Re-posted from The Huffington Post

Reuters’ recent report that Afghan security forces are systematically freeing captured high-level Taliban leaders in exchange for financial and political payoffs was familiar to me — it’s a story I started hearing over a year ago when I was reporting from Afghanistan.

Emma Graham-Harrison’s article discusses a “catch-and-release” system that is so well organized that the Taliban have a standing “Freedom” committee to handle the bribery negotiations with government officials. The officials authorizing and facilitating the releases include President Hamid Karzai and his half-brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, a Kandahar powerbroker with reported ties to the drug trade, the CIA and the Taliban. To the frustration of the U.S.-led ISAF military coalition, many of the released insurgent leaders quickly resume fighting.

It was a story I began hearing in 2009 when I was embedded with U.S. troops in insurgency-wracked eastern Afghanistan. “Catch-and-release” was a phrase that could get a table of soldiers at the DFAC dining hall in a snarl. One soldier sardonically grumbled to me that captured Taliban were back fighting his unit almost before he and his buddies could return to base. Since then I’ve been absorbing the literature and interviewing civilian and military intelligence, detention and rule-of-law experts in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Afghanistan, trying to understand this capture-and-release business and how it fits into my larger investigation into the culture of corruption that is gripping Afghanistan and the U.S. war effort.

While many of my sources, particularly those still working in Afghanistan, need to remain anonymous for reasons of safety and cannot be quoted here, their information and insights have allowed me to peer behind the curtain of this pernicious trade.

The catch-and-release system has long been known to ISAF, the international coalition battling the Afghan insurgency. In 2007, Canada’s Minister of National Defence Gordon O’Connor told a national Canadian television audience that the Afghan prisons “had quite a revolving door system.”

A cable I found among the recent Wikleaks releases reveals Washington’s concerns about the revolving door. In August 2009, U.S. Deputy Ambassador to Afghanistan, Francis J. Ricciardone, cabledWashington, “On numerous occasions we have emphasized with Attorney General [Muhammad Ishaq] Aloko the need to end interventions by him and President Karzai, who both authorize the release of detainees pre-trial and allow dangerous individuals to go free without ever facing an Afghan court.”

The cable noted a dramatic increase in pre-trial releases after April 2007, when President Karzai established the Aloko Detainee Commission. Prior to the Commission’s establishment, there was one pre-trial release in 2007. By 2008, the number released from the Afghan National Detention Facility ballooned to 104, and by August 2009 there’d already been 45 releases.

Many of the insurgents released from Afghan custody were high-value detainees held by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), Afghanistan’s intelligence service. A University of Ottawa law professor and detainee rights activist, Amir Attaran, told me that selling high-level detainee releases is a good business for the NDS. “The big bad Taliban buy their way out. The NDS guys are stunningly corrupt. They simply let the high-value Taliban walk–then torture the low-level Taliban to extort money from the families.”

The Reuters article indicated Ahmad Wali Karzai (or AWK as ISAF notates him) spent tens of thousands of dollars to secure the release of Anwar Shah Agha, an important Taliban commander who directed attacks west of Kandahar to Herat. After Agha’s capture in Kandahar in May 2009, AWK got to work, getting Anwar Shah Agha transferred to Kabul, where he was released less than a year later in March 2010. The article stated that Anwar Shah Agha “has since returned to the battlefield.”

Reports by The New York Times, ABC News, The Washington Times and The Times of London on Ahmad Wali Karzai paint a picture of a corrupt kingpin in the opium-soaked Kandahar heartland of the Taliban. The recent WikiLeaks disclosures show AWK’s extensive connections to the CIA, long involved in the drug trade in the Golden Triangle, Latin America and Afghanistan, as historian Alfred W. McCoy has documented in his magisterial The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Trade.

To combat the catch-and-release system with improved Afghan detention operations, the U.S. established Joint Task Force 435 in September 2009, which became the Combined Joint Interagency Task Force (CJIATF) 435 a year later. According to a CJIATF 435 document, the task force is attempting to help the Karzai government build “self-sustaining Afghan National Detention and Rule of Law institutions that are compliant with Afghan and international law.”

Brigadier General Mark S. Marks is the CJIATF 435 Deputy Commanding General. “He has a whole plan for this rule of law,” Daphne Eviatar, Senior Associate of Law and Security Program at Human Rights First in New York, told me. “The idea is good, to promote trainers, mentors, so the U.S. can hand over some of the detention to the Afghans — though the U.S. still wants to continue to hold some of the detention.” Many of the Afghan detainees the U.S. wants to hold are on NATO’s infamous “kill or capture” JPEL list that targets over 2,000 top insurgents. Though the U.S. is trying to transform the Afghan judiciary, international observers doubt CJIATF 435’s ability to reform the deeply rooted Taliban-NDS release racket.

As U.S. and ISAF officials grapple with the pre-trial release issues, they face a complicated problem. Allowing corrupt Afghan government officials to continue the catch-and-release trade can strengthen the insurgency. But disempowering the Afghan government can prove equally disastrous. “The ultimate challenge for counterinsurgency is stuck between building the right system for the long-term — basic security forces or the judiciary — at the same time dealing with a situation where rapid demonstrable results are the rule of the day. You’re trying to do contradictory things here,” Nathan Hughes, Director of Military Analysis at STRATFOR, a global intelligence company, explained to me. He concluded, “You’re stuck with the partner you have.”

And a flawed, duplicitous partner, the current Afghan administration is indeed. The recently revealed “catch-and-release” business is just another example of the culture of corruption that has enveloped the war effort, endangering U.S. and NATO troops — and verily the entire outcome of the war. General David Petraeus has repeatedly termed the legitimacy of the host nation government as the “north star” of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. If that’s the case, we are being led far off course by a false reading.

Re-posted from Muslim Voices

As part of my reporting in Khost Province, Afghanistan, I hoped to interview an Afghan woman. I recognized early on this seemingly simple task was going to be challenging.

Khost Province is in an extremely conservative Pashtun tribal region, where Islamic women are most often isolated from unrelated males in a practice called purdah. When in public, Khosti women typically wear burqas, the enveloping shroud that shields them from gaze.

A number of years ago, I had become acquainted with Pashtun women in burqasin the adjacent tribal regions of Pakistan. Northwestern Pakistan and eastern and southeastern Afghanistan are the heartland of the burqa, particularly the chadri, the loose-fitting garment that covers the entire body, including the eyes, which are veiled with a fabric grill. Westerners often call the chadri a “shuttlecockburqa,” descriptive of the profile a burqa-ed woman presents.

While the sight of Pashtun women in burqas was unfamiliar and unsettling to me, I recognized the burqa also represented a fundamentalist Islamic communication that the woman was an inviolate spiritual creature.

‘Whose Fiat In Matters Of Fashion Was Law’

While the Koran and the hadith, the collected commentaries on Muhammed’s life, require Muslims to dress modestly in public, there is, however, no mention of theburqa in these sacred texts. The requirement for modest dress by women, calledhijab from the Arabic word for “curtain” or “cover,” is interpreted in diverse ways across the Muslim world, from chadris to no head covering at all.

For centuries, Afghan women in particularly strict households have used theburqa, though it was not in widespread use until the reign of King Habibullah, who ruled from 1901 to 1919. He decreed his two hundred comely wives should wear the burqa when outside the palace to prevent them from enticing other men.

Quickly becoming the au courant fashion, the use of the burqa spread among the ruling Pashtuns.

In the Westernizing years of the 1950s and ’60s, burqa-wearing dropped off among the upper classes in the modernizing cities, in the process creating aburqa fad in the working classes as they inherited their employers now passé outer garments. (Though there was a revival during the Soviet era of the 1980s, when some women sought refuge from the increasingly secular culture, even in the progressive capital of Kabul.) But it was the Taliban who made the burqa a symbol of female oppression, requiring that all mature Afghan women wear the garment when in public when they took Kabul in 1996.

When the Taliban fell from power in 2002, the wearing of burqas ceased to be mandated. However, it is still seen in the more liberal cities, such as Kabul and Herat. In the conservative hinterlands of eastern and southern Afghanistan, theburqa is the norm.

So given the conservative culture, I knew it would be somewhat of a cultural challenge to arrange an interview with an Afghan woman in eastern Afghanistan.

To Interview An Afghan Woman

The wild insurgency in Khost, Afghanistan’s most violent province, added another level of complexity. The insurgency necessitated stringent security. Afghan families cooperating with American forces also faced danger from the Taliban.

But I still thought I could interview at least one Afghan woman. After all, there were Afghan government officials who were women; Afghan NGO workers who were university educated. Perhaps I could arrange an interview through an American woman, and pose my questions from behind a screen. I am nothing if not flexible and resourceful. I had faith I could interview an Afghan woman.

About a month before I departed for my embed with the Indiana National Guard 1-19th Agribusiness Development Team (ADT) in Khost Province, I began making inquiries about an interview. I asked the ADT if they could arrange something. They said they’d try.

I approached CARE, a highly regarded NGO with active aid projects in Khost, to see if I might arrange an interview with one of their female workers. I researched the nascent Afghan woman’s organization, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), but quickly learned it was a secret organization due to Taliban threats.

No Meeting, No Quarter

When I arrived in Khost, I began to realize the challenge I faced. A tentative meeting with the Khost Province Director of Women’s Affairs was abruptly taken off the books. The Taliban blew up her car and said they were going to kill her. She left on a military plane for Kabul, with no plans for returning.

While there was indeed a CARE female worker in Khost City who was willing to talk to me, we needed to coordinate a neutral place to meet. Due to the dire security problems the humanitarian NGOs face, they very wary of being seen as allied in any way with the U.S. military. Given that, the CARE worker could not come to Forward Operating Base Salerno, the military base where I was embedded with the ADT. Nor could I arrive at her CARE location in any kind of military vehicle, or with any kind of military security.

Cognizant both of the extreme security risk and his responsibility for me, the ADT commander, Colonel Brian Copes, explained he could not let me travel unaccompanied into Khost City. Nor did I think it a particularly prudent thing to do. Kidnapping journalists has become almost a cottage industry in Afghanistan.

One day the CARE worker and I thought we had a plan: The ADT was going to the local Shaikh Zayed University. We could meet in a room near the ADT’s meeting with the administrators. There’d be sufficient security nearby, and her neutrality would be respected. So close. But instead the Taliban sent a “night letter” to the university administrators, and the meeting at the college was canceled. Maybe next time.

‘Let Me Look For Dogs And Women’

As the weeks rolled by with no woman interview in sight, I began to get increasingly nervous. I could see Khost Province was far more conservative than even the Pakistani tribal regions I’d seen. Indeed, I seldom even ,em>saw Afghan women, let alone spoke to them. For the most part, they were hidden in their homes.

One day I was in a remote mountain village with the ADT, on a visit to plan an irrigation project. Excited by the possibility of some help, a village elder led us through the hamlet to show us some existing watercourses. A pack of small boys followed us. The village men watched from under the shade of a pepper tree. Curs growled from the shadows. Our village guide suddenly darted ahead, dodging through a gate. “Wait here,” he called over his shoulder. “Let me look for dogs and women.”

Expats Found, And Lost

At one point, I thought I had it worked out. There were three Afghan female interpreters on Forward Operating Base Salerno. All three were long-time refugees from the chaos of war-torn Afghanistan. After decades in Pakistan, Europe and the United States, they’d each returned to serve as translators for the military, drawn by the high pay.

They were essentially Westernized women, who had grown up in Afghanistan. But I had lowered my expectations considerably. If interviewing an expatriate Afghan housewife who’d spent the last twenty years in Boston or Fresno was all I could get, that was good enough for me.

I approached the friendly women, who ate their meals together in the mess hall. They agreed to meet me after work for a group interview. I was giddy. But when I arrived for the interview, the three sat glumly on the steps to the building. As they left the offices of the private company that supplied the civilian translators, a manager asked where they were going. “To an interview with a reporter,” they told him. The manager told them they absolutely couldn’t do an interview with the media. I told them I understood, and would see if the ADT might be able to intervene. But I thought there was little hope. Drat, foiled again.

A Chorus Of ‘No’

I became reduced to asking virtually every person I met if they knew an Afghan woman I could interview. It became sort of a hobby.

A doctor told me some Afghan men interpreters brought their educated wives into the base hospital for treatment. Maybe I could arrange some sort of screened interview where I couldn’t see the woman, chaperoned by the translator husband and a female American soldier. An inquiry to the men brought stunned silence, and then a no-nonsense “No.” No.

I got so many negative responses, I began recording them. “Oh, man-that’s not going to happen,” was a pretty typical (polite) response. The less polite responses questioned my intelligence.

One veteran army captain who’d worked in Khost for a year on a development team told me he’d never spoken to a woman. Captain Bob Cline of the ADT told me the tale of his translator going into a paroxysm of fear as they approached a vet clinic. An Afghan husband was approaching with his two burqa-ed wives. The translator was terrified that the captain might see the women. They had to immediately back up and negotiate safe passage to avoid a potentially disastrous sighting.

Sharing Joy And Triumph

My relentless nudging finally paid off. When I agreed to keep the name of the female interpreters secret and not ask any questions relating to their work, the translator company finally relented, albeit with the prompting of the ADT’s Major Shawn Gardner and Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Sari. But two of the three interpreters still refused to be interviewed, fearful of losing their jobs.

With the intervention of ADT Deputy Commander Colonel Cindra Chastain, one kindly 51-year-old interpreter took pity on me, and agreed to sit for an interview. Lieutenant Melissa Gutzweiler sat as a chaperone.

The Afghan woman was tense when she sat down, her mouth a thin line of worry, her eyes flicking from side to side. I emphasized that her identity would be protected, and I’d ask no questions of her work. Soon she was cheerily telling me about her privileged girlhood in pre-war Kabul; about her father, an international businessman with contacts in London and other European capitals. Then her life as a refugee in Pakistan and eventually the United States; being part of the growing Afghan community in America. Her smile was warm and open as she talked about her large extended family; the message of peace and brotherhood her religion promulgates.

As we sat there taking in her shared joy and triumph over adversity, my long, seemingly futile quest to speak with an Afghan woman suddenly seemed all the more worthwhile.

 

Yesterday a suicide bomber in an Afghan National Army uniform detonated himself at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost Province, Afghanistan, killing eight American civilians and wounding many more. Reports indicated the explosion was at the dining hall or gym. The blast was so large it could be heard miles away—including nearby Forward Operating Base Salerno, where I was recently embedded as a correspondent with the Indiana National Guard Agribusiness Development Team.

When going out on missions into insurgency-wracked Khost Province, we often went to Camp Chapman to rendezvous with the PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team), a civilian-military unit also doing development work in the province. Chapman is a highly secure base. It was an open secret that the CIA and other shadowy government entities operated out of Chapman, including helicopter forays into the nearby Taliban-controlled tribal areas of Pakistan. According to some sources, Predator and Reaper drones also used Chapman’s Soviet-built, 9000-foot runway for attacks on Pakistan hideouts of the Haqqani network, one of the main insurgent groups in Khost.

As I didn’t have a security classification that allowed me on the base, the armored MRAP vehicle carrying me always had to stop at the gate—a source of some chagrin among the ADT soldiers eager to eat at Chapman’s legendary dining hall, run by celebrated “fat Navy cooks.” While I couldn’t get in, a bomber carrying a large amount of explosives clearly did.

The bombing raises a number of disturbing questions: How did the bomber penetrate the base’s security? There are elaborate biometric BAT-HIIDE identification systems to prevent unauthorized Afghans from entering the base. Was he an ANA soldier with a Taliban allegiance? Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid indicated he was an ANA soldier named Samiullah, though the U.S. military says there were no ANA soldiers on the base. Or was he one of the many thousands of Afghan “local national” workers who do the scut work on American bases across Afghanistan, including Chapman where there were reportedly two hundred Afghan workers. Or did accomplices somehow smuggle a dedicated jihadi from the adjacent tribal areas onto the base? And the ultimate question: If an insurgent can set off a bomb in the midst of one of our most secret bases, how safe are other, less-secure bases?

The latest American strategy includes dictums to always “put an Afghan face” on our efforts, whch necessitates increased partnering with Afghan security forces and government ministries. It’s a strategy fraught with complications—another of the “least worst” options that now characterize our policies. How do we determine who is friend or foe? What is the human capacity of Afghan organizations to handle the torrent of development money the Coalition plans to send their way? What will happen to the funds in a culture of endemic corruption? And in the context of the Camp Chapman bombing, how will this strategy work when the Pashtun insurgency has deep tendrils into every aspect of eastern Afghanistan, including the army, government and tribal society?

 

The Afghan insurgents’ improvised explosive devices are responsible for 80% of the casualties in this war. The bombs—buried in roads and trails, plastered into house walls, secreted in fields and orchards—cause horrific injuries. A relatively small IED can hurl dismembered bodies twenty-five feet in the air. The U.S.-led Coalition’s heavily armored MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles patrolling the IED-spiked roads don’t even offer total protection. Though they often protect the passengers from the shrapnel, the explosions are causing an epidemic of Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) from the pressure waves and heads hitting walls and ceilings. Since 2007, the military has diagnosed 70,000 soldiers with Traumatic Brain Injury, 20,000 this year. Insurgents are now building IEDs large enough to rupture even the 37,000-pound, bank-vault-like MRAPs. IEDs are the greatest threat to the Indiana National Guard Agribusiness Development Team (ADT) in eastern Afghanistan’s volatile Khost Province.

Ironically, the main ingredient of this most feared and effective weapon is a basic agricultural product: ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Mixed with a fuel such as gasoline or diesel and armed with a power source and trigger, ammonium nitrate fertilizer has the 75% of the explosive power of TNT. And it is ubiquitous in Afghanistan.

While it has been outlawed since 2005, ammonium nitrate fertilizer is still commonly imported from neighboring Pakistan, both for farming and bombs. Earlier this month, Afghan authorities raided a warehouse in Kandahar, where they seized a half-million pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, 5,000 100-pound bags, along with 2,000 bomb devices, including timers and triggers. Fifteen Afghans were captured.

After the raid, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told a press conference the obvious: the ammonium nitrate ban wasn’t being enforced. He said, “If we have to pay for some of it, I’m open to that.” A U. S. State Department official at Bagram Airfield, the largest Coalition base in Afghanistan, says there is now a directive to pay $28 for each bag of fertilizer turned in or seized. “We’re finding it everywhere,” he says.

The average size of an IED is about sixty pounds, most often packed into a plastic bowl or bucket to prevent metal detectors from finding it. Small anti-personnel mines, called toe-poppers, are sometimes packed in discarded ½-liter water bottles. According to Secretary Gates, aging Soviet-era mines serve as the initiators, though blasting caps work equally well. (In the hullabaloo following the Kandahar seizure, Gates announced a major new counter-IED initiative, as he decided the multi-billion-dollar, hydra-headed interagency JIEDDO—Joint IED Defeat Organization—wasn’t doing the job, an assessment underscored by a Government Accountability Office report two weeks earlier that criticized JIEDDO for a lack of organization and reliable data.)

Pressure plates were initially the most common IED triggers, sometimes hidden in military litter, such as plastic MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) bags or even candy wrappers. In Khost Province, where the Indiana ADT is working, trip wires are the most common triggers.

On a recent Quality Control/Quality Assurance mission to Tani District, an IED blew up a few hundred meters from where the ADT were paying Afghan villagers for their dam-building work. One ADT soldier says, “We were paying them, and Boom! We could see the smoke.” Most likely a band of Taliban operating out of a village about a kilometer away had earlier buried the IED. After the ADT convoy rolled further up the mountain, the insurgents had armed the bomb for the returning MRAPs to trigger. But instead a speeding Afghan villager on a motorcycle tripped the IED. He luckily escaped with minor injuries.

 

Karzai’s Fortuitous Flu Bug

As the election run-off between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and challenger Abdullah Abdullah approached, tensions were running high, particularly among Abdullah’s Tajik supporters, who thought the election process was fatally flawed. There was widespread talk of anti-government protests—even among the Afghan population opposed to the Taliban.

When Abdullah withdraw from the run-off in early November, saying the process was corrupt, he urged his followers not to take action. But Abdullah thought mistrust could further alienate the disenchanted populace from the Kabul government. Abdullah told Stars and Stripes, “Anything can happen. The reason for the fragility is mainly because the government is not trusted.”

But in the days prior to the cancellation, the Karzai government had already hobbled the protest movement. The day before Abdullah withdrew, the government declared an HINI flu emergency in parts of the country, including Panjshir Province, the fierce Tajik region that has been a hotbed of support for Abdullah. With the run-off looming, the government declared mosques, schools and universities—the traditional gathering places for politically minded Afghans—to be closed for three weeks.

Though Ahmed Abdul Rahman, the UN World Health Organization officer-in-charge in Afghanistan declared the order to be “appropriate and timely,” there was widespread cynicism about the timing. The country had 320 HINI cases by November 3, with two fatalities tied to the disease. An Afghan member of parliament, Kabir Ranjbar, told the IRIN news agency, “The disease was not widespread and cannot justify a state of emergency in which the entire education system is closed.”

 

When I was last reporting in Afghanistan, I learned almost all soldiers carry lucky charms. Soldiers’ faces lit up as they talked about their father’s dogtags that survived Vietnam, their grandma’s Christian crosses, holy medals, auspicious coins, their children’s Crayola-ed art laminated to carry into the field. One soldier pulled out a pacifier, dropped in his duffel bag by his baby son who felt he needed the comfort of one too.

While preparing to return to Afghanistan, it struck me I was definitely charm-deprived— clearly in need of some luck for my second round of reporting in Afghanistan. So I called on friends and family for some auspicious amulets to tote with me. Very small and very light, I requested. I do have to haul this up mountains. But thus equipped, I promise to return in good health.

So I travel through Afghanistan with a mixed bag of talismans: My musician son Dylan’s lucky drum key; youngest son Seth’s Seattle Marathon medal. Both insist they want me to hand-return their cherished mementos. (I imagined the chunks of metal deflecting a bullet.) Grandchildren sent drawings. One sister had a retrograde priest bless a St. Christopher medal. While I thought Chris had been drummed out of the saint corps decades ago, I was happy to learn the priest insisted he’d be recalled.

Friends sent a variety of charms: buckeyes, one in a velvet bag, the other with a particularly large eye; a smooth Lake Michigan rock; a JFK fifty-cent piece; a “Gratitude and Attitude medal; a Thai Buddhist namol amulet; a paladhik Shiva lingam that protects me from dogs and snakes; a Wiccan charm; an all-seeing Eye of Osiris; a Santo Expedito card (token of Brazil’s favorite go-to saint); a small sky-blue bag with a Iemanja Goddess of the Sea traveler’s protection.

Consider me charmed.

This blog is re-posted from Muslim Voices

(Editor’s Note:  Journalist Douglas Wissing is on assignment in Afghanistan and, when he’s able, will be sending along essays on his experience there.  This is the first of those pieces.  In it Wissing explains just how difficult getting to Afghanistan is.)

HOW DO YOU GET TO AFGHANISTAN? What is required these days, when war has once again wracked this central Asian Islamic country? An assignment to cover an Indiana National Guard Agribusiness Development Team (ADT) in Khost Province, a conservative Pashtun tribal region in turbulent eastern Afghanistan, had me asking these questions with considerable focus.

I’d been in Pashtun regions before.  My first experience came in Pakistan after the Russians had withdrawn from neighboring Afghanistan; my hope that I could visit that country as well.  The Afghan civil war was raging and the Pashtuns controlled the border regions—as they had since time immemorial. Waiting in the old cantonment city of Peshawar on the border of Afghanistan, Pakistani officials informed me tribal leaders had barred travel through the Khyber Pass. I wasn’t going to Afghanistan after all. Instead I traveled by local buses north through the tribal regions of Pakistan, in the process learning something about the devout, independent and fierce Pashtuns.

But that was a different time in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions, pre-9/11, when there was still a residual glow from the U.S. support of the muhadijinagainst the Soviet army. And it was definitely pre-Taliban. With a full-blown insurgency against the U.S.-led forces now roiling the Pashtun regions on both sides of the border, taking the local bus to Khost just isn’t going to happen.

Getting The Right Gear

The assignment sending me to Afghanistan began with a meeting of the Indiana ADT commanders at Camp Atterbury in the hills of southern Indiana. While we discussed their mission, I could see the commanders assessing me. Was I going to be a liability to their team? A security problem? One of them finally asked, “Can you sprint with forty pounds on you?” Seemed like I was going to Afghanistan, though there was work to do.

The process of embedding with a military unit in Afghanistan is labyrinth, starting with an application to the unit commanders. The application asked pertinent, though somewhat daunting questions—blood type, next of kin, “Do you have any disabilities that prohibit you from running? Do you have your own Body Armor/Kevlar? (Required).” If approved by the unit commanders, the application goes “through channels,” eventually to the Pentagon and then on to Afghanistan, where it is approved or denied by the Public Affairs Office at Bagram Airbase outside of Kabul. Once I had that approval, I moved on other particulars, including body armor.

A helpful CSR at www.bulletproofme.com walked me through my body armor shopping spree. For Afghanistan, I needed Level IV protection, two ceramic plates about 5/8-inch thick to stop rifle bullets, added to the Kevlar panels already in the vest. Loaded with the plates, it weighs about 35 pounds. This wasn’t cheap, almost $1,500. My two sons kept sending emails that I was not allowed to try to find used body armor on eBay. (I did find a used Kevlar helmet at an Army-Navy surplus store, but don’t tell them.)

Vaccinations are inescapable for a journey to Afghanistan. Ruellen Fessenbecker, the indefatigable nurse at the Indiana University Travel Clinic researched my needs. She recommended shots for Hepatitis A and B, Typhoid and Polio. I purchased doxycycline as a malaria prophylaxis. While rabies shots are suggested, Ruellen thought I should just chance it, and endure the painful shots if a rabid dog attacks.

Working Out With Captain

Those questions about my ability to run with forty pounds on my back were certainly an impetus to my exercise schedule. I signed up for a Boot Camp exercise class with Urban Fitness, led by Allison Chopra, an excellent trainer who clearly harbors some sadistic tendencies. She was a perfect goad. I got fitter. When my Boot Camp class concluded, I sought out the R.O.T.C. fitness instructor, Captain Christopher Hormel, who led the 6:00 AM exercise classes at Indiana University. One run with these buff young officer candidates quickly taught me I needed to do a lot more jogging if I was going to be able to handle the mountains of Afghanistan. So I did. Can run farther and faster than any time in the last fifteen years. But I am still counting on that big hit of adrenaline that gunfire brings to accelerate my speed and sustain my endurance.

Visa application to the Afghanistan embassy went out, and came back in quick time. Medical insurance was a little more complicated. Most medical policies, including mine, have a war-zone exclusion, which means you have to buy a supplemental policy for injuries sustained while in the war zone. While the military commits to providing medical care in the field and back to the U.S., once here the continuing care for war injuries needs to be covered by a supplemental policy. Doug Polifron of the New York International Group Inc. is a war-zone specialist, an agent for Peterson’s of Lloyd’s of London. I skimped a little, only purchasing dismemberment insurance, rather than death-and-dismemberment. The cost for a month’s worth of medical and dismemberment coverage (the paperwork included a gruesome little drawing showing me how much each of my body parts is worth if I lose them) was about $1,600.

Ticket To Ride

The military required that I provide my own transportation to Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, you can’t buy at ticket to Kabul on Travelocity. I located a couple of consolidators who deal with Afghanistan, mainly for expatriates and NGO aid workers. An economy ticket to Kabul from Indianapolis was about $1,800. Flying via Atlanta, I arrive in Dubai about 8:00 PM. Not much point in getting a room, as the flight to Kabul on Pamair Airlines leaves at 3:00 AM. The plane descends into Kabul three hours later. I was told the middle-of-the-night departure allows the plane to land at a decent hour for security, prompting me to surmise rocket-launchers are not early birds.

To begin my embed, the military requires I make my own way from Kabul International Airport, where my flight arrives, to Bagram, about sixty kilometers away. Trying to find secure transport for this leg of the journey was among the most challenging tasks. You can’t just walk out to the taxi stand, for obvious reasons. Kidnapping journalists has become almost a cottage industry in Afghanistan. Indeed, because of tight security, taxis aren’t even allowed on the airport premises. I kept sending emails to a recommended shuttle service, Afghan Logistics, but didn’t receive replies.

As I interviewed Afghan hands for background information, NGO representatives kept emphasizing the danger of being on the ground between the airports. When I told my transport plan to a USDA provincial reconstruction official who works in Afghanistan, he exploded, “I can’t believe the military won’t pick you up at Kabul International! We don’t travel on the ground there. We fly between the airports.” Well, a shuttle flight isn’t available for a journalist.  I eventually heard from Afghan Logistics, and have exchanged a number of confidence-building emails with them. Based on our exchange, I anticipate a driver holding a sign with my name outside the terminal doors. He’ll take me to an interview in Kabul, and then on to Bagram. And then I will be embedded in Afghanistan and my real journey begins.