I retract that last bit about this place ‘not being so bad’. In what is my temporary accommodation (if God wills it), I have rats the size of small ponies galloping along the inside of my roof every night. Audacious overweight mice waddle about the place, fat from food left out. Last night I watched a mouse lazily eyeing a piece of leftover cake, as I sat on somewhat grimy velvet toshaks trying to get the wireless internet to work in our dimly lit living room. Cockroaches scatter from the kitchen when I walk in.
Mornings are fun though. Having a shower requires walking outside to a small yard and sticking your arm down a deep and dark pothole to feel about for a tap, which, once located, you have to turn on then run to the house next door where turbaned tribal elders (guests of the Afghan NGO I now work for) are already milling around, in order to switch the water pump on. Once this pot-hole-tap-pump ritual has taken place, you have to sprint back to a small bathroom and strategically position yourself somewhere between the toilet and the sink to catch intermittent violent spurts of dusty smelling water, all the while avoiding getting electrocuted by some live open wires poking out of the water boiler’s plug socket.
However what this place lacks in hygiene, it certainly makes up for in other things. I’ll write about those once I’ve found out what they are, but on the whole life is good.
Moving on to life and death issues of a slightly different nature, I was upset to find out yesterday that instead of applauding the fact that a recent news story has shed light on some further atrocities committed by US Special Forces, my former employer down in the Southeast has been berating and bullying another colleague there for accommodating the journalist who wrote this particular story. Here’s why.
A few weeks ago, this journalist (who happens to be a friend) contacted me, asking if I had seen an ISAF press release,which stated that during the course of a night raid in Gardez, a Special Forces team made a ‘gruesome discovery’ when they came across three women who were bound and gagged and already dead. My friend asked if I knew anything about this, or whether I had more information (as I had been based in Gardez for the past year and a half, he felt I was an appropriate person to ask). He soon decided to head down there himself to investigate the incident further. It very soon transpired that this press release was a lie, as the women were in fact shot by the forces entering the house and left to die from their wounds. You can read about the story here and here.
The fact that this story got a lot of attention in the press, which might add to the pressure already on the military to change the way they conduct these operations, is beside the point, apparently. Information supporting this journalist's investigation was supposedly leaked and the rules of the organization were not observed; some interviews were even held on the compound, shock horror.
I find it sad that some individuals working for an organization, which is ostensibly here to serve the Afghan people, are wasting valuable time trying to find someone to blame for not following protocol – when all this story did was to throw light on yet another botched military operation in which two pregnant women were killed, which the military then tried to cover up. It’s sad to observe otherwise good people getting caught up in the bureaucracy of a large organization, blinded by what they perceive to be some kind of authority vested in them, and unable to recognize when to do the right thing.
