A trip to Fort Kabul, Afghanistan
You get a good sense of how at least a part of the war in Afghanistan is going by taking a trip into Kabul.
Each time since my first visit to the Afghan capital in early 2002, the American and international community here have seemed more isolated. Now they’re crowded behind tiers of concrete blast walls, coils of razor wire, blocked-off streets, steel blast gates and barriers of all kinds.
Here, at least, the insurgents have managed to divide us from the rest of the city, with the ruthless use of car bombs, suicide attacks and IEDs. All of them deadly effective. People get killed here.
In response, we go into a defensive crouch.
To fly into Kabul, you wear body armor and helmet on a military flight. Then, for the 10-minute ride to the international compound, you add blast goggles and fire-resistant gloves, the military folks load weapons, and you all clamber into a heavily armored truck driven by a pair of sharp-eyed, tense, humorless Brits.
In a convoy, we careened at high speed through nighttime traffic, nudging other vehicles out of the way. As in Iraq, traffic etiquette for local civilians seems to be: when a military convoy is bearing down on you, get the heck out of the way.
Foreign military convoys zoom along while Afghans pull over and peer from their battered sedans, and the joyfully decorated and perilously overloaded “jingle trucks” perch precariously on the road shoulders that slope down into sewage gullies.
At one point our Brits had us racing up the wrong side of a divided boulevard, dodging the headlights of oncoming cars and trucks and the occasional unlighted donkey cart.
Inside the gates are the U.S. and international military headquarters and the American embassy complex with a swimming pool and what must be one of the few actual grass lawns in this land of rock and dust.
Anyone who leaves goes in a convoy of armored vehicles. A State Department official told me there are no “frivolous” trips out into town. No kidding.
Back to the airport at dusk last night, our Brits took a rutted, dust-choked route that snarled us in stalled, honking traffic, with pedestrians and trucks looming suddenly out of the gloom and no way to anticipate if one might be a suicide bomber.
It was scary, all right. And disturbing to find myself thinking of all Afghans as threatening.
It made me think all the more highly of those Americans and other outsiders, military and civilian, who are willing to work “outside the wire” for the sake of a better Afghanistan.
Each time since my first visit to the Afghan capital in early 2002, the American and international community here have seemed more isolated. Now they’re crowded behind tiers of concrete blast walls, coils of razor wire, blocked-off streets, steel blast gates and barriers of all kinds.
Here, at least, the insurgents have managed to divide us from the rest of the city, with the ruthless use of car bombs, suicide attacks and IEDs. All of them deadly effective. People get killed here.
In response, we go into a defensive crouch.
To fly into Kabul, you wear body armor and helmet on a military flight. Then, for the 10-minute ride to the international compound, you add blast goggles and fire-resistant gloves, the military folks load weapons, and you all clamber into a heavily armored truck driven by a pair of sharp-eyed, tense, humorless Brits.
In a convoy, we careened at high speed through nighttime traffic, nudging other vehicles out of the way. As in Iraq, traffic etiquette for local civilians seems to be: when a military convoy is bearing down on you, get the heck out of the way.
Foreign military convoys zoom along while Afghans pull over and peer from their battered sedans, and the joyfully decorated and perilously overloaded “jingle trucks” perch precariously on the road shoulders that slope down into sewage gullies.
At one point our Brits had us racing up the wrong side of a divided boulevard, dodging the headlights of oncoming cars and trucks and the occasional unlighted donkey cart.
Inside the gates are the U.S. and international military headquarters and the American embassy complex with a swimming pool and what must be one of the few actual grass lawns in this land of rock and dust.
Anyone who leaves goes in a convoy of armored vehicles. A State Department official told me there are no “frivolous” trips out into town. No kidding.
Back to the airport at dusk last night, our Brits took a rutted, dust-choked route that snarled us in stalled, honking traffic, with pedestrians and trucks looming suddenly out of the gloom and no way to anticipate if one might be a suicide bomber.
It was scary, all right. And disturbing to find myself thinking of all Afghans as threatening.
It made me think all the more highly of those Americans and other outsiders, military and civilian, who are willing to work “outside the wire” for the sake of a better Afghanistan.
