Mr Glavin recently in Afstan...and returning, unembedded, except...

Recollections from the Sandbox:

...
KANDAHAR AIRFIELD –It might help to imagine this place as something out of a science-fiction movie, set in the distant future, on a desolate, searing-hot and faraway planet. More than 30,000 earthlings from 42 different countries are hunkered down in a vast and heavily-guarded mining colony in the middle of a windswept plain. Groaning, lumbering vehicles rumble around dusty streets. Strange pilotless aircraft circle overhead.

Every once in a while a siren wails and a robot voice announces: Rocket, attack. Rocket, attack. It’s the hostile aliens again, firing explosive missiles into the middle of the place. You throw yourself on the ground. You stay there for two minutes, then you hurry to the nearest bomb shelter. You wait for the all-clear siren.

You rejoin the streams of determined and ragged-looking machinists, engineers and technicians constantly shambling to and fro, their trades, nationalities and ranks indistinguishable except for the most subtle peculiarities in the patterns on their overalls, or in the weapons they’re carrying, or in the barely-discernable insignia on their epaulettes. They file in and out of warehouses, two-storey, double-wide ATCO-type trailers, supply depots, cafeterias, and command-and-control centres of one sort or another...

A year ago, I arrived at Kandahar’s civilian airport on an Ariana Airways flight from Kabul and roared off towards the city in a fixer’s beat-up early ‘90s Toyota Corolla. If we hadn’t immediately got stuck behind an International Security Assistance Force convoy that was backed up behind a jackknifed oil truck, I might not have noticed that the regular airport was immediately adjacent to the busy post-911 airstrip that had become Kandahar Airfield. I never even visited the place. This time, I wanted to get a glimpse of the Afghanistan that soldiers see, so I hitched a ride in on a Polaris airbus out of the Canadian Forces Base in Trenton, Ontario...

. . . It’s much harder work to find excuses for otherwise intelligent Canadians who know nothing about Afghanistan but who will still earnestly proclaim with a straight face that what’s going on here is really all about oil, and that Canadian soldiers are here only to advance the sinister aims of American imperialism, and the plucky Taliban resistance may be animated by a sense of decency we might not share, but none of it is any of our business anyway, and we should just leave...

I'm headed back to Afghanistan within the month. I won't be inside KAF, but instead, like the time before, I'll be embedded with the people, as I like to say (I was on CBC Radio this morning here in Victoria giving out of myself about these things)...

A post by Mr Glavin from the time before, November 2008:

Riding With Mad Max Across The Kandahar Plain, To Visit With Ehsan Ullah Ehsan (see here for more on the good Afghan and the CF)

Some recent posts at this blog relating to Mad Terry here, here and here.