Of Mythic Battles, Schism, Parting Waters, Watery Death, plus some general observations on Transition

It's Ashura. Or thereabouts: the Cultural Advisor informed us that today was Ashura, but when I looked it up it appears I missed it by a few days. Or maybe it's that whole mix-up between the lunar Islamic calendar and our one. Anyway, very important day. Mainly because it's when the Ali, the Prophet's grandson, was martyred at the storied Battle of Karbala (61 AD) - at least that's what the Shi'a say, and who is unmoved by the frenzy their mourning can stir up - from sad, sad poetry to self-flagellation (sometimes alarmingly, with swords and chains). The Sunni take it a bit easier, keeping it to fasting to mark the day Moses parted the Red Sea. And indeed, it was the Battle of Karbala that divides them: cosmic loss on the one hand, glorious victory on the other. Googling around, this day also seems to mark the day when Noah was delivered from the flood, when Abraham was saved from Nimrod's fire, when Job was healed from his illness, when Jacob's blindness was healed thanks to getting Joseph's shirt.

Little wonder, perhaps, that today was the day President Karzai chose to announce the second tranche of Transition. (Natterings on Transition below - basically the Afghans taking over lead security from ISAF). The areas he chose bring the total population under Afghan lead security to just over half - no mean feat. Among the areas added today are three districts of Helmand: Nawa, Nad-e Ali, and Marja (that other big chunk of this AO, Nimroz province, also got tapped). My press person rolled her eyes at the inclusion of Marja - a district that was always on the bubble for Transition distinction given its difficult recent history, the fact that it's not an official district, and the paltry contribution it would make toward the 50-percent-of-population mark. Big problem is that Marja's been a favorite destination of Western journalists, who've had plenty of material from there to wring their hands over just 18 months ago when it was the epicenter of Taliban resistance to the surge. Today, it's greatly calmed down, and "market walks" - a bizarre ritual where we walk through a market just to show we can do it without getting shot up - are now commonplace. Problem is, if the slightest thing goes wrong there, it's I-told-you-so bait for the press (looks like it's already begun). So now when you complain about security in Helmand you get "Marja, Marja, Marja." 

I didn't get it either until someone patiently explained Marsh from the Brady Bunch to me.

So schism, vengeance, portents, what else? Why Moby Dick, natch.

Yes, I've been reading this sprawling, glorious mess again because I finally bugged Emma enough to pick it up. So I had to as well. I'm not saying any of this whole struggle has anything at all to do with Ahab's deadly obsession, but I did kind of get it when our dear Mr. Melville wrote

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke."

The Thin Green Line

I'm always struck by how much water changes a landscape. As you helo out over the dunes that surround Leatherneck you can look out at Helmandia's eye-stabbing beige forever when bam! - the color changes to a deep brown, then green, then a crazy quilt of farm plots and courtyards, houses, neatly walled-off fields, traffic on streets - nothing but a .50 cal gun perched in the patch of daylight to disrupt the bucolic tableau. Finally, a deep brown wash and the weedy, muddy Helmand passes through the lozenge, and you lay your eyes on what all the fuss is about.


It was here, in the Central Helmand River Valley, that the U.S. Agency for International Development got its start. It was the 1950s, and the USA was full of post-war (that's WWII for the kids) bluster and bromide. We'd had the Truman doctrine, defeated Communisim (except where we hadn't), the baby boom was in full swing, and golly, it was time to do development. An early target was, yes, Hemand.


One of its ur-foundational investments, the irrigation waterworks were supposed to be the bootstraps by which Afghans would pull themselves up to be modern, prosperous, educated - dammit, American. Rajiv Chandrasekaran has a great (if a bit ungenerous) piece in the Washington Post about development overreach and social engineering in the Helmand River Valley, building Lashkar Gah into a Yankee hamlet of tree-lined streets and sock hops. Much is made today of the hubris of the time, but it's really also almost charmingly naive - that if you just add water, and ta-da! - an ancient-plus-traditional society develops. No clue that thousands of years of nature had taught farmers to be suspicious of the new, that the greater the project the more things go wrong, or that prosperity itself would attract outsiders first to share in it - and by so to tip the millennial balance among the natives - and then to destroy any vestige of success because that success enabled a wholesale dominance of the successful over the ancient.


But that’s water over the dam. The newcomers came and set down roots. Helmandia has a leg up because it's already suffered its unintended consequences. Now folks in Nad Ali identify themselves first by their irrigation coordinates and then by tribe. Now the divisions are much more a matter of who has title to what land; who has rights to how much water. Now the conflicts are between these haves and the "desert people" - many of them fleeing conflict elsewhere (you gotta wonder how bad it must have been there if they come to Helmandia for relief) - who decide this or that patch of unoccupied land looks good to sink a well in and start growing poppy.

Maps of Helmania - political, population, vegetative, topographical - show a featureless plain with the foothills of the Hindu Kush in the north and a stripe running first north to south, then bending east to west. This is the Helmand River, which rises in mountainous Zamindawar, makes a brief stop at the Kajaki Dam, and flows south through Helmand, making a right turn at the "fishhook" to head across Nimroz before crossing the Iranian border and disappearing into the desert - one of the world's only rivers not to drain into some sea somewhere. CHRV is the lungs of the operation; Kajaki is its heart.

Next up: Kajaki.

Now it can be told...

I've used OpSec as an excuse to go light on the blog thing here, but now that Eastern Storm has rolled out, I'm exposed as either lazy or too consumed with the nation's priorities. Feel free to guess.

Anyhoo, very impressive USMC/ISAF/ANSF operation to the north, clearing the last main holdouts of Taliban in northern Sangin and Kajaki and securing the beating heart of Helmandia, the infrastructure complex around the Kajaki dam. Here's some video footage of the operation.

And here's me at the dam, along with Helmand Governor Mangal, ANA Commander Malook, and II MEF General Toolan. Heros all (of them).

Lots more to write, but it's gotta be later!

3655

That's the days since you-know-when. Counting leap years. Counting all those days we remembered the victims in our mission lobbies. Those ramp ceremonies with us at attention as they march the caskets up. The dinners turned to wakes for a bygone America. Debates about unifying or dividing. Tales of profiteering and pandering. Serving too, though don't forget. Being brave and smart and working hard. Getting by.

Yesterday the Kabul embassy took its turn, and people had to hunker down to avoid the bullets and RPGs. I hear they even ate MREs. I'm ok: I'm in Helmand far away, somewhere between Washer and Nad Ali, surrounded by desert and Marines.

We're trying to get out of here. But we're also trying to - in the words of one of our maximum leaders - make it matter. We're close in Helmand, but time is running out.

Now, Now Zad

I've been doing "deep dives" lately, ostensibly to fill in for a colleague on R&R, but in fact to look in depth at what we're up to at various district centers. Today was Now Zad, site of portentous TV headlines and pre-COIN bombardment of that town by ISAF. I had the good fortune of heading out in an Osprey, my favorite helicopter - has those rotors that point up for liftoff then tilt forward and it flies like an airplane - fast - until it's ready to land again, when  it becomes a helicopter. No leaky hydraulics, exciting, fast.

 

What used to be the second largest town in Helmand before the Soviets burned all the orchards and destroyed the kerez system - the underground tunnels that channel groundwater so farmers can irrigate - is now an arid clutter of mud ruins and scattered families, another sunblasted landscape with most of the population evacuated.

 

We're doing some repairs to the kerezes and supporting agriculture as circumstances permit, but this is a community that lacks fundamental security (lots of Taliban, lots of IEDs), and its, shall we say "governance" is too ethically fraught to invest too much money that way. The closing act for the visiting group was a shura of would-be "elders" airing their frustrations. How do you reverse a concerted scorched earth policy? Does it really take this long?

 

Iftar (OOrah)

"The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family...," says Greg Mortenson, which sounds pretty good, considering you just need to drink some tea. Balti here being the analog for Afghans generally I guess, but then Balti are of Tibetian extraction and have little to do with the Taliban ISAF is up against, who are mainly Pashtun and, in Helmandia, Baluch as well. But then too Mr. Mortenson has had his own reckoning with the truth, building a whole NGO effort on a phony story about wandering off a Himalaya somewhere and being called by village kindness to build schools. At least I think that’s the story…. 

Anyway, the three cups thing seems to be alive and well in the coalition, where the thing is Key Leader Engagement, or “KLE” – quaffing chai with the local governor, tribal leader, Chief of Police. Conversation is always laborious, since few of us speak Pashto or Dari, and trusted as they are, interpreters still tend to constrain spontaneous fellow-feeling. But it kind of works: Afghans are all about relationships, even though, like kids these days, they tend to value them more than commitment, what with the foundations of reliability always shifting with circumstances, and with circumstances in a place like this always shifting as wildly as they do.

So Iftar. This is the great Muslim tradition of your first bite to eat after the sun goes down during Ramadan (the fasting month). It’s loaded with all kinds of freight, being a very family kind of affair, a kind of month-long Thanksgiving where you’re just dying to eat, man, and everyone with you is too. Not of course to forget the piety of the occasion, which kicks off with a prayer and is followed only a few hours of quick sleep later when you go through the drill again before the sun comes up.

Enter the Marines. KLE being the best alternative to the pointy end of the stick in action, where all kinds of people can get hurt. Iftar being a great time to do it, and key leaders being the absolute naturals to do it with. And at Camp Leatherneck, too. Here we have our DFAC (dining facility) which is like three corrugated metal barns stuck end-to-end, with food lines in one and the other two devoted to benches and tables where Marines galore chow. 

Our delegation arrives from prayer in splendid robes, brocade vests, brilliant white turbans, shiny sandals. Warm greetings, pressing flesh, occasionally touching cheeks, then off we lead them to the chow line. Being dinnertime, the place is packed and the chow lines are long. You can tell they hate to cut in line - Marines are fierce egalitarians - but the level of their guests demands it. Each in our party gets a paper plate and a cellophane-bagged set of plastic dinnerware and we load up. It’s Indian food night, so the grub looks a little familiar to our guests, and they load up and head back to the distant barn (where, despite encountering the cordon, troops are advancing).

This is where it’s hardest. I imagine they have no idea that this is high Marine hospitality: you eat our chow. In our chow hall. You be one of us, at our table. We are real people together. I imagine they’re puzzled. I imagine they might have thought they’d be getting something more, I don’t know – fancier? How do they feel about all this? The best we can do is chatter through our interpreters, try to read the body language. And then - soon even the most taciturn is telling stories. His eyes dance, the grave, senior one is chuckling and shaking his head. Pretty soon they’re drifting off for little side meetings or interviews with official press. I think: is it the ice cream? All that food and no clean-up muss and fuss? Marine magic? 

So who knows. Another iftar tonight, Marines hosting. This time it's at the Afghan Cultural Center. I'll bet this time we take off our shoes and eat with our hands.