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Military ops, crops and laptops in rural Afghanistan
Mon Oct 19 10:11AM
I sat on the mud floor of my home for the night, goat droppings all around me, hunched over my laptop in smelly clothes next to Afghan soldiers and US Marines while I filed my copy by satellite.
Snipers lined the domed roofs of our compound while Marines patrolled the perimeter, and I emailed 700 words on Operation Germinate, a three-day sweep through villages along the deadly Buji Bhast Pass known to harbour Taliban insurgents.
This was cutting-edge technology at work in the medieval world of rural war-torn Afghanistan, a place far beyond the reach of electricity and mobile phones and where it feels time has stood still for centuries.
My photographer colleague David Furst and I had overstayed our embed slot by more than a week to be part of this mission in southwestern Afghanistan, which had been repeatedly delayed after anti-Marine riots hit a nearby town.
I had never done anything like this before -- David is an old hand but kindly made scant mention of how"green" or new to this I was.
It had been a surreal reporting experience from the moment we landed in our helicopter next to a field of cannabis crops on day one of the operation. The Marines mused over their college days when they enjoyed an illicit smoke, while later, the Afghan National Army soldiers made no secret of picking handfuls of the weed to tuck into their pockets for later.
I had waited until dawn with"Weapons" platoon, a section of the 2/3 Marines, before we made our way across fields towards our first village, under fire from the mountains around us.
The Taliban had escaped the villages when they learnt of our arrival, but their ammunition fell thankfully short of our cannabis plot and after calling in a helicopter to scare them off, we continued on.
As elderly men with deeply-lined faces wandered out of their decades-old mud and straw homes clutching prayer beads to make way for the advancing assault, that surreal feeling returned.
But any doubts I might have had over the need for this finely-orchestrated military assault were quickly erased when an hour later I watched Marines arrest two suspected insurgents whose home was filled with more than 20 sacks of home-made explosives.
Having kept the most of the details of this operation a secret from my bosses -- a requirement imposed by the US military on us all to prevent insurgents from finding out about their plan -- I set up my satellite Internet connection next to the Marines' one-armed detainee, his eyes covered with food packaging and duck tape, and filed a hurried despatch to the office in Kabul.
Then it was the young Marines' turn to be amazed. "You can get online here?" they asked."So, you could even get on Facebook, in the middle of the Bhuji Bhast Pass?"
We moved onward to dozens more mud compounds filled with little more than rugs, cattle and fowl.
Between the gun-toting Marines, the cannabis-smoking Afghan soldiers, and me and my portable world wide web, we had brought a decidedly odd version of the modern world to ancient Afghanistan.
In this blog, journalists of global news wire AFP blog about the news they report and the challenges they face covering events from Baghdad to Beijing, the White House to Darfur. Claire Truscott is a correspondent in AFP's Bangkok bureau.
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Needs a bit of editing!
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Still needs a bit of editing!
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That is what is needed in Afghanistan. A full infrastructure for everybody. Civilise the area with internet, electricity, water, etc so the medieval Taliban are shown up to be regressive and wealth destroying.
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Don't under-rate the Taliban. They may use Yesterday's kit but they are not medieval except in their religion. Power and wealth are the same corrupting influences the World over. In this Country the Zealots scream about obesity, homosexual rights, unsafe alcohol use, anti-hunt legislation and back it up with the power of the Courts where they can take your freedom, property, children and good name on a whim; In Afghanistan, the Zealots generally take your money, property and/or your life on a whim. So no real difference there, then. Perhaps we should ask the USA to send several Divisions of Marines to rescue us from our Zealots.
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Is there anywhere left in the world we Westerners don't want to pollute with more 'stuff'? If you had ever been to Afghanistan, you would know that it is one of the oldest surviving civilizations on earth. 'Civilize the area'? You mean kill anyone who doesn't buy-in to your shopping psychosis and ungodly worship of meaningless, transient 'celebrity'? We have several thousand years to go before we can lecture these people on how to live their lives. Social networking? For pity's sake! We're the ones who need civilizing.
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You can easily see where the American's are going wrong. Marines are soldiers of the sea; it's all in the name.
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To Paul Ingrams. Get a life. Where did I say "kill everyone". "Shopping psychosis" - excuse me? The only person with what appears to be a psychosis is you. The fact is that the Taliban have a pre-medieval honour-system of revenge killing, despotism and enslavement of women that is incompatible with modern life. This neeeds to be changed before they can be helped. Period.
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Paul Ingrams: What on earth are you on about? Did you even read the article? The 'social networking' was a marine _commenting_ to the reporter. On Afghanistan, you make it sound like it's a wholly intact land, some frail utopia hidden from outside influence.
It's not. It's severely fractured, has endured countless wars, occupations and invasions. I believe it's finally now that the international community is attempting to build it up and make it a better place.
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in reply to next weeks article comment 5 ........ not all psychic,s are con merchant,s
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ben.brown.t21: no.8: "It's severely fractured, has endured countless wars, occupations and invasions. I believe it's finally now that the international community is attempting to build it up and make it a better place." Too true!
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auvsiuk: no.7: "The fact is that the Taliban have a pre-medieval honour-system of revenge killing, despotism and enslavement of women that is incompatible with modern life. This neeeds to be changed before they can be helped. Period." Couldn't put it better! It is these old 'traditional' attitudes that are doing so much harm.
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Major assistance is necessary; the country's infrastructure, what there is of it, is just about viable - it needs this help for it to be built up. However, if all this intensive work is to be worth the effort, this change of attitudes needs to happen on the ground. For example, children should feel safe going to school, both boys and girls. I have read about girls being attacked and intimidated for, and/or made to feel scared of, attending school, let alone the girls schools attacked and burnt down: all this needs to stop. And yes, many women of Afghanistan need help and advice to feel empowered, that the future is also theirs. It has been well proven that when the women of an impoverished country are postively helped , the benefits are all the greater.
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Back to the article: all a bit gung-ho!
"The Taliban had escaped the villages when they learnt of our arrival, but their ammunition fell thankfully short of our cannabis plot and after calling in a helicopter to scare them off, we continued on...
But any doubts I might have had over the need for this finely-orchestrated military assault were quickly erased when an hour later I watched Marines arrest two suspected insurgents whose home was filled with more than 20 sacks of home-made explosives." I suppose this sums up one major reason why the intl. community is in Afghanistan - fighting the Taliban and the crop growing.
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Let's just hope they can have the free and fair elections that a lot of this effort is all about - doesn't seem to be happening. In saying that Afghanistan needs this assistance from the intl. community, I far from support the imposition of western mass consumerism and all that seems to come with it whenever nation building is done in this manner. One can only hope that the outcome is a positive one.
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