This is day four of the largest military operation since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The assault is centered around Marja in Helmand province. Marja isn’t so much a town as it is a collection of family compounds spread over miles of arid, desert terrain.

While many have focused on the size of this operation–it involves more than 15,000 Afghan, US and British soldiers–to me the most unique aspect of the assault is the way that the civilian population has been approached.

For nearly a month leading up to the operation, Marja was blanketed with leaflets telling people to leave their homes for Lashka Ghar, the largest nearby town. If they refused to leave, the pamphlets said, civilians should at least stay indoors after dark. Meetings were held where Afghan and NATO military leadership warned village elders  of what was to come and how best to stay safe.

Sadly it was not enough for the 12 Afghans–mostly women and children–who where killed Sunday when a computer guided missile fired from a US Marine base missed it’s target and struck a compound where the civilians had taken refuge.

The first question that leaped to my mind when I heard the news was, “What were these people even doing in Marja? Who learns that hell is coming to town and sticks around anyway?”

Last week, I had long conversations with people at the Red Cross, I was told that they–along with the Afghan Red Crescent and a government refugee agency–had prepared space for 15,000 families in camps, schools and other public spaces in Lashka Ghar. But on the eve of the operation, only a handful of families had sought refuge there and the Red Cross spokesman told me that some of those families had been there since the last Marine operation in Helmand, in July.

So why did the people of Marja stay put?

Well first of all, not everybody thinks that they did. AFP reported on Feb. 6 that “thousands of people are fleeing their homes” ahead of the operation. But the article offered zero evidence that this was true, and the one refugee the interviewed even said “there are still people living there [in Marja]”

Nobody I spoke with in Helmand could confirm the “thousands fleeing” story, and I frankly just don’t believe it.

I have heard a few different theories as to why many Marja residents (Marjians?) didn’t leave their homes. The first is that the people of Marja are sympathetic to the Taliban, which may be true in part, but I’ve heard too much anecdotal evidence to the contrary to believe that everybody there is.

The second is that Taliban groups threatened the people of Marja and essentially coerced them into staying and being used as human shields. This is credible, especially because the roads in that part of Helmand have been laced with mines, IEDs and God-knows what other kinds of booby traps.

The third theory bouncing around is that it is planting season and so people don’t want to leave their crops un-sown before the spring rains arrive. This last theory is just speculation, and since I haven’t interviewed any Helmand farmers lately, we’ll just leave it at that.

In all likelihood, it is a mix of all three of the above factors that have kept the residents of Marja at home and in harm’s way. These factors are yet another example of the awful choices that so many Afghans face on a regular basis, just to keep living from one day to the next.

Most people, no matter what country they live in, can imagine having to choose between living through a major military strike and braving a road that has been modified to kill anything that travels over it. Or leaving their livelihood. Or being killed by fanatics. Or getting accidentally incinerated by a GPS guided missile.

There are no good options here and any outcome could be deadly.

US Rep. Charlie Wilson, while in Congress

Charlie Wilson died last week, an event that has not gone unnoticed in Afghanistan.

I saw a Dari language newspaper clip the other day that called Wilson “a friend and strong supporter of our Mujehadeen brothers.”

It was Wilson who almost singlehandedly channeled $5 billion US taxpayer dollars to the Afghan insurgency against the Soviets, orchestrating a covert deal with Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to get Stinger missiles to Afghan freedom fighters who had previously been fighting Soviet helicopters with with little more than mules and old rifles.

And of course there was his legendary womanizing and partying, the pinnacle of which was an episode involving cocaine, Playboy models and a hot tub in a Vegas suite.

After the movie about his life came out (based on this fabulous book) with Tom Hanks playing Wilson, his reputation as an American hero seemed to be cemented.

But recently, another narrative of Wilson’s life has emerged.

Melissa Roddy over at HuffPo has a fascinating read about Joanne Herring (played by Julia Roberts in the movie) and her ties to Pakistan oil interests. If I’m reading Roddy’s piece correctly, she says that Herring used Wilson–who purchased substantial interests in Pakistani oil around the time he advocated funding for the Muj–to keep Afghanistan at war so that Pakistan could lay claim to vasts swaths of eastern Afghanistan that have long been part of the disputed Durand Line.

Roddy has plenty of evidence to back up her claim and though the writing is a bit dense, she makes some very, very compelling arguments. The upshot is that Wilson got rich off the whole thing, even becoming a lobbyist for Pakistan at $300,000 a year.

But I take issue with her last ‘graph, where she says that “Afghan people see [Herring and Wilson] in a different [negative] light.”

Forgetting the fact that it is dangerous (and disingenuous) to claim to know what all “Afghan people” think, the Afghans that I know who have heard of Wilson seem to like and admire him. The fact is, whatever his motives, his actions helped end the Soviet presence here. The war was going on before Charlie Wilson got involved and if he hadn’t done what he did, it would have likely gone on much longer (though probably ended the same way.)

Though lobbying for the Pakistani’s in the mid-90’s (a time when they were using US money to fund a secret nuclear program they would later sell to Iran) was scummy, from an Afghan perspective, Wilson did alright by the Mujehadeen.

I’d bet that if you asked  former Mujehadeen fighters if Wilson getting rich off of their victory was worth them getting stinger missiles to shoot Russian helicopters out of the sky, they’d answer in the affirmative.

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

Today is a national holiday in Afghanistan.

On this day twenty one years ago, February 15, 1989, the last Soviet soldiers departed Afghanistan after suffering defeat at the hands of the CIA and ISI backed Mujahedeen.

The withdrawal was no easy feat. As the Soviets left, tens of thousand of Afghan fighters surrounded Kabul and shelled the city for control of the capital. Once the Russians got to the nearly 13,000 ft Salang Pass, things got even worse. The north side of the pass was a sheet of ice, snow drifts blocked the south entrance  and Mujahedeen fighters had the high ground, taking pot-shots to force the Russian retreat.

It was here that the last Russian soldier died in Afghanistan.

According to Russian journalist Artyom Borovik, the soldier was fixing a truck that had gotten stuck in the snow and the engine froze. He was killed when his section of the convoy came under attack.

In all, 15,000 Russian soldiers and over 1 million Afghans perished in that conflict.

There is great temptation to compare that war to this current conflict. Indeed, when I do radio shows in the US I’m often asked, “Well if the Russians couldn’t stabilize Afghanistan, how can we?”

While I don’t know if the US can stabilize Afghanistan, there is simply no comparison to what the Russians attempted here and what NATO is doing now.

Russia’s 40th Army was full of woefully under-equipped conscripts. Many lacked basic neccessities like warm weather gear and proper boots. Food was also in short supply and after dark, some would pillage villages for rice and meat. Soldier on soldier rape was common as was a brutal regime of punishment visited upon the conscripts by officers.

To compare that army with the professional, well-fed and equipped volunteers of the NATO coalition is like comparing Lee’s army after Gettysburg to Patton’s army before Sicily.

And then there are the politics.

The USSR was reviled in the global community for their presence here, whereas today Afghanistan is the scene of one of the largest multi-national coordinated relief and reconstruction operations in history.

Here in Kabul, the Russians were trying to prop up a regime that was never popular. It was a socialist clique of elites that wanted to install a program diametrically opposed to Afghan cultural values and religion. While Karzai isn’t exactly the most popular leader in earth, the global community’s attempts to set up a working government here are careful to involve Afghan stakeholders and hew close to cultural norms and decision-making processes.

This post is not a defense of what the west (or the east) is doing to Afghanistan today.  I only aim to point out that this is a much different–I would argue better– set of circumstances than the Soviets were faced with.

That does not mean the outcome will be any different.

Last week, the International Conference on Afghanistan was held in London (here’s a link to a wrap-up.) Hundreds of reporters from dozens of countries covered the event, which featured addresses from UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

But journalists from Afghanistan were desperately underrepresented, with only five Afghan reporters attending the conference. It wasn’t for lack of interest.

Editors and reporters in Kabul tell me that 18 journalists applied for visas to cover the conference, but 13 of the applications were rejected.

The British Home Office and UK Border Agency, through interviews and a written statement, say that the visas were rejected for sound reasons,  specifically because many of the journalists lied in their applications.

“I can assure you that [the applications] were all assessed and rejected for valid reasons,” Cubby Fox, spokesperson for the Home Office in London told me. These reasons included “a mutilated passport [and] not declaring their previous travel immigration history.” Fox says that some of the journalists lied on the official visa form, saying that they had never been to the UK, when in fact they had visited at least once before.

But Afghan journalists are skeptical. It’s easy enough to imagine one or two journos fibbing on the application, but all 13?

Danish Karokhel, editor-in-chief of the Pajwok news service (whose own visa application was granted) says the real reason that the visas were denied may have been the British government’s fear the Afghan journalists wouldn’t leave the UK after the conference ended.

“I think one of the reasons they did not issue the visas is that [the British] were worried that some of these journalists would escape Afghanistan and not come back,” he says. “I think that is the main reason…”

Karokhel told me he’s seen it happen before.

“We’ve had several cases of Afghan journalists that go abroad and don’t come back,” he says. “About two years ago there was a journalism conference in Germany. 12 Afghans went and just four came back…The embassies don’t trust us anymore.”

Most galling to the Afghan reporters who were allowed to attend, there were three delegations of reporters from Pakistan, more than 20 people, according to one conference attendee.

“It was an Afghan conference and there were just five Afghans there,” says Karokhel. “It is important for Afghan media to participate in such conferences. It would have positively affected all Afghan media.”

(I wrote a more complete version of this story for the Afghan magazine Killid Weekly. When that version goes online, I’ll try and post it here.)

The view from the Afghan Desk living room

It’s been a mild winter so far. Usually by this time of year there have been one or two huge snowfalls in east-central Afghanistan, but not this winter.

That’s bad for farmers.

Farmers here rely on the spring snow melt to help them through the planting season, especially as the hot and windy summer approaches. Unfortunately, with the lack of accumulation this winter, irrigation ditches could be dry come April, meaning low-yields that could strike a blow to agriculture, Afghanistan’s largest economic driver (behind foreign aid and narcotics.)

When it snowed last week, the Afghans I work with in the city were literally singing out prayers of thanks, because they knew that their country cousins need the snow for a good harvest.

But as you can see from the above photo (taken this afternoon) there really isn’t much on the ground, even after an entire day of mild accumulation.

(To see an Afghan Desk photo essay on Afghan agriculture, click here.)