Proof of P.J.

I got into Kabul yesterday afternoon to a warm welcome from my j-school buddy Martin Patience. Martin is Scottish and works for BBC here in Kabul doing radio and TV. He’s a very talented young journalist and exceptionally generous, offering me a place to stay at the BBC house for the two days that I’m here.

BBC house is a lovely little villa in a bustling neighborhood in Kabul. There’s a wood-fired stove in the living room and as I’m writing this, an Afghan housekeeper sets a proper tea service before me so I can enjoy a morning chai.

Last night we went to dinner at an amazing restaurant tucked away off a wide boulevard in Kabul. A guard, armed with an AK-47 stood watch out front, while we enjoyed a traditional Afghan meal inside. Everybody at the table was a foreign correspondent except for a young woman named Eva who is a German academic doing research here for her PhD.

As we ate, a couple of musicians sat in the corner playing some local folk tunes on instruments that I can’t name.

When the meal was over, the waiter brought out hukas and we smoked and talked about this country and the U.S. adventure herein. Everybody toasted my good fortune at landing a story in WaPo and they shared their own wonderful tales of covering conflict and humanity abroad.

After returning home, Martin and I raided the BBC beer cellar, which also doubles as a safe room during rocket attacks.

I woke this morning—in an actual bed for the first time in a month—and the house was going nuts. President Bush made a surprise visit to Kabul this morning and Martin was already on the phone with London giving an interview for the talking heads there.

I’m staying out of the way and working on pitches for some other stories that I reported during my embed.

Tonight we’re going to hit some local drinking spots, which should be quite an adventure. I think I smell another Modern Drunkard feature.

Hi all.

Sorry I went blackout for the last week or so. I’ve been working on a story, and as Gabe wrote, I was worried I would scoop myself. The story was published today on page B1 of The Washington Post. It’s an exclusive, I was the only media present. I have already recieved a lot of feedback about it, and I can’t wait to hear your thoughts as well. I’m about to end my embed and head to Kabul to party with Martin Patience of the BBC, who I went to j-school with.

I’ll post more from there.

Here’s a link. Enjoy.

Hello readers,

This is your friendly neighborhood backup blogerator. Just wanted everyone to know that our feerless reporter is hot on the trail of a big time story. With his minimal internet connection, he doesn’t have the capacity to fill us in, plus he doesn’t want to scoop himself, but when the story goes live, you’ll all be the first to hear.

gk

A few months ago, attractive CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan was at this very base reporting a story about the road that the U.S. is helping to build in central Afghanistan. The story aired on 60 Minutes a few Sunday’s back and was pretty good.

People here are still talking about the visit. In fact, as soon as I got off the plane, a female NCO mentioned Logan. “She’s smart, I’ll give her that,” said the woman. “But she uses her tits too much to get what she wants.”

Others here shared this view, saying that though she is definitely a good reporter who made a great story, she used her, shall we say, “feminine wiles” to great effect with the enlisted men and officers.

“A captain would pick her up at her tent and take her to the DFAC (dining facility,)” says one writer embedded here. “When she left I asked the guy, ‘Hey, when are you going to drive me to the DFAC, I always have to walk.’”

After an entire night spent waiting up for a plane to show up and take me to FOB Salerno, I finally caught a ride at dawn on a giant C-130 transport plane. I sat in back with some enormous boxes of supplies and immediately passed out to the steady thrum of the giant propellers. It was a one-hour ride.

I showed up at a tent that will be my home for the next few days and a bunch of young soldiers were standing out front.

“You new here?” One of them asked.

“Yup.”

“Welcome to hell. This place got a pretty bad bomb attack the other day. They call it rocket city.”

Wonderful.

It’s actually lovely here, with fragrant pines and jagged hills all around. We’re only about 13 miles from Pakistan, and the Hindu Kush range stands huge and imposing to the east. It’s also much warmer than Bagram and there hasn’t been a cloud in the sky in the 24-hours I’ve been here. I’m rooming with a pack of hard-core war journos, including a documentary guy that I’ve been swapping stories with of my doc days in New York.

I’ll only be here for few days, until I can catch a Blackhawk to a smaller, more forward FOB.

Some general apparently thought it would be a good idea to order all military personnel in Bagram to carry a weapon at all times. As it was explained to me, “Even though this is considered a garrison-like environment, we’re all soldiers first.”

I can dig that, but because of the rule, everybody brings machine guns to dinner, the gym, even the bathroom. It’s funny when you’re sitting in the mess hall and there’s an M-4 with a grenade launcher attachment lying across your dinning companion’s lap. It’s even funnier in the Pat Tillman Memorial USO lounge (which I’m currently sitting in) when guys (and gals) try to lean their weapons against the wall in such a way that they won’t fall over.

The good news as that these soldiers don’t keep rounds chambered, so if the gun falls over (which they sometimes do,) no one gets hurt.

Accidents do happen, however.

There was this memo posted outside my barracks this morning saying essentially that a soldier was killed because he and comrade were “engaged in horseplay with a loaded weapon.” I don’t even know what it means but the memo went on to use the phrase “horse play” like nine-times.

Quit horsing around with those guns!

I spent about three hours with a military intelligence officer last night. I shouldn’t say what he does or who he is, but he was extremely candid about how the war is being fought and our chances of success. Let’s call him Bob.

Bob says that this war is not really being fought against Afghani’s as a group, but rather against a sect of Pashtuns, one of a few dominant cultural groups in the country. He says that U.S. forces are having some success in this, but that the fight has to be waged “valley by valley.” Put this way, it seems feasible that this place could be brought to some kind stability but, “We need more troops,” Bob says. “A lot more.”

Adding to this headache is the nature of rural Afghanistan. The residents of these valleys treat their area as a nation in and of itself, almost like city-states. They are violently xenophobic and can tell an outsider from a mile away. The leaders—such as they are—of these valleys, are resistant to infrastructure, like roads and electricity, because these things can only serve to weaken their power. Bob told me that when he first got to Afghanistan, some Afghanis in the mountains were under the impression that U.S. forces were Russians. They didn’t know that the Russians had been gone for thirty years, and had no way of finding out.

Bob didn’t give the U.S. initiative of building a Kabul-based federalist state much chance of success. He says the attitude of many in the villages is, “What has Kabul done for me?” Instead, Bob advocated a three state solution, not all that different than Joe Biden proposed for Iraq. Of course this isn’t going to happen, I’m just telling you what he told me.

The brightest spot in our conversation was the efficacy of U.S. soft power in the region. “Hollywood has a lot more power here than they know,” he says. He also pointed to the stability of the area surrounding Bagram. The base employs hundreds, possibly over a thousand locals from surrounding villages for all kinds of jobs. These people and their families don’t want to kill the golden goose. Bob says that by providing jobs for folks from surrounding villages, the U.S. has essentially bought both goodwill and safety for their effort in this area.

On the other hand, Bob also says, “There’s an old saying. You can’t buy and Afghani, but you sure can rent one.”

Rockstar!

I spent yesterday morning with the helo wing of the 101^st Airborne Division out of Clarksville, TN. The unit is set up in the edge of Bagram Airfield in a series of hangars and large open tents called clamshells.

The guys I was with are helicopter mechanics, pilots and test-pilots who make sure that the birds are ready to fly and fully operational. I was blessed with the opportunity to sit in an Apache cockpit, learn the weapons systems and get a quick lesson on how to fly the thing.

After that, we headed to a zillion-dollar Apache flight simulator where I once more strapped in to the cockpit and got an hour-long lesson in flying and shooting insurgents. The Apache is an amazing weapon of destruction. Last month Popular Mechanics listed it as one of the six most lethal aircraft in history. The chopper is mounted with a laser guided missile system, equipped to shoot Hellfire missiles, as well as an assortment of other heavy, deadly munitions.

The most remarkable aspect of this beast however, is the MTADS (Modernized Target Acquisition Designation Sight) system. The Apache is a two seater and the guy in front does the shooting. He wears a helmet that connects him to the powerful 30 Cal machine gun, loaded just under the Apache’s nose. All he has to do is turn his head and the machine gun goes wherever he looks. “It’s literally point and shoot,” says CWS Bob Braswell, who has flown the Apache I combat over both Iraq and Afghanistan. When I asked him what kind of lethality the gun dealt out he said simply, “Hamburger. It turns people into hamburger meat.”

He showed me some videos, taken from the night-vision camera mounted on the Apache. I could clearly make out insurgents engaging U.S. ground forces in a village not far from here. The grunts called in air support and when the Apache’s started shooting that 30 Cal, the insurgents bodies were blown to pieces in perfect, digital detail.

“That could be his arm,” says Braswell, pointing to a glowing chunk of insurgent lying near some bushes. “Then again, it could be his ass. There’s really no way to tell once this gun goes to work.”

For the past two and-a-half days I’ve been at Bagram Air Force Base, reporting stories and waiting for a flight to Forward Operating Base Salerno.

I feel like I’m in a small city in the mid-west U.S. There are 16,000 plus people here, both military and civilian contractors. There’s Burger King, Popeye’s Chicken, Subway, DQ, and Pizza Hut (who deliver, base-wide.) There’s all night gyms, churches, a spa and local Afghani’s selling rugs and knickknacks. The PX has about as much stuff as a small Wal-Mart, from deodorant to external hard drives. There are also thousands of unexploded mines lying in fields just outside the 11-mile perimeter.

The airfield here is huge. F-15 and A-10 fighter planes, Apaches, Chinooks and Black Hawk helicopters take off constantly. Watching an F-15 light up its afterburners at night, streaking down the runway and off to engage in the business of killing is a strangely exhilarating sight.

And then there are the Fobbits. Fobit is a derogatory term for military personnel that never venture “outside the wire,” meaning they never leave the base. They are primarily support personnel, logistics, intelligence or even kitchen workers. The U.S. army is a vast bureaucracy and it takes many, many kinds of people and jobs to make this bureaucracy go. Many of these folks are basically working office jobs, they’re just doing so in a war zone.

But the secret is this: their lives here are pretty boring. They work very long shifts and when off-duty, they’re still stuck around their bosses and co-workers. There are endless rules, from where you can wear a hat (not in the mess hall,) to how fast you can drive (five miles-an-hour or you end up in the brig.) And of course there is no drinking.

More than one Fobbit has told me, “You have no idea what I would do for a Saturday night away from this place.”

At about half-past nine, my driver and I arrived at a roadblock set up just outside of Bagram Air Field manned by U.S. soldiers and some Afghan military. I would later learn that a VBIED (vehicle borne IED) threat had been called in to the checkpoint so traffic was stopped dead. Forty or so cars—driven by local Afghanis—were stuck, waiting to get onto the base. Even U.N. vehicles were being turned away.

I got out of the car and approached the soldiers, who were all heavily armed and very testy. I explained my situation to a young grunt. He was extremely courteous and told me that as soon as the roadblock was lifted, my driver and I would be the first ones through. He accompanied me back to my car and as we were walking, a sedan gunned its engine, coming straight for us. I dropped behind the soldier and he immediately shouldered his weapon, marching towards the car, screaming, “What the fuck are you doing?!? Stop NOW!” The sedan stopped and the soldier lowered his machine gun. He smiled and looked at me. “Everybody speaks weapon,” he said, chuckling.