Sylvia's Journal

More side-by-sides today: people putting their guns down to pray, the gun remaining within reach of the prayer mat. Policemen in the dark city as we drive back home from dinner with blinking red lights on their white leather bandoliers, as if they are Christmas trees, they look very festive but they are not there for decoration.

The whirlwind of the changes that come from Washington, all requiring new powerpoint bullets, new language, new strategies and pronouncements, sinkl back into the slow Afghan and US government bureaucracies that move at a glacial pace. Never fast enough for Washington, but then what happens, after we respond promptly? I don’t think I have ever seen so many people jump so high when asked, produce written pieces (bullets) and throw things over the wall.

The paperwork needed to be completed for us to ramp up our activities is caught up in perpetual loops it seems, as we need signatures from each of the four US ambassadors we have here and pass through the channels that get to and from them, endless.

Peter did his debriefing with the deputy minister and those who fund us, explaining that it is ludicrous to expect people, who earn less than what is required to pay the rent in a small and substandard apartment, to manage projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This seems a sure way to ensure corruption and graft. For a surgeon to make a decent living, this requires a private practice on the side, or rather after having briefly shown up at work to refer patients. They are not supposed to, but could you blame them?

Things don’t add up when you read the plans that are hatched in DC, they never have added up in the past. There is no evidence that they will now; yet, the cynicism coexists with my idealistic fervor that somehow, this time, we are going to make a difference. Maybe this is why I have a hard time expressing an opinion about Afghanistan, no matter how many articles or editorials I read. Everyone seems to be a little bit right and a little bit wrong.