Notes from a Dangerous Place: Afghanistan, Part 1

This piece was written by a friend who has spent the past few years working for NGOs in Afghanistan.

Just got back from Kandahar. Great to see our team there again, and while we never felt in grave danger, there were the usual levels of excitement. On our second night there, we had a twenty minute Taliban-Afghan National Police firefight just around the corner at a local police substation.

When that died down, there was another, shorter burst of fire way off to the north, not tied to any recorded attack. A colleague claimed that this was the US Special Forces at Camp Gecko, who do their target practice immediately after firefights in various parts of the city, as they consider firing their rifles loudly to be a "show of force" in response to the attacks. It made me laugh, whether or not it's true.

The foreign military presence in Kandahar is mostly confined to base and has been utterly ineffective in improving security for Afghans on the ground. They came out on serious patrol for a couple weeks last year, after Mullah Omar got himself into the Guinness Book of World Records with the Sarposa prison break... but that didn't last, alas.

Kabul is enjoying rain and alternating cool and hot weather - nice springtime climate before the dust kicks in. The north is lovely... winter wheat coming up on the hillsides everywhere, along with great red and purple swathes of wildflowers. Stunning contrast to last year's drought. The rain has also put a good stretch of Faryab and Jawzjan underwater, of course, and displaced a few thousand people. Not much of a happy medium out here.

Across most of the country, security is down the toilet, but at least we have continuing confirmation that the Taliban don't really care too much about NGOs; if they did, we'd be dropping like schoolteachers.

On the "unintended consequences" front, a number of hard-advocating NGOs finally got the International Security Assistance Force [ed. note - NATO forces] to agree to stop using white vehicles, to distinguish the military from humanitarian NGOs. The advocacy campaign was of course based on the premise that ISAF has a general duty under international law to distinguish itself from ALL civilians... but in the course of the argument, "white vehicles" became the idee fixe, the symbol of Afghanistan's shrinking humanitarian space.

Of course, at this point many NGOs have stopped using white vehicles and have gone as low profile as possible, to keep from getting kidnapped by people who know an NGO vehicle perfectly well when they see one. So after an initial round of congratulations on a hard-won ISAF concession, it sank in that the humanitarian community had just tacitly accepted the responsibility to distinguish our vehicles from everyone else's... rather than the military really accepting its obligation to act like a legitimate target.

[Photo of Kabul from AFP / www.qsl.net]