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!