I haven’t seen a full chador on any woman yet, though every local woman covers at least her hair.

Many women (perhaps half, but it varies from neighborhood to neighborhood and I am taking no formal survey) do not cover their faces at all.

Many women also do wear the familiar and infamous blue burka, but they wear it as a kind of shawl, covering only their head and shoulders, hanging open in the front revealing embroidered dresses, high heels, jewelry, freedom.

Kabul is largely flat and China is a neighbor: I expected more bicycles.

That isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of bicycles (and all of them Chinese made), just not as many as I would expect given the perfect conditions for bicycling and the poverty. Bicycles are often an opportunity for commerce as much as they are transportation. The relative lack of bicycles is another indicator of the extreme depth of the poverty.

There also aren’t as many mopeds or motorcycles as I expected. Again, you do see them, but not nearly in the numbers you see in Katmandu, for example.

The one thing I’ve seen more of is police directing traffic. I have never seen this many, not in any city, not even in Germany (it is the Germans who are funding the hiring and training of the police here). At least some people are being employed.

The police do share the drivers’ sense of the traffic rules though. Their directions aren’t always, um, clear.

Parts of the city look like nothing so much as the former Yugoslavia. Soviet style apartment blocks riddled with bullet holes.

But West Kabul is a crime. Once, there was a city there. Teeming, crowded, bustling, joy, sorrow, life. Now, just flattened. They say fifty thousand died.

Massoud, the architect of this particular horror, is also a national hero. He fought the Taliban tooth and nail and forged the Northern Alliance which played a crucial role in taking Afgahistan back from those, other, monsters. He was killed just before September 11th and, at the time, his death was considered a great blow to Afghan freedom.

Massoud's heirs now rule the country and exploit a memory now growing golden. You see Massoud's picture on billboards, over doorways, on the side of supermarkets, hanging from the rear-view mirrors of taxicabs - all over the city he destroyed.

There are no unambiguous heroes.

As in most poor countries, people drive to get where they’re going, though Kabulis are even more intense. It doesn’t matter so much what is in between points A and B. Right-of-way is unknown and the side of the road upon which one should strive to stay (the right) is regarded as an at times wholly arbitrary convention.

Everyone complains about the traffic jams, but they aren’t that bad. They don’t touch Atlanta, much less the platonic ideal that is Jakarta. They aren’t even as bad as Katmandu, to consider a similar, if not exact, poverty level.

Why aren’t the jams too difficult? As with the relative deficiency in world class pollution, Kabul doesn’t yet have the number of cars it needs for truly epic, hour and soul wasting gridlock.

Kabul is dusty. A fine mist of dust and smoke hangs in the air at all hours. It coats my throat, making the planned participatory nature of our training sessions also necessary. While the participants talk, wrangle, and do the exercises we’ve devised, we swig down water and tea, preparing to introduce the next element.

. . .

It snowed overnight, about an inch. Wet and sticky, it spun the trees and barbed wire into confections and churned the ground into mud. At least the snow pulled the dust down out of the air.

“Kabul has one of the most beautiful natural locations of any city in the world. . . Nestled in the Kabul River valley almost 1800m (5,900ft) above sea level, it has an enviable climate and four distinct and equally charming seasons. . . In winter the breathtaking mountains surrounding the city are covered in snow.” Kabul (The Bradt Mini Guide)

Kabul is set on a plateau inside a bowl of mountains. This landscape is perfect for holding in pollution. The only reason the air isn’t nearly unbreatheable is that Kabul doesn’t have enough industry or enough cars – yet.

The UN plane came in fast, barely giving us a chance to see the city’s crumpled chessboard. The sun hid behind a haze of dust and cooking smoke. I got in the slow line through passport control and was the last person but one through. The colleague I’m traveling with had already made friends with our driver by the time I made my way to the exit. He had also grabbed my suitcase on the way out - saving me the need to refuse the persistent and often grabby offers of assistance - even though I had both of our baggage claim tickets.

Kabul is poor. Oh, god, is it poor.

I have never been to a poorer city. And this is Kabul on the upswing, on the rebound from depths of which most Americans or Europeans simply cannot conceive.

Today someone said to me, with some irony but also in all seriousness, "Even the communists were better than this."

We've been here just over a week now.

One can access the internet in Kabul with relative ease. It is slow, of course, but most hotels offer service and there are internet cafes scattered around the city. However, with only about one free hour every day to check our e-mail, well, work comes before blog.

I have been keeping notes and I will group some of my observations thematically. I'll post them as I have the opportunity.

Everybody has their formula for picking a winner, and I am no exception. But I stick with the classics:

Defense wins championships - but it doesn't cover the spread.

Patriots and Panthers.

It's the small (and perhaps not so small) epiphanies that make it all worth while.

Given the past week's worth of sub-zero weather here in New England, I am prepared to consider that fleece is evidence of God's direct intervention in human raiment.

Back in the misty days of 2001, Caleb Crain, writing in the late and lamented Lingua Franca, introduced the amateur aesthetic anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake to wider audience - including me. I ran right out, got myself a copy of Ms Dissanayake's What is Art For?, and found myself caught up in a fascinating intellectual journey.

Mr Crain's article is now on the web ( Part I and Part II ). Read it and then do as I did: run, don't walk, and read at least one of Ms Dissanayake's books.

" Suppose there were a person who saw, before almost anyone else, that the most important concept in modern biology could be applied to the arts. Suppose, however, that this person studied biology only as an undergraduate, never took a class in anthropology, and never received a Ph.D. Suppose, in fact, that she were a homemaker for a dozen years and then spent fifteen years in the Third World, where it was difficult for her to gain access to the research libraries and social networks that most professors take for granted. Nevertheless, over the past two decades—with no more institutional support than a few years of adjunct teaching, several grants, and a couple of visiting professorships—she has managed to publish three books setting forth her ideas. And today a new field of study has sprung up where she pioneered. Suppose, in addition, that some people think that a scholarly framework based on her insights will displace much of current aesthetic theory—that future generations will understand literature and the arts as she does, reconciling the humanities to the science of human nature. ... Dissanayake posed [a] question boldly in her first book: "Since all human societies, past and present, so far as we know, make and respond to art, it must contribute something essential to human life. But what?" A biologist, she proposed, would consider art as a set of behaviors rather than a class of objects. Dissanayake was more interested in sculpting than in marble statues, and even more intrigued by dynamic arts like singing and dancing. She reasoned that if natural selection had shaped these behaviors—as it had shaped every other functional aspect of human design—then the behaviors must result from predispositions that gave hominids an advantage over their competitors as they evolved. What was that advantage? Dissanayake has looked for it in children’s play, premodern ritual, and mother-infant attachment. There is no consensus among evolutionary psychologists that she has discovered the definitive answer. But there is a widespread belief that she has found the right way to ask the question. "

(via 2blowhards)

The Asian Centre for Human Rights launched their website today.

Founded in March 2003 to track human rights across Asia, they offer a rights based analysis of political situations on the continent.

The Council on Foreign Relations has set up a website to discuss foreign policy in the context of the Presidential election.

The one thing the site does quite well is tracking all the foreign policy statements of the candidates.

John Scalzi, in comments at Making Light, has an observation I wish I'd made. After all, I read enough SF to think this way:

" [A]s a general rule, if you *don't* want someone to show up on your site, or in your discussion (or whatever), don't name the discussion (or whatever) after them (and especially, I would think, don't name them after authors, who are by nature curious about being fictional creatures in someone else's universe). Thanks to the twin powers of search engines and personal vanity, putting someone's name on something on the Internet is tantamount to inviting their presence, not unlike (depending on your perspective) invoking angels or demons. And we all know how much trouble that class of creature can be.

Henceforth, the above observation is to be known as the Law of Internet Invocation: 'If you name them, they will come.' "

I find the idea that support for human rights is contingent on how one feels about the current President of the US very odd. I find the idea that support for human rights is contingent on not questioning the policies of the current President very, very odd.

I had always thought it was a self-evident truth that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights". I confess that I never used to, and in fact still don't, think about the President of the US when thinking about how to support human rights. Silly me.

I find the whole spectacle of cold, reptilian, completely unsympathetic Kissingerian realists turning, spinning, twirling into rigid, uncompromising, "we have chosen this particular form of compassion for your own good" Wolfowitzian idealists based solely upon who happens to be in the White House to be very odd. I mean, they're both sticks with which to beat people, but they are very different sticks.

Blue jeans are made in America no more. Levi's, one of the most distinctive of American pop icons, is moving off shore and they locked the gate to their last US factory today.

NPR's Morning Edition today suggested that teenage girls drive clothing sales and that Levi's didn't attract that crucial demographic. One girl was broadcast saying that "Levi's have no style". Philistine. But in a strange way that girl was exactly right about why Levi's are my sole clothing totem (Levi's is the only brand name I allow on the outside of my clothing - and only on that little red tag).

Whether clothes have style or not seems to me to be the wrong criteria as long as the person in them does. I dare say that my Levi's have style - but its a style no teenage girl could pull off.

Still looking for that blue jean baby queen Prettiest girl I've ever seen See her shake on the movie screen - David Essex

. . .

There is, in fact, still one blue jean made in America: Diamond Cut. I am going to try a pair . . .

Whose idea is it to expose young men - very young men - to a month of near constant scrutiny between their next to last and final games? No wonder the final rush of Bowl games, and in particular this year the Sugar, are always played in such sloppy fashion.

Those who are surprised at the poor showing of Oklahoma might do well to consider just this point. And add that their next to last game was the loss of their Conference Championship. Most athletes (though, I dare say, not all, at all, at all) have a well-drilled sense of fair play. To play for a higher prize when having fallen short of a lower does not seem right to the true sportsman - and most players on any college squad will be nothing more than sportsmen, not at all looking forward to making a career on the gridiron.

And LSU's defense was awesome.

Colleague, non-American, entered the US this morning about six in the A-M, meeting a friend for breakfast and coming to our office about nine. He was fingerprinted and photographed. Indeed, he must have been very nearly at the head of the queue.

They say it only adds fifteen seconds to the process of entering the country. My colleague agreed that the process took not much more than minute, but added that he was furious for two hours:

Welcome to Fortress America. Don't enjoy your stay too much, don't forget to leave on time, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

UPDATE: The pun is obvious. One of my co-workers made it yesterday and I saw it today on Eschaton.

"The War on Tourism"