30 Days Through Afghanistan

Stuck again! We tried to catch a flight out of northern Afghanistan this morning and it was cancelled. The Germans who are helping us did everything they could but we couldn’t get out. It’s life here and the real challenge is overcoming issues like this.

The great news is this gives me an opportunity to catch up on some of the great questions we’ve received via the comments. Before I jump into them, I want to thank everyone so much for commenting! Going through and reading them is the highlight of Ken and my day. There are a lot of reasons we wanted to do this and one of the biggest is the direct interaction with all of you.

We keep running into these extremely interesting civilians who can never talk to us officially, but teach us so much about counter insurgency and what’s happening in Afghanistan. It sucks for Ken because video cameras scare them away but I can get in there and really get some good information.

Today’s secret man was in his late 40’s, wore a black 8-point hat, dressed professionally and was sitting quietly before I went outside to catch some fresh air. When I came back in, poor Ken was embroiled in conversation with him. I say poor because I could see how badly he wanted to capture it on film, but it just wasn’t going to happen.

We’re still in Kabul, fighting to escape, calling all sources and pulling all strings to try and get out to the next regional command.

Today we watched a bunch of helicopters come and go and we waved bye-bye as they left. The mission continues though! We’ll be out there again! We never give up.

If you missed yesterday’s blog, we talked with the black hat man in the air terminal in northern Afghanistan. He is a U.S. State Department employee who couldn’t talk with us because it takes forever to gain the approvals to do so.

There is a magical place full of wonders and excitement filled with international soldiers and rich cultures… it’s known as eastern Afghanistan and I really hope to take you there someday.

I’ve been there before, and in all honesty, it’s the one regional command I’m most excited about. I’ve already spent about a month in the east bouncing between various FOBs and covering stories and to me it seems like a place on the brink of security.

Kabul | Day 24 — Societies are riddled with bad people; it just so happens Afghanistan has a lot more of them. We were discussing who the bad people were and how they were harming society here.

Since my memory is horrible, resulting in my absolute reliance on my notebook, I decided to look into who the bad people in Afghanistan are. Since weather prevented our flight this morning, I had plenty of time to talk with an officer from the ISAF Joint Command Information Dominance Center, which is basically ISAF’s memory.

I was struggling to find a simple phrase to describe "bad guys" since it’s too generic and Taliban and Al Qaeda are too specific. Then, when we were up north, one of the soldiers called them anti-Afghan fighters. Afghanistan

PRT Herat | Day 25 — The weather here astounds me. Tuesday it was beautiful blue skies and the helicopter left us standing on the helipad. Wednesday it was dark grey skies and pelting down rain preventing any helicopters from reaching us. This morning, we awoke to beautiful blue skies again and we finally made it out of Kabul.

We originally planned to be in eastern Afghanistan today, but we traveled west so we could get moving. We’ve decided to extend our 30 Days Through mission for approximately five days, to give us a chance to cover everything we need to. The story is more important than the timetable.

We jumped aboard a U.S. Air Force C-130, which made a quick pit stop at Kandahar Air Field. When we found out we were going back to drop some soldiers off, Ken and I just looked at each other and prayed the plane wouldn’t break. We made it to Herat this afternoon and were greeted by our Italian hosts.

PRT Herat | Day 26 — Thank you Chris. Your comment and questions to my "Hallelujah in Herat" blog led me on a very interesting journey. To catch everyone up, he basically asked "Why is Herat so nice," and I went out and found some answers.

When I woke up this morning, I was thinking about writing about provincial reconstruction teams and what the Italians are doing here. Then I read his comments and decided to do a little Herat investigation. When I heared the answers, my ideas for a blog changed.

We went into the city and saw some construction projects and when we got back we ran to get some coffee. I walked into the shop and the shopkeeper is a 23-year-old Afghan from Herat. He speaks English well enough that I asked him Chris’s questions.

He told me Herat is so nice because half the people left when the Taliban took over. They moved to Iran and learned how nice life could be and when they returned, brought those dreams with them. He told me one million people used to live here before the Taliban, 500,000 left, and since the Taliban have been run out of town, the population has exploded to more than two million. I did a little fact checking with this, and the population may be quite a bit lower than his number.

PRT Herat | Day 27 — We’re back! We had some problems with internet, which prevented us from uploading on time. I’m really hoping Day 26 doesn’t get lost in the stack, because I’m hoping it spurs some interesting conversation. I can’t stop thinking about the "Lion of Herat" everywhere I go.

So today, Ken and I jumped in an Italian provincial reconstruction team convoy and watched as they distributed food and medical supplies to a local Kuchi tribe. The Kuchi tribe is a nomadic tribe so we anticipated a great drive out to the middle of nowhere where we would see vast fields of tents and Sheppard’s.

We were wrong and we learned something new. The nomadic Kuchi tribe also has some permanent homes about 15 minutes from here. They live there for a little while before migrating onto other areas. The only problem with today was the complete lack of an interpreter. It’s a pretty strange experience to be embedded with Italians, where only a handful speaks English, while visiting Afghans who don’t speak any English. We walked around with a desire to talk to any of them, but we were unsuccessful. It was still better than Kabul!

PRT Herat | Day 28 — I love my father and the embroiled conversations that erupt between us sometimes. I cherish the moments where we disagree and we go back and forth on various facts and ideals. I haven’t always listened to him, but over the years I’ve learned that we may not always agree, but his opinions are always based on some founding principle.

Since being out in the field with Ken, I haven’t had many opportunities to talk with my father. The time we did get to chat he told me how he had to disconnect himself from this project because he felt as though he was getting too involved. I assured him I wanted him to participate as much as possible in this project, but to also learn from what we are learning out here and not to get stuck in the mud. I’ll admit, the one trait that flows through all Gallahans, is being stubborn. We’ve mastered it.

PRT Herat | Day 29 - Afghanistan is such a huge topic across the world, it's easy to forget the individual stories here. So many people are grouped together and called Romanians, Croatians, Dutch or Americans, I tend to forget sometimes there are individual people here with their own individual stories and beliefs.

Nazifa's story was particularly touching. To me, these stories highlight not only the caring nature of humanity, but the caring nature of nations. Visa processes are very difficult, I know because I'm trying to navigate the maze right now with my wife. So for a nation like Italy to allow Nazifa in for the medical treatment symbolizes something greater, something I believe hearkens to the soul of nations.

Somehow during my thoughts, I remembered talking with the Lithuanians at PRT Chagcharan. They told me how they asked their country to knit 500 caps for them to hand out to Afghan children during the winter. They were very proud to say their country not only knit 500,

but knit 5,000 caps. I remembered how proud they were to serve in Afghanistan and help bring peace to a country with a population eight times larger than their own.