Same same...

Thursday, 31 July 2008

At around noon today a bomb exploded in front of the Pakistani consulate here in Herat, Afghanistan. I suppose that, as embassy bombings go, this one was pretty soft-core: nobody killed, two policemen and one bystander (a woman) injured. From my desk in the office I could only hear a loud bang and feel a slight shake.

The office was closed for the rest of the day, local staff were sent home and the expats were cloistered away in the team house.

As we sat around the dining room table eating lunch, just after the bombing, everyone tried to act calm. But you could tell that some were nervous and anxious: In typical aid worker fashion, they tried to diffuse the situation with dark humor. We chuckled at the fact that it had, in fact, been a bicycle bomb. Other countries get car bombs. But in Afghanistan, the bicycle bomb is an “appropriate technology.” One colleague, a middle-aged German woman (with an accent exactly like the girlfriend of Dr. Evil) has been in Afghanistan for 4 years now. Her comment: “Ya… it’s so hot, they have no girlfriends… now they just blow things up…”

Joking soon led to war-story one-upping, about other bombings or “ordinance related” experiences that various people in the room had previously in Afghanistan or other countries. And even if only half of what my esteemed colleagues were saying was factual, the combined experience was still impressive: everyone in the room had at one point or another worked in or in the line of duty been sent to or through a war zone or place of ongoing civil unrest. Nearly everyone in the room had either been shot at, been in the vicinity of an artillery or mortar attack, seen or been in close proximity to an act of terrorism, witnessed mob violence of some kind, seen tracer fire, or mistakenly walked into a minefield.

This is not an easy crowd to impress with stories of snorkeling in Acapulco or office party hi-jinx.

And I think the genuine sort of “been there, done that” attitude among aid workers towards the armed conflicts that we are often on the periphery of contributes to the surrealism of places like Harat. As years in the aid world roll on, every bomb blast or burst of AK-47 fire at once puts us more on edge and also further lulls us into a state of attentive resignation. Whether we live with this reality in the field full time, or we travel regularly to these places as part of a job that is otherwise basically cubicle-farming, this does become a reality to which we are accustomed. A friend of mine who spent time first in Somalia and then Haiti once remarked to me that he’d been car-jacked enough times that it was no longer exciting. Another friend, in Sri Lanka, on hearing the rumble of yet another bomb blast just turns up his TV a bit, rolls his eyes, and says, “here we go again…” When you think about it, in terms of simply getting through the day without being kidnapped or caught in a crossfire, the food is really the biggest difference between here and, say, Luanda or Nagorno-Karabakh or Port-au-Prince or Vojvodina or Batticaloa.

It was almost exactly 12 years ago (July 1996) that I sat in a grimy store-front restaurant in Phnom Penh eating greasy noodles and reading the local English language newspaper. One headline proudly announced that law and order was being restored and security was improving in the nation’s capitol. The evidence was that only 70 foreigners had been shot or shot at inside city limits during the previous month. Apparently this was something of an improvement. A side box announced a new emergency toll-free number to call in case you were being robbed. It had only been a few weeks prior that two Australian journalists had been kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge south of Phnom Penh (they were both eventually killed). Later that evening I passed a few hours at a local watering hole down along the Mekong River. Chunky expats quaffed watery beer, openly smoked marijuana, and flirted with Vietnamese hostesses. A local band labored through their version of Pink Floyd.

Sitting there on the veranda, watching the afternoon's monsoon slow down to a drizzle, catching the odd whiff of pot smoke, and hearing the occasional distant gunshot through a marginal rendition of “Comfortably Numb” (“… just a rittle pin plick..”) was the consummate surreal moment.

Then, this evening, after the sun had set and the anxiety of the day’s bombing had begun to wane, a few of us loaded into the company Landcruiser and made what I understand to be a weekly pilgrimage to Herat’s expats-only “mobile bar.” About 50 expats, mostly NGO or UN workers, crowded onto a small veranda and adjoining room. It was an odd mixture of Europeans of various ilks, a few Americans, three or four Africans, and one Iranian. They sipped luke-warm scotch from water glasses or beer from cans and discussed football (soccer), R&R in Dubai, and whether it was better to fly to Kabul via Khandahar or Jalalabad. After a while someone turned on some bad house music and a disco light. Five or six people went inside and began dancing to the music, barefoot on a large, beautiful Afghan rug.

Of course Afghanistan is a unique place with a complex history and millennia-old culture. And of course it’s not really just like Kosovo or Azerbaijan or Jaffna or [INSERT NAME OF THIS MONTH'S TRENDY WAR ZONE HERE]. Of course, the situation in Afghanistan is totally unacceptable on a number of levels: The rapidly shrinking humanitarian space here is just untenable. And the conditions under which the Afghans themselves live - particuarly women - is flat deplorable. Still, I find myself wanting to argue a little with news media and maybe some of the military and UN and even the NGO types who at times, it seems, to want to make Afghanistan out to be some new thing. The new extreme. A new humanitarian challenge.

See, it's really not all that new. For as exotic and unique as it might be, in terms of the humanitarian issues (not to mention the surrealism) Afghanistan is boringly typical. We have seen this before.

Then, as the surrealism of the place and the day, topped by the evening at the "mobile bar" began to sink in I couldn't help but flash back briefly to that sultry evening in Phnom Penh, 1996. Although it’s my first trip to Afghanistan, I began to feel… familiarity, almost nostalgia. And I couldn't help but think of Afghanistan in terms that one might hear, appropriately enough, in Cambodia: “Same same, but different.”











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