Americans suck. Bring back the Ruskies!

Once again, I'll expound upon my title after I fill you a little bit...

I consider myself a realist... I'm embarrassed on a daily basis by the activities of my co-workers with regard to the locals here in Afghanistan. I hear people say stupid stuff all the time, stuff that makes my skin crawl. I see how people drive - everyone drives like idiots here (locals included), but I see co-workers taking it personally and freaking out blahblahblah.

--However--

I think this company is doing a lot of good things to stabilize the country. Training police, contributing to the local economy (landlords charge a lot), providing jobs, giving kids money, etc etc.. And there's the other little thing, you know, the ousting of the Taliban. No more random beatings in the street, no more public execution halftime shows at soccer games. Stuff like that.

So why am I talking about this? The LA Times recently published an article talking about how Afghans are fed up with a security firm here in Kabul. I'm going to take a couple selections from the article and break them down a little bit, just for the heck of it. I'm going to be as objective as possible, but as always, I will take the liberty to make fun of people's comments and embellishments, however "slight."

First excerpt:
"I feel like we are under an occupation," Safi said. "This is a residential area, and we are civilians. I'm worried we will be hit by a rocket. We had visiting guests come but when they saw the Americans with guns they became so scared they turned around and left."

I'm not really sure what definition of "occupied" they're going off of. I've never been occupied before, so maybe I'm not a really good judge of this, but the last time I checked there were no curfews in Kabul, and maybe the next time they have guests they should tell them about the checkpoint near their house. As far as being hit by a rocket, a couple weeks ago someone was launching rockets randomly into Kabul, killing a few civilians. Hopefully the risk of being blown to hell will motivate them to become proactive in assisting us with information they might be privy to about activities in their neighborhood. Aside from the occupation comment, though, I sympathize with them and can understand where they're coming from.

Second excerpt:
...[But] attitudes may be changing, in part because of the security issue and the behavior of some employees of the private security firms. The problem has reached the point that the U.S. Embassy is forming a committee to address the issue of Afghan perceptions of Americans, a Western official said.

Agreed. Not a whole lot I can say to dispute that. What would be more powerful than that might be foreigners (I say foreigners because, for example, most of the people in this compound are not Americans) changing their behavior in an effort to change perceptions.

Third Excerpt:
Heated debates abound in teashops and bazaars about security contractors — many of whom drive aggressively, block off streets without notification, wear military fatigues and wraparound shades and appear to randomly point weapons at residents on congested streets.

Drive aggressively: A fact of life if you ever want to get from point-A to point-B in Kabul. It might just be more obvious because a lot of the vehicles we have are enormous.

Block off streets without notification: This required permission from the Ministry of Interior and cooperation with the locals in the area. Random road blocks are also a fact of life in Kabul, and not restricted to this firm or any firm.

Wear military fatigues: Not true.

Wear wraparound shades: I was unaware of the fact that wraparound shades were oppressive and militant. Most people wear them because the sun is really bright. Maybe if they have problems with "wraparound shades" they should tell the kids outside to stop selling them, and also tell the kids how offensive they are so the kids stop demanding that we give them ours.

Appear to randomly point weapons at residents on congested streets: I'm kind've split on this one... I know we have some serious rednecks in our mist who think that's fun, but for the most part people do not point weapons at residents. We all drive with weapons for protection, because there are clearly people here who mean us harm (See 2 blogs down, Zendagi Migzara.) In any case, most of the people here are professionals, and have enough experience that they don't really get off on that behavior. Like I said, however, there are exceptions.

Fourth Excerpt:
"In our tradition it is bad that women are coming and their bags are checked," he said. "When our guests come to our homes their bags are checked, it takes an hour. Then they, the Americans, come to my house, ask what I am doing, who my guests are and why they are coming. We are not terrorists."

In our tradition, it is bad to use women as suicide bombers, but unfortunately it happens a lot. I've seen how bags are checked, and it's in a very polite, unobtrusive manner. And it doesn't take an hour. Personnel here do make a point of checking up on residents, but it's also in an unobtrusive way. They are all about cooperating with residents in the area - they don't demand to know what they're doing, it's more an attempt to see how things are. This last comment reminds me of people in the USA who get pissy because they have to wait in line for a security check, and are mad because they're standing in a line that hopes to ensure their safety on an airplane that could be used in the same manner that the planes on Sept 11th were used. Is waiting in a lobby that much more glorious? Oh wait though, I forgot. The "it wont happen to me" attitude still prevails.

Fifth Excerpt:
"They are unofficial ambassadors of the United States, and we need to balance security with other concerns, the need for being open, respecting civilian Afghans, in the way we drive and conduct ourselves," he said. "At the same time we need to be mindful there are people out there who do not wish us well. This will be a constant struggle."

BRAVO. Mashallah. Agreed 100%.

Sixth (and favorite) Excerpt:
Nazar Mohmad Khazak, 81, who has lived on the street for 44 years, compared life with the security contractors to the Russian occupation of the 1980s."We are scared of the Americans," he said. "The Russians were here for 10 years and their military stations were out of the city, not among families. I passed the difficulties of the Russian occupation. But as difficult as that was, it wasn't as hard as this."

*WOW*... Michael Moore would love this comment. This is probably the same guy who came by the other day and told some of the girls who hang out by the checkpoint to "stop having sex with the infidels." (They're not, they sell stuff to us.)

Honestly. I will say a lot of negative things about the way contractors act in this country, but seriously. Let's go over some of the things the Russians did to Afghanistan:

o Lined up Afghans and ran them over with tanks
o Carried out terrorist operations against Afghans in Pakistan
o Mined the absolute dogshit (some estimates put it at 3 million mines) out of the country, many of which are still here and very much still blowing up children and farmers
o Killed thousands during their withdrawal, so as not to look like the US did in Vietnam
o Created millions of Refugees in Pakistan and Iran

(I would mention "Created a country ripe for civil war and the Taliban," but I'd have to blame the CIA for that too, and I don't want to get off the subject...)

I got this info from the book Soldiers of God, by Robert Kaplan. I'm not sure how to cite sources on a blog.. Either way, read this book. It rocks.

Apparently to Mr Khazak, these are all a better alternative than having a company train police (so they're not corrupt as hell, which they are, but who knows if that will change) and send qualified people in to protect their leaders from being killed. Kinda makes me wonder what this guy did for the Russians and, probably after that, for the Taliban, so that things "weren't so bad" when the rest of his countrymen were gettin' it stuck to them.

So in conclusion, I guess my point is that I agree with some stuff in the article, but disagree with other stuff. The article covers one perspective of the population, probably that of the uninformed/possibly senile. As I've written before, I do have a lot of respect for the Afghan people and I am concerned that these opinions are floating around, but you can never expect to make everyone happy. There's other stuff in the article I didn't add, so please read it through and see what you think. (The link is up at the top).

Anyway, more later..

The Clown-ops Continue

Nothing really new to write about, I suppose. I've been keeping myself busy creating a training regime for new people and for people that have been in country for a while and not bothered to learn what they need to know. I usually work on the training stuff at night after work, when I'm bored in my room and have little else to do. It also gives me the luxury of only half concentrating on what I'm doing, as I'm often distracted by friends coming online and whatnot. So I'm usually doing three things at once - watching the National Geographic Channel, talking to 3 or 4 people at the same time, and working on something in a different window. I don't really consider this "working" though. Allow me to speak on that briefly.

I guess I had a strange image of what "work" was, because I always hear people talking about "working their ass off" or "working 10 hours" in a day. After being in the military, I kind of had a skewed image of what this whole "work" thing was, because we would go to "work" and do nothing. Then we'd go on missions, and I suppose we would "work" for sometimes 20 hours a day, but I didn't really consider it "work" then, either. It was just what we did, because it was what needed to be done to get the mission completed. Or that was what our job on the team entailed, and what we had to do.

So now I'm here in this quasi-civilian status, and I often hear people talking about the "work" they do, or "working their asses off," when in reality I know for a fact that they're writing emails or surfing the net. So I'm a little undecided on what the definition of "work" is. What I've come up with is that "work" is time spent at the "work place," regardless of what you might be doing while located in the "work place." People are very particular about how their time is spent, and even if they're doing personal business while "at work," they're not doing it on their own terms, so to them it's still "work." This leads me to believe that millions of people located in various offices around the world and in the USA who are "working their asses off" are just talking shit and being huge babies. If they weren't "at work" they'd essentially be doing the same thing at home, but they're just mad because they're not doing it in their underwear while consuming cheerios in an inappropriately huge bowl, along with an episode of Spongebob playing in the background. My point is, I think that people confuse "work" and "productivity." Instead of saying "I worked my ass off today" when they actually accomplished a solid 8 hours of work, people should say "I produced my ass off today," to indicate that they were actually productive at work. "I worked my ass off today" should be reserved for people who go to work and don't really do a whole helluva lot, but want everyone to sympathize with them because, again, they weren't at home looking at snuff videos from Iraq and eating cheerios. So I try to avoid saying I "worked my ass off," especially in an office environment. Honestly, do these people carry sandbags around and climb around on shit in the office? Have they ever been in an office for three days without showering, all the while crawling around in filth and falling into dirty rivers when it's around or below 50 degrees? I understand mental fatigue from looking at a computer screen and dealing with mouth breathers all day, but how physically wrecked could you possibly be? When someone says "I'VE BEEN WORKING MY ASS OFF HERE" I get this image of their ass somehow becoming physically detached from the rigors of the "work" they've been doing, and nothing could be farther from the truth. Even when I carried a 100+lb pack for 9 hours in the middle of the night, I never stopped and said, "Wow, I've been working my ass off," even though it did indeed feel like my ass was physically detached and in a pool of magma, nerves and all still connected. And that was before we even started "working" on the mission.

I don't really know what the point of this little rant is. Maybe because I've observed grown men acting like little kids with a serious case of hyperbole-itis. So in an attempt to continue my little game of "King of the Hill" on a mound of moral highground built by obese, 12 year old knuckle draggers trapped in the bodies of 45 year olds, I'll refuse to say that I "work my ass off."

Unless, of course, my ass happens to somehow become physically disconnected while being productive in my place of work.

Sorry about that. I didn't plan on writing that. It just happened randomly, like all glorious things. Kind've like the big bang.

Ok, like I said before, nothing new is really happening around here. Here's a funny article about someone who used to work here on the same program, and who I thought was a complete hilljack and bullshitter. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,132403,00.html Give that article a peep to see the caliber of some of the people I work with.

Enjoy your day, and have a helping of McDonalds fries for me.