A hockey rink, a Tim Hortons ... I must be in Kandahar

Delays are expected in a country at war.

IEDs are emerging as a favored weapon here in Afghanistan, putting pressure on internal demand for air travel and upping the pressure on aircraft maintenance crews. Navigation also becomes tricky when the weather turns nasty — as it often does, with flash sand storms and the like a near-daily occurrence.

As flights are delayed or cancelled, journalists are understandably at risk of being bumped to make room for military personnel.

It is a lesson I’ve had drilled in on a daily basis and underscored during a recent journey. After waiting for three days in Kabul, I boarded a British C-130 to take me south, landing in Khandahar in the dead of night. I was one of the last passengers passing through the tent terminal when I heard the telltale pop of small arms fire close by, in a small rapid burst.

A U.S. Army officer came running in, yelling that a gunman was shooting towards the terminal from the perimeter fence just across the road. It was the second incident of the day in Khandahar, I would learn. A rocket earlier that afternoon aimed at the airfield prompted a scrambling of flights.

The next day, eight rockets sliced through the relative calm capital city in the north, landing near the airfield in Kabul. A Taliban spokesman later told Western media that many more would come before the elections later this month.

While reaching Khandahar was a step closer to linking up with the Marines, the base felt far removed from the reality of war, with its many surreal flourishes. NATO troops wearing a rainbow of uniforms, thirsty for frozen drinks, lined up in 100-plus degree heat outside of the Tim Hortons coffee shop which overlooked a concrete hockey rink ringed in giant red maple leaves.

I resisted the urge to indulge in a frozen beverage, but gave in to the lure of free wireless outside to café to check email on my iPod.

The next day I boarded another C-130, this time headed into Helmand Province’s Camp Leatherneck, the headquarters for the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade. I have been waiting here for two days, with only one more flight to go. At last count, it had been cancelled or delayed four times.

Camp Leatherneck has the look of an expeditionary tent city. Just about everything — showers, housing, latrines, chow hall — is housed in large portable structures neatly lined across a flat, parched moonscape terrain. There’s air conditioning in most tents, but it’s difficult to believe it during certain parts of the day.

Yesterday, the midday temperature inside the communal tent allocated for media embeds reached 95 degrees, leaving about a dozen reporters in various stages of undress jockeying for space near the plastic air vents. Today, reporters are trickling one-by-one out to the flight line, all of us hoping that perhaps this day will be ours to get moving again.

Marine leadership here says the campaign in southern Afghanistan aimed at flushing out Taliban fighters in a region that has largely gone unpatrolled by NATO forces has a lot of parallels with lessons learned in Iraq.

“It requires a great deal of patience on our part to move into an area and have people establish those bonds of trust and confidence that they expect to have with anybody who says they’re there to help them,” Col. George Almand, 2nd MEB deputy commander, said Wednesday.

That lack of military policing has made Helmand Province “an important place” for Taliban fighters, Almand said.

Violence, however, is up everywhere in this country. During the first six months of 2009, civilian deaths shot up 24 percent over those reported during the same period the year prior, the United Nations reported recently.

No doubt about it, it is an incredible time to be in Afghanistan as the country readies itself for its Aug. 20 election. Kabul is alive with activity, blanketed with vivid election campaign posters, most notably for President Hamid Karzai.

The photo poses of the Pashtun leader seem to fall into one of three categories: pointing, pondering or pontificating. Other posters explain the process of casting a ballot in simplistic visuals. The brightly dressed cartoon characters are drawn standing in a line, waiting.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/afghanistan/090806/waiting-transport-freya-editing