Sylvia's Journal

I wrote my entry for today in the plane, high above Iran, going from one world to another. I had much time to read.

After some 300 pages in Obama’s Wars the president still hasn’t made the speech to the American people about the troop commitment to Afghanistan of about a year ago. He is still meeting for hours, and watching military powerpoints. It is fascinating, though utterly confusing, to read about the discussions in the American military-political stratosphere, high above the clouds for someone who is living far below the clouds, with everything above my head opaque.

Over the last year we have been summoned more than once to the embassy compound to hear then this then that strategy, with all the new vocabulary that goes with it. It was always communicated to us, by civilians. With Woodward’s revelations about the skirmishes between the military brass and the Obama entourage I realize that the opaqueness was effective – little did we know.

One sign that the consensus was fragile at best were the frequent changes of what was important. Were we trying to eliminate the Al Qaeda leadership? Defeating or disturbing the Taliban? Which Taliban? There was COIN (Counter Insurgency) combined or not with nation building (no-nos for Obama because it can’t be done anytime fast), then Quick Impact, to be realized according to a sequence of commands: clear, hold, build, transfer.’ I think there was a fifth command but we didn’t have time to learn the words by heart. All I remember was that our part in this strategy concerned the building and transferring.

Sometime in March and April we were all ordered to look at some 80 districts along the ‘ring around Afghanistan’ in an attempt to promote the free movements of goods and help the economy by liberating and securing the districts along this road.

For us that meant assisting the district health officers wherever they existed to better manage health care delivery so that the population would notice that the government cared – a tall order that turned out to be misguided since the government is not only perceived to be corrupt, large parts of it are.

In the end we never got the exact numbers of where to put our efforts and now the districts are out of focus again and many so unsafe we couldn’t even go there if we wanted. Still, a district health assessment, considered urgent some 9 months ago, is close to being commissioned. We are always a running a little behind what Washington orders.

With each new strategy or tactic new words were introduced which made everyone scurry back to their computers to make new powerpoints and present the reality, perceived or for real, using the new words and trying to make them real, precise and practical using new diagrams and new flow charts. Luckily reality is entirely malleable and luckily we have powerpoint and armies of translators (many of them doctors who make better salaries that way) to come up with the right Dari and Pashto words.