Dry Mouth - Kabul Life

I received a complaint today that I’m not blogging enough. To be honest, it’s incredibly dull in Kabul at the moment, even with the Loya Jirga (a big meeting of Afghan leaders, officials and diplomats to talk about peace, Americans and the future, but with no legal imperative).

You can tell how boring the Loya Jirga has been from the media coverage.
* Story 1: ANP shot a suicide bomber targeting the Loya Jirga site. We’ll never know whether the dead man was actually a suicide bomber or a policeman got jumpy, shot him and then claimed he was wearing a vest afterward.

*Story 2: two rockets were launched at Loya Jirga site, but missed. Now, rockets are launched at Kabul regularly and never get reported on. In most cases insurgents, disgruntled folks and even wayward teenagers set them up on one of the hills and leave them to fire without checking, so they rarely hit their target and no-one really cares anyway. However, at March’s peace-themed Loya Jirga, rockets did land near the site (with no casualties), so this does have some newsworthiness.

*Story 3: Karzai demands that international forces stop night raids and cease arresting Afghans and keeping prisons on Afghan soil. PK does this every so often to appease the Afghan public, to whom invading a home at night is the ultimate insult and violation of their culture. However, international forces claim that most night raids are, if not accompanied by Afghan special forces, are signed off by Afghan commanders. So either PK is completely divorced from his military leaders or he’s not exactly making things clear. As regards prisons, no matter what your view on the moral/legal right for an invading force to operate detention centres, Afghan facilities are woefully inadequate and, as recently shown from reports like these, regularly use torture.

*Story 4: committee number ‘39’ (of 40) at the Loya Jirga has been pulled because Afghans believe 39 is a ‘bad number’ associated with piimps. This is true. Men who are 39 years old tell people they’re ‘40 minus one’. Still, it shows how little of substance or interest is coming out of the jirga.

The only hope for news is that tomorrow at the closing ceremony, President Karzai will announce the second round of cities to be transitioned to Afghan control of security. At least, that vain hope is why I’m getting up at 5am tomorrow to drag myself to the media tent, which is at least a kilometre away from the actual jirga.

So, in the meantime, here’s a picture of Murphy in the rubbish (above).