Kabul, February 2010
This weekend we had a small family reunion, briefer than we would have liked, but it had to happen now, because my uncle has been assigned to Afghanistan. He’s growing a beard for the first time in all the years I have known him.
He works in international development, with local groups and NGOs to build clinics and schools, ensure uncontaminated food and water, and start businesses. He has been stationed in Ivory Coast, Nicaragua, Morocco, Uganda, Colombia, elsewhere. He and my aunt and cousins got out of Rwanda on the eve of the genocide. We have said goodbye many times knowing it would be years until we saw one another next.
Kabul, January 2005. The grey is smog, not from combat.
Afghanistan is again everywhere in American news—the McChrystal interview, Wikileaks; yesterday the Times speculated how things could have been done differently, and summarized them so far, and Frank Rich wrote that “Americans at home have lost faith and checked out” (commenters on Garry Wills’ NY Books piece have not checked out).
January 2005
One of my college friends has been traveling to Afghanistan since 2003, also for development work. I re-read seven years of his letters last night after my aunt and uncle left. He writes about seeing lots of construction, further out from the city center than in 2003; heavy traffic, partly because of checkpoints and roads blocked-off for security; more police but fewer international forces around Kabul; fewer burqas, though also fewer women out and about. I dread the prospects for Afghan women if we leave. But I doubt they’ll figure high in our calculations.
Car in traffic, Kabul; February 2010 // Election posters, September 2005
I have no brilliant insights on this, no deconstructionist reversals; I feel my lack of qualifications acutely. I have surface details but only a scattered story to connect them, and the more real this gets, the less I feel able to draw conclusions from what I know, or that any conclusions I might draw will matter. I just want want my friends and family safe.
(Any opinions here are mine alone. Photos are my friend’s. He doesn’t blog and since the photos are anonymous I am keeping him anonymous, too)
