My Afghanistan Journal

There’s a well-worn story about one’s introduction to Afghanistan. The usual “jumping-off point” for GIs, Foreign Service personnel and expatriates is Dubai, a wealthy playground in the United Arab Emirates featuring luxury shopping, lush golf courses, an indoor ski hill and, of course, an international airport. There is a 2½-hour flight on Kabul-based Kam Air, twice a day from Dubai to Kabul. When approaching the Kabul International Airport, the pilot addresses the passengers and advises them that they will soon be landing in Kabul, and that they should set their watches back 700 years!

Actually, the story has a grain of truth. Afghanistan, on Central Asian time, is only 9½ hours ahead of New York, but 2009 on the Gregorian calendar is the year 1387 on Afghanistan’s solar calendar. Its culture, infrastructure and institutions, unfortunately, bear a close resemblance to what 1387 must have been like. Its central government and judicial system are slightly more advanced, but still struggling with the 21st century.

Hennepin County Judge Steve Swanson and I had worked together in Bosnia in 2004. He wrote me from Kabul in July 2008 that he planned on leaving Afghanistan at the end of the year, and asked if I would be interested in taking his place. He had been serving in Kabul for more than a year and a half as the senior judicial adviser to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Afghanistan Rule of Law Project. When Swanson had previously asked me if I might be interested in Afghanistan, I had remarked that the difference between Sarajevo and Kabul was that in Sarajevo there might be an increased likelihood of accidental injury, but in Kabul it’s likely that someone would be trying to do you in, and I wasn’t very interested in taking chances. However, by late 2008, I had been retired from the bench in St. Cloud for nearly two years and was looking for an “encore career,” so when Steve asked again, I replied with a résumé.

In early December, I took the nonstop 15-hour flight from Atlanta to Dubai, which was laid over for eight hours in Dubai, and the next morning boarded the 6 a.m. Kam Air flight from Dubai to Kabul (which left an hour later). The 2½-hour flight is over Iran and along the border with Pakistan. The view from the air is mostly sand and snow-covered mountaintops. No vegetation and nothing green, but then it was December. Besides, Afghans will tell you there are no trees because the Russian Army cut them all down so the mujahedeen couldn’t hide behind them and kill Russians. Lamb is a staple of the Afghan diet (for the few who can afford meat) and with so little vegetation I was puzzled about what they fed the sheep. When I asked, I learned once again not to ask a question to which I don’t know the answer. The answer: “Garbage.”

Kabul International Airport is what one might imagine the port of entry to a war-torn Third World country might look like. Long lines of people wait at passport control with makeshift bundles and boxes that function as luggage. Young boys desperately beg to carry your luggage during the long walk to the parking area across rocky, dust-blown fields ringed with razor wire and teeming with beggars of all ages. Uniformed men with AK-47s are ubiquitous as are waiting taxis, military vehicles and armored SUVs.

The sights and sounds of Kabul are much like its airport. The streets in this city of 5 million are predominantly dirt and rocks; there are only occasional stop signs, and sometimes large rocks are placed on the streets, presumably by parents, to serve as speed bumps. There are few semaphores and none that work. Beggars line congested intersections—usually young children who tap on car windows and run alongside as the traffic moves. The streets bring to mind scenes from Slumdog Millionaire, infested with garbage and open drainage canals, and teeming with pedestrians, bicycles, motor scooters, ancient British lorries, human-powered pushcarts and cars (mostly older Toyotas), buses, taxis, SUVs used by the United Nations, military vehicles from the U.S. and perhaps a dozen other NATO countries.

Kabul is not a warm-weather destination. Its winter climate doesn’t approach Minnesota’s extreme cold, maybe more like Iowa or Missouri mild, but it’s still too cold for the sandals and light jackets or thin shalwars I witnessed its schoolchildren wearing on winter mornings. There’s not much electricity, the city is mostly dark at night (we used our own generators in the guest house where I lived), and many Afghans heat their straw and mule dung-constructed homes by burning trash, sometimes even the plastic water bottles discarded by foreign workers. It is the Third World; the life expectancy for females is age 45, for males, 42.

Guns are everywhere: mounted machine guns on jeeps and troop carriers, men armed with assault rifles on rooftops, sandbagged bunkers on streets manned by the Afghan National Army and police armed with assault rifles. The office compound where I worked and the guest house where I lived were surrounded by a concrete wall ringed with razor wire; both premises included guard shacks to house drivers and bodyguards during working hours. The office compound was patrolled by an AK-47-bearing security guard during the day. I have pretty much concluded that there must be a direct and causal relationship between the presence of poverty and suffering in a culture and the prevalence of guns.

I lived with about 15 other expatriates in a three-story guest house located in what was probably a better than average residential neighborhood. The other guest house residents were mostly lawyers and court managers, but also included were an English professor who managed the English as a Second Language program and a couple of information or media specialists who coordinated press and public relations. Because total security can’t be provided for the thousands of foreign workers in Afghanistan, the idea is to blend in with the population, though the concrete wall, gate and frequent SUV traffic have to give it away to anyone taking a close look. Each of us had our own room measuring about 15 by 18 feet and furnished with a desk, bed, television set and armoire. Most rooms also had a private bath and shower. The guest house had a kitchen, central dining room, recreation room and small gym.

On arrival, I was issued a laptop computer, cell phone, Kevlar vest (“flak jacket”) and “Pocket Buddy.” The function of the latter is to send a tracking signal to a central security office map that shows your location in case of kidnapping. It also functions as an emergency cell phone.

The “flak jacket” was heavy, cumbersome and annoying and didn’t fit well with a suit or sport jacket. We were strongly encouraged to wear it whenever we left the guest house or office. Many of us conveniently “forgot” it, including me, until one day when Kelly, a husky 6-foot-5-inch former federal court manager, Texas bar bouncer and North Dakota farm boy noticed I was carrying it instead of wearing it in the car on the way to work. “Well,” he said to no one in particular, “I sure would hate to have my ass shot off and have people saying that ‘the damn fool didn’t even have enough sense to wear his flak jacket.’” Kelly’s remark and the February raid by the Taliban on Afghanistan’s Ministry of Justice building in Kabul in which they murdered 20 people were enough to convince me to wear it instead of carry it.

I was the judicial component manager for the Rule of Law Project. It consisted of liaising with the Afghanistan Supreme Court in order to provide a curriculum and courses for a continuing judicial education program, and for the Judicial College or “Judicial Stage,” which is the educational prerequisite now required for appointment to the national judiciary. A primary emphasis of the educational arm of the USAID project was development of a strong anti-corruption law and continuing training for judges in legal and judicial ethics. Unfortunately, it had mixed success. After adopting a Judicial Code of Conduct drafted by a committee appointed by the Supreme Court and assisted by Minnesota Judges Steve Swanson and Mickey Greenberg, the Court, in spite of relentless lobbying by me, USAID and the European Union, refused to adopt the necessary disciplinary regulations needed to enforce the code.

After more than 30 years of war and civil unrest, Afghanistan has been left without a formally educated bar and judiciary. Its formal legal training is available through an undergraduate university degree from the Law and Political Science Faculty, or from the Sharia or Islamic Studies Faculty of its university system, which is centered in Kabul, but also has branches in the larger, urban provincial capitals. In order to practice law, graduates of the Law or Sharia Faculties (which resemble departments such as political science, philosophy and theology in American universities) must be admitted to one of three graduate programs—Judicial, Commercial or Government—and complete a one- to two-year academic curriculum and practicum. Unfortunately, as late as 2007, a study showed that only 36.6 percent of Afghanistan’s judges had completed a university education in law. And most of Afghanistan’s approximately 1,500 judges, especially those in rural provinces, are not graduates of the Judicial Stage; most did not have university degrees or any formal legal training but were appointed by local officials from local or tribal courts by loya jirgas, or meetings of community leaders as the need arose during wartime. The Rule of Law Project, shortly after its implementation in 2005, initiated a project aimed at providing basic legal training to those Afghan judges, who had been pressed into service without having received a formal legal education, by sponsoring a six-week “Foundation Training.” The program, which in many ways resembled bar review courses in the U.S., proved to be extremely successful, providing a “crash course” in core legal subjects to nearly 900 judges over a three-year period.

Among the judges trained in the Foundation Training program were 43 women. The first women judges were appointed in 1969, and by 2005 there were 32 women judges and some 400 women lawyers in Kabul. There were also women working as judges, prosecutors and lawyers in other major cities. After the Taliban came to power in 1996, women were banned from public life, but emerged again in 2001, after the Taliban were driven out. In 2003, with support from the U.N., the Afghanistan Women Judges Association (AWJA) was founded. Unfortunately, because of deteriorating security, the AWJA suspended operation in December 2008.

There are complaints by women lawyers and judges that they are shuffled aside and given little responsibility by their male colleagues. The executive secretary for one of Afghanistan’s nine Supreme Court justices told me that she had been a judge in a province adjoining Kabul, but was given almost nothing to do by her male colleagues. They told her she didn’t need to come to the court every day and they would take care of the caseload. She opted to work as a judicial secretary, apparently believing it was her only alternative if she wanted to do meaningful work.

To the credit of Afghanistan’s judiciary, the younger judges I met, who graduated from the Judicial Stage since the Taliban were ousted in 2001, appeared to be extremely bright and well-intentioned in spite of a crippling culture that is rampant with poverty, discrimination and corruption, and fiercely resistant to change. They persevere in a dangerous, low-paying job (entry level is the equivalent of $50 a month, and senior trial court judges earn about $200 a month). I came to believe that the only people in Afghanistan braver than the vendors who push carts through Kabul’s torturous traffic are its judges: An estimated 15 of them were brutally murdered by the Taliban in the past year.

Warm weather came to Kabul in early April this year. The return of spring in 2009 was not a harbinger of warmth, renewal or new life in Kabul. Instead, it brought increasing screams of fighter jets and the pulsing of helicopter rotors over the city. It was reminiscent of the soundtrack from M*A*S*H. Rule of Law administrators who attended meetings at the embassy returned to describe rooms filled with senior military officers, an exceptional number with stars on their shoulders. Renewal of the Rule of Law Project by USAID had been anticipated by the end of the month. Instead, through the murky catacombs of the State Department bureaucracy came an order to demobilize and for all personnel to leave the country by late May. The new administration was re-evaluating its Afghanistan policy, but we could expect to return at the end of June. We were told to go home, pack our bags and leave them near the door. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke and the newly appointed ambassador to Afghanistan, retired Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, would make an announcement following a high-level meeting in Kabul in mid-June. Following that meeting we were notified that we would not be returning and that the Rule of Law Project had been discontinued.

The entire U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is now under review, and it’s not unusual for people to ask what the future holds for that involvement. Of course, it’s a question better addressed to those above my pay grade. There’s much to be done there and much good that we can do. The vast majority of Afghanistan’s people genuinely like Americans; they are smart and they are survivors—the toughest people I’ve ever known. They couldn’t live in that dirty, destitute and dangerous country otherwise. Unfortunately, the country lacks natural wealth and resources, infrastructure, and strong institutions. And it has no history of a central government. Their best and brightest seem to have no interest in fighting and dying for a country that’s infested with terrorists and has been ravaged by war for more than 30 years. Most look for a way to get out. Must we exterminate the Taliban in order to protect ourselves from al-Qaida? To “win,” must we be as ruthless as the Taliban?

“The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

There are times when I think it’s best to cut our losses and just adopt a policy of “do no harm.” Then I think of families burning garbage to keep warm in the winter and those kids walking to school through the snow without winter coats and wearing only sandals on their feet.  L&P

—Bernard E. Boland, a former chief judge of the 7th Judicial District, retired in 2006. Since returning from Afghanistan, he has opened a mediation practice in St. Cloud.