Kabul, Afghanistan
By Nightly News staff
It was supposed to be a week devoted to reporting on the military and political situation in Afghanistan, where a runoff presidential election is scheduled for Nov. 7.
Yet even as “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams was still in the air, making his way toward his first visit to the country in more than a year, assignments were being overturned. It would turn out to be a week looking for stories amid extraordinary violence that NBC’s Richard Engel reported has reached record levels.
First came the crashes of three helicopters on Monday, which killed 14 Americans, making October the deadliest month for U.S. forces since the war in Afghanistan began eight years ago. Then came the Taliban attack on a U.N. guesthouse Wednesday in Kabul, the capital, which killed eight people — five of them U.N. workers — plus the attackers.
In Kabul, the vibe has changed “literally overnight,” Williams observed in an e-mail interview with the Huffington Post.
“Kabul has hardened and tightened — it’s much more about security now that the Taliban has ‘entered the battle space’” with its attack Wednesday, which has prompted a reassessment of the U.N. role in promoting the election, Engel reported.
After the blast, "there was nothing here to salvage," Chris Turner, a truck driver working as a contractor for the U.S. Defense Department, told Williams, who toured the devastation afterward.
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ANALYSIS
By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
I’ve spent much of the past two weeks – some in New York and the rest in Los Angeles – listening to the pundits and experts talk about the war in Afghanistan. From the Sunday morning network round tables to the Saturday evening interviews on National Public Radio, I’ve enjoyed a lot of good debate, from both sides of the issue. I’ve also heard quite a few jaw-droppers.
Here are five popular ideas on the war, the strategy, the nation and the people of Afghanistan – which those of us who spend years reporting from the region find a little misguided.
1) Afghanistan is like Vietnam. It will turn into a quagmire, and lead to another ignominious defeat for the U.S.
This is a favorite argument among left-leaning pundits, but while Afghanistan’s remoteness may smack of Vietnam, there is a big difference: This is no war of national liberation, embraced by a whole population.
If there’s a national "idea" sweeping Afghanistan it isn’t freedom from Western colonialists, its freedom from 30 years of conflict.
Many Afghans will no doubt continue to sit on the fence until they can see a clear victor – coalition forces or the Taliban. But the vast majority of Afghans do not want a return to the hellish years of the Taliban regime.
They’re willing to give coalition forces a chance if that can bring peace to their lives, without fear of revenge attacks or recrimination by the Taliban. That yearning for something other than the Taliban, is one key plus for those who argue that the war is still "winnable."
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Correspondent
HERAT, Afghanistan – We watched a teenage girl die last Friday.
Seventeen-year-old Shirin had been brought to the Herat Regional Hospital Burns Unit a few days before we met her. Ninety percent of her body was covered in third-degree burns.
Her mother-in-law said Shirin had burned herself by accident. The girl was preparing a meal in the kitchen but somehow confused cooking gasoline with petrol, she said.
But Dr. Mohamed Aref Jalali, the director of the burns unit, said Shirin told him in private that she had set herself on fire deliberately after fighting with her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law.
Many girls in Afghanistan think self-immolation is the best solution for family problems, according to Jalali.
"[For these girls], it’s no good to solve the problem with the father-in-law, with the mother-in-law," said the doctor. "They think self-immolation will solve the problem."
It’s a "solution" that appears to be a major problem in Afghanistan, particularly among young women between the ages 13 and 25.
In the first seven months of this year, medical staff at the Herat’s burns unit – the only one of its kind in the entire country – said they have seen 51 cases of female self-immolation. Only 13 have survived.
The practice comes from Iran, where many Afghan refugees had fled to during the decade-long war with the Soviet Union (1979-1989) and the era of mujahedeen fighting that followed in the 1990s, said Jalali. But its popularity has spread among Afghan women, often from poor, uneducated backgrounds, where the tradition of child or forced marriages runs strong.
"The forced marriage is the best reason and the important reason, and it starts from the economic problem," said Jalali.
Often in arranged marriages, women are viewed in very stark terms.
"She is here only to wash, to clean, to give baby … and nothing more," said Marie-Jose Brunel, a French volunteer nurse at the burns unit who was full of Gallic warmth and purposeful seriousness. "If they have no freedom, no possibility to study, to be considered like nothing, it’s very, very difficult."
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By Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News Correspondent
Afghanistan's presidential elections, marred by allegations of widespread fraud, appear headed for a runoff, but no matter what the outcome there appears little chance it will change the government's pervasive culture of corruption and crisis of confidence.
"Corruption? Corruption? The entire Karzai regime is corrupt!" Dr. Wadir Safi bellows in a fit of anger and frustration. Outside Kabul University were Safi is a long-standing professor of International Law and Politics, a large crowd of students gathers as Safi delivers an impromptu lecture on what many here see as criminal behavior by President Hamid Karzai and his administration.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
LOGAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan – Early on a recent morning we were driving to a shoot when an astonishing sight loomed up ahead of us. NBC News cameraman Steve O’Neill exclaimed, "It’s the Great Wall of China!"
The "wall" snaking before us, easily several miles long, was made of Hesco sandbags and circled a camp for Chinese workers. Though not permitted to enter the site, we could see rows and rows of neat white buildings with blue trim; the temporary structures looked exactly like the migrant workers’ housing at construction sites all across China.
Size apart, it was all somewhat unremarkable, except for the fact that we were in eastern Afghanistan.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| "It's the Great Wall of China," said NBC cameraman Steve O'Neill when we saw the Hesco sandbags surrounding the Chinese workers camp at the Aynak copper mine in Afghanistan. |
The Chinese workers – several hundred technicians – are part of a multibillion-dollar Chinese investment in Afghanistan’s largest-ever infrastructure project, the Aynak copper mine.
Discovered in 1974 but virtually dormant since the start of the Soviet War in 1979, the Aynak mine is believed to contain the world’s second-largest untapped copper deposits and could propel Afghanistan into the ranks of the world’s top 15 copper producers.
After wooing Afghan officials from as early as 2001, a Chinese mainland joint venture finally won the rights in 2007 to develop the site over 30 years. So far, it has sunk more than $4 billion into the project.
The joint venture – between majority partner China Metallurgical Group Corp. and Jiangxi Copper Corp. – expects production to begin by the end of 2011 with an initial annual output of 180,000 tons of copper that will eventually grow to 320,000 tons. China will have rights to half that output, which it needs to fuel its own massive economic growth.
But the mine is just outside Kabul, in Logar Province, where there has been heightened insurgent activity. Some 1,500 Afghan police are stationed on site with a new police barracks in the works. And although they say they are not attached to the project, the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division occasionally sends units to patrol the area. China – of course, not being a member of NATO – has no troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
It’s this set-up that’s feeding a percolating debate about China’s role in Afghanistan.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
KABUL, Afghanistan – I hadn’t planned on writing about kites in Afghanistan; the subject just seemed too obvious after the runaway success of the novel, "The Kite Runner." But then a Western acquaintance who’d just moved to Kabul told me about an afternoon he spent shopping for colorful kites to decorate the walls of his new home, and it sounded like something I just had to do.
I’m no kite-flyer, but having lived through a couple of summers in Beijing, I’ve seen the Chinese-made stuff – brilliant, elaborate and intricate – and have grown to appreciate their design. So off I went to the Jadeh Maywand neighborhood in central Kabul, where kite shops line the sidewalks – dragging along my Afghan colleague, Iqbal Sapand.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| A boy shops for new kite parts in Kabul. |
We had been tasked by our bureau chief, Sohel Uddin, to "buy the biggest kite possible." For weeks now, we’d see from our bureau rooftop kites flying high above our heads almost daily at sunset. Sohel was determined to try his hand.
Faced with a row of narrow, open-faced shop fronts crammed with string, spools, and of course kites, we poked our heads into one owned by Zalgai. The poker-faced 45-year-old, who goes by just one name, had caught our eye simply because he happened to be leaning on his counter. He welcomed us into his shop, beckoning to the raised carpeted area behind his counter, and Iqbal promptly sat down. On cue, a glass of simmering tea followed.
Zalgai’s family has owned this shop for 38 years (even through the Taliban years, when kite flying was banned and their business was forced underground). And like his grandfather and father, Zalgai was trained as a kite-maker. But five years ago he stopped producing kites to focus on selling them.
"I can make a lot more money this way," he said. Making kites takes too much time, he added, all that fussing with delicate paper and the bamboo frame. Moreover, the kites he carries in his shop bring him a brisk enough business.
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By Stokes Young, msnbc.com Director of Multimedia
I've never been to Afghanistan – only looked at countless photographs and screened hours of video reports on the U.S.-led conflict there since 2001.
But over the past week, I dug into NBC News archival coverage of Afghanistan as we prepare for the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of the war-torn country on Oct. 7 and ahead of the launch of Richard Engel's documentary 'Tip of the Spear' on Sunday.
As I watched 50 years worth of highlights of NBC News coverage of the country, one feeling jumped out at me again and again in the pre-2001 segments: doesn't this look familiar? The texture and atmospherics of video coverage, the suffering of Afghans and statements like Tom Brokaw's "the Afghans have a fighting tradition," at the end of the Soviet occupation in 1989, struck me as being eerily reminiscent of reporting we often see today.
Obviously, the conflicts are not exact parallels. Afghanistan did not provoke the Russian invasion by hosting terrorists who attacked Moscow and our volunteer troops certainly aren't Soviet conscripts. But many of the complexities of a foreign army fighting a war in Afghanistan persist.
Here are just some of the reports over the years that stood out to me. Let me know what you think in the comments section below.
1959: Chet Huntley reported on the state of Afghanistan in advance of a trip by President Dwight Eisenhower. Afghan culture at the individual level stands out in his narration: "The average Afghan's loyalty starts with his family and extends to his tribe...sometimes, he does what the national goverment tells him to."
1980: One thing that has definitely changed since 1980: the mujahideen fighting foreign forces are far better armed. Kalashnikovs and RPGs have replaced the colonial-era British rifles so prone to fail against Soviet troops.
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By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
KABUL, Afghanistan – If there was ever one "foreign devil" on the Silk Road who most fascinates amateur history buffs, it must be Sir Marc Aurel Stein.
The Hungarian-born British archaeologist’s career sparked an obsession of mine – and no doubt of countless others – with the history of the Silk Road, a series of trade routes linking China to the Mediterranean.
So upon hearing Stein was buried in Kabul, I made a beeline for his gravesite as soon as I arrived here.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| The British Cemetery sits on a dusty road in central Kabul. |
A race for ancient artifacts
Born in 1862, an era when archaeologists could still raise funds for lavish expeditions and gallivant about the globe, Stein single-handedly put the Silk Road back on the map, as it were, with a series of incredible discoveries in his later life.
The fruits of his excavations and scholarship shed new light on the region by tracing the original trading routes along the Silk Road and, most importantly, documenting the spread of Buddhism from India to China.
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A suicide car bomber killed six Italian soldiers and 10 Afghan civilians Thursday in the heavily guarded capital of Kabul.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the deadliest attack for the Italian contingent in the country. Violence has increased since the U.S. sent thousands more troops to push back the resurgent Taliban and bolster security for last month's still-unresolved presidential election. It's the fourth major attack in five weeks in Kabul. NBC News' Adrienne Mong reports from Kabul.
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By Sohel Uddin, NBC News Producer
KABUL, Afghanistan –I was led into an office at the British Embassy this morning, where an official was going to help us with some consular issues. The officer was trying to get rid of two men in the room so we could have the privacy to deal with our matter.
One man left immediately, but the other took his time, engrossed in filling out a form.
I took a second look at him; it was Stephen Farrell, the British-born New York Times reporter who was dramatically rescued from a Taliban hideout Wednesday. While he survived, his Afghan colleague and a British soldier were killed in the raid.
Farrell was not wearing the traditional Afghan clothes and hat in which he was shown in photos after news of his release – and his beard had disappeared, too.
Having briefly met him before during previous reporting assignments, I asked how he was. He shook my hand and gave me a despondent, withdrawn look as he told me what a difficult time it has been for him.
The temptation to ask more was interrupted by the consular official anxiously ushering him out of the room.
As he left, it struck me how big the story was surrounding this subdued figure.
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