Afghanistan - A Place Where If It Can Go Wrong, It Will! By Design!

It's been a fun week - using "fun" in its most ironic sense.  One of the skills I've developed over more than 20 years of intelligence work and 43 years of life experience is a strong sense of what could happen - which, if I give it some thought and weigh the various probabilities, i can give a pretty fair assessment of what will happen. I'm not talking Nostradamus stuff here, just the basics, maybe a step beyond the "you get a BB gun, you'll shoot your eye out" level in "A Christmas Story."

So, there I was, back in October, brand new to this Forward Operating Base (a grandiose name if there ever was one), walking around when I noticed that the power cables running from the generator to the housing area were just barely buried under the crushed rock that is the ground here. We're not talking gravel, we're talking fist size rocks that have been spread 4 - 6 inches deep over most of the FOB.  These cables were not protected by any type of conduit, or even taped - just insulated cable that had been run from generator to power distribution boxes, then the rocks poured over them.  We drive heavy (20 ton) vehicles over these rocks/cables. Now, I'm not a certified electrician, and I have not stayed in a Holiday Inn Express since leaving the United States, but that struck me as asking for trouble. I brought it up to the "FOB Mayor" - the guy you go to when a toilet clogs or there's no hot water and pointed it out to him. His response was all too typical "That's what the contract called for."  When I clarified that the rocks would tear the insulation, thereby letting water in when the winter/rainy season came, he gave the second response that I really hate to hear: "I'll be gone by then - someone else's problem."  Well, it's rained for the past 3 days/nights - not steady, but sometimes very heavy.  Yesterday morning the wi-fi was down on the FOB - why?  Because water had gotten into the power cables that serviced the room that had the wi-fi hub.  It took all day to get an Afghan electrician out to run new cables to rewire the four rooms that were shorted.  Oh, guess where the new cables run?  Now they are on top of the rocks (it wasn't in the contract to bury them).

The second of my "Cassandra" experiences (for those of you not familiar with Cassandra, she spurned Apollo's advances and he cursed her with being able to fortell the future, but no one would believe her - she slid into insanity shortly afterwards) was in one of our two latrines (bathrooms to you non-military types). I noticed that in one of them, you occasionally did not get hot water, you got nothing but steam.  That is usually not a good thing.  When I looked at the hot water heater, it's temperature gauge showed between 60 and 70 degrees celsius - that's 160 degrees F!  This is the same hot water heater that melted the guts in the toilets.  I continually have brought up this issue, to no avail. There was talk of moving it to the laundry room to replace the non functioning water heater there, but it never made it to the top of the priority list.  Well, it is now. It blew up this afternoon. Literally. Filled the room with scalding steam. Luckily, no one was close enough to it to be more than scared and were able to get outside before the boiling water got too deep.

I relay both of these experiences because they show an attitude of ours that will result in our defeat if left unchecked.  The attitude of "it's someone else's problem" is a poison to the work we are, ostensibly, trying to do here.  That, combined with our complete dependence on the contracting mechanisms to get anything done is positively ludicrous.  I found out that I have "upset" the local handyman because I do things myself to improve my situation (I put linoleum down on my floor, built my own shelves, installed two washing machines and a dryer in the laundry room, etc.) rather than pay him to do it or arrange to have him paid to do it out of official funds (it costs three to four times as much if it's being paid for with "official funds"; go fig.  With the materials, i could have rewired those billets rooms - and I probably would not have charged 2500 dollars to do it - but we are the military - we're supposed to be self-sufficient for that kind of thing, aren't we? I'm reminded of the book"The Sand Pebbles" (and subsequent movie with Steve McQueen and a young Candace Bergen.) A main theme of the movie is "breaking peoples' rice bowls."  Well, if we want change in Afghanistan, we're going to have to break a few rice bowls (pilau bowls?)  We are pussyfooting around, trying to fight a politically correct counterinsurgency. There is no such thing.  The US Forces try not to offend the NATO/Coalition forces and vice versa. Somewhat ironically, no one has a problem disrespecting/offending the Afghan forces, as I've related in previous entries.  The end result is nothing of lasting significance gets done.  I'm wondering if anything of lasting significance is "in the contract" implied by our presence - only time will tell, I fear.  

You want to end the Afghan conflict quickly? Once the troop surge is in place, inform everyone, US and Coalition, that nobody rotates out or goes home on leave until the Taliban are defeated, the people have electricity and access to water, and a functioning government is in place. That way it can't be "someone else's problem" and no one will want to wait around for the contract to be let. Within 6 months this country would be turned around on the right track.