Singapore- After finally moving on from KL, I’m passing though Singapore’s Little India for a night en route to Bali. Little India (Little Tamil Nadu) is probably the most sanitized Indian neighborhood on the globe and not bad for it. Tamil is one of Singapore’s four official languages along with Malay (also the national language), Mandarin, and English, sometimes referred to as Singlish in local jargon. I’d read in the Wikitravel entry on the city state that Malaysian newspapers are banned here and purposefully grabbed one in KL the bring through customs hoping to stir something up but it was allowed in or not noticed, a bit of a disappointment. I ditched my gum in KL but more because it was old than trying to start something here. As I don’t have much going on at the moment, I’m going to plug a really great article trilogy by Brasilero wildman Pepe Escobar on Asia Times about I time that I know well with photos by Jason Florio of pre-9/11 Afghanistan.
Abu Dhabi- To get from Tajikistan to Abu Dhabi was a bit of an arduous trip via Kabul and Dubai and no sleep. Here are a few random shots from the Blackberry from 24 hours in my often bizarre life.
Samira, the sassiest beer wench in Dushanbe. Bar Karaoke, Hotel Dushanbe. Sim Sim (Tajikistan's national beer) pivo in the foreground, just 2 somoni (less than 50 US cents).
The man, the legend. Rudaki and arch. Rudaki was a lauded Persian poet for whom Dushanbe's main thoroughfare was renamed (from Lenin) after Tajik independence.
Nothing to see here, move along. The Dushanbe airport, where the metal detectors are not on and no one is looking at the x-rayed baggage. And that's after the French taxpayers put money in to refurbish the place... (so the French airforce can use the tarmac en route to Afghanistan).
The Kabul airport, where every kind of sketchy aircraft comes and goes all day long. Probably the most interesting airport in the world for a layover. Here I get stirred by a buzzing Mi-8. Six American soldiers died this day.
De rigueur decor, Kabul airport. Those are big binoculars!
View of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building (for now) from the Dubai-Abu Dhabi Emirates bus. It’s getting hot in here.
The comfort of Abu Dhabi. Good times at the Meena villa, if only I could figure out how to work the entertainment system.
Dushanbe- I took a quiet stroll through Tajikistan’s Museum of National Antiquities this morning after a friend here told me about a giant sleeping Buddha there in what I guessed would be the incredible Hellenic-Buddhist fusion of the now long gone Bamiyan Buddhas that once stood in the wind swept Hazarajat. So for 15 Somoni (just above $3) and covering my filthy New Balance’s with those surgical cover things, I toured the museum which had everything on display from neolithic adze’s to Tajikistan’s Persian-Islamic period. But it was all about the giant Buddha. What we mostly know about Tajikistan is some of its Soviet-period history and maybe a little about its five-year long devastating civil war (1992-1997). I want to get a little more insight into the country’s pre-Islamic history to get a better picture of where it fits into regional history and present day geopolitics. Ancient trade and cultural links have tendency to mirror post-Soviet revived present day ones and for this reasoning, a quick study of the museum’s pieces was in order. On the second floor, the Buddha lay in nirvana in his “sleeping lion” position in all of his reconstructed glory. This hulking 13 metre-long sculpture was discovered near Qurgonteppa in the country’s south, wedged in between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan (see map).
Seeing this made me think of the legend of the mega sleeping Buddha believed to be hidden somewhere in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan described by Xuanzang, the first Chinese backpacker, in 630 AD. In September, 2008 a 19 metre Buddha was discovered near where the two standing ones were demo’ed in March 2001. Not quite 300 metres, but still, not too shabby. Large parts of the Tajik Buddha did not survive the centuries but were artfully reconstructed to give one a good idea of the ancient sculptor’s original vision. The museum had a lot of interesting pieces to say the least. Here’s another one, a scabbard of a griffin that looks to be of ivory.
The labels in the museum were mostly in Russian and Tajik and not extensive to say the least. But I had much better luck than Asia Times columnist Pepe Escobar in 2001 who was in Dushanbe just before the museum opened and was unable to see this piece of nirvana.
On a totally unrelated note, I have a new piece in today’s Asia Times:
Los Angeles- The AfPak Channel has an incredible photo essay that Messr. Mohammed Qayoumi, president of Cal State East Bay, gave them after he scanned a 1950′s era image book published by the Afghan Ministry of Planning in the now relatively very quaint days of the Zahir Shah monarchy’s Cold War zenith. Obviously the book is strictly representative of Kabul in that era though one must know that modernization was the order of the day in neighboring Iran under the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and to a lesser degree under the dizzying, revolving door of Pakistani regimes of PM’s Khawaja Nazimuddin, Mohammed Ali Bogra, Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Ibrahim Ismail Chundrigar and Ayub Khan to Afghanistan’s east and south when pro-Western foreign and domestic policies were in vogue throughout the post-colonial realm. Afghanistan, which had virtually no imperialistic baggage to shed, was attempting to move forward wedged, as always, betwixt and between “great” powers of the twentieth century. These so-called great powers of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, and Eisenhower Doctrine-era America among others, saw Afghanistan as a barren polo ground where Cold War manoeuvring was in play. “What an unlucky country.”
New York- Photojournalist Jason Florio had a slideshow at the Apple Store in the South of Houston street district tonight where he took the audience through over a decade of adventure and memory spanning Islamic Asia and Africa with 9/11 interspersed. Jason has the before pictures to many of my after. Afghanistan just before 9/11, the towers just before the collapse, Iraq just before the neoconservative destruction of the Ba’ath Party and so on. I took a few snaps on my Blackberry but check his site for a more complete view.
A photo from John Kiriakou's The Reluctant Spy showing the theft of diplomatic documents by American agents in Peshawar, Pakistan in early 2002. My Afghan visa application is somewhere in there.
New York- In October of 2004, I received a strange call from an FBI agent at their Manhattan headquarters named Teresa Meehan. Agent Meehan has apparently been tailing me and clipped her business card to a piece of my mail in Brooklyn at the time to let me know she was on the case. What case that was, I had no idea at the time.
The other week I was browsing the new non-fiction releases at the Union Square Barnes & Noble and I picked what looked like another ex-CIA tell all. The Reluctant Spy by former Agency man John Kiriakou caught my attention for some reason and I started flipping through it looking for nuggets until I saw a strange photo in the center. I was of a van packed with files in Peshawar, Pakistan in February of March of 2002 claiming to be from the “Taliban Embassy” (actually the Afghan consulate but I won’t split hairs). It looks like I finally got my answer to how agent Meehan was trying to find me five and a half years back. Of course then I had to skim the entire book to find the corresponding entry. According to Kiriakou, an enterprising NY/NJ Port Authority Detective named Thomas “Tommy” McHale who was, for some reason, working for the FBI in Pakistan after 9/11, asked permission from the Pakistan authorities to break into the building under the cover of night and abscond with everything inside which must’ve included my application for an Afghan tourist visa in November of 2000. The documents were brought to Islamabad and then flown to the Washington area where they were not examined until the spring of 2004 (which would explain the gap in time I had been trying to figure out) because bureaucrats claimed they did not have people to translate the documents (though many innocent visa applications like mine and my accompanying Swiss backpacker friend were obviously in English) from Pashto and Dari into English which is apparently the sole language U.S. government officials are capable of reading. Kiriakou says the documents sit today in a warehouse in suburban Maryland like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, never to be reexamined.
When I was called by agent Meehan, she asked me, preposterously, if I had ever attended a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. I practically laughed her off the phone back in October of 2004, imagining her sitting in her cubicle in lower Manhattan with a grimacing, simplistic picture of George Walker Bush somewhere in the vicinity. Then I quickly reflected on how pathetic it was that my government could be this bumbling. While staying in Lahore in March 2007, I took a quick side trip to Peshawar and barged into the Afghan consulate there to interview the sitting Consul General. I was told the Consul was busy and was pointed in the direction of the office of the Vice Consul. He was a youngish Tajik that claimed he had no answers for me and was incapable of speculating when asked. Kiriakou’s book seemed to answer one burning question: how long was the Peshawar Afghan consulate in control of the Taliban after they had been ejected from Kabul? I found it peculiar that no one seemed to have any clue to what I thought to be a fairly straightforward question. According to The Reluctant Spy, Agent McHale and his men broke into the compound several months after the Taliban had been overthrown and the Bonn conference had installed a new government with Hamid Karzai as its head. From the book’s description, it sounds like the place was manned by a chowkidar (caretaker) who was arrested at the time by local police for questioning. So there was definitely a period of months between the fall of the Taliban and when the post-Bonn government gained control of this ever so important consulate. Interesting…at least to me. One of the most heavily covered events, at least in terms if the sheer number of journalists on the ground at the time, and no one, including local Peshawaris, could give me an answer to this simple question. Eight years on, I think I have found most of the answer.
Recent Comments