Earlier this week three ISAF servicemen in Kabul were not safe and sound - they were traveling through the intersection on the northwest corner of our embassy, and a suicide bomber with a vehicle full of explosives attacked their convoy. Not only did the suicide bomber kill two Americans and one Pole, he wounded several Afghan citizens. The Coalition losses in this conflict are great indeed. But the numbers of ordinary Afghans suffering are even higher now.
I was not in the city when this attack happened - I was at Camp Marmal, a large German-run base that formed the HQ for the Balkh Province PRT and also hosts the U.S. Consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif. The general overseeing retrograde and firing range clearance issues invited me to join his trip to visit U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) work and to attend an Afghan National Army Engineering School (ANAES) graduation ceremony. Why not? Never turn down a chance to learn something more about the world outside Kabul.
With the consolidation of coalition forces into an ever-smaller number of bases, Camp Marmal is a mix of U.S. and northern European troops - not just Germans, but Swedes, Finns, Latvians, and Dutch. Just like the home countries, there are a lot of tall blonde people riding bikes around Marmal.
It's hard sometimes to get one's mind around the seemingly contradictory activities that are going on here. We visited a USACE office, where they described new construction projects for Afghan bases that are keeping a number of local people employed even during the drawdown. But the same afternoon we visited two units of young National Guards, tasked with deconstructing massive base facilities and shrinking the camp, Detroit-style, to something the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) might be able to handle on a leaner budget.
The general drove out to the edge of the camp to see them, asked where they were from (Ohio and Wisconsin), praised their work, cast the strategic importance of what they were doing, and did a beautiful job of encouraging them in a long, lonely task.
A squad leader shared with the general that her team had increased their efficiency to recover 95% of the material from a standard tent-like building. The general affirmed her squad's efforts and emphasized that every government entity had to count its pennies - we couldn't just abandon everything to the dust and wind.
So this is how wars end these days. Taking down all the metal and canvas that formed a base, even down to the plumbing and electrical wiring.
Next door to all this deconstruction is a brand-new engineering school for the ANA, Camp Shaheen. The soldiers there are learning facilities maintenance (to be able to run all these bases they are inheriting) and explosive ordnance destruction (EOD; to destroy all the IEDs that insurgent forces use as their worst weapon). The general watched a demonstration of road building and spoke at the EOD class's graduation ceremony.
My military colleagues estimated that about 50% of the 74 graduates we saw would return and pass the final course, "IED Defeat." This sounded a lot like the final round of a video game to me, but it's no game - the ANSF lose at least 4 soldiers every day to IEDs. After receiving their graduation certificates from their Colonel, each student would raise his certificate in the air and shout "I will aid Afghanistan!" We are all hoping they will succeed.
Oh yeah. I got to ride in a Blackhawk helicopter between the bases and fly over the Salang Pass region on the way back. Thankful for every experience.
太酷了，赞！
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