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62 fifteen To Coordinate— or to Be Coordinated In September and October I ventured out of Kabul so I could get an idea of how things were going in the provinces. By November winter would have set in, and once the weather turned bad, it would be difficult to travel. To tempt me to explore their country, the Afghans kept repeating that there were three different Afghanistans: “The first is the one you Westerners imagine; another coincides with the city of Kabul; the third is the country of remote provinces, far away from the cities, and of the three, this is the only real Afghanistan.” Meanwhile I went on reading Olivier Roy, who made a distinction between the Afghan town as a “place of innovation” and the far-flung provinces as the “home of religion, tradition . . . , and values that stand the test of time.” Before the season of heavy snow began, I visited the provinces of Kandahar , Herat, Farah, Ghor, Khost, Kunar, Ghazni, Paktia, Paktika, and Uruzgan. What I’d been told was true. Indeed, I felt as if I was visiting ten countries instead of the provinces of one single nation. I soon learned not to trust the military aircraft and helicopters that cluttered the skies of Afghanistan. They can make you feel that anything is possible: that you can take off here, go there, take off again for another destination or reach such-and-such a mountain village at the drop of a hat. In reality, the worst thing you can do is let yourself get drawn into this frenzy of technological omnipotence and the illusion that Afghanistan has suddenly become an easy place to visit thanks to the powerful means of transport offered by the international coalition. Actually, my travels around the country almost never went according to plan or schedule: sometimes the plane broke down, or the weather turned nasty, 15-2423-0 ch15.indd 62 6/3/13 1:52 PM To Coordinate—or to Be Coordinated 63 or there was a military or humanitarian operation that rightly took precedence . Not to mention getting to one airport and finding out you had to leave from another, or all the times the plane or helicopter that should have been coming to pick you up didn’t turn up, or all the other times the flight plan was changed when you were in the air and you landed somewhere else. For me, this rampant uncertainty created problems when the Brussels delegations were visiting, because they often included individuals who hadn’t the faintest idea of where they were landing and for some reason thought that everything would be running with the precision of a Swiss watch. When I managed to get out on my own, however, I was happy to encounter that timeless Afghanistan, the land of the unexpected, where generations of travelers had lost their patience. Sometimes friendships, small adventures, discoveries you wouldn’t otherwise have made came about precisely due to a delay or a change of schedule. Once, when I was with General Alberto Primicerj of the Alpino Regiment, who was tasked with ISAF reconstruction activities, I was stuck for two days at the U.S. base in Farah, out in the desert, waiting in vain for a plane or a helicopter to take us back to Kabul. It was 45 degrees centigrade in the shade, and during the day we couldn’t stay outside for more than ten minutes. The camp had only the most basic facilities, so I shared a small room where I found a scorpion under the bed. For security reasons, lights had to be turned off when it got dark, and in the morning we couldn’t even have a proper shower as water was scarce. On the other hand, I learned so much about what life is like on the front line and how important even small things are in those circumstances. Food is essential for keeping morale high, and the canteen served an excellent evening meal of hot Mexican bean chili with the world’s best guacamole. Or maybe, under such straitened circumstances, it just seemed that way. meetings with provincial governors were another and constant source of surprise. Once, the governor of Farah asked if he could catch a ride on the plane and turned up with two guns and a few rounds of ammunition. I saw them under his jacket and I just managed to get him to hand them over so I could hide...

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