***** The United States' military base in Gardez, Afghanistan - its perimeter marked by a small woodshed with the words Crack House painted over but still visible - straddles the smooth asphalt main road that leads southeast.
For the Americans, blocking the road helps create a "safe" radius around their base. For Afghans, however, it creates an inconvenient detour. When the main road is rejoined, it soon offers up the "customs inspectors" of a renegade Afghan commander taxing all new cars that pass. The Americans do nothing about this, local residents say.
Two years after the Bush administration vowed to fight terrorism worldwide, the American presence in the heavily Pashtun area of southern Afghanistan has mostly come down to this: two obstacles on the road, one imposed by the Americans, the other ignored by them, and neither, as Afghans see it, benefiting their country.
(Amy Waldman & Dexter Filkins, "2 U.S. Fronts: Quick Wars, but Bloody Peace," <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/19/international/asia/19WAR.html>) *****
FUN:
***** After the bombing of the truck in the Ramadi area in Iraq, an American tank dispatched to the scene sprayed a field of tall grass with heavy machine gunfire, killing no one, for there was no one there to kill.
Even the jokes have turned. In the American military headquarters in Gardez, a soldier scrawled out the word "FUN" vertically on a blackboard, then wrote out sentences to follow each letter: F is for the fire that burns through downtown; U is Uranium bombs; and N is for No Survivors in Al Ramadi.
"I know they hate my guts, but they can't say so because I've got a gun," an American soldier said the other night, standing guard outside the base. "Kind of funny, isn't it?"
(Amy Waldman & Dexter Filkins, "2 U.S. Fronts: Quick Wars, but Bloody Peace," <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/19/international/asia/19WAR.html>) *****
Friends:
***** One day last week, a group of new officers from the Iraqi Highway Patrol lounged beneath a highway overpass. Asked about the Americans, they responded with scorn.
"I hate the Americans," said Muhammad Khobaeir Waeel, a new officer. "They don't respect us. They throw us to the ground and put their boots on the backs of our heads."
With such friends, America may scarcely need enemies as it tries to govern two countries that are very different from post-1945 Germany and Japan. Those who work with the Americans do so at risk.
In Gardez, one Afghan interpreter for the military said that when he went on raids, he wore a hood over his head so no one could identify him. He had heard that interpreters working with the Americans had a bounty on their head. "People blame us for giving the Americans information," he said.
(Amy Waldman & Dexter Filkins, "2 U.S. Fronts: Quick Wars, but Bloody Peace," <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/19/international/asia/19WAR.html>) ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>