to every level of human interaction--if it seems overly political, well it is, and it exhausts many Iranians themselves as well as many foreigners (of course, being a fan of the supremacy of politics in life, I love it, and I think it gives Iranians a real leg-up in the modern world). A compliment, when followed up by a specifically glaring lack of action also has the effect of being a huge insult...one of those insults that knocks people flat on their asses and gets talked about for a long time because it was such a great diss.

The point is, after all of this lovely ta'âruf the US president needed to get down to business by way of introducing one or two solid chunks of new policy. Rather, what he did was say this:

"You, too, have a choice. The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nation. You have that right -- but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilisation. And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated capacity to build and create."

Burn. Along with not introducing any new policies on the part of the US, Obama instead offered sharp criticism by implying that Iran is not being responsible and that the main thrust of its diplomacy is bolstered by terror and arms. Iran is far from being my favourite state actor, but this sort of talk is useless and largely out of line. The most negative interpretation is that the US simply doesn't get it while a more positive one would be that Obama and his team get it but the broader political establishment both made them throw this in as a disclaimer and required the speech to be cautious so as to elicit a response from the Iranian government before introducing concrete policy initiatives. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

Many Americans would like to believe that the US's primary USP is its ideological commitments, but the reality is different. It doesn't particularly fail in that regard, but first and foremost its commitment is to its citizens, nor is it a particularly responsible member of the international community. Even if Obama really is different than the neglect or disparagement of liberal ideals which we have seen from the US recently, the US has no right to go around chastising others for support of militant movements. Support for groups like Hizbullah as bargaining chips is minor compared to the level of US support for Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Additionally the comments reveal that Iran's desire to build a bomb is taken to be undeniable. I would argue that there is no consensus about this in the Iranian leadership other than the notion that the door should be left open. The chances of the leadership committing to weaponisation are indeed small in any circumstance short of an attack on Iran, the political and clerical opposition would likely topple the government were that openly mooted. Rather, Iran, like the US, is a status-quo power with the occasional ideological flourish. The inflammatory statements which come from Iran are usually the populist rants of President Ahmadinejad and aren't taken seriously by many Iran-watchers--when Khamenei gets on stage things are much more subdued. Again this is no more inflammatory that the Bush managed to say even when he wasn't mangling his words. The reality is, that while Iran has been a force for stability, real security nightmares have come to pass, like Israel's and Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear weapons. True, Iran's internal human rights record could use some work (especially with regards to treatment of Bahais), but it's still the liveliest and most participatory governments around its region.

So it's clear that the US view of Iran is disproportionately bad in comparison to other regional actors. This probably boils down to a matter of pride, as well as the shock of all the anti-Americanism expressed during the revolution (as used to it as we are now, it was a genuine shock then). What worries me is that deep down the American security services and intelligence agencies just don't get it. One of the main qualifications for getting the necessary clearance to work at those levels is loyalty to the US, and by and large this is not the pluralistic US of Nawroz and Chinese new year but of apple pie and narrow worldviews. Anyone with genuine empathy towards non-Americans (I once heard a CIA official call it "affinity for foreign regions"!) isn't going to make it far in this system and their viewpoint will have been largely shaped by the received wisdom or lack thereof. This isn't a particular criticism of the US, it's a problem with the nation state in general; in this case the Iranian security services have similar issues. It means that some Americans think they're being real clever and understanding by buttering up Iran but haven't had enough exposure to the culture to realise that they came off as demeaning by not following up a grand gesture with grand substance. Such people might not also realise that they US really needs to change the way it acts, even if those are the actions that Iran has been criticising for so long for entirely the wrong reasons. And this is what I mean when I talk about the "deep state". There is a certain class of people who must be disabused of entirely false notions for the US to take the steps necessary to produce dialogue with Iran.

Iran too has deeply intrenched and unaccountable actors that make policy decisions they should not. However, where Iran sometimes lacks full democracy, nobody can accuse one faction of having a monopoly. All of the various security services, government foundations (which control 85% of the economy), and many different elements of the military and revolutionary guards answer to their own patrons and interests, but this hardly equals a coherent policy like one sees in the US or Turkey. Rather, it can best be seen as a gross lack of accountability and state-wide sclerosis that makes any sort of major political movement difficult. When Iranian-made weapons turn up in bazaars in Afghanistan they are not the result of state policy, they could be the decision of one commander somewhere to make a little bit of illicit financial gain or of a factory owner, or both parties thought they were selling to someone legitimate who was really a front for someone less so. So yes, there are all sorts of actors with all sorts of interests buried deep within the Iranian government, but they don't represent a deep state that is really in control of Iran.

What the US needs with Iran is leverage, and that leverage cannot be built by scolding Iran. Serious dialogue needs to be based on interest. As much as it pains me personally, if the US (and Iran) can ignore talking about ideology, they will be able to do a lot together merely because it is in each other's best interests. The US is not in a position to scold Iran and needs to refrain from doing so, and as such needs to approach talks with unconditionality. I would advise Iran of the same thing. Luckily both sides want dialogue and we'll gauge how much that's the case by willingness to overlook gaffes. Khamenei's response was rightly welcomed by Obama's press secretary. Let's just hope that the US doesn't wait for change from Iran before it does the right thing itself.

The Big Picture in Afghanistan

2009-03-16T15:04:00.000+05:30

There's one question that's on everyone's mind when the come into my office. What do you think is going to happen with Afghanistan? I haven't heard another theory or narrative that I'm completely satisfied with actually, so I've gone rogue and developed my own.

Stalemate followed by eventual collapse of the insurgency. Right now both the Western Coalition and the various anti-government elements known collectively as the Taliban have difference strengths and weakness that match them fairly well in their contest over Afghanistan. Both groups have now reached watersheds in their ability to control and influence the situation and what happens from here on out will shatter the traditional discourse of insurgency that both sides now buy into. The "Taliban" do not own the morality discourse and are fast running out of demonstrable strategic gains. The result is that they will increasingly discredit themselves by trying to win over people who are not sympathetic to their message and possibly also playing the role of spoiler. The situation for ordinary Afghans and aid workers will not improve for a few years, but security will eventually improve as it becomes apparent that the opposition doesn't have a viable option and that the government of Afghanistan is the least bad option.

There is no Taliban. There are a number of groups, at least forty, using the Taliban as their brand identity. They have different goals and motivations both at the level of individual and group. Some groups operate in a valley or district, others provincially, and others still operate both nationally and internationally with a combination of cells, linkages, and co-operation with other networks. Some groups exist independently of any government, others are funded and given logistical support directly by members of the Pakistani state. A bombing carried out by the Haqqani network was planned in an office in Islamabad, materials were sourced by legal, illegal, and semi-legal means through a network of actors with Haqqani providing key logistical support for one major bottleneck in the plan's execution. Further down the road, the combined governmental-Haqqani apparatus worked with yet more diverse elements to facilitate, obscure, and obfuscate the plan until its fruition. This description of one incident is representative in the diversity of possibilities and groups involved in carrying out an operation, not its sepcific details. Along with not reflect facts, lumping insurgent activity under the heading of Taliban also helps validate their narrative. Most analysts realise there is no coherent Taliban movement, but is too often used as a crutch in describing the situation.

This insurgency is different that the one against the Soviets. If you travel to Badakhshan, the far northeastern province of Afghanistan never to have been ruled by the Taliban, it's amazing how much anti-Soviet grafitti there is in a place which has almost no organised insurgency today. What's the difference? It's who's fighting. The primary distinction between the 1980s and the 2000s is that in the former everyone fought while now insurgent activity is limited almost exclusively to Pashtuns. Now most Pashtuns are law-abiding and upstanding citizens and this statement should not be taken as a group indictment of them. Rather it is an acknowledgement of the fact that anti-government activity occurs within networks strongly correlated to the Pashtun ethno-linguistic sphere. Futhermore, Persian- and Turkish speakers (Uzbeks, Turkmen, Hazaras, Tajiks, Aimaqs) are if anything probably more conservative than their Pashto-speaking brethren. The ability of Pashtuns to organise and agitate either individually or collectively stems precisely from their greater contact with modernity resulting from interconnectedness with South Asian culture and global ideological trends. The ethno-linguistic dynamics which have appeared since the 2001 invasion are key way in which the current insurgency differs from that conducted against the Soviets.

So where to now? In 2008 the anti-government insurgence made remarkable strides in both number of incidents and areas of expansion. Any security-risk map of Afghanistan has changed since 2003 from red/orange splotches in the south to a line which runs down the backbone of the Hindu Kush mountains, effectly dividing the country in two. Both geographically and politically, two of the most important gains for insurgents last year were the collapse of security in southern Herat province and eastern Badghis.

Now here's a question? Why did eastern Badghis fall apart while Herat city remained fairly stable (the insurgent influence spreading far northeast to an almost un-contiguous patch)? Because of the limitations of the insurgency. Until 2008, the expansion of the insurgency has occurred in areas where a potentially sympathetic population had not yet been swayed. Invariably this has meant Pashtun communities like those in the south of Herat and in the eastern districts of Badghis. (This rule is not absolute; in southern Shindand, when a group used the violence as an excuse to call in an American air strike which killed almost 100 civilians, residents' enthusiasm for the insurgency was somewhat diminished) An unconventional military force cannot take Herat (nor Qandahar, nor Kabul), and on the whole anti-government elements have not tried. Also, Herat is strategically useful to various insurgent factions in that it serves as a sort of free trade zone where weapons can be bought and money can be made. Instead of Herat, various groups focused their energies on the valley of Bala Murghab and Ghormach in eastern Badghis where there were both dense pockets of Pashtun settlement and the major strategic objective of delaying the completion of the last stretch of the ring road. Eastern Badghis has since seen major clashes and even some of the furthest-north airstrikes since 2001.

With the collapse of government authority in major chunks of the west in 2008, the Afghan war has now reached a stalemate. Anti-government forces can't gain any more support in new areas of the country and will need to show successes. Reporting often reveals a bias whereby insurgents always seem on the verge of winning precisely because their modus operandi is spectacular, media-grabbing incidents, whose likely outcome is the result of response to media coverage. Coalition, or any anti-insurgency forces, have an in-built problem of perception in that few of their successes will grab headlines. A village not having been overrun by insurgents will not make the front page. By this same logic however, anti-government forces also need to achieve spectacular strikes to keep up attention and validate their narrative. The Qandahar prison break and the Serena attack caught headlines but now insurgents need to have more of that in other areas of the country, specifically the stable north otherwise an insurgency which claims to be national but is in reality not will run into serious legitimacy problems.

Tipping the other half of Afghanistan. Anti-government threats to the north have followed two trends since 2007. Various anti-government groups have intended to incite such sentiment amongst potentially sympathetic groups in at least four major areas throughout the north. This involves a combination of propaganda, support, and matériel. The other major stratagem is the pursuit of a spectacular attack in the north to validate the national reach of the insurgency and make believable the idea that the north too is now ungovernable.

Two pockets in the north which are more receptive to anti-government sentiment are western Balkh province and Kunduz province. Both areas have relatively high amounts of Pashtun settlement, though in Kunduz such settlement is both denser and in higher concentrations. The northern Pashtun populations are the result of both natural population movements within an ethnically diverse state but also of government-sponsored resettlement campaigns from the late nineteenth century. In the end, these Pashtun communities never fully integrated into their surroundings and also remained tied to wider trends within Pashtun society. A large number of Pashtuns have intermarried and effectively Persianised but still many cluster together in separate villages or on the edges of existing settlements where they may not be properly incorporated into consultative processes such as shuras and needs assessments. Adding fuel to this lack of social integration was the Taliban occupation of the area from 1997 to 2001. The Taliban regime attempted to turn the tables an favour local Pashtuns to be in charge of its administration in the area, leading to more than a little vindictive justice and further embittering communities. The Taliban's favouring of the Pashtuns at the expense of local Turks and Persians played a large role in permanently delegitimising any movement by the name of the Taliban in their eyes. Some anti-government factions seem to be aware of this and bifurcate their strategy, targeting Pashtuns with the message of a revived Taliban and Turks with propaganda hailing from "The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan" (IMU). In any event the result is that anti-government activity happens to a much greater extent in areas that are already sympathetic to the Taliban cause.

In western Balkh a lot of this process has been an attempt to build in-group sentiment and solidify group solidarity by means of night letters posted in public places. A recent example (and representative of past incidents) was a graphic showing the Afghan nation as a puppet with the strings being tugged by various actors from the government of Afghanistan, to foreign countries, to the NGO community. It was written in Pashto and clearly had the purpose of explaining, justifying, and proselytising for the movement rather than threatening dire consequences due to its already overwhelming might and support. Furthermore, the notice was fairly professional and reproduced by photocopy and distributed by motor vehicle, both requiring a significant amount of capital and indicative of top-down organisation. Insurgent activity, when it does happens in this area is fairly low-level and consists predominantly of threats and murders, with the occasional small arms fire attack or poorly constructed IED.

In Kunduz the dynamic is similar but the higher population receptive to anti-government activity means that incidents are both more common and more disruptive. It also helped that the Taliban regime chose Kunduz for their administrative centre in the north, which means the connections to more active networks in the south remain stronger. Complex attacks involving small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades (RPG) are more common, as well as well-construct and consequently deadlier IEDs and even suicide attacks. Suicide attackers in Kunduz do not originate in the province but are brought in from further afield; still it is important that the community can sustain and conceal them long enough for them to execute an attack. Still in Kunduz, there are areas where anti-government sentiment and activity is extremely high and areas where there is none at all. Moreover, armed groups have had mixed success in convincing non-supportive groups of their cause. In a few occasions insurgent patrolled have been publicly embarrassed or the recipients of local backlashes. In short the dynamic in Kunduz reflects that of elsewhere in the north, activity exists where and because support already exists, and those not in the in-group have no interest in joining. At the end of the day anti-government elements fail to win new hearts and minds and end up preaching to the choir.

In two other areas of the north, anti-government activity is either the result of political rivalries or influenced directly from the outside. In the areas surrounding Aqcha in eastern Jawzjan local potentates routinely try to raise their profile by sponsoring violent activity. The political benefits are that they can demonstrate their usefulness by appearing to stamp such activity out or they can be credited with it. Incidents are consequently less numerous but more high-profile. The same political forces in Jawzjan that make such campaigns desirable also combine to tamp down violent activity before it escalates too much (it is made apparent to the actor that he has crossed a line). In Faryab armed groups from the volatile eastern districts of Badghis are likewise trying to destabilise the situation but have met with relatively little success thanks to willingness of locals to report on their movements. Remarkably Faryab has had almost no increase in incidents from 2007 to 2008 which the few additional incidents being limited to a single district.

Spectacular attacks. The strategy of significant attacks in the north of Afghanistan seems to have been a goal since at least November 2007, when a major suicide bombing captured headlines by killing 40 people in Baghlan, including members of parliament and a potential presidential hopeful, Mustafa Kazimi. In addition to reports of plans for a high-profile kidnapping, anti-government elements succeeded in a major suicide bombing of the police headquarters in Puli Khumri (Baghlan's capital) which killed and severely injured several Afghans and international forces. Baghlan is bears the brunt of such threats because it is strategically significant being located in the north and because it straddles the key north-south route between Mazar/Kunduz and Kabul. Every additional kilometre into the north of Afghanistan posed great challenges for anti-government groups trying to carry out attacks. It involves more security forces to be bribed and more chances to be ratted out. However once cannot underestimate the desirability of such an attack for anti-government hopefuls looking to strike a major blow to the government's perceived stability and raise their street cred amongst fellow insurgents. The 2007 bombing in Baghlan may well have been one of the few events in the north to have been covered in international media. Similarly the attack on the Serena hotel in Kabul got far more coverage that similarly executed and more deadly attacks because of the symbolic value of the establishment and the fact that the deaths were foreigners.

The dynamics of the north argue against the southern, Pashtun-based insurgency ever getting a firm foothold there, but until that is apparent through a long process of trial and error, these groups' own internal ideologies and the need for the perception of manifest success will push them to try. With insurgent control having reached both its maximum depth and breadth in approximately the southern half of the country, such groups will have little on their hand but to attempt to extend their influence in the north. (Attacks on military forces and perceived collaborators in the south will of course continued unabated though) The result of more attention, resources, and matériel being poured into the north will have a negative impact on regular people, NGOs, the international presence, and the government for probably the next one to three years. The long-term news is good but the short-term will be trying. Insurgents always like to say they have time on their side. The oft-repeated phrase runs: "You have the watch, but we have the time." This is defeatist and simply not constructive; in this case the Coalition has both the watch, the time, and more importantly acknowledges the existence of time, but it will take time.

The Afghan Scene: The Culture of Aid in Afghanistan

2009-03-13T18:05:00.001+05:30

Delving further into this occasional series on aid in Afghanistan, I thought I would do my own spiel on who comes here and why, and what they do when they get here. Now, this has been done before (I think even the actual Afghan Scene got around to its own send up), but this is my take. Essentially these are a number of personality types that people fall into, and they often move from one type into another (as I have); sometimes they overlap too. An remember that people have to be fairly "interesting" to get here in the first place. Generally living and working has remained tolerable thanks to what I call "the filter", it's exotic enough that it filters out people who just want to stay at home but also not violent enough that it filters out the craziest conflict junkies. What ensues is enough solid people that you make some first-rate friendships and enough drama to fill the rest of the time rubbernecking and reminding yourself how sensible you are even though you too are drinking a G&T behind Hesco barriers. I really encouraged comments and suggestions regarding this, maybe we can even make a definitive taxonomy.

The romantic. You know this guy from numerous portrayals in pop-culture. He loves the traditional, real, unsullied culture before the white man (yours truly) sullied it with 1960s urban planning schemes, communism, stinger missiles, new-fangled Islamism, and pavement. This mindset has a lot in common with the hippy but overall has a more colonial era feel to it. Also hippies tend to come from the US while romantics often hail from western Europe. Romantics don't always take themselves seriously, but they have a tendency towards sepia-toned photographs of themselves near random derelict forts, high-priced nicknacks from Zardozi, and tea at Turquoise Mountain (yes I do like both organisations and have bought stuff there myself). Many such individuals are the product of the western nationalism meme (everyone must have their own flag and national cuisine!) so sometimes its easier to accept the 21st century construction of Afghanistan with its ubiquitous qabili pulaw and creeping xenophobia that the real complex historical picture.

If the romantic is motivated enough by religion they might well fall into the missionary category, but often they don't simply stay romantics. They often stay in Afghanistan and, having learned to take it with a wheelbarrow of salt become lifers or realists. This probably best describes me when I arrived (read my initial posts!) with my obsession with the Persian language (still there but only acknowledging I'm an LA snob), occasionally wearing of kurta pijama (okay for South Asian weddings filled with women, booze, and good music), and willingness to abstain from alcohol. Though if the romantic gets sufficiently jaded and cynical they are also good candidates for veering to the other extreme, the mercenary.

The missionary. The distinguishing feature of the missionary is the religious motivation, and it applies to one religion in particular. It's actually the most complex category because it encompasses both the best and worst instincts of people seeking to help Afghanistan. On the one hand you have people who are honest and open about their faith and quietly use it as a motivation to do good things in competent ways, but on the other there are a few people who are way too certain in an uncertain environment. Other big issues are the social isolation of missionaries and the fact that religious organisations add a layer of complexity to underlying political and cultural issues.

Some faith-based NGOs and individuals have had remarkable acceptance and longevity in Afghanistan. I figure religion should and can be a positive force, even if I don't personally have time or interest for it. And if religion is your deal, the best way to do it, then being open about it is the way to go. People will make their own individual choice whether to deal or not. I am annoyed that people have to complicate the picture with religion, because Afghans are particularly sensitive to the topic, but then again the major problem with Afghan society is xenophobia and the suspicion of different customs and lifestyles. As a liberal, pluralistic Westerner that argues for rights in the West, I can't start making exceptions in Afghanistan. Also development inherently involves a degree of proselytisation (usually to modernity and modernity-appropriate customs and mores), so pure and simple transparency and accountability go further to justifying aid and the aid community's presence.

On the other end you have the loonies, best exemplified by the group of Koreans that were taken hostage in Ghazni. These individuals exercise the minimum amount of planning and cultural sensitivity, but here I would also argue that the religious loonies share common ground with the secular loonies; witness two Germans that were executed after they set up camp by a river in the mountains and decided to take a naked swim in the river. Another annoying point is bringing in small children to Afghanistan. This country doesn't have proper facilities for them so it's putting them at risk and it's unfair to minors. People should be encouraged to come to places like Afghanistan, but ultimately when basic health is at issue they need to make that choice for themselves.

The missionaries then represent a microcosm of the aid community in general. The real salient point, and where they fit into my taxonomy, is that they do keep separate from everyone else which means lessons are unnecessarily re-learned. A large part of this tendency in turn is the result of the personality of people who tend to a) be attracted to religion and b) be motivated by said religion to come to Afghanistan. They're quiet and they don't socialise a lot with others. They don't go out to L'Atmosphere or La Cantina, and so they don't get to know the rest of us. Because aid coordination is already so limited we need all the social interaction we can get (of course I'm always annoyed by quiet, introverted people, but I can let that go).

The adventurer. The adventurer's main attribute is the quest for adrenaline. Adventurers have varying degrees of cultural sensitivity but are always motivated by excitement. There are nature adventurers who like long journeys in remote places far from accoutrements and medical services. Also in this category are conflict junkies, people who get excited for reasons correlating with or resulting from media attention. Conflict junkies might be motivated by the appearance of badassness more than the actual adrenaline rush from putting oneself in a potentially harmful situation. One should recognise that most people get a little bit of conflict junkie/adventurer in them after living in places like this. After a while you get used to traded stories of near misses and Ben Gurion Airport shakedowns.

The lifer. The lifer is destined to spend his or her life wandering from one conflict zone or third world country to the next. They have a genuine interest in their work and living in such environment but often end up going from one ineffectual contract to the next, often because they either do not think of the big picture or don't feel compelled to do anything about it. Some lifers are happy and have deep and profound specialisations in areas of development you never knew existed. Others are emotionally stunted and have never come to terms the tradeoffs or requisite management skills necessarily juggle such a career with a fulfilling personal life. Many journalists fall into the lifer category. A lot of NGO workers are here too, going on as country directors and programme managers. A hidden upside though is that many such people are refreshingly devoid of national attachments which clears away a lot of bullshit and can allow you to connect with them at that basic human level that I am so fond of.

The mercenary. The mercenary is rather like the lifer, but here the work comes before the sorts of environment. A mercenary is indifferent to whether they are in western Europe or Afghanistan, just so long as they do their job and get paid well for it. (the lifer will get bored in a place like Europe) A lot of technical advisors fall into mercenary category as do meatheads. Meatheads are often caricturised as their own group because they form such a distinct and visible presence (drunk and routy at conflict zone bars), but in reality they are no different than the hydrologist or Islamic finance expert, just trained in a specific area. Private security company employees (to use their full name) are usually people with a military background who have discovered they can get paid obscenely more in the private. The role of PSCs is an interesting one to watch in that they provide essential services (and usually more cheaply and effectively) that cumbersome nation-states and their armies cannot. Where PSC employees differ from other "mercenaries" is in institutional culture. A PSC will often follow a pattern of starting up with a small, competent, and close-nit network of individuals, who are highly effective and therefore attract a lot of business. As a result the company will scale up, stop vetting so carefully, and take on all sorts of people, and this is where most of the corruption and abuse enters. Some people who start out in the military/PSC realm eventually end up acquiring more of a humanitarian sensitivy and end up forging the middle route between humanitarian actors and belligerents, eventually bringing them into the realist camp. Other "mercenaries" manage to get attached to the country (or at least its complexities) and end up staying on because accumulated knowledge and connections become more valuable and there's opportunity to fix even more things and earn more money.

The hippy. Life used to be nasty, brutish, and short. And for most Afghans it still is. Yes, there are people who prove that a nobly savage utopia can be sought in even the most patriarchal society and still others who get stuck short of the Indian subcontinent whose citizens and customs most of their brethren end up benighting and making a mockery of. Ah, but these Afghans live in small simple villages, work on the land, and have grounded spirituality, and celebrate the small things in life. Many of them also have astoundingly rude and harmful notions about a lot of things in the world around them, and will have to change many or most of their received wisdom if their children are going to live past forty with a decent amount of teeth.

Such people differ from romantics in that whereas romantics see a specific intricate tapestry (which also doesn't exist), the hippy sees a simple universal tableau. Frankly the hippy doesn't last long in Afghanistan due to the sheer weight of reality around them and are much better suited to places where the simple folk are more well off like Turkey or Iran. But still you'll see a few here.

The realist. When you understand that, yes Afghanistan is completely full of bullshit, as is the aid effort to help it, you have become a realist. Maybe you also realise that the best you can do is contain the drama here from affecting other society that are willing to play ball; just create a space so that people can put it together when they stop beating each other over the head with gilded tissue boxes. The realist also realises that the majority of the world's population live fairly comfortable middle-class lives and doesn't feel bad about a weekend of normalcy in Dubai. I think all of start out as one of the above groups and go on to become realists at heart. Or we don't and move on to some other place more amenable to our lifestyles. Of course missionaries and adventurers can always get their kicks (rockclimbing or Jesus) alongside a more hard-headed approach, but that's more difficult for the romantics and hippies. Lifers and mercenaries have different goals altogether. For me an example of a realist approach is that I don't bitch and moan about not being able to drink, but I damn well do so when I get the chance because there is nothing wrong with it and things won't be okay here until people have the freedom to do different things than other people. I ask myself how long I can stay in this country as a realist without being, well, unrealistic about my goals for myself and my career, to which I respond that I need to go out and doing something else.

Aid in Afghanistan: The trouble with reporting

2009-02-25T19:02:00.000+05:30

A BBC story published just a few minutes ago gives me an excellent opportunity to outline some of the problems I see in reporting from this country. Check out the story and the associated "in pictures" feature:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7879058.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/08/south_asia_the_remote_afghan_north/html/3.stm

It's a good story in terms of the basic level of reporting, but it lacks context and begs the question 'what next?' The story is about a poor village in the Farkhar Valley of Takhar Province, an area which I have been near myself. The story does well in capturing the basic conditions of the village, where people are cold, hungry, and not integrated into the modern economy. As the story goes on however, I noticed that the villagers themselves have actually seen a bit of personal attention from the aid effort.

There is mention of a small power plant. Yes it runs little else but light bulbs but that is a huge surplus in productivity in that people can work a few more hours in the day and it saves on fuel costs. A mobile clinic. It may come occasionally, but occasional is far better than never. The local roads have not been paved, but indeed the main Kunduz-Taluqan-Fayzabad road has been (some sections are not quite finished). That in itself was a titanic feat of engineering. What are the complaints? They are vaguer complaints about warlords and corruption. Also true, and although I want to emphasise the situation of this village, and many others is dire, it shows how people bitch about things.

The problem overall is how little money has been invested in Afghanistan relative to other post-conflict countries like Bosnia. Without the figures on hand it is something in the neighbourhood of $60 per person here compared to around $1,000 per person in Bosnia. Considering this and the extremely low baseline in terms of human development which we are starting from, the project mentioned in this story alone seem like a good return on investment.

So what's going wrong? It's the lack of attention and coordination. It's not enough just do follow through with projects, they have to be perceived to be beneficial as well. The problems are not individual persons or organisations for the most part, but structural issues that reach up to the top levels of the state system and the aid industry. The issues are both at the highest levels of politics and in basic approaches taken in Afghanistan. These will be the subjects of my next few posts. Up next: The Psychology of Aid.

Reflections on London

2009-02-16T14:58:00.001+05:30

My last leave wrapped up successfully and I know find myself back in Mazar. The break was relaxing and envigorating because, rather than sitting back on a beach, I went on a networking binge and made some progress towards shaping my exit strategy from Afghanistan.

My time in Afghanistan has been wonderful, both in terms of friends and experiences, but like most good things it has an expiry date. At some point I determined that this would be the end of 2009. I've had a good range of experiences that fit into a coherent narrative for my future career goals and I've also think I will have reached the upward limit of what can be done (for me and Afghanistan) both in my current job and in general. ANSO's been really great in that sense, in that it has given me a top-down perspective on all the different levels and systems of operation in this country and I really need to shift to a higher gear to make things happen. Just being another programme director or country director, no matter how effective, just isn't satisfactory amongst this crumbling system. Another issue is that I don't wanna become a one-trick pony specialising in Afghanistan. Some people may truly love Afghanistan, or the romantic side of them may be infatuated with the noble savagery of it all. Spending time in a place like this is good for lots of us, but after a while we, like the Afghan social discourse, have to move on.

The first question was where to go next? No offence to east Asia, but my specialisation really doesn't extend there, so I left that out. This has left me with a narrow set of options in terms of cities that are acceptable bases of operation. The full starting list was Bangalore, Delhi, Bombay, Karachi, Dubai, Tehran, Beirut, Tel Aviv, London, New York, DC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Delhi and Bangalore are lovely but still a bit too small and constricting. Various political problems make Tehran (my citizenship) and Karachi (the state is collapsing) untenable. Beirut and Tel Aviv are cool, but that's the problem, just cool (I could add Istanbul here too, the 20th century population transfers made the place too homogenous even if it has remained cool). Los Angeles and San Francisco, while truly my favourite places, are just too far from anywhere. DC and NY have that old frumpy east-coast culture, which means they are both passé and not international enough. This left with Bombay, Dubai, and London. Bombay would require a lot of capital and Dubai I still think is wonderful and centrally located--it really is the world's natural hub. In India I like the local identity, Dubai I like because it's the only place that truly doesn't try to impress an identity on you and lets you be humid.

By process of elimination I was down to London, which was also attractive because I knew so little about it, having only seen it on two brief occasions (two nights of clubbing in 1999 and a 10-hour layover summer 2008). Thanks to my generous friend I got a great place to crash for three weeks and time to introduce myself to the city.

Weather: The weather is not so bad. The frequent rain is refreshing without being annoying, and the brilliant green (even in winter) helps you not notice how overcast the sky is.

Style: Don't listen to what people say, Londoners do not know how to dress and that is okay. Rather than have a general sense of style, they have three styles which are each done very well but in that leave little room for individual refinement. (By contrast in LA you are what you wear, if you just put on a normal three-piece suit you're lame because you're not being creative--if for some reason you wanna do that and still be cool you have to carry it over into the realm of self-conscientious kitsch.) The three styles are penguin (suits), modern (self-conscious alternative), and casual (jumpsuits warn on high street, yes).

Urban layout: London, like LA, has no proper centre. It has a bunch of little neighbourhoods which all compete for attention and have different places in different estimations of cool. Zone 1 is of course the centre, but it doesn't steal the cake. The problem with strong centres such as NY and DC have is that they ultimately suck in too much culture and stifle diversity.

Attitude and Culture: For a while I tried to get a sense of this for London and kept coming up empty. Then I realised, there is none! The oddity of meeting actual English person brought this point to the fore I think. London is not England, it's London. All sorts of different people doing different things. Maybe there are some stiff old-school Brits around somewhere, but they're social capital certainly isn't very high because I found that being my chatty self I could just start up conversations and make friends.

Opportunities: Here's where London really shined over DC. DC is stuck by being the political centre of a large and powerful state. In London the city is connected internationally by the legacy of empire, but the UK is too small of a state to overwhelm people's agendas. The short is that the city looks outward and provides opportunities in security and politics that no American place can and that India will still not be able to for some time.

So I like London, I'm sold on it, and it should be a good place for the next few years.

My carbon footprint is larger than yours!

2009-01-16T21:39:00.003+05:30

It feels like a miracle, but I got out of Kabul and have had a wonderful day in Dubai. Miraculously this morning we took off on time as the clouds parted from their week-long barrage of snow (the plane that I took came from Dubai last night and only landed on its third attempt). This included the fifteen-minute delay created by NATO, which cleared airspace for military activity as they too were taking advantage of the break in the weather.

When I arrived in Dubai I received text message which informed me that Salang, despite the valiant efforts of the Afghan National Army, had finally been closed thanks to the combination of twelve hours of snow and avalanches (bummer those are).

Dubai is golden. I listen and nod politely when I hear the criticisms from those who are so fond of New York and Boston, but now I'm fighting back. It just feels normal to me and yet aspirational (probably has something to do with my personality) and for a person who gets tired of peculiarism, I get the strange sensation I can just be myself.

I came out of Terminal 2 with the crowd of Iranians (way too many blond highlights going on there, got to see one woman throw of a chador to reveal a tank top), and got on to the hotel. The best part was the weather, all the Philipino workers were complaining about the 24C weather, but not me!

Once settled in, I washed off the grime of Afghanistan and hailed a taxi to the Dubai Mall. The Dubai Mall (at the base of the Burj al-Arab, the world's tallest building), though still half-finished and with many of the stores set to open, actually manages to put the Mall of the Emirates to shame. I spent three hours just walking it not including stopping everywhere and couldn't help noting how much nicer it was than Kabul City Centre. Here, in no particular order, are some of my thoughts:

1) Maybe there can be too many Starbucks. After the fifth one (they really helped magnify the disorientation) a part of me felt like crouching down, crying, and yelling "please stop watching me"...not to mention the copious Starbucks clones such as Caribou Coffee, Barista, and Costa.

2) The wall of pork. In the gourmet supermarket on the basement floor there was a room entirely devoted to pork. It was a mighty selection, from chorizo from every Latin country to scores of Italian sausages to a wall of bacon. All the better was that not a single product therein was pork free. Pork-flavoured ice cream was all that seemed to be lacking.

3) Blank spaces should be covered in LED screens. Always.

4) The food court. Again, addressed to Americans: What the fuck is wrong with you? Why do you people not embrace the 21st century? And why do you so disdain the goodness of fast food? But Europeans have these problems too while at the same time defending decidely mediocre national cuisines. The food selection was dazzling, even in terms of American regional food. And that's saying something because Americans perform weakly in fast food offerings both in terms of taste and variety. The Great Kabab Factory of Delhi fame has started franchising too. After panicking over the shear variety of choice I gave up and went for a mix of traditionals...chhole bhature complemented with a few pieces of extra spicy from KFC.

Laden with a new pair of shoes (I came with old running shoes I've been running 10k in way too long and which felt immediately demodee on arrival to Dubai), I returned to the hotel and resolved to find a nice place to sit outdoors and drink a beer and finish Rashid's Descent into Chaos. Le Meridien has a big food court here and I settled on the Irish pub with many things on tap.

Of course I owed it to myself to stop by the large club in the middle of the courtyard--an inappropriately loud house party in the middle of one's hotel is never to be passed up, even if it is playing a mix of late 80s ami-pop, remixed Gugush, and too much Cheb Khalid. Plus it's furnishing consisted of throw pillows and it offered complimentary nargilas. I sidle up to the bar and start a conversation. This is one of those moments when contact with the real world (as opposed to Immoralistan aka Afghanistan) blows away any pre-conception of how civilised you thought you had kept yourself on the frontier. Moreover, for someone who spends his professional life thinking about things blowing up, stopping things from blowing up, who's blowing them up, and how to stop people from getting blown up with them, mixed with a large dose of constant political intrigue, normal conversations are difficult. I mean I'm behind, really behind. I just watched Om Shanti Om, the biggest movie of all time by every metric, a few days back--I actually booked Emirates so I could do nothing but watch film trailers all the way to London and be able to carry on a respectable conversation. By this time tomorrow I will know what Saif and Soha Ali Khan have been up too. But not yet.

After one Corona I leave the bar resolved to drink on my own a bit and enjoy the freshness of the tap. Sitting out in the warm evening (the air smells of plants--something one misses in Afghanistan where the environment has been crushed time and time again) and people watching I must admit I appreciate Dubai. It has the diversity and humanity, which Los Angeles excels at over New York, but so much more of it. I ended up at the Irish-themed pub hanging out a random mix of people interact on a normal basis and not being bothered by questions of nationality at all. Dubai is a never-ending construction site, has way too many roads and I see how an east-coaster would feel isolated, but it's so pretty and shiny and shows how consumerism is a force for good in our lives too by creating lively integrated spaces.

I didn't go for the Irish food (thought about cabbage and bacon with potatoes mash)...and instead opted for a nice fish curry even though I imagine that's all I'll be eating in the UK. Off to bed and on to the UK.

Escaping Winter

2009-01-11T14:03:00.002+05:30

The time has finally come to go on leave. The goal here is to obviate about four weeks of what it hopefully my last winter in Afghanistan. It's not that good a plan because I'm going to the bleaker environs of the UK, but at least they understand the concept of central heating there.

Getting out of Afghanistan in winter is always especially stressful (as it getting back into the country, but who cares if their return from leave is delayed?). In my case there will be two hurdles to contend with. The first involves crossing the 3500m pass of Salang and the second is the flight to Dubai. The weather is a great deal shittier and colder in Kabul than here...while we get 10-15C on many days, Kabul has considerable trouble peaking above freezing (mainly because we are at 300m while Kabul is at 2000). This means the weather on the Kabul side is often cloudy and snowy when it's just fine here in Mazar. That said, the authorities do a stellar job of keeping Salang open throughout all but the worst blizzards.

The departure from Kabul by plane is also traditionally stressful. It might be better now as the airport seems to have gotten better navigational facilities (planes can land at night now). The problem is planes landing in low visibility it seems--they don't need much to take off, just lift in the direction of the flight path and then pop above the cloud cover. So as long as the plane is already on the ground your chances are improved, as opposed to a plane coming from Delhi which might have to turn back before it can land. For this reason it's good to go with the local airlines, who will take off no matter what. Once those first 5 minutes are over and you're skybourne, it's smooth-sailing to Dubai and you relax and appreciate the well manicured Iranian countryside below you (lucky bastards with their fancy freeways and roadside foodcourts). It's also a good idea to have a few extra hundred dollars on you so you can buy a ticket on another (potentially less scupulous and safety-conscious) airline.

With all luck my next post will be from the UK, where I will be feverishly socialising and networking my way into the new year. Or else it could be a drunk poste from L'Atmosphere in Kabul!

The Limits of Force: Why the coercion constraint matters

2008-12-30T13:31:00.001+05:30

News junkies out there will notice the trend I am talking about, that conventional militaries have been less successful at solving problems lately. There is actually a very good and succint explanation for why this phenomenon exists and how it operates. Since I don't hear this discussed much I'm laying it out here, with a proper shout-out to my undergrad poli-sci professor, Victor Magagna, who explained this idea (and others) so well.

The coercion constraint is the concept that cost of coercion increases geometrically for the coercer with each additional increment of force used. In other words, it becomes increasingly costly to make someone do something for you. You have to expend more effort, provide more incentives, and so forth. The end result is a lot like one of the things Sartre said, "we always have choices." For the sake of simplicity imagine you want a specific person to eat an apple and assume that they would rather not. You can bargain with them, you can provide incentives and inducements, but you actually cannot force them to do so. If they absolutely refused you can threaten them with death, but if they still refuse and you carry out that threat, the apple is not eaten. On the other hand you can force-feed them the apple but then they still didn't do it, you fed it to them. If the point had been for the apple to be eaten, then it would have been significantly less costly for you to do it yourself. Now consumption of an apple is a minor issue and could probably be accomplished with basic incentives, but the point is that the only way to get there is a bargain with the other agent. The use of force is really a bargaining mechanism, whereby you increase the cost to someone else of not doing the thing you want them too.

The coercion constraint matters as a blunt point of reality, but it also carries important implications for conflict in the 21st century. Coercive threats mattered a lot more in pre-modern times because the ideologies that supported them were much stronger. The constable showing up with goons to take a percentage of your grain always sucked, but it was underlined by a whole range of assumptions (usually believed by the elite themselves too) such as the state's legitimacy being divine and hence the right of the nobility to take their share. Nowadays people find such justifications absurd. It's not that they believe less in God, it's rather that God has been recast in their image. Modernity required that sovereignty be popular for the state to function, and the axial view (and axial deity) came into to line with that. Now God supports popular sovereignty (read the preamble to the American constitution for an example of this formulation.

The result of the trend to popular sovereignty raised the costs of coercion dramatically. States couldn't make unjustified wars with obfuscation or treachery, but more importantly, short of killing everyone who disagreed with them (genocide), wars could no longer change people's minds. Consequently violence these days no longer has much truck with things like conquering territory, but it is rather and attempt (however unjustified or ineffective) to make other people agree. This is why Israel's operation in Gaza is doomed, there is no way it's going to make the people of Gaza agree with their aims. It is has also been at the heart of Western strategic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Militants in Afghanistan cannot be coerced to stop their insurgency and regular people cannot be coerced into not supporting them, they have to be convinced. So who has been successful in convincing? The two most successful military organisations of recent years are actually parastatal organisations with armed wings--yep, love 'em or hate 'em they are Hamas and Hizbullah. Along with their aid-related activities, their enemies have played a large role in convincing people to support them, by attacking them. Part of the Taliban's ongoing weakness has been its failure to provide real public goods.

The lesson of the increasing cost of coercion is that we can only accomplish our objectives when our strategies are within the bounds of reality. Coercion is no long a realistic means to produce desired outcomes and genocide (and other forms of collective punishment) are generally unacceptable. Organisations like the Taliban and Israel are engaged in a war against reality (wars against abstract nouns are bad, but that's another rant) and it truly is sad to watch bystanders get killed and hurt for such causes.

The Israeli Political Elite Sputters

2008-12-22T11:45:00.002+05:30

Yet again, it seems, Israeli candidates are making the rounds and promising the impossible, the toppling of the Hamas-run statelet in Gaza. It's a really novel idea and only been tried before in 1982, 2000-02, and twice in 2006. Given that this is mostly the same cast of characters seen over previous years, one has to wonder if they know they are full of shit and have just taken to smiling as the ship goes down.

In other news about Israel's slow collapse, I'm starting to wonder if the state could evacuate all the settlers if it wanted to. Remember evacuation of all settlers is a minimum requirement for a two-state solution, which I've long argued is impractical and outside the realm of possibility. During the eviction of settlers from one house in Hebron, the BBC noted that several soldiers were required to remove each settler and whatever the exact number, that's a lot of manpower. There are 400,000+ settlers now living on the wrong side of the green line. Let's say that half would go willingly, that still leaves 200,000 people who would need to be forcibly evicted. The Israeli state might not have the ability, coercively or politically to do so. (See my next post about the coercion constraint) In fact the Israel situation with its settlers (more broadly, its religio-nationalist extremists) shares striking parallels with Pakistan's situation along its northwestern frontier, with the main difference being that in Israeli radicals form a larger share proportionally of the population. In both cases the state's identity is deeply interwined with a less extreme version of the ideology's radical manifestation. See how much easier it is to base your state on fulfilling its duties to its citizens rather than an ideology!

Chickens and Modernity

2008-12-21T10:49:00.002+05:30

The root of the conflict in Afghanistan stems from the clash of agrarian and modern lifeways. To be more precise, agrarian societies that have come into the modern world (and all have) redefine customs in a way that distorts them because their original context is now missing. In parts of the world that were not in the vanguard of modernity (where modernity has been less jarring because it has been felt to be an indigenous process) and hence have the short end of the global political stick (everywhere that the West colonised basically), defence of these pre-modern moral and social systems becomes defensive if not also violent (anti-modernity is often misread, by supporters and opponents alike, as anti-Westernism).

The classic example is fornication. In agrarian societies sex outside the rules was dangerous and threatened the societies with collapse. In agrarian Europe, for example, power and authority were bound up in heredity which in turn was a foil for legitimacy, all backed by the divine authority of an axial god (popular legitimacy did not exist because mass society did not exist and was not technically feasible). Like everything else in agrarian society, this was fudgeable; new dynasties took control, but when they did so the assumption was that the losing party lost the favour of god and the underlying basis of the system was not felt to be challenged. In the modern context that entire web of assumptions disappeared as societies adapted to new technical and material possibilities. The significance was that when a society that had developed more aspects of modernity encountered one with its roots still firmly in the agrarian age, the moderns they seemed permissive and immoral. Because the more agrarian society is also modernising and forming its own mass society and national identity, it latches onto the most salient differences between it and the moderns to define itself. These differences are not those that existed from one agrarian culture to another or even from one modern one to another but rather they encapsulated diachronic change as synchronic juxtaposition. "What people did" in agragrian societies came to be redefined as a cultural artefact and emblem of distinction, and, unlike in the past, intended to be followed to the absolute fullest. Coming back to my example, restrictions of fornication were a common area in which later-modernising societies have come to define themselves as different. The results are harmful to the society in question because it is embracing activities which are at odds with the modern social relationship which is emergency. Invariably people start forming modern kinds of relationships (dating, love marriage) while the social elite is backing the reactionary morals (in this case a modern more which is based on a reinterpretation of a perceived agrarian norm). Not only are the new elite-back morals contradictory and harmful to individuals in the society, they're harm is increased but they are, with the resources of modern society, being implemented much more thoroughly than they ever could have been in agrarian society. This process is exemplified by the Taliban regime and the numerous abuses that occurred as they tried to pound a square peg into a round hole.

Modernity has altered ethics and morality in human life without altering the human, and one of my goals is finding away that explains these underlying shifts to people in an intelligible way. A lot of moderns reject ethics and morality because for them they are tied to the old way of doing things, whereas I think that these things are not only still important but in fact more important. What we have to do is realise that we are developing a new morality for our new world.

One concept I've long entertained is a collection of fables, echoing what Aesop and Gilgamesh when societies had to explain to each other how things would be done in the new agrarian world in which they then lived. Events do not occur in clean narratives, but consicousness seems to string them together as such. And let's face it, some people are just not entertained by social philosophy.

The linked story (from the Chicago public radio show This American Life) could be one example of such a fable. It is a very vivid illustration of how pre-modern social ways cannot hold their own in a modern world (spoiler alert). The story involves a youth in Balochistan and his father, who's a pretty high on the social ladder. The father wants to break an old friend out of jail, so he plans to stage a raid on the prison. To ensure his friend isn't his with any stray bullets, he buys a tawiz which is meant to protect him against such things. To make sure the tawiz works, they buy a chicken and try shooting at it. The father and his friends touch the chicken no matter how many times they try. The youth, in the meantime is insisting that these are a new kind of gun has to be held and aimed a different way, which makes him the subject of ridicule. After the old guys finally give up the kid takes a shot and, aiming properly, gets the chicken the first time. It later emerges that over US$1k was spent on the tawiz. The story demonstrates (and the reporter himself goes on to comment) how this event reflects the power shifts brought on by the modern revolution and also on how emasculating it must feel to be on the wrong end of the transformation.

Scott's Northeastern Tour

2008-10-20T14:10:00.003+05:30

This month I finally got around to one of my original goals when starting this job...getting out to see more of the countryside. I embarked on a trip that took me to Kunduz, Takhar, and Badakhshan provinces. I met a lot of people and it turned out to be great workwise and gave me a greater sense of the country I'm working in.

Kunduz has good German food at the Lapis Lazuli guesthouse, Taloqan has a small core of really cool people, and the folks from AKF showed me a good time in Fayzabad. I didn't end up taking so many pictures because frankly the landscape looked just like a less dramatic version of California. The coolest part of the drive was the road between Taloqan and Rustaq (specifically after Puli Begam). The "road" is pictured...we actually we riding along the riverbed for a while and the bits which look kinda like pavement are really the water. That's another point, so many days of unpaved roads leave you exhausted.

Another thing that amazed me is how--and I know this sounds odd--homogenous the country is. With the exception of being able to get fish near the Amu, I'm disappointed that all you find is qabili pulaw, monochromatic lamb kabab, and week vegetable khoreshes. More stunning is that they all taste the same everywhere. I'm starting to get the feeling that the synthesis of the Afghan identity has been remarkably successful and that the problem rather lies in society's difficult relationship with modernity. All sorts of pre-modern praxes have individually been nationalised and modernised but are in the present context incompatible and often hypocritical. One example being hour the 'science of honour' has been perfected amongst women (more and better ways have been found to keep their honour beyond reproach) which complete ignores the fact that it's way too expensive to cordon off one half of society into limited and pre-ordained roles.

The construction of the road between Kesham and Fayzabad is also something really amazing. It involves some pretty impressive terraforming and it's rare that you see a road of this size being built where there is no pre-existing alignment. I got the sense that the engineers were just having fun in some instances by trying to make the job more difficult. Sometime rather than build the road into the more amenable gradually sloping opposite bank of the river, they were blasting away 1500m sheer rockfaces to make way for it.

Pakistan's Existence

2008-09-30T18:48:00.001+05:30

Reading the transcript of the first debate between the presidential candidates did not reveal much new and inspiring insofar as their opinions were concerned, but it was illuminating in that it helped me put together an idea I've long been mulling; what precisely is wrong with US foreign policy? My answer: Lack of a coherent and reflexive approach to sovreignty. Sovreignty is central to the equation because the US is itself a state of the 1648-style Westphalian kind. This problem is becoming most evident with the failure to address the Pakistan Question and the resultant denial of rights to millions of people.

There are two different ways for the state system to fail us. There is either a lack of state control over a particular area or the state exercises its control improperly. (my definition for the state is a geographically delimited public goods monopoly. The state may be an individual in the legal sense, but it is not a human being. There is no "right" for it to exist, rather it has duties; contractual obligations to provide rights (public goods) to all of its inhabitants) The lacks of control are well know and admitted--the Chad/Sudan border, the Place Formerly Known as Somalia, most of Congo. The other side of the continuum in state failure is too packed to even begin to list and some states are worse than others in this regard.

My proposition is that there are three such holes in the state system that pose particular threats. I think of them as my own personal axis of evil. These states are Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. All three fail on the level of failing to provide rights to large numbers of people living under their control, but most interesting is that these states' failures also create black holes in the state system. All three states' claims to legitimacy rest on mutually contradictory tenets that serve to weaken the order around them.

For the sake of brevity, I'm just addressing Pakistan for the moment. Pakistan is the one thing that keeps Afghanistan from becoming a success, or for that matter just surviving. All of Afghanistan other neighbour's can be bargained with and play within some basic parameters. This goes for India, China, the Central Asian states, and Iran (the US's failure to deal rationally with Iran goes back to the corrupting influence of Israel policy, which is subject for another rant). Pakistan on the other hand cannot not be dealt with within the framework of the state system because the Pakistani state has already failed.

The curious part of Pakistan's failure, and the one that I think leads policymakers astray in constructing a coherent approach to it, is that it has failed on both of the levels I have mentioned about. The very success of the political elite in building a strong state has overlooked such a states necessary foundation and consequently produced holes in the state system on Pakistan's fringes. Whereas Saudi Arabia has had sufficient resources to subsidise its legitimacy by doing things like supporting illiterate business men who would never be able to succeed anywhere else without fully embracing modernity or funding missionary activity abroad, Pakistan has had to pursue a much more austere programme to hold the state together. That 'programme' has been the military, which plays such an immense role in Pakistan's political culture that it has practically become the state.

The growth of the military state in Pakistan has fanned the flames of defensiveness already rife within the state. States founded on ideologies other than liberalism (providing public goods to all citizens) are always problematic, whatever they may be, but states with multiple ideologies are even more fractious. Pakistan's elite struggles visibly with whether it is a state for South Asian Muslims, an Islamic state, or a curator of the Mughal legacy. The quick creation of the state glossed over the fact that there are as many differences between South Asian Muslims as their are between many Muslims and Hindus, hence the pan-Indian Muslim identity of many Muhajirin from places like UP class with different Muslim identities in Balochistan and NWFP. Adding to the irony was that secular, plurast India became a more Muslim state from the point of view of traditional sharia (this is worth another rant too) and also the fact that much of the Muslim elite did move to Pakistan during partition effectively lopping off the head of Muslim (Mughlai) high culture for the Muslim masses or could not or did not want to make the move in 1947. (For more on partition, Yasmine Khan's The Great Partition is an excellent place to start.) The muddled rump that was detached from India to become Pakistan was then given one further ideological complex--a defensive posture against the universalist India.

The most important of all of the above has the creation of mass hypocracy amongst large sections of the Pakistani elite, the ones that morally conscious individuals need to do business with. Hence many Pakistani who know well that there's nothing wrong with intoxication, fornication, and modernity still support causes that would make their own lives hell if they ever came to power. This psychological phenomenon is not unique of course...in the US it's easy to witness Christians giving money to a cause that seeks among its objectives to deny rights to homosexuals, even though they themselves would not directly support a move. In Pakistan however, these tendencies have become more extreme and more unsustainable. At the policy level Pakistan has more and more sought to encourage unattainable policy objectives in the interest of holding together the coalition of elites who still buy into the existence of the state of Pakistan.

After every major attack, some observant commentator notes that 'the Pakistani elites will now have to get really serious about the threats facing them'. This is not true because it ignores the fact that getting serious would mean questioning the existence of the state all together. The attacks on the ISI headquarters, the Wah Cantonment, and the Marriott Hotel (narrowly missing the entire government) have not been enough to exercise support for the groups that carry them out. To give a few examples of untenable foreign policies which Pakistan will continue; continuing support for militancy in Kashmir when the only solution to the dispute is political, supporting any movement that might set up a Pakistan-friendly regime in Afghanistan despite that Afghans would never support it and that the idea of strategic depth for Pakistan has been discounted, and sending in the military to suppress upprisings in Balochistan and the FATA when these situations could be addressed by simply giving the people there the rights of ordinary citizens.

The war in Afghanistan needs to be fought on Pakistani soil, and the reality is that there is no conceivable way the Pakistani government can be a partner in this. The current attack across the Durrand Line are useless because they don't seem to be part of a more complete and well thought out strategy, but they are not wrong. In the near future it needs to be understood that to the degree to which Pakistan is a sovereign state, it doesn't have effective controls over the areas where coalition forces are attacking. The Pakistani state will not allow access to such forces, or even if they did say so, they would then support proxies to fight them. As for "the Pakistani street", many people will indeed be infuriorated by an assault within the state's borders, but those same people also need to understand that support for that state is no longer a viable options. Every Pakistani is in fact now faced with the decision between supporting the Pakistani state, whatever they may construe that to mean, and supporting their own humanity, their rights as individual human beings. The militants born out of decades of Pakistani policy are now fighting a war not for political objectives but rather a war against reality. I never thought that I would see causes much stupider than the US war on an abstract now such as terrorism, but sure enough some people managed to come up with one.

In the long term, policy makers need to sit down and start planning the future of the region after Pakistan is gone. This could be anything from a deeply rooted regime change in Islamabad, to dividing the state into a number of smaller ones to reincorporating it back into India (though I'm sure India would be more than happy to not take responsibility for an area that has become such a basket case). Gradually a consenus is emerging that borders can be withdrawn with a proper amount of process. The long process that led to Kossovo's independence should how long, delicate, and arduous this can be, but the state system needs this basic amount of flexibility (that borders can be withdrawn without the consent of all parties involved) in order preserve its survival (and it does have many concrete advantages). This process can be done the wrong way to, as Russia's hamfisted incursion into Georgia and subsequent recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia shows, but that should not distract us from the issue. Some states, like Somalia, should be declared dead (for what to do afterwards on that check out When States Fail by Rotberg), and others--the other two in my access of evil, Saudi Arabia and Israel--need to be left to collapse on their own terms to a large degree and I think that any intervention itself might produce greater problems than the states are already producing. But Pakistan's existence is no longer tenable either for Pakistanis or non-Pakistanis and should be the subject of immediate international intervention to figure out the next step. Again, states don't have rights to exist, people do. That means individuals in Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, the US, etc. The longer that the international community waits to address the unsustainability of Pakistan's existence, the uglier the outcome will be.

Shostoshuye Maghzi

2008-09-24T12:09:00.002+05:30

This has to be one of my favourite words which I've learn recently.

shustoshuyi maghzi (شستشوی مغزی), or brainwashing

Yep, it's a calque.

Turkish food!

2008-09-15T11:26:00.004+05:30

We now have a fourth restaurant in Mazar! So along with the Royal Oak (truckstop fare and atmosphere), Delhi Darbar (Indian comfort food), and Ittifaq (pizza and burgers), we now can enjoy Turkish food. I just got take-away from there last night...it seems to be the only thing completed yet in the soon-to-be-impressive Amiri planned community. Amiri is one of the series of privately financed subdivisions going up on the east of town...if you're interested in their business model, think Irvine Corporation. The food was good at any rate. the Karishik Pide and ezme salatasi tasted just like they do back in Turkey.

Maybe the market for restaurants is not so big as I thought. After living here a while it has become apparent to me, that only three NGOs including myself are based here, and that leaves embassy staffs and the UN and ICRC to make up the rest. Kabul this is not.

Today whilst driving through town, my driver made a funny observation (we were looking at a convoy of World Food Programme (WFP) trucks). "People don't like the WFP flower here because it's so dark and the bread doesn't look right." My response was "obviously they are not hungry enough." The observation was amusing because it is a reminder that this area was once relatively affluented. Flour doesn't bleach itself but the fact remains that people consider normal what in places like India or the Middle East is considered a rather unnecessary luxury. The other thing is that it's probably not the starving people suffering from food shortages in Kohistanat District of Sar-e Pol who are complaining--it's the urban customers buying bread from bakeries. Bakery owners who, thanks to corruption at all levels, take their cut of WFP wheat. Remember the flour is as good as any other but not bleached, but since people think that unbleached equals inferior quality, bakers acquire the WFP flour and cut it with the regular stuff to the degree they can get away with. This leads to scenes of customers accusing the naanwalla of scamming them with WFP bread!

Work, Vacation, and Beyond

2008-09-05T17:11:00.004+05:30

After about two and a half months in Mazar, I can at last say I'm settled in--both to the place and my job. I finally got to take a small vacation to a place other than India, and have even begun looking at the next step beyond Afghanistan.

My work is always fun and fascinating. Anything that I accomplish in a given day is all subsidiary to one big bullet point: building and maintaing my own human intelligence network. That, it turns out, isn't my notion of "work" at all in that work is something unpleasant which involves an Excel spreadsheet. Here when something happens (unfortunately that means 'goes boom' for a security advisor), the resulting process is very akin to gossip collection at a party ("Sonali slept with whom?, okay you talk to Alex and I'll talk to Aziz")--we divide up who has the best contacts for the particular information sought, go to it, issue a report, maybe hash it out further with the boss in Kabul. And it's all very intuitive. Furthermore you get to interact with the plethora of NGOs (and other actors) roaming about in the north of country, which means there's always a parade of interesting people from different walks of life stopping by my office. A while ago some food security people stopped by one of our meetings, so afterwards we went up to my office where I got a full Q&A session with them about how food security work is carried out, what it entails, what specific dangers they face and how they mitigate them; interesting for my own bank of personal knowledge and useful for me professionally in understanding their security profile. An organisation doing food security faces completely different risks and threats than one involved in microfinance. Likewise yesterday I got to learn about demining. So the job is fun; always interesting, engaging, and different. And the best part is I get to have all the fun of doing intel without having idiotic masters, the Americans (assholes) or Russians (clowns).

I've also come to discover that, as predicted, the security world is in great need of people who can put two and two together. At the micro level that means being more interested in protecting people than shiny new weapons, but on the broader scale it also means that what sounds tough does necessarily work. This all brings me back to the (unsuccessful) interview which firmed up my decision to quit DC a few years back...it was four days into the 2006 Lebanon War and the interviewers asked me what was going to happen, and were consequently very displeased at my answer that the IDF was going to get its ass kicked for a number of reasons starting from lack of defined strategic objectives. My point is that these people (security consultants) had a pre-defined notion of how the world had to work and they weren't about to let reality intrude on it. Basically people handling security matters need to know why Russia is a threat just like Israel is, even though neither gets their fair share of blame.

The city of Mazar is survivable, but being a quiet place I find it something of a din of iniquity. I chill a lot more here and get a lot more reading done (thanks to the Kindle as well, which is awesome), and it's okay because I'm not missing out on things like I would be in Kabul and I have a really nice home/office to come back to here in Mazar. In general, even though there are a lot of expats around, they are all pretty introverted and hard-working. Plus there isn't a critical mass of people who like to party. This is made tolerable by the work and the fact that I would feel like a tool if I keep hanging out in Kabul, with its cast of interesting (much better than DC or NY) yet repetative people (the meatheads, the glamour-seekers, the int'l men of mystery, the granola-munchers, and so on). I will not be one of those people who just stays on here indefinitely without any direction...I will get out a some point next year and if not it will be because I found something in Afghanistan that is a damn good and clear alternative. It would be nice to live in a Western country if it helps me in my career goals (not North America, which I've long since outgrown) and eventually if I do something development-related it would be nice to spend time in a country with more morality and decency (Georgia?! Turkey?!) rather than Afghanistan, which all too often seems like a bunch of Sarah Palins running around unwilling to acknowledge the realities necessary to achieve what it is they claim they want.

Finally there was the vacation; a quick tour of Toronto, DC, and London. I also got a new passport and stopped in for MillerStock near Buffalo. I've definitely learned never to go visit a big group of people...go stay with one friend or just bring one or two along and leave it at that. Trying to fit everyone in in DC was insane, but the plus side was that everyone showed up. Muhammad was there from Khurtum, Waise made an appearance from Manila. I had great hosts (Lynn and Ann) and a generally good time. DC has improved as well--two cheers for gentrification. I spent a good a mount of time in what used to be an incredibly depressing Columbia Heights which is now full of nice house and appartments and fun things to do and shop at. And of course I also got to have Ravi Kabab with Neda and Navid. It was nice to leave DC in the end, and I definitely don't know when or if I'll be coming back though. Been there done that. On the way back to Dubai I had a day layover in London which did turn out to be an eye-opener. The customs gods smiled on me getting to and from Heathrow and I got to spend the whole day with my lovely friend Jaya getting a tour of the city. It's a huge and quite strange place (19 degrees in August...hmm) but I decided I might well give it a go post Afghanistan. I also have some friends there and hence a potential roommate pool and place to start building a new network. The real test will be to see if I can survive the winter there...the next step is to try spending vacation there in late January, do some informational interviews, and get a feel for the place.

Advising on security and touring Bamiyan

2008-06-10T15:24:00.003+05:30

In the months since I last contributed to this blog, there have been a lot of changes in my life. After about six months I finished up with Altai, then took some time to finish up a long-overdue report for Integrity Watch, and then found a new job. My main interests were to do something in a feel where I had little experience--the only thing I want to remain constant is that I continue to get more managerial experience. So I decided it would be either communications or security. In the end I got an offer as regional security advisor for ANSO (the Afghanistan NGO Safety Organisation). It basically involves coordinating security amongst all the NGOs in my region, which will include the north (from Faryab in the west to Badakhshan in the east and Baghlan in the south). Other job descriptions could be "mainting, establishing, and expanding human intelligence networks" or "herding cats".

The other event was that I finally got to see Bamiyan and Bandi Amir. The most beautiful part of the road to Bamiyan was the journey itself, proceeding through Ghorband and over the Shibar pass (Alexander's route). The toughest part is that most of the way is not paved, meaning that from where you get off the road between Charikar and Jabal-us-Siraj and Bamiyan is a 6-8 hour insanely bumpy road. The landscape consisted of dramatic peaks interspersed with lush green valleys that smelled heavily of roses and lupins.

Pictures themselves don't capture the beauty of Bamiyan and the dramatic natural setting. And the niches are just as impressive without the Buddhas. They were already in a pretty lame state before their destruction, with Aurangzeb having smashed their faces and having long been stripped of adornment. It's impressive actually to picture them as they must have been. Of course if they are restored, I hope they are totally rebuilt to their original splendour rather than cobbled together from the remnants.

There wasn't much to do in Bamiyan otherwise...but there was one really good restaurant, the Silk Road, where my group (me, Saurabh, and Joran) met up with Naysan and Yazmine, who's been posted in Bamiyan for some time now working for AKDN.

Banning Indian Soaps and the Construction of the Afghan Self

2008-04-24T17:33:00.004+05:30

First of all, I wish the Western media could divorce itself from the desire to try to fashion a coherent narrative out of what is happening here, and barring that to keep pushing this notion of the resurgent Taliban. (and in that I detect and inherent bias toward what I term "the fecundity of the west fallacy"--no matter how shortsighted and incompetent NATO can be here, it must be remember that there is no comparison between them and the Taliban or Soviets and that they have the moral high ground and are doing a difficult task in a difficult situation--a fact which I think is not lost on most Afghans)

Anyway, yes, South Asian pop culture is taking over the world (woohoo!) and people are at a loss as to what to do about it. One of the most fascinating things about this country is that traditional culture has completely failed but modernity has yet to take any seriously indigenous root (you know my rant on modernity and culture, right?). The issue with Indian soaps revolves around the common theme here--that people tend not to have individual moral constructions. So you get a lot of situations where everyone says something is wrong and denounces it publically, but btw they all do it themselves. I know that may sound a bit overwrought, but the issue is much more complex than pure hypocrisy. It's truly amazing how much these soaps have captured people's imaginations here (they're extremely simple and directed at the bottom tier of the Indian market), and what's happening is that people enthralled by the products of mass culture and the idea. For example a big part of Tulsi or Imtihaani Zindagi for the viewers is that you can you can go halfway across the country and discuss last night's episode with people. At the same time these programmes are new and not indigenous and the logos (cf. Hodgson's conservative spirit) is that new is bad. The fact that they involve Hindu characters and storylines creates a big cognitive dissonance too (these soaps are the first time that many Afghans are brought into contact with Hinduism and hence the idea that Islam and hence their baseline moral discourse is not always on top).

So if your a representative, it's easy points to say "ban it". And people will bitch but they don't have any paradigm for opposing it. These things (like the law against T-shirts and sexes mingling) are not re-entering the discourse now so much as they always were the moral absolute and no one discussed it before. As the ban is further being discussed, people are asking why there had to be such a ban in the first place, so that now what you're getting is a discourse. It sucks in the short term (people have more limitations), but it's also the only way people will figure things out for themselves and things will get better. Politicians here are democratically elected but don't know any way to act except the traditional patronage system (nor do there constituents) so another thing is that you get a lot of grandstanding without attention to underlying issues. Everyone here does want to drink, flirt, and be entertained, it's all a matter of them admitting that to themselves!

Igniting 2008

2008-01-09T15:54:00.001+05:30

First and most importantly, it is hereby announced that DJ Mariz-e-Muhabbat (Saurabh) and DJ Ilaaj (me) will be throwing the mightiest Bollywood party yet with the help of our apprentices, Shararat (Khatidja) and Safed Bijli (Nathan). On 24 January, prepare for all of Kabul's snow to melt and for the winter to dissipate into a heatwave.

As for the lesser important start of the new year on 1 January, I managed to bring that in in proper style in India. This included Shareena's wedding in Bangalore, new years in Delhi, and an unexpected detour to Dubai and Bombay.

Of course all this goodness nearly didn't happen thanks to a snowstorm here. My Indian Airlines flight was cancelled due to poor visibility (you have to feel sorry for the people on the flight, who took off from Delhi, circled around Kabul for two hours, and then had to return!). Well, a few of us were determined to get out and managed to do so with the help of Pamir Airlines. Indian assured us they would honour our tickets from Dubai if we could get there, so me and a few others took them up on it. Of course we had to buy new tickets to Dubai, and Pamir was accepting cash only, so I narrowly escaped thanks to a then complete stranger (Dinesh Sah) loaning me $110 so I could by the ticket. So in the course of the day waiting around at Kabul I got to make some friends and network! Along with Dinesh and a few other development types, Ron Susskind, an American author, was stranded along with us. I also learned that the Kabul airport restaurant is not to be scoffed at (it is easily found by following a series of post-it notes) and that they have a most delicious karahi gosht there.

Finally we got on the flight, which took off in a hurry before night fell and ascended at a good 50-degree angle to pop out over the clouds. The rest of the flight was smooth and I had the honour of sitting next to someone who had never been out of Afghanistan or on a plane before. It was truly amazing to see his first impression of the outside world, from the snaking and well-lit Iranian expressways below us to the platforms in the Persian Gulf to the blazing light of the Emirati coastline. In Dubai I had a mini-vacation in the terminal which is a first-rate shopping mall and spent some of the last cash I had on a Starbucks coffee. Event the (expensive) drive from Terminal 2 to Terminal one was a treat just getting to see the clean roads and big shiny buildings and feeling the Middle East again. I hung out with my new friends at the terminal and talked my way onto a flight to Bombay (the Indian Air rep had simply written that I should go Dubai-Bombay-Bangalore on the ticket in chicken scratch--my original flight was Kabul-Delhi-Bangalore, so dealing with a state-owned monopoly has its advantages in that they can easy fudge schedules).

The rest went smoothly and I can't complain, since averting Delhi saved me the risk of getting stuck in fog. Even though I only saw Bombay on the takeoff coming out, I have to say it's one of the most amazing things I've seen. I've never seen a city so big or so dense before...the sheer amount of huge buildings and closely packed houses that fill a peninsula which juts far out into the Indian Ocean and spill out into the Maharashtrian hinterlands dwarfs Manhattan. While I generally need to do things other than go to India, I have to take up some friends on their invitation to give me a proper Bombay tour. Also, note that I'm calling it Mumbai, the city is Bombay (a Portuguese creation) and I would like to emphasise in the rudest way possible that Hindu Nationalists can all go fuck themselves! :-) When I got to Bombay, the first thing that greeted me were the headlines announcing Modi's landslide victory in Gujarat. This is depressing because it was bad enough when Modi was the genocidal leader of Gujarat who was personally responsible for thousands of deaths in the pogrom--no, now the overwhelming majority of Gujaratis are vilifying themselves by throwing their support behind Hindu nationalist terror. Did I mention Gujarat is dry? As a person of integrity I slam teetotaling every chance I get, and to Gujarat's ebullient extremist I have just one insult: you guys are worse than a bunch of American Christians and NWFP extremists combined. But then again, we can always be thankful for justice in that prohibition, conservativism, and discrimination will sink Gujarat eventually as they have slapped down everyone else who has tried them.

Enough with that rant; Bangalore was beautiful and the weather was perfect. I stayed with Martin and Priya, friends of the groom who were great and polite hosts. Shareena's wedding was great too. I spent a lot of time relaxing and eating super-hot Andhra food. The only downside was that I had to "blacklist" a former friend for extremely disappropriate behaviour (her name is Amber Sommer; because transparency and accountability are so important to me I make a point of calling people out either for good or ill--that way we learn from past mistakes.). But the fallout itself had an upside in that I wasn't pressured to go to annoying tourist traps and could focus on the real Bangalore: eating and shopping!

Delhi was also fun and mellow. I spent much of the time with Saurabh (my friend from Kabul), and Aasim who just returned from a trip to Pakistan. The three of us ended up at Malchamarg Market of all places on new year's eve, at a Chinese restaurant. I also did yet more shopping, buying pretty much every major piece of music made between the summer and now as well as a tonne of classic movies (Mother India, Amar-Akbar-Anthony, Muqaddar ka Sikandar, Hey Kabuliwala, etc.). We also hit all the best restaurants of Delhi, like Karim's and Andhra Bhavan. The only thing I still have to cross off the Delhi list is Dum Pukht, which specialises in Lakhnavi food (yes, Nihari!) and has a remarkably particularistic menu. That's a big relief in Delhi, where even the best Mughlai establishments feed the need to give you a selection of Mughlai, South Indian, Continental, and Chinese--come on people, just do what you do best! I personally find that there are very few people who can do such diverse cooking styles well, so unless the establishment is damn good, most of that menu will just be dead weight. Of course I also got some drinks in at 4S, the dive bar in Defence Colony which I so often call home.

The flight back to Kabul was smooth and on-time, and since I've returned so has everyone else. A few friends had breaks far more dramatic than me and have also returned home in good spirits and ready to start the new year. Now all we need is for this weather to warm up...

امید و سپاسگذاری

2007-11-11T15:01:00.001+05:30

Things in Kabul have returned to a steady, pleasant, dependable pace. I accomplish my first major task here at Altai, which involved a presentation on construction materials markets in Afghanistan for the Capacity Development Programme of USAID. It was the smallest group of people I ever presented to! Not to say that that stopped me from talking more than my share. I can say now that I truly like my workplace and the people too. Before my next project starts tomorrow, I've had some time to catch up on much needed sleep and finally get settled for the first time in month. I finally moved into my new room in Guesthouse L'Atmo, which, like its name suggests is right across from L'Atmosphere restaurant. And it's conveniently on the same street as my office, which greatly simplifies my commute. I picked up my old stuff (that had not gone to India with me) from Lorenzo's place. Most important of this was a few books I've been wanting to read which include another anthropological work by Michael Edwards about honour and politics on the Afghan-Pak border and an English translation of Shahnameh (which I'm beginning to think would be pure laziness to read).

As my plan for world domination proceeds apace though, I've had some other additions and insights which have enriched my life in the last month. First I have to give props to Arzu and Mitra, my respective Aussie and Kiwi friends. Mitra's definitely proven herself to be one of the coolest people I know and alway down to sit down and humour me by listening to all most hopes and dreams concerning suitors of the opposite sex.

The other interesting occurrence has hit me from halfway across the world, and reaffirms my notion that there is more order in the world than we think. Some friends from DC might remember Jerusha. Every few months or so I've gotten to exchange a few emails with her, and before then in DC she was easily amongst the coolest people I knew, and someone with whom I've always felt a strong connection. Last month a few interesting things happened: I started hanging out with her friend Alison who is in Kabul, and I went to Mazar, where one of the most prominent local family's shared Jerusha's last name and therefore appeared on every other billboard. Just a few days later we ended up getting in touch and staying in touch much more regularly. Since, I've had the enormous pleasure of better getting to know someone who is unlike anyone else I know and a true example and inspiration. On top of all the great friends I have here, in India, in Europe, and in the States some people really stand out, giving you something to look forward to at the end of the day and an ear-to-ear grin. It reminds me how lucky I really am.

Nothing warms my heart and puts me in a good mood like strong personal connections, which leads me to more general (some would say goober-ish) thoughts on life and relationships. For the moment I'm enjoying my job, my life, and the moment.

Trip to Mazar-e Sharif

2007-10-26T23:37:00.001+05:30

This week for work I got the opportunity of going to Mazar-e Sharif. The best part, however, was that I got to go by road. For those of you who don’t know or haven’t heard of the place, let me explain a little bit about the city. Firstly, Mazar has a lot of historical significance. Its name means “noble shrine (mazar = “place of pilgrimage” and sharif = “noble”). Furthermore it is situated near and is the modern successor of the ancient city of Balkh. Balkh was a key strategic goal in conquests dating back to the Achaemenids and Alexander. It was also the city in which Zoroaster came to reside and propagate his new religion with the blessings of the local ruler of the time and the birthplace of the sufi poet Rumi, who eventually came to reside in Konya in Anatolia. The focal point of Mazar is of course the shrine at its centre reputed to be the final resting place of the Caliph Ali. The association with Ali suggests that Ali was in fact pretty awesome in that he managed to get around not just in life but in death as well. There are at least three other places contending to be Ali’s final resting place, and the most important of these is Najaf in Iraq (which is acknowledged by most Shi’is and is coincidentally local near where Ali establish his government in Kufa and where he was assassinated). In accordance with the old archaeological proverb “once a sacred place, always a sacred place”, the holiness of the shrine almost certainly goes back to far before Islam. It is very likely that the site originally marked the resting place of Zoroaster or an important site in the development of his faith, and for any one of the preceding reasons it is still regarded as holy by Zoroastrians.

More recently Mazar was made famous by the Taliban who took the city despite fierce resistance in 1998. Prior to the Taliban Mazar and its surroundings had been ruled by Rashid Dostum, a local Uzbek (speaking a Turkish dialect) warlord who had been in control since during the Soviet occupation when he was allied with the Soviets and their puppet regime under Najîbollâh in Kabul. Even though the Soviets withdrew in 1989, Dostum’s support helped prop up Najîbollâh until 1992. When Dostum withdrew from the government the regime quickly collapsed precipitating the mujahidin takeover and Afghanistan decent into total anarchy.

Mazar lies in the northern (şomâlî) plains near the border with Uzbekistan and the Amu River, about 400 km north of Kabul. It is separated both culturally and geographically from Kabul by the Hindu Kush mountain range. These mountain have traditionally formed a strong barrier in that they average between 4,000 and 5,000 meters in height. While Kabul faces the Indian subcontinent (the Kabul River drains into the Indus system), Mazar has always had closer ties to Samarqand and Bukhara and it very much a Persian city and part of the Persian heartland. Its climate is also much milder than Kabul’s given its elevation of 380m as opposed to Kabul’s 1,800.

For us the journey took about nine hours on the almost fully reconstructed Salang road. Leaving from Kabul the road ascends quite quickly from the plains above Çârîkâr to its highest point at the Salang tunnel which is at 3,800 m (that’s over 12,000 ft. for you Americans). After that you emerge very far above the tree line and follow and never-ending course of switchbacks until the road comfortably establishes itself in a lush river valley.

I can only imagine that this road and the people unfortunate enough to live along it saw a lot of action during the Soviet occupation, given that this was the main transport road between the USSR and Kabul. The terrain also provides numerous hideouts for potential attackers, who could easily attack Soviet equipment which must have been a sitting duck on the narrow path upon which it could travel. This is witnessed by innumerable shells of tanks, APCs, and parts thereof which litter the entirety of the road. It speaks to the Soviets’ helplessness, demoralisation, or both, that they did not or could not collect their damaged military hardware after attacks. It’s quite amusing see many former APC shells stacked atop and alongside one another to form embankments and tank turrets being used as flower planters.

The architecture and agriculture in view along the way was also quite fascinating. At lower elevations the rivers are surrounded by rice paddies, which are well watered when fed by the rising waters in spring during the melt. In mid summer and fall these field seem to by used for grass and forage for livestock. At higher elevations and in more rocky terrain, the grains are replaced by orchards of fruit and nut trees. These were really beautiful being that we travelled the road in October and their leave were all coloured in bright yellow and red (and this set against the barren mountains in the background). Everywhere a tremendous amount of effort had gone into terracing and irrigation. The terraces reached their greatest complexity for the orchards, many of which were cut out of slopes of up to about seventy degrees. Even on flatter ground every tree had its own little channel that supplies it and runs into a little well immediately around the tree’s base. Furthermore, the each tree is also based on a small rise to provide adequate drainage. In many cases individual trees were supported by complex masonry which exceeds that of any human dwelling. The efficacy of these techniques is apparent when one compares maintained trees to ones which have been abandoned or gone feral. These individuals appeared to be in a much sorrier straight, plus it’s interesting to note how quickly the terraces degrade when not maintain, with tree quickly breaking free and falling below to the river. Some points relating to harvesting: The tractors on hand were all Soviet or FSU in origin, with Belarus’ eponymous tractor making quite a strong showing. Given that the fields were all too small for tractors or used for crops not suitable for mechanical harvesting, the tractors seemed to be used entirely for hauling things such as blocks. Hay is threshed with a scythe (I didn’t see this in action but it was apparent from the patterns in the harvest fields) and left to dry in piles on individuals’ rooftops. This is depending giving that the weather is predictably rain-free until November.

Given the scarcity of arable land in mountain valleys, the towns usually don’t try to compete. They are all clustered on the sides of mountains and stacked on top of one another like the pueblo style in the US. It would have been really interesting to walk around one of these villages and check it out at closer range. All the houses are interconnected by interwoven networks of staircases and paths and interspersed at irregular intervals by individual gardens and fruit trees (which means that there must be an interesting water supply and drainage system at hand to keep all of the watered and then to keep your [rooftop] garden from collapsing into your neighbour’s living room). I was paying special attention to building materials given my current project at Altai, and two things were apparent to me; local materials are amply used to good effect and the local architecture is both practical and dignified. It really makes me disgusted with the compound-style houses favoured by the Afghan middle classes, which are designed at fortresses to protect familial honour from threats which either never have or will exist or actually originate from within such compounds. The traditional architecture consist of baked mud-bricks or fitted and cut stone (more stone at higher elevation since erosion is happening at a faster rate). On top of this they usually have a covering a dried mud-plaster mix. Nothing looked sloppy, with fixtures such as windows carefully fitted at neat angles and carved out of local wood.

We stopped in a town called Douşî for lunch, which was awesome. The menu at this restaurant consisted of lamb kabab, yahni, and dâşi, which we in the West recognise at digi. The digi consists of meat and gravy, with the meat being whatever they have (we ate at this place on the way back too; the first time they had veal, the next they had lamb) and the gravy also consisting of whatever they have. It’s all served in something like Kashmiri style with bread, lots of raw onions, and some masalas which you can add, one being based on dried red chillies and the other of dried green chillies.

The city of Mazar itself is not overly impressive. It’s not that large and not exciting. It is laid out on a rectangular grid with broad avenues, all perfectly centred on the shrine. This sobriety is reflected in the people, who by their own admission are much more focused on religion than having a good time. The city shuts down at sunset and restaurants are not open past eight. Although apparently young people compensate by going buck-wild in Uzbekistan on the weekends. The city of Termez right on the Uzbek side of the border has a disproportionate amount of clubs all disproportionately stocked with hooched out Afghan youth.

We got to eat in a few family homes too. One night we went to the house of Najib, who runs Altai’s Mazar office and the next to the house of Rafi’s family (Rafi being are consultant on this project who comes from Mazar). Our hosts were gracious and the few great, but I was deeply troubled by the intense immorality of a place where you get to meet the male family members but none of the women. Even though they were both very progressive families (one of the families made a great show of serving us beer), my overall impression was one of sadness, incompleteness, and un-Islamic-ness.

Of course no trip would be complete without its dramatic bits. Amongst our group we had the company of one extremely arrogant young man from Jalalabad who managed to embarrass the rest of us at almost every conceivable opportunity. This guy was pretty much a bad caricature of the embarrassment to humanity that is fundamentalism. First off he made a big show of refusing to go to the local franchise of Delhi Darbar because it was Hindu-owned, an action which is forbidden by almost any interpretation of Islam for a huge number of reasons. He also confronted our hosts for dinner on one occasion to inform them of how un-Islamic they were. Out of curiosity on one occasion I engaged him in a discussion of classical Sunni jurisprudence and found that, not surprisingly, he knew nothing (not even heard of classics such at Tabari’s History, Shafi’i’s Risala, or Bukhari’s collection of Hadiths) and gleaned most of his opinions from one Indian Deobandi leader and an intense obsession with originality (which itself fits into the psychology of the Deobandi movement). Anyway it was sad to see someone struggling with the ideas that the rest of humanity has confronted over fifty years ago—basically it reminded me of talking to an American Christian!

The trip back was a bit more intense in that the change in altitude comes as a much greater shock, as does the change in temperature. At one point we also stopped to take a piss and, as we were getting out of the vehicle, realised we didn’t know if the area had been demined. This was solved easily enough by finding a group of sheep. The logic here was that the sheep would have set off the mines had there been any. And it seems to have been right, judging by the lack of explosions. We also stopped at a few point to pick up fruit from the roadside—chiefly pomegranates.

The Nuances of Afghan Office Etiquette

2007-10-16T20:28:00.001+05:30

One of the highlights of my current job is getting to talk to people. In doing market research on construction materials I regularly find myself in the offices of five to ten heads of companies in a given day. This means I have had ample opportunity to compare and contrast different different settings in which Afghans conduct business. After a while, I couldn't help viewing these things through an anthropological lens as well.

The basic schematic of the Afghan office is, like many throughout the world, a projection of power. There are typical two rooms. The first will be less lavishly furnished and be occupied by an average of five people at any given moment; a mix of servants and sundry employees. The second room will be the lair of the boss himself. It will contain an enormous desk and the rest of the space will be taken up by obscene plush couches arranged in a salon setting. The meeting will also entail some sort of serving of food. This schematic allows numerous waits for exhibiting and mediating power, so here's how.

The number of people in the anteroom. This shows the power or status of the person you are about to meet. In fact most of them seem to have nothing to do but hang out (there are usually different servants who will bring you your tea later on). The people in the anteroom therefore, not just show how many people the boss can afford to hire, but also that he can afford to have them sitting around not doing much. The more powerful the boss, the more people and the more leisure on hand.

The main reception room. You and the boss will not be the only people in this room. Very often other people have been waiting since before you arrived to conduct their business. They may even have been waiting through multiple previous visitors. Unfortunately (for Afghan society) I never am made to wait, owing to the fact that Western visitors accord status, and those like myself who speak English are at the top of even that pecking order. Being made to wait and seeing the other guests that are brought in will impress upon the other individual the importance of the person they are waiting to see. If the person you are waiting to see cannot speak English themselves, they will frequently produce a foreign-educated son as a measure of social advancement, usually with the excuse of acting as a translator, which is pretty thin when everyone speaks Farsi. The desk is often little used and mostly for show, a fact often compounded by the impractical arrangement of unnecessary electronic gadgets upon it.

The food offered and the method of its offering. Tea can be served either before you sit down or offered just when it becomes clear that you are about to leave. The food will be non-existent or the usual assortment of nuts and raisins or include some specialties as souhan and gaz. Some people, as a result of class or pretension, go for the cornucopia effect, presenting you with a table covered in things like Pringles, Dorritos, and LU cookies. Some also dispense with tea and offer you coffee (perceived as a core indicator of things Western; Westerners are often perceived to dislike tea), soda, or even Red Bull.

The use of Western artefacts. This is something of a cross-cutting theme. The amount of Western artefacts on hand is inversely proportional with the amount of modernisation of the given boss. This extends from clothing to food to decor. The person educated or brought up the West will great you behind a well used desk in an office tastefully decorated with Afghan objets d'art while wearing a kurta-pijama. On the other extreme, we once spoke with the son of the boss, who had been left in charge. This individual, whilst making an aweful attempt at a Tehrani accent (which is prestigious thanks to the cultural power of Iran and the massive Farsi-language entertainment industry based in Los Angeles which is also given voice in the accent of Tehran), was wear probably one of the most amazing get-ups off all time, consisting of: acid-washed, flared, and incoherently embroidered jeans (Rajastani embroider on one pant, mickey mouse on the other); a collared shirt which had massively oversized cuffs, cufflinks the size of bones, and patterned with oversized neon-hued pieces of cheesecake (the collar was necessarily popped), and to top it off, a leather life-preserver-style vest that was sekwinzed.

It's not just the boss's personality or pretension that factor into this but also those of the clientele. Whatever the individuals preferences, there clients or potential clients will also look for certain signals. Many people have a regal salon-style set up, but will instead take you too a modern and efficient office when given the chance. Another axis is professionalism. The more professional the company, the more familiar its offices will look to someone from the West. People who sat behind a desk where they were visibly at work knew how much they would sell in a given interval, the cost of their inputs, and be full of potential strategies for growth. The biggest divide overall is between businesses that just consist of trading and transporting goods and those that are trying to establish an actual corporate structure, which is necessary to institutionalise the benefits of economic growth.

Life on Planet Altai

2007-10-10T20:35:00.000+05:30

Going into my third week at Altai, I think I really like this place. It's a good mix of being professional and informal. The work is well divided so I don't have to focus on much beyond the job which I am supposed to do.

My job right now consists of finishing up some market research on construction materials in the place of someone who got sick just before I started. In a sense this is training for a large market survey which I am going to head up for Nestle starting in November. As little as I know about construction materials, the work is really interesting as it involves me going around Kabul and getting to talk to all different sorts of people, plus also getting to know the Afghan economy close up.

Due to my lack of technical know-how, I've been paired up with an Afghan engineer (Aref, long based in Germany) who helps me fill in the gaps in my interviews. While necessary for this project, in general I hope I won't have to take assistants in the future. It makes the interviews more difficult because people don't expect me to speak Farsi when I have an Afghan assistant. It is also problematic because Aref speaks only German and Farsi, and my technical German is crap. He is used to thinking of German as the language of technology where I accord that status to Farsi. As a result, rather than asking a direct question in Farsi, I have to discuss with Aref in German and then have him translate into Farsi. Yes, my German is improving quickly. It also amusing because I have spent so many years devaluing German as just another old European language and now have to treat it with some respect. But Farsi is better, way better.

The living arrangements are okay. Currently I'm in the largest guesthouse out in Taimani. Let's face it, these are dorms. It's great fun. I rarely get to sleep on time and instead spend time drinking Ovaltine with Mitra and Arzu. We have continental breakfast laid out for us every morning and people clean our rooms. I'm not complaining; I've been roughing it for the last year and I'm quite happy for the perks! My living situation will soon get much better as well. Four expats are moving out so Altai held a room auction. I was the only one who placed a bid, so I got my pick :-) My new room will be in the guesthouse directly across from L'Atmosphere (a French restaurant with readily available alcohol which serves as a second office for the Altai staff) and only 50m away from the office. The room is right next to the bathroom and kitchen (yes, at moment my room is unattached, so I have to go outside to get to the bathroom, common room, or kitchen, which will suck come winter) and also has a desk and really soft mattress. I might also spring $120 for a diesel heater. One year of lighting the bokhari (wood stove) by myself has been quite enough, plus with a wood stove it will be cold in the morning unless you keep waking up in the middle of the night.

Back in Kabul

2007-09-20T14:59:00.000+05:30

Well, after four months in India I am finally back in Kabul. The last week in Delhi was fun if also a bit hectic. I stayed with my friend Kaushik in Mayur Vihar and ran around doing errands. On top of this, a few others were getting ready to leave--Mohit Sinha is going to Bangalore to work at a think-tank and Aashish Mishra, who's off to do a PhD at LSE. On top of this 4S, the infamous cheap bar of Defence Colony will be shutting its doors on the 20th for a one-month renovation. True, it's not the end, but one must worry that renovation will entail making it less ghetto and dive-y, which after all, was the whole point.

The flight to Kabul was relatively normal, by general standards, not those of a typical flight to Kabul. No goats, neem trees, or firearms in sight, nor was anyone carrying much more than twice the allowed amount of baggage with them. Indian served complimentary beer on the flight (I was the only non-taker), and no-one felt compelled to fast, even though the journey is under two hours. The terminal reconstruction is quite evident in Kabul and it's gotten much nicer at the airport.

Having been gone for four month I noticed a lot of changes. For one, things appear to be looking up. There's even more construction than before and a lot of small businesses are being repaired as well. On the hand, people are bitching about increases in the price of flour and oil.

It's nice to be back, the weather is perfect, about 25-30C with no humidity. I've made it a habit to sit out at L'Atmosphere, where no one is bothered by my using the internet, even though I'm not ordering anything due to the fast. In summer, it's an open-air restaurant (any of you who have been to San Diego, think Cafe 976) with lots of fig, pomegranate, and cherry trees, as well as grapes and roses too. I'm a bit annoyed by the constant repetition of the soundtrack from My Best Friend's Wedding (the English version of Mere Yaar Ki Shadi Hai), but oh well.

I found, with Nathan's help, a nice guesthouse behind the Kabul City Centre shopping mall. It's actually a private house run by a nice and mellow Australian guy, and is next to an awesome Lebanese restaurant. Beyond finishing my survey of perceptions of NGO-sector corruption in Afghanistan, I'm trying to rustle up a new job but networking with everyone imaginable. It's much easier to find work hanging out here than going to DC or Cali, just because communication tends to be so poor between Afghanistan and wherever the donors are. Plus you just get a lot of experience in anything you do here.

So, basically, the job search begins, the partying continues!

The Gilded Tissue Box: Trying to distribute aid to Afghanistan

2007-08-16T21:02:00.001+05:30

Right now I'm wrapping up my big report for IWA and getting ready to go back to Kabul, and on to the next job. The concept for the report is 'perceptions of NGO integrity in Afghanistan'. It's actually two reports, based on two questionnaires (one for the population as a whole and one for NGO professionals and political elites) with participants in twenty provinces. What we've found is this: There are major areas of Afghanistan who are confused about what NGOs are and there are lots of non-Afghans who are also equally confused. Now, at this point it's important to underline that people in highly educated societies tend not to know what NGOs are. Yes, but these same people tend also to live in functioning states which provide public goods. Afghans have a whole array of competing would-be public goods providers, amongst which the dominant one by far is not the Afghan state per se (please no one say they need a citation for this). These are my thoughts about the significance of this work.

Before we can move on to the Afghans, we need to look at the situation from the point of the NGO community itself. First and foremost there is a general failure to be practical--this means a relevant combination of theoretical and specific, not one or the other. The NGO community would do well to recognise the realities defined in political science and economics (which is often disdained in itself). You'll observe my point as I continue, the grand scales bears heavily on the specific analyses. Here are some ground rules for understanding the situation in Afghanistan:

States are geographically delimited public goods monopolies. As such, they try to build, maintain, and enforce monopolies over the production, distribution, and consumption of public goods, such as the rule of law, justice, freedoms, etc. The state is also the principle agent in the state system, which, thanks to a huge body of treaties and common law, has been growing since at least 1648. There global political arena is composed of states, bodies composed of states, organisations which operate under the auspices of the state, and those who define themselves in response to states and the state system (the last two need not be mutually exclusive).
Political actors are any person, group, organisation, body, multilateral institution, reptile, or platypus which has an effect on the any political economy or ecology. Yep, every conscious being is pretty much a political actor.
Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are just that. Your local sewing circle is any NGO, as is McDonalds, Bearing Point, Louis Berger, Integrity Watch Afghanistan, Counterpart International, and the Foundation to Protect Swedish Underwear Models. For the purpose if this spiel, I'm talking about NGOs as organisations that distribute aid.
While a given organisation is either part of the state or it is not, it's relation to the state could be discribed on a continuum. At one end of the continuum you have the organisation being completely inside the government, basically the Man's bitch. An example would be the Department of State in the US. At the other extreme would be an organisation that has nothing to do with the government (like the secrecy-shrouded PLF--Platypus Liberation Front; holed up in an undisclosed location). Yes, the reality is that every organisation falls somewhere in between, and there's a handy adjective for this, official. The more anything is sanctioned by anything else, the more official it is, with regards to point of reference for definition.
Legitimacy is how much support something has. It doesn't matter what it is or how official it is.

So, in Afghanistan we have a lot of political actors, all with varying degrees of officialdom. On the official side we have the internationally recognised government of Afghanistan and bodies (militaries, embassies, development agencies) of other sovereign states. On the unofficial end we have the Taliban (boo!), warlords, clan, kin, and tribal structures. None of the above are necessarily good or bad, and all have varying degrees of legitimacy.

The state can not distribute the amount of public goods necessary for all the citizens of Afghanistan, so other organisations fill the vacuum. Some organisations are official; the Afghan government and other states acknowledging its lack of capacity open bids, sign contracts, and invite other organisations to provide [public] goods. Along with the actual provision of public goods, said organisation also often help to strength the Afghan state's ability to do so (capacity building).

Uninvited are the Talban and other traditional power structures. The Taliban want control over the state and hence the monopoly, warlords want the added prestige and wealth associated with the ability to distribute public goods, and maybe a monopoly over an area as well. Tribal or clan institutions may or may not compete with the state, but given different discourses of legitimacy, traditional institutions may serve as an arbiter between the average citizen and larger actors. Actors that can best tap into and influence the discourse of legitimacy gain the most power.

Most actors lie somewhere between official and unofficial. Non-official actors such as warlords or local jirgas may be coopted into the state in exchange for improved legitimacy and interest aggregation and adjudication. NGOs also lie on this continuum. USAID is a highly official arm of the US government. It contracts out a project to an independent NGO, say, Counterpart, which then becomes a more official player in so doing. The individuals and organisations who then work with Counterpart have varying degrees of officialdom within the resulting structure. Notice that whether the NGO is for- or non-profit is of only tangential importance. Legitimacy is often misconstrued, by those within and with the NGO community to be a function the profit motive. In reality, an NGO is a business and a corporation, and it's profit status doesn't necessarily relate to its transparency, accountability, efficacy, or legitimacy.

The point of IWA's recent survey is that, while Afghans are more aware of NGOs than, say, the average American (they deal with them more), they are still quite confused. Some provinces where people rate official power structures as most influential are unlikely to ever have experienced proper governance by the national government. In other places, political actors blur together, with local government, NGOs, and warlords being identified with each other in important ways. Aid delivery must be thought out and organised, yet there is a paradox because we know that command economies don't work. This means that not only do NGOs have to coordinate, they have have to coordinate in structuring and regulating the market to increase the demand for [certain kinds of] aid and integrity in their consumption and distribution.

One of the most important points in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is that harmonised aid is important, but it does not go so far as to recognise the necessity of adapting to market forces. Along with economic markets, there exist also ideological markets, requiring marketing and PR. The branding, marketing, and packaging of aid are as important as the product itself (of course the product also needs to be good, as the makers of US foreign policy would do well to understand). We've all made fun of the 60-odd page brand identification manual that USAID puts out, but there's a logic there.

To go beyond what the results of survey, or even what a trough of phenomenological interviews can suss out, the problems faced in the reconstruction of Afghanistan are at least as much a result of structural factors in the aid distribution regime as they are the result of specific factors in the Afghan beneficiaries. These include the problem of dual accountability, whereby aid distributes are supposed to be accountable to both their beneficiaries and their donors (who are often nation-states whose interests may conflict with those of the intended beneficiaries), and the problem of the orientation of NGOs themselves. But just as important is the notion amongst many non-profits that they are superior or more rashid than for-profits.

The tendency of non-profits to fully grasp the reality of the situation makes them overall less confident and less effective in aid distribution. Non-profits should strive to internalise the principles of integrity and accountability as deeply as they advocate them. They also need to realise that there is no magic bullet for accountability and hence to stop wringing their hands about it. The consequences are immediate. Afghans are confused over non-profits/ intentions as well as their identity, often not being aware of who is supposed to benefit or why.

The problem with accountability for non-profit NGOs is the lack of incentives. While for-profits are certainly involved in many abuses, their model theoretically creates a more efficient model for integrity. The same profit model that can cater to a baser instinct also introduces more checks and balances by which the for-profit should be more transparent and accountable, at least to its shareholders. Following the theory, a for-profit will lose money if it doesn't do the job and do it well, and furthermore it will face internal punishment if it loses out on revenue or future contracts (being unethical costs money!). In too many non-profits, this business ethnic is non-existent. No one gets fired when a product fails or doesn't get produced in a timely fashion. Donors sympathise with the non-profit NGO that can't balance its budget and don't cut off its funding right away. It is considered tolerable for a non-profit not to pay its employees (who work just as hard as employees of for-profits) well or be insolvent, whereas a for-profit would become a laughing stock for this. Most non-profits are accountable or at least genuinely try, but the non-profit model has serious flaws and strains which should be better addressed.

For the situation to change, NGOs have to grow up. (Some place are ahead--NGO discourse is much more advanced in the US and Iran than in Europe for example) In order to become truly effective, non-profits need to realise that they are just one of many political and economic actors, and that they are political and economic actors themselves. They also have to be as conversant and comfortable with economics as with the discourses of justice and public health. Non-profits also need to embrace markets, and embrace the hard game of politics with all the clever PR of Shell and Unilever. Economics is the moral science, explaining how humans satisfy their wants and needs and theirin explaining how we can help them be satisfied more often. The market for public goods in Afghanistan will be filled, the question is how we are going to structure the market.

Barsaat!

2007-06-19T16:04:00.002+05:30

The monsoons have finally brought some relief to my AC-less ass. Temperatures are now topping about 30 during the day, with the addition of a pleasant breeze. Thanks to global warming, there not to much actual rain here, but still enough. And moreover the sky is now often blue instead of copper. I've made some quite good friends here and you meet quite a few interesting folks around Delhi in general.

As hinted at by my lack of AC, my NGO still remains insolvent, hence I have not gotten paid and have instead received quite a bit of kindness from friends. I, however, am now thoroughly on board with the job search. I have learned that Monster and Jobster both suck. For Monster, I didn't exactly have a narrow search--about ten different kinds of proffessions in about 20 countries. Got back one result. I mean what the hell? I guess things have not changed much since the old Monster which would respect to my interest in, say, non-profits, by returning search results for IT workers for such companies. Jobster is also strange in that the social networking phenomenon doesn't apply well to job-searching in that most people are not in a state of constant search. When they find a job, they forget about their profiles. A better thing would be to offer these services with Facebook or Friendster, since people would still be logging in even when happily employed. Of course this would require more people to grow up and use social networking sites.

All of my experiences with my current NGO just encourage me ever more to get into my own business and simply run things myself. And India's a positive environment for that in that there are plenty of opportunities to be had here.

Another upshot of my insolvency is that it's led me to try eating at more cheap places here. One, an Andhra restaurant near where I live, produces a lamb-nugget that is awesome. Consisting of a manlier meat, it even beats the chicken nugget from the roadside dhaba in Tamilnadu. Crispy and batterfried in a spicy batter with all sort of chillies and garlic, these lamb-nuggets are mighty. Serve them with cheese sauce and white people would kill for them too. This Andhra restaurant also makes a fish curry that is no joke. Being good Andhra food it's the first properly spicy thing I've found during this stint in India. In general this country suffers from one pepper, the green/red chillie, which is often not that hot. The first step to good hot food is to supplement that heat with black pepper, which is different and complementary. But more importantly, more kinds of chillies could be used like in Mexico or the US. Of course I still haven't found a good Christian or Zoroastrian (Parsi) restaurant. Having brough the chili to India in the first place, Christians are the most reliable connoisseurs of spice in India.

Delhi: The Arrival

2007-06-01T15:36:00.000+05:30

Now I've been in Delhi over two weeks and it's a big improvement over Kabul. Thanks to Chitra's help I found a decent appartment in Green Park and I've set up my office in Priya Complex market in Vasant Vihar. My "office" is actually Passion, which is a tea house that looks like a post-modern Starbucks and offers free wireless hi-speed internet.

It's an interesting experience finally getting to live in Delhi, and here are the biggest insights I have into Indian society so far.

-Some things are universal. The guy from AirTel who's supposed to set up my internet has so far managed to miss two appointments.

-You litterally cannot build stores and fill them with products fast enough here. People have a desire to spend their money but few places to do it. In the upscale suburb of Gurgaon there are countless megamalls and hypermarkets under construct to complement the 15 already completed. Delhi only really has a few decent shopping areas--Ansel Plaza, SouthEx, Khan Market, and Priya Complex, the rest are all out in Noida or Gurgaon. Now before you realise my bias, I'm not saying this as a snobby Californian so much as a consumer who just wants to be able to get stuff in an enjoyable and navigable environment. The old bazaars, say in Shahjahanabad, are now mostly wholesalers and not practical for the consumer, and the rest are crowded, dirty, and annoying (or tourist traps), even if they do have good food. Overall Delhi makes Los Angeles look pedestrian-friendly, which means not that it doesn't have public space, but that those spaces are too superhuman in size and hence too alienating. Whoever can fill demands more decent public/commercial space will make a lot of money. (this relates to my theory on how any good public space needs to be comercially oriented, this is why the National Mall in Washington DC is such a dramatic failure; it's not fun and it's not social)

-There is a serious lack of entrepreneurialism here and this has serious implications when coupled with the need to feed this growing economy. I'll give an example of how this plays out. At the tea house where I work they have a music playlist that basically consists of Backstreet Boys and Michael Jackson, which the odd bit of Shaggy thrown in. All day long they will play the same Backstreet Boys songs over and over again and this doesn't change ever, I've been here almost every day for two weeks now and I've stopped in before as well. Now it's interesting that this never drives the staff crazy and that they don't think that they can say something to their manager about changing it. Trust me, nobody likes Backstreet Boys that much. Ever. The next point goes to why I don't ask them to change it. My reason is simple--the music will switch to whatever I ask them to change it to and then probably remain on that in perpetuity. In other words, it wouldn't get any better. This may be a bit presumptuous on my part, but I think as an example it captures something of the picture. I remember seeing a newspaper ad that has the shocking title of "World's Most Reliable Career!". Think about that for a minute.

A other cool thing is that I've already managed to have some visitors here. Shareena came to stay with me here and Liz and Sahar, both of Kabul, are also in town for short periods. Sahar actually will be here for about four hours tomorrow on a layover, during which I plan to take her to the famous Bukhara restaurant.

Shifting to Delhi!

2007-05-11T18:59:00.001+05:30

A lot has happened since my last blog entry. My trip to Delhi went exceedingly well in way I never imagined. The girl who I had just met at the time of my last entry (Chitra) is now my girlfriend, and I will be shifting to Delhi for two to three months!

In Delhi we did end up going to Chitra to Elevate and then the three of us (me, Chitra, and Sanaa) hung out the next day and went to an excellent R&B club in Vasant Vihar, and me and Chitra decided we were a couple. Soon I found myself extending my stay by another week.

Upon arriving back in Kabul we tried to work out my visa paperwork, but it was more complicated than before. In order to get a working permit, we have to conven our board of directors to clarify that we can hire foreigners in our charter. This isn't very difficult or unreasonable--it's simply a matter of following the steps--but there's no way it would have been done before my one month tourist visa (which I got in Delhi) expired. So we came up with the decision that I will work from Delhi for the next two months while this gets straightened out, which also conveniently allows me to spend some time with Chitra!

With housing prices in Delhi being what they are, I should be able to get a very nice place with all the amenities. One amenity which I will be getting for the first time in my life will be air conditioning, which is essential now that the temperatures are consistently topping 40 degrees there.

My last weekend in Kabul is proving to be very pleasant as well. One of the higher-ups from Nathan's NGO, the COO, came to town and we spent the day touring various attractions. First we went to the OMAR (an organisation which clears landmines) mine museum, which has a collection of old military hardware. All of this was illuminated by Azim, Nathan's driver, who was conscripted out of high school by the communist government to fight the mujahidin. Azim also pointed out who controlled which hilltop during the worst of the fighting (from 1992-96). Basically all the warlords in Kabul (Dostum, Hekmatyaar, and Mas'ud were the main players) controlled various hilltops and spent the four years before the Taliban took over trying to dislodge each other from them (to give you an idea, Kabul consists of two big plains, with about three huge mountain peaks in the middle, and the northern plain also has about five major mesas interspersed upon it). With warlords such as Hekmatyaar firing up to 2,500 poorly guided, Pakistani-supplied rockets a day, one can see how the city emptied quickly and got to its current state.

After the museum, we went to Babur's tomb (Babur was the descendent of Timur who founded the Mughal state in India), which is surrounded by pleasant gardens filled with picknicking families. It has been restored by the Agha Khan Foundation, which has faithfully planted the garden with Babur's favourite trees like fruit trees and sycamores. After that we drove around the bombed- and burnt-out hulk of Darulaman Palace. All and all it was a very nice tour on a very nice day.

Brain Masala and Elevate

2007-04-07T15:10:00.001+05:30

I did manage to get to India, but Tuesday was a little stressful. First it turned out that what the Ministry of the Interior had given me as an exit visa, was not in fact the right document. So I couldn't go through customs. This time I held my ground. The customs guys wouldn't budge, so I pulled some wasta with a friend who's an advisor to Karzai. Soon the airport director was in on this and they finally agreed to hold my ticket and boarding pass while I dashed back to the Interior Ministry for my exit visa (turns out, the visa are issued in the passport directorate across from the ministry compound proper). I just barely managed it. We (me and the airport cabby) had to get exact change, and then passport photos, and finally head back to the airport. Luckily the flight was delayed and I ended up being the first person on the plane. The airport officially were stunned that I had pulled it off. Ironically at the passport directorate, just as the man was about to give me the visa, he said 'you shoulda come in here a few days ago, we would've given you a six-month multiple entry visa, which is the point of me going to India in the first place.

But here I am in Delhi, and it's nice and warm, as well as clean, green and fresh. I was dismayed to get off the plane and find that alcohol wasn't being sold for two days due to the municipal elections. Oddly enough, alcohol was also supposed to be forbidden today and yesterday too, because of vote counting and Good Friday, but no one seems to be heeding it now. The first night I contented myself with going to Karim's and getting some nice Shami kabab and karahi. The man who sat down next to me at the table goaded me into trying his brain masala, which was indeed tasty, except for the brain part.

As expected, I have been a lot more efficient here than in Kabul. I generally spend my time circulating between an internet cafe and one of the many coffee shops here. The coffee shops are a bit nicer and cooler than their American counterparts, usually full of businessppl like myself staring at their laptops with the addition of an above-average number of ridiculously hot girls.

In the evenings I've been having fun with some people Saurabh put me in contact. It's kind of like a refined version of my old crew from DC, with people who work in the World Bank, local Think-tanks, and some journalists. Also in the mix is Sanna, from Denmark, whose purpose here is doing research on middle-class drinking habits. Everyone is happy to provide her with material.

Yesterday the Indian end of the crew was too tired, so me and Sanna met up in Defence Colony (where I got some awesome Mangalorean fish fry for dinner!) and decided to go to TC. Now TC (Turquoise Cottage) is a random-looking Irish-style pub near Hauz Khaas Village. We wanted to go separate because Mohit, Kaushik, etc, usually don't like these sorts of places (they're loud and annoying, which I would agree with too, except that I'm curious). It was hilarious, the part played nothing but 'uncle music', some of which is very good like REM and U2, but would never fit into a 'cool setting' that I could imagine. In any case, we met a girl there name Chitra and hung out with her for a while. It turns out her goal for tonight was the same as ours, to go to Elevate in Noida. Elevate is prolly one of the largest and most important clubs in the world, with best and newest in music, so this truly should be an experience. This city is cool, and it's actually making me cool, if such a thing were ever possible!

The Joys of Visa Renewal

2007-04-02T20:20:00.001+05:30

So my visa expired on 19 March. My boss was understandibly discouraged that I had not taken care of it before, however, the time preceding this was so busy at work that I think I would have just been killed had I tried renewing it then. Rather than spend at least $700 to go and stay in Dubai, I undertook to renew it here in Kabul. That didn't fly. Way too much red tape and attention focused on our organisation. My status is legal here and it only takes a few days to get a new visa abroad, so I do now have to go to Delhi (it's cheaper to stay there than Dubai).

My attempt on Sunday at leaving the country failed. Yesterday, all in all, I had a fascinating day and it gives me a little hope for this country. So I went to the airport, and lo and behold they would not let me get out with my expired visa by paying a fine (or a "fine"). Nope, they've clamped down on that, but they don't have expedited procedures, so despite my whining I had to go back to the Foreign Ministry and get an exit visa. They did make my ticket refundable though. I found out today that I do better going to the ministries by myself--when one of my coworkers comes with they seem just like my servant and I like some other ignorant international. When I go myself I get to blab away in Farsi and everyone finds me adorable, plus in Kabul it's next to unheard of for an American to do things unaided. So the foreign ministry sends me to the Interior Ministry, where the deputy minister just gives me my exit visa straight away, there were no fees and he didn't even ask for a bribe (that's where I think the combo of being foreign and Farsi-speaking is especially endearing). I then went down to Indian Airlines for one of my flights--the manager recognised me from the airport and just changed the date, no questions asked. Then I went to Kam Air for my return flight and no problems. I spent 0 cents yesterday getting this straightened out. Then I went back to work and made the best spreadsheet ever!

Delhi will be nice. Relaxation and modern conveniences, plus lots of good food. I'll probably find a nice cafe with wireless and up my productivity. I also miss driving. Maybe I'll rent a car and enjoy not only paved roads but multi-laned freeways.

Nouruz Piruz!

2007-03-22T21:55:00.001+05:30

Happy 1386 to everyone!

Today we had a lovely outing to the Hotel Intercontinental and Bagh-e Bala. The Intercon is an old building which dominates a hill west of the city. It was built in 1969 and this is evident in its exterior. You feel like on the set of Spielberg's Munich (an awesome movie which captures the political ambiance 70s excellently as well as questioning Israel's right to exist by making the protagonist choose between being Jewish and Israeli) or one of the 'before' pictures of Beirut dating to 1973 hung up by a nostalgic Lebanese restauranteur. Rather unfortunately, the interior seems to have been recently renovated, making it less than shocking. I've still seen a big hulking hotel in Damascus where even the furniture is absolutely unchanged. We walked around Bagh-e Bala which is the big park next the hotel and filled with thousands of picknickers. There was lots of good snacks around too, including masala french fries and fresh sugar cane and sugar cane juice.

Otherwise it's a quiet new year's, with me and Saurabh more or less left to our own devices. The various components of my gang/family are out of town, including Nathan, Sahar, Lorenzo, and Khwaga. My productivity is up in any rate, so I can work on my own regular schedule--that despite even the latest bout of diarrhoea. The press conference seems to have gone well--We got an interview with one of the top journalists at Le Monde, and BBC, Reuters, AP, AFP etc. came out to hear us. I participated in a radio discussion--in Farsi (yikes) and gave an interview to Radio Netherlands myself.

Also exciting is that Neda is now adding herself to the list of people interested in Kabul. It looks like I just might bring DC here. All I need now is Angelo and a franchise of Mixtec with their excellent Margaritas.

The Elaj

2007-03-09T16:42:00.001+05:30

I got a nice surprise the other morning. I woke up to the Saajan soundtrack playing at full volume thanks to the construction crew working on the new house next to mine. It really is one of the tops of all time and I had Dekha hi Pehli Baar in my head all day long. One of the great things about Kabul is the South Asian edge. Much like my own preferences, the music is never, ever too loud nor are there any situations where it is inappropriate. Ever.

It's been a busy week, and there's been a slight promise of summer (one day it may it up to 14C!). The second Bollywood party turned out pretty well last night. Like the last party this was a joint effort between Saurabh (DJ Mariz-e-Mohabbat 'lovesick'), myself (DJ Elaj 'the cure') and Mudasser (Khauf 'fear'). There was a good mix of both people and music.

I finally managed to meet up with my friend James, who's doing his PhD research here. He was dressed in fine Peshawari style with a white kurta and black vest. Also appearing last night was my friend from high school, Etai. It really is a trip to see fellow high school people here. In any event it was really fun chatting with him again and seeing that some people from high school are leading normal lives.

Other activities lately have included a budgetary analysis workshop put on by ActionAid at the Kabul City Centre, which got me a lot of good contacts for my NGO accountability project. Then it's just been back to the office to vet my questionnaires yet again.

Baavar nakardani-st!

2007-02-13T23:52:00.001+05:30

It's about 11pm on Tuesday, and yes, I'm in the office. In between slogging through a report about the disappointingly un-corrupt copper industry, I edited an awesome paper that Lorenzo wrote. It was a study of corruption in relief efforts in the Maslakh camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) near Herat. The findings were both fascinating and shocking. The camp (which at its height had 180k people, was quickly taken over by it's own mafia, mafia in the form of local NGOs, and the traditional mafia of Herat. Donors engaged in things the like providing educational services because they look good but were at cross purposes with the nature of the camp, which is to get people resettled eventually. People would go back to their own villages and have no access to education, school materials were usually diverted for profit, and educated refugees were deterred from teaching so that the Herati network would rent out the positions to its own people. "Block leaders" in the camp would keep certain children malnurished so that they could rent them out to families so that they could get more rations. The purpose behind them getting more rations of course was that the block leader would retake yet more supplies so that he could redistribute them for profit and patronage. In an especially ironic result of illiteracy mixed with profiteering, people decided to scam the vaccination programme just like they had the food. The outcome was that NGOs actually had to run anti-vaccination campaign because people were getting sick as a result of over vaccinating themselves.

Next amusing story. Yesterday I get an email from Tilly (Nathan's boss at Counterpart) asking me to translate a letter one of their servants had received. The letter is from the German government printed on official stationary (yes, they have one format that they use for everything) in annoying unbelievable pretentious formal German (again, the norm). The letter is clearing addressed to this person (yes, they got an exact address in Kabul). It is a letter informing her that she has received a temporary German driver's licence enclosed and that she should proceed to the German consulate in a week with a passport photo and pick up her official copy. Now this person has never been to German, speaks no German, and moreover does not know how to drive. It couldn't be a scam--who would make money if she goes to the consulate? Also a German driver's licence costs thousands of dollars and entails many hours of training and a four hour driving test. It is the only country in Europe where I cannot drive with my American licence. Hilarious on so many levels.

The other good news is that we have acquired a new cook for the evenings. None other than the amazing Matin who until just this week cooked for Ali Azimi (Waise's father, who is leaving Afghanistan). We're splitting him between me, Lorenzo, Khwaga (we are all usually in the office here anyway) and Jerome. This guy is a true artiste, and makes the best Afghan and Iranian food I've ever tasted.

Foods I Don't Like!

2007-01-29T16:32:00.001+05:30

As usual I'm lazy and the last month has been at turns eventful and uneventful. I got to meet with the warlord from Kunar province, Malik Zarin, who had some clever proposals about reigning in the illegal timber industry. My copper project is progressing too and I really feel like I'm starting to know how to do things.

One of the latest challenges I've been facing is developing a questionnaire aimed at a report we're going to do on perceptions of NGOs. It's shot through with holes and I'm going to go over to Counterpart and work with Sahar on Wednesday, it turns out they're facing similar problems. It is fun doing the questionnaire in Farsi though.

I have also adjusted to the altitude here, especially as it concerns my ability to take in alcohol. I've been able to get properly drunk a few times here and I had a nice evening drinking with Nathan, Sahar, and Marina at the Gandomack last night.

And yes, I have discovered here that there are a lot of foods which can be just plain nasty. Chief amongst them are the feet of any hooved animal and kidneys. Cows' feet are nothing but pure rubbery gelatin cooked in an especially nasty gravy which rather hard chickpeas which give you the notion of chewing on bits of bone. Kidneys taste like warm, soft, metal. No furthern description necessary.

The last cool thing that comes to mind at the moment is Ashura. I've never been in a place where the Shiis really come out of the closet and celebrate but here you see all the black banners with red lettering lamenting Yazid's victory of Husayn at Karbala in Iraq. People even attach the banners to cars, which I think is bold given that Shiis are only 20% of the population. And you can see the results of the increasing anti-Shiism on the part of Sunnis. They say utterly stupid things and show a profound lack of understanding. It seems as if the ascension of Shiis in Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran itself are bit too much for some people to bear.

Hindustan Ki Masti

2007-01-06T14:03:00.001+05:30

My week-long vacation in India was frankly awesome. It was amazing how smoothly the whole thing went; God was definitely on our side.

To start out with keep in mind the number of miracles, which it took for us to get out of Kabul in the first place. We had to get to the airport, the airport and its employees and parts had to be functional, the weather had to cooperate, and the plane had to come. Traffic getting to the airport was an absolute nightmare. Every road was packed as millions of people flooded into the city for their holiday shopping (for Eid-e Qorban, that's Id al-Adha to you Arabs and Passover to the rest of you--along with cars the roads were clogged with sheep for slaughter). It took nearly 1.5 hours to get to the airport. Then there was the problem of electricity at the airport. Out airline, Indian Airways, was all fancy and dependent on computers and such, so of course they had to wait till the power came back to process customers (Kam Air, the Afghan airline, had no such problem, as they seem to issue mud-tablet boarding passes with cuneiform). And finally the airlplane did actually take off.

The transfer to our Bangalore flight in Delhi was as normal as could be, meaning chaotic. I should interject here that we're not talking about long flights, the Kabul-Delhi one is 1:40 and Delhi-B'lore is 2:05. The Delhi airport is a great achievement in failed socialist planning. The airport was not intended for expansion, with the result being that most passengers are ferried by bus to their plane far out on the tarmac. The airport only has about 10 gates proper and no real procedure to international transfer. This means that you can't check your luggage through. According to Nathan, a group of people sit around confused in the passport control room, knowing that they can't go through customs--an official eventually takes a herd of people through a door and sits the down in the departures lounges, then they herd you around to get your luggage and connecting boarding pass (both of which are on the other side of customs). For we simply had to get to the domestic terminal. Of course this is not in the same building. It is in two rather small buildings some kilometres away. In other words the transfer involves getting to sit in traffic on the N8 freeway for a while. The airport does kindly provide shuttles, but they only leave once an hour so they are hardly useful if your transfer time has been squeezed down to about 50 minutes.

We did get into Bangalore around 10.30 in the evening though and had no trouble finding a room at the place I stayed at this summer, right in the middle of downtown on Brigade Road. It's nice to be in a normal country without the NGO price-bubble. A fine room can be had for only about USD 30 per night--a self catered meal for three from an Andhra restaurant cost Rs 250 altogether-the same amount would buy a crappy vegitarian dish in Afghanistan. Bangalore has little history and like most cities in India is relatively new, at least in relation to those in America. That's fine though--I'm generally bored by historical sight because they only amount to things and drawn rather to commercial culture. And Bangalore has great shopping.

The next day we (me and Nathan) managed to find Neda, hit up several malls, and then close down a bar. The weather was also perfect, warm and dry. This with some of the world's restaurants makes me so thankful I'm not in a place like Europe. After the bar had closed Nathan managed to fulfill his grand desire to play beer pong. All the while we were debriefed by Neda who is trying to sell to a friend of hers at Columbia, Vivian, who seems eligible on all counts. The day after that involved more shopping!

Finally we went over to Livio's place (Lorenzo's brother) in Indiranagar. It was a beautiful three-story place with a lovely roof deck. Livio works in Bangalore as an architect, which is pretty cool considering all the opportunities it offers given the construction everywhere. Saurabh and Lorenzo were both there from Kabul and we all went to a great Mughlai restaurant (it's called Tandoor if any of you come through there). Finally the next day was the big new years party. We all brought the year in in style with non-veg catering and lots of booze. It was a real mix of people, with all the Indians being especially impressive in that they were intelligent and articulate--not to mention that they all have beautiful accents which make you feel stupid. The only slight drawback was that me and Saurabh had not taken control of the music and hence the selection was below par. Nathan disappeared on the roof with a girl named Leila (from Tunesia, but living in Dubai!) where they "made friends". Meanwhile me and a girl from Nellore were totally loaded and sang (and tried to sing) old Telugu and Hindi songs.

Alas, due to our limited timeframe we did have to leave the party at a reasonnable hour. We decided to get our beach time in in Mahabalipuram, a town about 40 km south of Chennai (Madras) which is famous for its stunning temples and rock carvings. We didn't really have time to take the train, so I hired a driver who was to come on the morning of the 1st. Meaning that at least I had to get some sleep so as not to miss the drive. One thing I learned is that the roads are quite decent, well marked, and well paved, so it would be a lot more fun to rent a car in India--especially in the south. Of course car rental is kinda a new concept in a place where it's cheaper to hire someone to do almost anything than to do it yourself.

The drive was indeed beautiful, Tamil Nadu, the neighbouring state of which Madras is the capital, was really like a foreign country. It's flat and interspersed by the occasional huge mountain. The saris were amazing too. Tamilian saris get truly bright and and out of control which colour schemes unheard of anywhere else. Plus, like anywhere in India, the sheer variety of styles is amazing. I guess it's like looking into the future but in fashion. When you see the tremendous diversity of India, you understand where the South Asian pop-culture juggernauth gets its power from. There's an amount of strength, diversity, and plurality there that Western countries can only dream of if they're willing to open they're doors fully to immigration.

In Mahabalipuram we made for the nicest resort we could find an crashed there for two nights. The temperature was perfect--about 30 during the day and 25 at night, all the while with a nice breeze coming off the Bay of Bengal. Yep, we just veged.

On the way back we stopped for some awesome chicken manchuri and a "Kerala Chicken Fry" that rocked Nathan's world and redefined what the chicken nugget should be. It was excellent chicken breaded and fried in tandoori masala with spring onions and cilantro. Awesome. That night it was back to Livio's house to hang out with them and Saurabh until it was time to leave for the airport. Amazingly there were no difficulties in returning to Kabul either. So all in all it was a pretty stunning trip.

Of course I came back to be suprised by -25 night and the realisation that my water tank will be frozen for the near future, but that is another adventure!

Surviving Winter

2006-12-12T19:52:00.001+05:30

Well life here has finally settled into a routine, a very cold one. The other night, in a blinding flash of insight from Nathan unlocked the true potential of my heater. I discovered that I could let in more air to increase the heat of the flames and that I can burn wood to heat up the room a lot and then start up the sawdust component to keep the room warm further into the night. I also realised that I do have a small kitchen in my house, which I had previously though was only a store room. That being said, the weather hasn't been all that bad since most days are above freezing here.

My boss, Lorenzo, finally came back from France, with tonnes of great ideas that hadn't occurred to me for my own project. In other news Saurabh left from India after three days of snow had shut down the airport's short-wave radar. Then last night I went out for dinner with Team Counterpart, since Ian is leaving for DC tomorrow and our land mines specialist, Matt, decided to get out of town early before they shut down the airport again.

The most exciting news, however, is the Nathan might well be moving into my hood. While we didn't have room for him in my lovely rustic house, he will be getting a room with Khwaga, which will make Saurabh his housemate and give him some exposure to Afghan culture, along with the wood-burning stove which he so fervently desires. Counterpart, Nathan's NGO, realised that A) they were running out of space at their guest house, B) that is was probably the most unsecure living arrangement obtainable in Kabul, and C) that their insulation from Afghan society was hurting productivity.

And, yes, I am ready for that lovely trip to warm Southern India!

Bollywood Reloaded

2006-11-29T16:52:00.001+05:30

Sorry for the delayed post, our internet's been messed up at work and I finally got time to come out to a coffee shop and get a connection.

So, the best way to describe me and Saurabh's party is to see the pictures, which I have just posted on flickr. The party was a great success and we managed not to get overcrowded. The music was awesome--between us we managed a pretty complete South Asian anthology. Of course there were other fun parts, like the fact that we seem to have scared away a number of Americans with the modern music selection and lack of alcohol. You'll also notice it was a grand excuse for me and Saurabh to get pimped out in full party regalia.

Otherwise I have been dividing my time between hanging out with Nathan and Sahar and watching Battlestar Galactica ("the DC refugees" whose compound I have termed farangestan due to the fact that it's more than a dwelling place, it's a cultural voyage to the land of potato chips and English speakers). Because the internet has been down in my office, I have spent the extra time improving my Farsi.

The other interesting thing that I can say about this place is that it is the middle ground between to titanic cultural spheres, India and Iran. The US doesn't matter and much of the West comes filtered thru Iran. For people who know what California is, they assume it's some sort of Iranian colony (not totally wrong) and that we are all Twelver Shi'is. It's also interesting to watch people correct their Farsi around me toward the Tehran/Los Angeles standard. All I can do is embrace my Iranian identity, sometimes I drop the Afghan pleasantries for the urban Iranian version, which both fits people's expectations and makes me anything but American (if they know what that is!). More important that my complexion and hair here is my cosmopolitan affectations, looks don't matter in the way a Westerner might expect, since people here look like everything (I've seen a few people blonder and pinker than me) and the surrounding countries are all equally diverse. I really kid you not, it surprises me just as much, but after a few conversations with people who don't know the difference between France, the US, and even Arab, you begin to realise that perceptions differ greatly! I think the calculus goes: "not Indian, not Western (firangi), so Iranian". In other words, though people might have problems with Shi'ism and Iran's expansionist politics, Iran is still the "near other" and refers to 'good' westerners as opposed to the 'bad' ones who continue to be culturally alien whilst in Kabul. Of course this is a slipshod analysis, but I'm rather surprised at the amount of street cred I get on my block, especially considering how I see my neighbours treat other Westerners and vice versa. It is what it is, but it's cool to have your worldview readjusted!

Where's the party, yaar?

2006-11-18T17:17:00.001+05:30

In my lastest right of passage, I have had the opportunity to witness the expat scene in action. The easiest way to describe it is that it is a much more extreme version of Cairo. Last Wednesday I went to Samarqand and it really was the bar scene from Star Wars--mercenaries aplenty and all sorts of other rough-and-tumble detritus from the oecumene. The next night I went to a house party that was only slightly better; less mercenaries but the music selection was lowest-common-denominator of old American pop and yet more current American pop. Of course there was no Farsi spoken at all and a random white guy told me that he was taking the time here to improve his Arabic!

Actually there are a lot of cool people, when met in a different environment. And the unfortunate truth is that a party's coolness is inversely proportional to the number of Americans present. Last night I went with Saurabh to have dinner at a restored beautiful fort in Kaarteh Parvaan, which functions as a base for an NGO that runs academies to preserve local artistic traditions. Fascinating project and cool people.

So, again I'm thankful that I have a normal situation and get to live and work with locals. With Nathan, Sahar, and Lorenzo all gone this week I've branched off with the Desi crowd. Nothing beats chatting endlessly about cricket matches, fight scenes, and the best remixes. Whilst watching the B4U music video countdown me and Saurabh hatched the idea of having a Bollywood party, so that we can have our superior music and dress well. We'll see how that goes next weekend--we're gonna use the office and hopefully project montages of classic fight scenes on the wall. I guess this will be my debut on the party scene, but it should be a cooler and less provincial crowd due to the music selection.

The food here is good generally with some exceptions. Afghan Fried Chicken completely sucks. I tried it because it's the closest thing to my house, but it has no Afghan masala or jaadu or anything like that. I've tried most of the places for chapli kabab around here too. The one by the park is disappointing and the one by here gets props for using marrow and eggs in the mix, but still isn't spicy enough. The winner goes to Nathan's hole-in-the-wall place out in Karteh Seh (about five people can fit inside and the place is only identifiable by the clever sign on the window which reads "Peshawari chapli kabab". It's relatively spicy but it doesn't rank up there with Kabab Palace in Arlington or Ashiana in Diamond Bar. The Frontier (as this area is broadly know) is one of the world's cooler food ecosystems as far as technique and flavour are concerned, so there will be more good news hopefully. For those of you who don't know what chapli kabab is, Nathan put his finger on it by describing it as "a man-burger". It looks just like a hamburger patty, but the brilliant Frontier folks have figured out that you can ADD OTHER THINGS TO THE MEAT. And they add the most flavourful mix of spices, chillies and onions to the meat before cooking it in oil. Often some flour is mixed in to that it comes out a bit crispy (actually this can go to the extreme of deep-fried hamburgers at some of the famous fast food locales on roads around here. The frontier region is exceptionally rich with fast-food, which is one thing that US sorely lacks (burgers and fried chicken, or else you have to sit down and wait).

Some of you asked me to tell more about my job and what I do. Right now I'm starting up a project on natural resources and the government's role or lack thereof in their extraction. Within that, at the moment, I am figuring out which resources and what my methodology is going to be. There's plenty of time for drinking massive amounts of tea and bullshitting with my co-workers too! My outerior motive should be to find resources around Herat and Mazar-e Sharif, so I can make a trip up there, which Lorenzo also encourages. Another co-worker, Gul Pacha, has mentioned that we should go to Peshawar and maybe even Lahore for a long weekend. That would mean getting to see the Khyber Pass! It turns out the Peshawar is only 4.5 hours away from here.

Home in the Hindu Kush

2006-11-12T10:55:00.001+05:30

So, after a very, very long flight I finally made it here. Upon arriving in San Francisco (barely on time because we didn't have a gate to go to), I had to rush over to my Lufthansa flight. Lufthansa and United not only have a codeshare, but also have two different planes leaving at the exact same time from San Francisco. How fun! I of course got on the wrong plane and then was redirected to the correct one just in time.

In Dubai I had to take a taxi between terminals so I asked the driver to give me a tour. Totally awesome. I don't know if I have ever seen so much so big--pictures down to it justice. It is the most auto-centric place I've been but the architecture was uniformly inspiring. I'v never seening seen so many ways to build a skycraper and on such a scale. Even the shopping malls were cool (and of course gi-normous). It's a purely superficial and aesthetic impression, but it's worth seeing just for that. And bollywood was everywhere.

Arriving in Kabul occasioned a little bit of confusion--I wasn't able to check my email en route and I couldn't find my driver amongst the melee so I called Nathan and went to go hang out at his office and then got in touch with my boss.

My boss, Lorenzo, job, and living situation all absolutely awesome. My office is across the street from my house in Shahr-e Nou. There are about 15 people altogether in the organisation and we've got more projects than you can shake a stick at. There all young and extremely motivated, plus they come from diverse backgrounds (students, former civil servants, etc.). Yesterday, one of my co-workers entertained me with a discourse on the vices of virtues of chapli kabab in Kunar, Jalalabad, Peshawar, and Abbotabad, and the joys of the drive to Peshawar. At lunch there was a cool discussion about women's status throughout history and the compatability of Islamic law and code law--all in Farsi of course. More fun yet, my boss just left for an anti-corruption conference for two weeks so I've been left in charge of the office on top of figuring out what I'm supposed to be doing in the first place! Two cool facts: our doorbell plays the theme from Mohabbatein and we have significant category in our budget just for cilantro. Also, when I come into the office every day I get an awesome breakfast of walnuts, cheese (panir-e irani), olives, bread, and black tea with cardamom and rose. That rocks. After that I get to work (my typing in Farsi is pushed 30 wpm, and I'm getting used to the Urdu keyboard layout) with my choice of Indian, Afghani, and/or Iranian pop. oh yeah, did I mention that I get to wear kurta pijama every day to work?

Lorenzo's a great boss and this organisation is really top-notch and unique. He's very much the French version of myself with fluent Farsi and just as determined as I am that I use my time in Afghanistan to network, improve my Farsi, and immerse myself in the culture. It's definitely helping that this workplace is entirely Farsi-speaking with bits of Urdu, Pashto, and French in on the side. My house is great too--we have a few flats around a courtyard filled with roses. It's traditional architecture and beautifully decorated. There's one for Lorenzo, one for me, and one for our servant, Ghani.

The social scene is full of interesting characters and I can tell there's always going to be a party or mehmani to attend. What's more is that there's more people in on our India trip for new year's now....the party just keeps growing :-).