After seven years of work in Afghanistan, the U.S. government’s premier development agency continues to pay hundreds of millions of dollars annually to private contractors that frequently fail to demonstrate results, according to aid workers, former diplomats and audits by the agency’s [Ed: USAID] inspector general.

President Obama said last week he was “committed to refocusing attention and resources on Afghanistan and Pakistan.” He named special envoy Richard Holbrooke to oversee aid and diplomacy in those countries. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she wants the U.S. Agency for International Development to assume development tasks ceded to the Pentagon.

Yet USAID’s multibillion-dollar Afghanistan reconstruction effort continues to struggle. Of six different audits conducted in the last year by the agency’s inspector general, only one found a program working largely as it was supposed to. (Full)

The article lists a summary of the different projects in USAID’s $7.9 billion spending in Afghanistan since 2002 and links to the audit reports.

Apart from the fact this is rather bad news for USAID, and the beneficiaries – the people of Afghanistan-, it begs to question “what can be done to make aid more efficient”?

To me, the aid organisations function in an “aid market economy”, with the same principles governing a market economy: reputation, marketing, reporting, performance, effectiveness, cost efficiency… Not -like the commercial market- with the goal to maximize profits, but the maximize aid efficiency.

You could apply the same principles from a commercial market to the “aid market”: demand and supply. The demand being “aid organisations requesting funding” and supply being “the world’s capacity to give”.

As, the supply is limited to “the world’s ability to ‘give’ “, say x billion USD per year, each development and aid organisation is competing for those funds, which are much more limited than the need.

What if we could instigate a bit more of the “market economy” dynamics to this equation? What if, just as a commercial company has to publish their net results at the end of the fiscal year, and has to prove its efficiency in its market to its stake holders, what if we institutionalize this better, and more transparently to the “aid business”?

What if we push more to have aid organisations concentrate on net returns: both short term and long term impacts of their programs? What if donors would push more for NGO’s, UN organisations, IO’s to have their operations surveyed by external auditors, and to have the reports made public (like this one from USAID)?

Would this not only ensure more efficiency of aid? Would this also not help donors assess where their ‘aid funds’ are better invested? And in the end, increase the net benefit to the stakeholders: the beneficiaries.

Otherwise the world can spend yet another century of aid. Ineffective aid.

Interested in aid and accountability: Check “Keeping a critical eye on aid & the UN” in the “Links: Aid Resources” header in the side column.
Picture courtesy Sabrina Quezada (WFP)

Frida, working for a human rights organisation in Ghor, ‘the deep field’ of Afghanistan, struggles in a recent post trying to find a balance between finding healthy food, without depleting the scarce resources on the local market or flying in food, and trying to keep body and mind healthy. Or should we really eat what those we serve eat…

Comes with the ethical question ‘what make us, the aid workers, different from those we are trying to help?’ What right do we have to be more privileged? A feeling and a struggle – I must admit – has been pushed more and more on the background of my mind since I started to work from our Headquarters in Rome, even though I wrote about it at the end of my short story about working with the refugees in Goma.

I guess, the answer is: we are more privileged than those we serve. And as long as we realize that fact, and that we continue to be grateful for this privilege, the only thing we can do is to try serving those we help even better.

PS: Frida also has a photo blog with absolutely astonishing pictures of Afghanistan. Have look!

Picture courtesy Debbi Morello

I am not a happy camper. And that is an understatement. Before we left, I emphasized them to keep a watch for us on our monitor frequency. And now, I call them, and … nothing, nada, ziltch. The sun is already set behind the mountain tops. Even though the sky still has a hint of a dark-blue afterglow, it is already dark. And when I say dark, I mean pitch dark. There is not a single light. The headlights of the trucks in our convoy beam into a void as they negotiate twists and turns of this bombed road. They light up nothing but emptiness. And bomb craters. And little flags marked ‘Mines’. But for the rest, I can not describe it in any other way but “Void-ness”. Absolute empty-ness. There is nothing in this part of the world. There is nothing that grows. There are no houses. No-one lives here. There is only light brown dirt. Dirt and bits and pieces of mangled war-toys. A rusted tank, half buried in the sand. Or a rotor blade from a helicopter sticking from a pile of rubble. But for the rest, dirt. I can not believe this part of the world has been a battleground for the past twenty years. The last fierce battle was only four days ago. The Northern Alliance meets the Taliban. One-nil. Taliban lost and evacuated Kabul. And we moved in with the relief convoy.

I curse, check another frequency they sometimes use, but still nothing. The radio room is not answering. It is Ramadan, and this time of the day, the radio operators in Kabul, twenty kilometers away, are probably gone praying, or are already at the Iftar, breaking their fast. We just flew in a C130 cargo plane full of food, and I went with a convoy to pick it up from Bagram airport, few hours truck-drive from Kabul. We can’t use Kabul airport yet, as a one ton unexploded bomb sticks out of its runway. And we don’t have any deminers in yet. Nobody is allowed to come into Kabul, except twenty expatriate aid workers. I am one of them. And the only one on this road. The only one outside the Kabul safe haven. I must be crazy to do this. At any time, I expect to see the flare of an RPG coming straight at us, as rumours say there are still rogue Taliban roaming in this area. We desperately need to get hold of “someone” in Kabul to inform them this convoy is on the move, and that “someone” needs to monitor us, just in case something would go wrong.

“What to do? What to do? How on earth can I get hold of Kabul.. Hmm let’s see.” I dial another frequency on the HF radio in the car. No UN frequency, but a ham radio call frequency this time. One push on the auto-tune button and in a few seconds, the radio beeps and displays: “14.195.0 – Antenna Tuned”.
I push the button on the microphone and ask “Frequency in use?” Not a beep. I wonder if this radio is receiving or transmitting at all. Maybe that is why the radio room did not copy me. Even though all worked well before we left.
- “Frequency in use?”. Nothing again. Hmm.. Ok, well… let’s try.
- “CQ 20, CQ 20, YA5T/m YA5T/m YA5T/m , CQ 20 and by.”, I launch my call. “YA5T is my callsign in Afghanistan. With the prefix “YA”, the hams will know what country I am transmitting from.
And the world explodes on this tiny radio. Dozens of hams answer my call. From Europe, North America, Asia. Shivers run down my spine. I can not believe this. Here I am sitting in a car, driving on what once was a road, with probably dozens of Taliban waiting to take a shot at me, in the middle of bloody nowhere. And still, with this small piece of hardware, I have the world talking to me… You have no idea how this feels. YOU HAVE NO IDEA…!

It takes me one minute to get ‘ON4WW’-Mark, my friend in crime on frequency. He is at home in Belgium, I am in a car in Afghanistan, but his radio signal booms in. I pass him the satellite phone number of the control centre in Kabul –just in case something would happen- and he remains on standby for the next two hours until we safely reach Kabul.

Even though in the middle of nowhere, we were not alone. I had hundreds listening in. From all over the world. Weird stuff, hey, ham radio? How do you explain that to outsiders? How do you explain not only what ham radio is, but also what it meant to you, in your life? How it changed the course of my life in many ways? Last year, I started to write down some of these stories in my eBook.

Ham radio. A sharp bend on the road of my life.

As I wrote down these stories, I started to realize – it does sound rather melodramatic, but it is true to state – that “ham radio has changed my life”. If no ham radio, I would not have done the Clipperton expedition in 1992, I would not have experienced the adrenaline kick that operating from a remote Pacific island gave me. I would not have done the expedition to Howland the year after. Then I would not have met Paul, F6EXV. Paul as co-operator then, and as one of my ham contest partners at John-ON4UN’s home. He would not have received the telephone call –during that contest- offering him a job at the UN in Congo. He would not have explained me what that work was all about, which raised my interest.

Less than year and one expedition (Peter I island in the Antarctic) later, I flew to Angola, for the Red Cross, on my first humanitarian mission. My job had nothing related to my education – I am a graphical engineer – nor with my professional experience – I was an IT manager in my last ‘normal’ job-, but I was to install radios. I did work which was solely based on my experience as ham operator. In the end, there is no difference between going on an expedition, fiddling around with generators, debugging antennas and raising masts, if it was on Peter I island, or in the middle of Africa. Well, true, they did not shoot at us on Peter I… But for the rest, there was no difference.
Angola, where I operated as ham with the calls D2TT and D3T later on, was my first mission in the humanitarian world, to be followed by hundreds of missions, to over a hundred countries. Never kept count how many. I did keep track how many countries I operated from. 85 so far…

Over the past 14 years, there were many exciting and memorable moments. Many are explained in stories on my website, and often have a mix of an exotic location, work and ham radio. Being the first to transmit ham TV signals from Zaire (now DRC), during the midst of the Kisangani refugee crisis. And a few months later to be the first on ham TV from the Vatican City. Or the 60,000 radio contacts I logged from our home in Kampala as “5X1T”, in between power cuts, baby sitting, bombings and evacuations. All the friends I made when on mission, and hooking up with people I have spoken with hundreds of times, but never met. I met them while on mission, and they welcomed me in their homes. Be it in El Salvador, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Nepal, South Africa, Tajikistan or dozens more)… And even more so, they often gave me a head start for my work, providing me with much needed connections to the local PTT officials or trustworthy local telecom repair shops where I could find that long-sought-for cavity filter…

There is not one single memory that stands out. They are all different in their own way. But if there was one time where I felt *really* lucky I was a ham radio operator, it was that one night, in the midst of nowhere, in Afghanistan, just a few weeks after 9/11 !

Peter, ON6TT

Continue reading The Road to the Horizon’s Ebook, jump to the Reader’s Digest of The Road.

Dubai International Airport – October 7, 2001.
I step out of the plane and look at my watch. 10 pm. Two hours to shop in the Dubai Tax Free before boarding my connecting flight to Islamabad, Pakistan.
I follow the stream of arriving passengers moving along on the first floor of the airport, overlooking the shopping area. I look at the vast crowd below. A dense mix of every possible nationality, religion and ethnicity in the world, expressed through a myriad of dress codes. From formal western suites, the traditional Arab dishdashahs, women in mini skirts mixed with those fully veiled. Rough Afghani chupans, expensive Indian silk sari’s, Berber djellabas, Australian safari shorts, Sudanese turbans, American baseball caps and Arab hijabs. This crowd seems to represent the world within one space. But the crowd is not strolling along from one shop to another in its usual way. The people are talking in groups, some with raised voices and expressive hand gestures, and others whisper. There is no laughing, nor joy but a nervousness makes the tension in the air so thick one could cut it with a knife. You do not have to be a clairvoyant to feel something is wrong.

Hundreds of people are lining up at the transit counters, below large displays listing numerous cancelled and delayed flights. The atmosphere is grim. Utter grim. I grab hold of someone in an Emirates Airlines uniform and ask her what is going on. She answers: “Have you not heard? The US started bombing Afghanistan a few hours ago. They closed the airspace above Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and all Gulf countries. No civil plane will be flying anymore for a while!”.
For a moment, I feel like the ground is pulled away from beneath my feet. “The US started bombing Afghanistan… This, we have feared since 9/11, a month ago. Retaliation. The beginning of the turmoil in the region, which will last for years. What will happen with Pakistan? How will the government react, how will the people react?”, thoughts flash through my mind as the lady explains the airline has booked hotel rooms, and buses are waiting outside.

I act like a robot: I walk through immigration, pick up my bags, and walk outside. The heat, humidity and mere mass of people crowded at the airport exit cuts off my breath. I get onto the bus and let myself fall into a free seat. I look at the crowd, the stuck traffic,…
- “Not flying tonight, are you?”, a voice says. I wake up from my reverie and look at the guy next to me. American accent.
- “No, apparently not!”, I mumble.
- “Harry”, he says as he holds out his hand.
- “Peter”, I answer, “where were you supposed to fly to?”
- “Oh, I was supposed to fly to Uganda”, he says, “my wife works there.”
- “Oh, really”, I answer, “I worked there too, left two years ago”. I try to make conversation, killing the time waiting for the bus to leave..
- “Really? You work for the UN?”
- “Yes, I do, for WFP”.
- “Oh, my wife works in the same building.. Cathy Ashcroft, maybe you know her!”. It turns out Harry is the husband of Cathy I know since years, the same Cathy I helped setting up the OCHA office in Kampala. We engage into a vivid conversation of Kampala, life in Africa, relief work and of course come back to the subject of the US bombing campaign.

After checking into the hotel, Harry and I walk to the night club, the only place we can still get a drink. In the mean time, it is already 1 am. A few men and a couple form the meagre audience, spread over a dozen tables. A small live band is playing without much enthusiasm. We take a seat in the back, and order a drink. I really really need a drink.
I tell Harry about how we feared for the retaliation, how we feared how the whole region was going to react. No matter how much everyone hated the Taliban, it was still an attack on a sovereign country. A Muslim country. Would countries in the region now choose sides? Be forced to choose sides? Above all, it would mean that masses of people would be killed. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands would start moving within the country, trying to find refuge. It could possibly cause an exodus into all countries around Afghanistan: Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Iran,… Working for a front-line humanitarian organisation, I know what this would mean for us: we would go and provide aid, close to the line of fire. I think of all our national staff who is still in Afghanistan.
All of a sudden the band changes beat and a belly dancer starts her act. There is something wrong with this picture… A war has started tonight. A big one. And here we are in a dark bar, watching a belly dancer…

I find no joy, pay for the drinks, say good-bye to Harry, and walk outside. Sitting on a bench near the hotel entrance, I lit a cigarette. I close my eyes, and imagine the infernos of fire, explosions, shrapnel in the black night around Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar. All places I have visited in Afghanistan. I can see families trying to seek refuge in their homes. I can see their fear not knowing what is going on, how long it would last, and what this would mean for them, and their livelihood. I can smell their fear even where I was sitting.
I look up. The night sky is clear. I imagine the Tomahawks launched from war ships close by. I imagine war planes rushing overhead, ten miles up in the sky. The pilots looking down at Dubai, this city of light and splendour, as they bank left and turn the direction of Afghanistan.

Postscript.
I was blocked in Dubai for three days. Spent the whole time in my hotel room, on email and telephone, coordinating with my team in Islamabad and with my counter parts in Rome. After three days, the air space was re-opened. I got onto the first plane that flew from Dubai to Islamabad. People were so anxious to get back home, they started a fight while boarding.
One month later, I landed in Kabul. As the Taliban retreated, they suffered quite some losses. People took the turbans from the bodies and threw them up in the trees. The turbans unruffled and for months long strips of shiny turban cloth were weaved in between the branches, floating in the wind.

It made me think of the start of the war and the belly dancer. The same contrast I found in dead bodies and their turbans floating in the wind, dangling from a tree. There is nothing poetic about the horrors of war. I understood what Marlon Brando meant in “Apocalypse Now”.

Pictures courtesy theme.cc (bombing), CNN (Tomahawk), umami.co.nz (Duty free zone)

Continue reading The Road to the Horizon’s Ebook, jump to the Reader’s Digest of The Road.

The iPod played some random music and stumbled upon Eva Cassidy. In a flash, everything around me stopped, and the music pulled me back four months when we were racing across the Atlantic delivering a sailing yacht, the Persuader Too, from the UK to the British Virgin Islands.

Eva Cassidy. About the only music both Pete, my watch mate, and I liked. Most of the other stuff I played on the boat -I have a weird music taste, I agree-, Pete did not digg. And vice versa… But Eva Cassidy, we did agree upon.

So often, when we had the sunrise watch, we became close friends with Eva. In thoughts… Her music playing through the speakers on deck. A nice stiff breeze filling our sails. The pitch dark night disappearing and the sun climbing up through the orange-red striped clouds, lifting the mystic veil of the night, and displaying an ocean of emptiness. A total void, filled with clouds, wind and water. And a yacht smack in the middle of this infinite splendor.
The stories of this Antarctic crossing, you find here. They are displayed in reverse order, so you might have to read them from the bottom up. It is strange, now that I re-read them, it seems the stories go from very ‘business like’ through a stage of happy-madness, to an almost mystical mood. That is what eight weeks on a boat does to you..
Four months ago it was. Seems a life time ago.

Anyways, here is the story about Afghanistan I wanted to share with you:
Often we put up our radio-boosters (VHF repeaters for the techneuts amongst you) in remote places. We pay local people to guard them, otherwise the equipment disappears as fast as we can put them up. These guys in Chagcharan (Afghanistan) took their job a bit too serious. We did not really mean they had to deploy an anti-aircraft gun to guard the equipment.

Afghanistan picture: Aramais Alojants. Picture Persuader Too arriving in St.Lucia: Tim Wright

Kabul. The Afghans pronounce it with a long, closed ‘o’, making it sound like ‘Ko-obel’. Most of the a’s are pronounced like an ‘o’ here. Ko-obel. Kabul. It is afternoon. The late-summer sun descends low over the horizon, giving the yellow scenery a golden glow with long exotic shadows. During this time of the year, the temperatures are nice. Really enjoyable. In between the battering dry heat of summer and the biting cold of the long winters, are those short periods which tourist brochures would define as a ‘moderate Mediterranean climate’. The tourist brochures for Kabul must date back to the fifties and sixties most likely.

We are sitting on the stairs of Kabul airport, facing the tarmac looking over the airstrip. Kabul International Airport. There are a bunch of us, all relief workers and reporters. Two from a Pakistani camera crew for the Deutsche Welle, a tall blond Danish demining expert, an Australian water drilling expert from Unicef, a Bangladeshi seed expert from FAO and myself. We are waiting for the UN plane to pick us up. And the plane pretty much has its own time schedule, defined by the “Chaos Theory” dominating Taliban air clearances, weather patterns and the number of people getting stuck at immigration each time the plane lands.

Immigration. The Immigration Counter… All speaks straight to the core of one’s imagination. The airport is heavily damaged. Probably already since twenty or thirty years. Traces of shrapnel and grenade explosions. Bullet holes in windows and walls. Some of them nicely lined up as maybe one of the last Russian soldiers emptied his AK47 while sinking through his knees, shot in the back of his head, spraying the bullets in a nearly perfect curve over the wall. War graffiti. As if saying ‘Alexander was here’, and ‘Alexander was here and never left’. ‘Sacha’ for his friends. ‘Alexej’ for his wife, who will never see him alive again. ‘Alexander was here’, 20 odd bullet holes in a row. The last ones disappeared in the ceiling, where most of the off-white square cardboard tiles have gone and one can see the building skeleton through the aluminum frames of the false ceiling. Cables run left and right in metallic gutters, now rendered useless as it has been many years since Kabul International Airport had its last spark of electricity.

That is probably why everything is so quiet. It calls for religious silence. Respectful silence. Or are sounds just absorbed in the vast empty space which is now left of the airport? It seems people do speak more softly, move more discretely through the different parts of the airport which are now nothing more but ‘remains’. The remains of the rubber belt which once delivered luggage. Torn up, cuddled up in a corner. Remains of counters, half removed, half torn apart. The most inspiring I found the remains of the mechanical displays above the check in counters, and the large display in the entrance hall. You know the kind which click-clack showing the flights, one small metal plate for each letter. What was the last regular flight which left Kabul International Airport? The flight 1203 at 10:15 to Tblisi, it says in Cyrillic on check-in counter 5. I am sure it is counter 5, but the display is dismantled, and two wires stick out of the metallic tube. Wonder if it was shot off or someone just took it with him. Maybe one of the last Russians leaving here has it on display in his living room in St.Petersburg or Kiev, as a war trophy: a plastic yellow square with the black number ‘5’ on it. Would any of his friends believe this was the ‘5’ of the Kabul check-in counter ‘5’, leaving for Tblisi at 10:15 somewhere in a dark past?

Through the entrance hall windows, you gaze onto the main space in front of the airport, filled with rubble. Stones, sprouts of yellow-dry grass. A shot-down primitive watch tower made hastily of metal rusty frames, probably once was the seat of the referee at the tennis club at the Kabul Intercontinental. In the corner, on top of a pickup truck, a guy leisurely rests his arm over a heavy machine gun, bolted onto the roof of the car. Some low scrubs of trees survived the third year of drought, and decades during which people had other priorities than the esthetics of the vegetation at the airport entrance.

Some Taliban officials sit outside the door of ‘Gate 2’, through which we came. One of them, I recognize. He has a turban with Scottish tartan squares, and a sleeveless vest over his long traditional coat and pants. He has the most amazing friendly blue eyes. Many Afghans have. Or green. Many have a light skin and ‘European’ features. My guy talks German, I remember. ‘Der UN Pilot has kein Uhr’, he smiles at me pointing at the sky. ‘The UN pilot does not have a watch’. He is a hydraulic engineer, and studied in East Germany many years ago. He traveled around a fair bit of the world, and right now, he is a ‘Taliban’, watching over the immigration procedures at Kabul International Airport. He cracks some jokes with the custom officials while putting his thumbs in the small watch pockets of his sleeveless jacket, once a part of a stylish Western suit.

He shouts a few words at the two Taliban guards, who are laying on their side on an iron bed frame on the side of the stairs, a bit further up. They are young men in their late teens or early twenties. In deep brown traditional clothes, with a dark gray-brown turban. All their turbans have one long end hanging down from the back over their shoulder up to their waist. Rather attractive. I honestly bet you it will come up one year in the ‘haute couture’ shows of a fashion designer in Paris. Their AK47’s loosely lean against their shoulders. – of the Taliban soldiers that is, not of the Paris models. -. Many of these guys live, eat and sleep with their gun. It looks like it is part of their dressing code, almost part of their body. Most of them actually grew up with their gun, to help protecting their tribe, their herd, their family, and now their nation. The gun is worn out, no more varnish on the wood pieces. The dark spray paint on the metal parts, is rubbed off by the constant handling. But like an old car, it is probably a reliable piece of machinery.

Golden yellow, golden brown, like a picture on a postcard. Remains of summer, a beautiful early fall evening. The mountain range around Kabul is dry. Not a single tree, just some yellow bushes. ‘Amazing’, says the demining expert. I agree. While sitting on the stairs right at the apron, we have a 180 degree sight of the landing strip, taxi runways and hangers around the airport. With the dry yellow mountains, under the fading yellow sun, with small yellow dust devils whirling up small yellow tubes of sand and dust here and there, in between the wrecks of literally hundreds machines of war. Shot down, missed the runway, blown up, or just dumped and stripped of spare parts. MIL-8 Russian helicopter gunships with big dark ragged edged holes in their light yellow and green camouflaged side. Pieces of old artillery and tipped over radar equipment. Antonov and Ilhutsin cargo planes sticking their tail or wing in the air. Hangers with caved-in roofs, with crashed fuel and supply trucks underneath their vast concrete weight.
Three Boeing 727’s from Ariana, the official Afghan national airline, have their cockpit windows covered with a large cotton sheet, and their engines are closed off with red orange shutters. These are the last remains of the Afghanistan national fleet. They still fly within the country, but maintenance and spare parts becomes a pain. The sanctions do not allow the import of plane parts, nor do they allow international commercial flights. A few times per year, one international Ariana flight is allowed to transport children for treatment in Frankfurt, if I remember well. I met the German orthopedic surgeon who accompanies the children on these trips. Was it Frankfurt or Munich? A long flight, he said. And adventurous! But a good opportunity to have maintenance done on the plane while on the ground in Germany.

This is a magical moment. Italian opera music with a full mezzo-soprano voice plays in my head. ‘In Pace’ by Sarah Brightman. Try it, and then picture this scene from what will once have to be part of a movie: ‘In Pace’, ‘In Peace’ playing with nothing but the soft wind on the background, the camera makes a slow, very slow panoramic 180 dgrs pan. A gracious gesture of cinematographic perfection, starting at the left from the hangers and the few MIG fighters left intact, over the yellow specks of grass in between the runways, slowly over dumped or crashed Russian trucks, helicopters, planes sticking out of the low scrub bushes like a mechanical war grave yard, all covered with the yellow dust. The camera moves over the tarmac and in between the soprano voice, the microphone picks up the very remote and soft roar of the white Beechcraft UN aircraft approaching. The camera pans slowly over the old Ariana Boeing 727, with the edge of the cotton window cover sheet softly waving in the wind. The camera slowly slowly zooms out to show the emptiness of the apron, the voidness of the airport, the absolute acknowledgement of existence and persistence in this war torn airport, in this war torn capital city of this warn torn country, which is the center of a war torn region, terrorized by draught and the playing field of the big international powers-that-be.

The camera zooms out, and from the left of the screen, one can hear a noise. Weet-..-weet. Very softly but sharply. Weet-..-weet. A repetitive metal squeak. Slowly. And as the camera continues to zoom out, a Taliban with his Khalashnikov over his shoulder, on an old Chinese bicycle rides into the left of the picture. Weet..-..weet. He has a bundle of hay on the back of his bicycle as he slowly cycles off the runway, over the apron, between the parked MIGs, the Ariana planes, and the taxi-ing UN plane. And at his own pace, the cyclist moves out of the picture, but the sound, you can still hear for a while. Weet-..-weet-..-weet. The plane neutrals the pitch of its propeller blades and shuts off the engine. (I always found that an appealing noise) ffffff-rrrrr-wwaaaaaaattt.. And before we know it, the plane has integrated into the yellow scenery, of a perfect afternoon in Kabul. The soprano voice fades out, and so does the picture. In Pace. In Peace…

Exactly one week later, at almost exactly the same time of day in Kabul, the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center.

Top picture courtesy of Carl De Keyzer , Taliban picture courtesy of Hashmat Moslih

Continue reading The Road to the Horizon’s Ebook, jump to the Reader’s Digest of The Road.

They did not think it was funny.

More stories on this site related to Afghanistan, you find here.

Just as 9/11 happened, we were giving a training for our Afghan staff here in Islamabad. Last night, we took some out for dinner. We picked them up from their hotel, and took them as a treat to one of the fanciest restaurant in town, in the Marriott hotel. As we drove up through the entrance of the Marriott parking lot, there was actually a traffic jam of the small local taxis, each with a huge satellite dish strapped onto their roof rack. Stickers on them for the big news networks. CNN, BBC, Sky, AFP, Fox, Al Jazeera, ITN, ITV, RAI… The hotel’s roof was engulfed in bright floodlights as the anchor speakers were ‘Reporting Live From Islamabad’, with the city lights in the background..

No more denial that our lives were going to take a sharp turn for the worse.. We were going to be in the midst of all the action… And the reactions of the people in the meeting was taking a twist today: from denial to a slight state of panic. The tone of the meeting is definitively much more nervous than the previous days.

Yawn…
My thoughts are running off. I am thinking of the Afghan staff at dinner last night. They were worried about their families left back home in Mazar, Kabul, Faizabad, Jalalabad… Would the Taliban go nuts, and start murdering and plundering? Or empose an ever stricter regime? They wondered how each of them was going to get back home, as we evacuated all international staff from Afghanistan the day after 9/11. We also suspended the UN flights from Islamabad into Afghanistan…

Somewhere, a change of tone in the conversation draws my attention. A lady from one of the agencies starts talking in a low voice. I concentrate again.
She is leaning forward and whispers slowly:

I stand up, cough, raise my hand. The lady stops talking and looks at me as if she sees a ghost. She starts pointing her trembling finger at me. She does not say anything.. Just points at me and after a few seconds, starts blushing.

Continue reading The Road to the Horizon’s Ebook, jump to the Reader’s Digest of The Road.

Anyway, that is besides the point, also besides the point is that I got this ‘ead at a party the Islamabad staff threw for me the evening before I was to fly to my new duty station. That was just before Martin and Robert thought it would be a good idea to have a ‘last one’ in the Islamabad UN club, and they introduced me to a bottle of “Skone Aquavit”. I could not remember much anymore after that. I do remember, I missed my plane the next morning, and had the worse hangover ever! I went back to the office. Martin and Robert looked at me with a real wide grin, and C. turned her head away… I must have had a look with question marks on my face, as Robert said “You don’t remember anything anymore, do you?”. Well I did not. Apparently, we got pretty jolly, started to dial everyone who was so unlucky to have their number stored on my mobile phone. ‘Last numbers dialed’ revealed we called all over the world. Once again my public apologies to all!!! I know it must have been late in Sydney, and early in California! And sorry if I said anything to offend you!
During that ‘dark’ period, we seemed to have run into C. plus husband who had a late dinner in the club. I must have made a disgrace of myself, as since then, C.’s husband does not want to talk to me anymore.
Martin also told me that the traffic cop did not think it was funny when we stood at the crossroad on the way back home, and I pulled out a whistle from my pocket too as I claimed to do a better job than him.
I think that was the last time I got drunk.

The pilot had warned us that this would happen. We had to fly over Afghanistan at a high altitude to stay outside the range of Stinger missiles. Only the airspace right above the airport was secured, so we had to descent within a circle of safety with one kilometer diameter. It felt like a roller coaster ride. And I do NOT like roller coasters. I kept my eyes shut, holding on firmly to the seat.

Fayyaz and I were the two WFP staff amongst the handful of people flying in today. This was only the third UN-flight allowed into Bagram airport since the Taliban fled Kabul, three days before. Three days since the event that marked the unofficial ‘Taliban defeat’ in Afghanistan. The first flight carried our security officers, followed by one with some senior officials. There would not be another flight allowed for two weeks, until we could assure the security of our staff.
I was asked to participate in this mission as the head of FITTEST, the UN humanitarian fast intervention team. I had to review the UN telecommunications systems in Kabul, and call in any resources needed to resurrect the installations. Until the next flight, I had to do with my two hands and any equipment I could find on the ground. Weight restrictions on the flight had not allowed me to take any tools or spares with me. One thing I knew already for sure: all public communication systems in Kabul were out. No telephone, fax, telex. The whole infrastructure was bombed to pieces or sabotage-d. For many months, the only communications would be done through equipment we brought in ourselves.

We landed around noon, amid the wreckage of old artillery and aircraft of all kinds. Two guys in local attire, riding four-wheel motorbikes, guided the plane to its parking space on the tarmac. When we got out, onto the tarmac, we went over to say hi. “Where are you guys from”, someone asked, as their short blond hair showed they were no locals. “I cen’t tell ya’, said one, in an obvious Texan accent, with a radio labeled ‘USAF’ (US Air Force) strapped onto his belt.. Hmm..

We drove off in convoy to Kabul, crossing an area which up to three days ago was the front line in a war witnessed by the whole world through the cameras of CNN and the likes. It was a sunny autumn day with an absolutely clear blue sky above naked mountains topped with snow, which presided over a bright yellow desert valley. The litter of the relics of years of war were the only signs of civilisation amongst the void of sand and dust: old Russian-made tanks and artillery, shot to pieces and half-buried in the ground. In several places, the road was bombed or a big hole in the asphalt, with a wreck in the ditch alongside, reminded us that this was a heavily contested piece of land, fought over for twenty-odd years amongst countless warring fractions. The last battle took place only three days ago, between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance troops.

Fayyaz and I were anxious to see our Afghan colleagues in Kabul who continued to run the food distributions during the war. They were all standing in the office compound as we drove in. We hugged them. We had not seen them since September 12, when all international staff was ordered to evacuate after 9/11. “Welcome back,” they smiled, “Welcome back!”. We all had tears in their eyes. We knew this was not just a welcome-back, but our return might also be the turning of a page in the history of Afghanistan. The last page in a chapter of twenty years civil war. This could be the first day of a new beginning for this lovely land and its great people, after decades of civil war.

We told them it was good to be back, how worried we had been about them and their families. It had not been an easy time, these two months since 9/11. Our national staff were the real heroes of this emergency operation. Against all odds, and under the continuous threat of bombing and military reprisals, they had kept moving and distributing massive amounts of food for the needy. A short visit to the WFP warehouse proved the point of how real the risks had been to all of them. The staff there described with pride how they had loaded food as the military installations all around the warehouse were bombed. They showed us bags of shrapnel collected after the bombings. Many pieces of metal and debris had come through the tin roof and walls.

It has been a while since I really touched radio equipment. You know how it goes: the more you get into the ‘manager’ role, the less you actually are involved in the real core of what you manage. For me, it was radios, computers, antennas, generators, networks, telephone systems. For two weeks, I would be the only international technician there… Time to brush up on long forgotten routines and manuals..

With some of our Afghan staff, we drove to the Intercontinental Hotel where our radio repeaters were installed. They all went off-air weeks ago. We found that, for safety reasons, the hotel staff had dismantled the radios, masts and antennae. All the bits and pieces were still there. But now came the next problem: as the UN flight to Kabul had had limited luggage capacity, I had not been able to bring my toolboxes. With some ingenuity and a Leatherman, we put all the pieces together again and flicked the switch: the two repeaters came alive with a soft hum.

As the days went by, bit by bit all comms systems were revived. As I was the only UN technician, the staff from the different organizations asked for all kinds of support. I drove around town with my improvised ‘intervention’ team, and a Leatherman. Amazing what those combinations could resolve.. Generators were revived, satellites phones re-programmed, Email systems started spitting out messages again. The most exotic thing they asked me to do was to configure a computer so the head of the UNHCR office could pick up his email. Nothing exotic about that – except that the computer had a Japanese version of MS Windows! Euh.. What’s the Japanese for ‘modem’ and ‘control panel’ again?

The trouble with all of these support trips was they were all followed a visitor’s protocol to first drink tea with the hosts. Unfortunately, the tap water in Kabul was real bad, and soon my stomach gave in to the constant attack of bacteria, and I got food poisoning (well ‘water poisoning’ more likely). One day, I just could not get out of bed anymore, except to go to the bathroom to throw up, or to do a liquid number two.

One of my more exotic tasks was to secure a good new site for the repeaters and mobile phone system we were bringing in. For years we had tried to get access to “TV hill”, a mountain smack in the middle of Kabul. It would be an excellent place for the antennae for our radio relay stations, but during the Taliban regime we were never allowed access to it.

I had asked the UN security officer to get permission to go up the hill, but he had not succeeded. I was hard headed (Tine, my wife has other words for it, though), the more as other UN staff in the guesthouse had started to tease me: “Hey, has WFP conquered the mountain yet?”. In the end, I went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They all said that only the –newly appointed- minister could give me this kind of approval. But he was not in. So I sat on the steps of his building for hours waiting until he arrived. I knew him from television. Dr Abdullah was a well known figure in the ranks of the Northern Alliance. As his convoy drove into the compound, and he got out of the car, I got a hold of him. He looked me up and down. Perhaps I did not look like someone who could conquer mountains, in my grimy sweatshirt and a torn and ragged WFP safari jacket (as I said, the check-in luggage allowance on the Bagram flight was extremely restricted!)…

In fact, conquer the mountain is just what we did. The minister gave the green light and signed a paper stating so. A day later, we were in a car with a guy called ‘Maruk’, who turned out to be the Minister’s personal bodyguard. Hey, I must have given a good impression!

“TV Mountain” has two peaks. The first had been heavily bombed and still had loads of live ammunition all over it. That was a disappointment: in between the anti-aircraft shells and thousands of rounds of heavy machinegun bullets, the uneven ground of the shelled bunkers and areas which looked mined, there was no space to put up any equipment. The locally hired UN de-miners also shook their head: ‘Too dangerous, it will take months to clear all this live ammo and to defuse any booby-traps’.

The local military commander in charge of the hill, came over. Maruk and Wahab, my local counterpart, started discussing with him in Pashtu. They kept on pointing at me, at the sky, the town, and a handheld radio.. The commander finally got into our car and we drove to the second peak of “TV mountain”. I gasped for a moment, as we stepped out into a magnificent scenery. We stood, at an altitude of 2200 meters, under a clear blue sky, with B52 bombers still circling overhead, leaving white trails behind them. Kabul with its buzzing activity lays hundreds of meters below us. We looked at the horizon and at eachother as walked onto the roof of a building with a round concrete roof. It used to be an air traffic beacon, and now featured a hole from a massive bomb in the exact center of it. I remembered the video shots of the precision bombing from fighter planes, I had seen on CNN.

‘The commander has a request’, said Wahab. He took us into the ruins of radar installation. A local military guy lay on a make shift bed. He had two radios in his hands. He listened on one, and repeated what he heard on the other… A manual retransmission of messages.. ‘The commander says their radios have interference, can you solve it?’, translated Wahab. I looked on the roof at their antennas. They were too close. It took me fifteen minutes to shorten the bamboo poles supporting the antennas and to separate them. Interference solved. The commander smiled satisfied, and slapped my back and we shook hands in agreement. “This is the place.”, I smiled at Wahab.

A week later, we brought in the first containers with equipment and the installations started.. The mountain was conquered. Still to today, “TV mountain” is the main communications site in Kabul.

This is a re-edit from an article previously written with by C.Hurford
Pictures courtesy of O.Hadziemin, L.Marre, R.Kasca

Continue reading The Road to the Horizon’s Ebook, jump to the Reader’s Digest of The Road.