Hello Prospective Employee

This is an exchange I had with my computer screen when I received this email, sentence by sentence:

Hello Prospective Employee,

How presumptuous!

Are you looking for a career in the Intelligence World?

Umm…

Would you like to work for a fast growing company with lots of advancement potential?

McDonald’s?

[Not McDonald’s] has been providing foreign language and intelligence support services to the United States Military for more than a decade. In addition to stateside services, we provide support and training across the world, including, but not limited to Iraq, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.

I’ll never work in Germany! Never!

My name is [stereotypical WASP name]. I am Project Coordinator at [my little north Virginia venture]. At this time, I am seeking an experienced TS/SCI Uzbek Linguist. This position has availability in Bethesda, MD and St. Louis, MO.

Uzbekcha gapira olmaiman!

The period of performance is from July 6, 2008-July 5, 2009. All candidates must possess the following criteria:

Limited working proficiency of the following languages (one for each FTE). A minimum proficiency skill level 2 for Reading is required as defined by the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Proficiency Levels or the equivalent that meets or exceeds the ILR skill level 2. For award qualification, testing must have taken place within two years prior to the date of this SOW. After award, and, at vendor expense, linguists must maintain a two year currency at level 2 or higher verified by test results submitted to the Government.

Level 2? Haha! You guys are screwed!

[blah blah blah] Arabic, Dari, French, Indonesian, Kurdish, Pashto, Uzbek and Farsi

French? Are Algerian terrorists still speaking French? That’s just so…..uh, so something. The French have a word for it.

Basic knowledge:

Familiar with computer operations

Knowledge of data retrieval/storage and generating reports

Computer skills? I know how to use Youtube. Does that count?

Demonstrated time management skills

I’m blogging instead of finishing my research proposal. That should give you a perspective on my time management skills.

Knowledge of computer programs:

Common office software i.e. Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and e-mail

What is Excel? No seriously, what is Excel?

Basic knowledge of geography, cartography, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS):

Basic knowledge of geography

Basic map reading skills

Skills, Knowledge and understanding of GIS applications (i.e., ArcGIS or GeoMedia Pro)

Create and edit GIS datasets then import and export datasets between GIS software and Microsoft Excel

Are you still speaking English? I didn’t understand any of that.

NGA specific/unique training may be required

Sounds ominous. Is that like Marine Corps boot camp?

Basic knowledge of research gathering:

Internet search tools

Search query: “girls of the Big Ten” + free photos. Does that count?

Library functions (query, ordering, etc.)

Some of the foreign male students at my last university would watch pornography on the computers in the library research stacks because they didn’t have enough money to have their own computers in their dorm room to watch pornography on. The inequality made me sad.

As an employee of [War Profiteering, Inc.], we offer you an excellent salary of $112K. You will also receive 10 paid holidays and 12 paid vacation days. Please do not miss a great opportunity to work with an accelerated company. I look forward to speaking with you soon.

You liars. You shameless liars. You do not pay that much. You, and every other company lie about how much you will pay translators. You then knock about 45% off of what was initially promised because translators are weenies who don’t stick up for themselves. Contractors are truthful to the guys who are hired as security because they are former marines who will pistol-whip their employers if they get lied to about salary/wages. Translators, on the other hand, go to some yuppie-ish northern Virginia/DC lounge and get drunk while complaining about how they got screwed by their employer.

Anyways, this is the first email that has come without my name at the beginning. You guys are getting lazy. But the best email by far said that the anonymous company would pay for my moving expenses to Guantanamo Bay. Really, who doesn’t have their moving expenses to Gitmo pre-paid?

 

Send in the Anthropologists!

This is a photo that few people would guess was taken in Afghanistan. Via MastaBaba, it’s a shaman in Mazar:

C’mon! Take a drink of whatever folk remedy he has mixed up in his red flower watering can! It will make you potent-better-fertile-hairier-hairless-attractive or something else entirely.

All joking aside, pre-Islamic religious/folk traditions still exist alongside Islam throughout Central Asia and much of the Muslim world. Sometimes harmoniously, sometimes less so. I recall an anecdote, from some forgotten place, of a young Wahhabi-trained Uyghur (I think) preacher deciding to go to war with the local shaman. But the local people did not see how the shaman folk remedies, blessings and ceremonies were un-Islamic. It’s like telling a Christian that the Christmas tree is a pre-Christian pagan symbol (which it is) and expecting them to toss it out immediately.

Anyways, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m no anthropologist. If you are interested in shamanism in Afghanistan (and apparently shaman is an inaccurate term borrowed from some Siberians) then I suggest reading these academic articles:

Sidky, Muhammad Humayun. ‘Malang, Sufis, and Mystics: An Ethnographic and Historical Study of Shamanism in Afghanistan’, Asian Folklore Studies, Vol. 49, No. 2 (1990), 275-301. Link!

Micheline Centlivres, Pierre Centlivres and Mark Slobin. ‘A Muslim Shaman of Afghan Turkestan’, Ethnology, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Apr., 1971), pp. 160-173. Download PDF.

 

A break

So this periodically happens, I am minding my own business and I get bothered by strange (i’m assuming) young Afghan men. It used to happen more often but not so much anymore. Someone will get my email address, deduce that I am not that creative and my ‘chat’ name is the same. I get messages from that someone who thinks it would be possible that I would like to chat with a stranger. If it’s obvious that it’s not someone that I know, I automatically delete it. But the following was a longer exchange because of his incredibly feminine name – so I thought, maybe it is one of my female cousins? And wouldn’t it be nice if they found me online? Alas, no. Out of the kindness of my heart, I am hiding his identity.

I also think I this may be from a job applicant and wouldn’t that be funny, if I ran across his resume later?

Behold:

tulips_roses*: hello and good morning
Oh so polite HiK: Hello. Who is this please?
tulips_roses: this ‘so not a girl‘
Sighing deeply but still so polite HiK: I’m sorry, I don’t think I know you, have we met?
tulips_roses: why
Irritated HiK but don’t you think she’s still so polite?: I’m sorry, I don’t chat with strangers. Goodbye
tulips_roses: what do you think am i stranger
tulips_roses: sorry to say befor know some one you can jage him’
tulips_roses: if you want to know me ask me any question i will ans it
Concerned HiK because did I mention that someone sent me poetry in Dari via text this morning (and no, not Mr. Namzad, he knows I can’t read that well. Though he has just very sweetly assured me that it’s quite good): Where did you get my contact information?
tulips_roses: go ahead
Irritated HiK: Where did you get my contact information?
HiK wanted to say something about his sister chatting with strange men but refrained: As I said before, I don’t chat with strangers and only want to know where you got my information so I can remove it in the future.
HiK SHALL block you: Anyway, since you won’t answer that. I will block you. Goodbye

*Sure, I changed his tag name but seriously, it was way more feminine than this. Wouldn’t you think that’s a girl too?

 

Black-haired Afghan Girls?

Not that I will make a habit of mocking myself, but it just have to share this exchange between myself and “sarcastic man.” It was discovered that I actually attend a single class at Uni (outside of research) for language learnin’ and I mentioned some of the people that are in the class:

Me: “And then there is actually an Afghan girl in my class who grew up here speaking only English.

Him: “I might know her. What’s her name?”

Me: “I don’t know. I didn’t catch her name on the first day.”

Him: “What does she look like?”

Me: “Uh… black hair and… pretty… and uh…”

Him: “Oh! Black hair and pretty? Yeah, that’s so rare for an Afghan girl. You’ve really narrowed it down.”

I used the occasion to claim that there are some Afghan brunettes in existence (and even a rare blond). I convinced none present of this. But here I submit evidence for the defense:

Ha!

And yes, she is from Afghanistan.

 

Go back to your stone-age village

I recently weaseled my way into an Afghan governance capacity building junket. There was absolutely no good reason for myself to be there. But there I was butchering not one, but two languages of Afghanistan while sitting in on seminars, roundtables, chit-chats and whatnot. Oh, and I also did logistics, transportation and trouble-shooting for about 12 Afghans for 5 days in a foreign city that I have never visited. I will accept my Nobel Prize for awesomeness later this year.

At the end of one meeting at some bankers’ bank the group was given some gift packet. On the way out of the high security premises we opened up what looked like the most interesting (expensive) thing in the packet; a small cardboard box with the bank logo on it. I opened it and determined that it was….what the heck is this? It looked like a small jack knife. It had a small leather click strap that seemed to hold down a metallic cylinder top. My hands were full of city street maps and our itinerary so I couldn’t open the device.

Of course, one of the Afghans started to ask me, the “knowledgeable” person, about the mystery device:

Him: “It’s very nice!”

Me: “Uh, yeah.”

Him: ” How many is it?”

Me: “Oh, I don’t know much it costs.”

Him: “No, how many megabytes?”

Me: “Mekabeats?”

Him: “No. M-Bs. Megabytes.”

Me [Totally confused]: “Oooh! Megabytes. Namebinam. I don’t know.”

Back at the hotel I opened it up and figured out what it was when I saw what the cylinder top revealed. It was one of those computer memory stick things. I’ve seen it on the television. They may have another more technical name. I don’t know. I don’t know technology. I just got my first computer last Christmas. I wrote my grad school papers with a pencil and paper before writing the final copy on a computer at the university library. Somebody asked me for a “hard copy” once and I didn’t know what it was. I tried to buy one of those computer disks a couple of years back that hadn’t existed for quite a while. I gave up on trying to save files and just started emailing myself my word documents and whatnot. I didn’t know what email was until about 1999. So yeah, I’m sorta tech-backwards.

Later, on my [new!] laptop I showed some of the guys pictures of my hometown: Lots of mountains, farm animals, trees, village of 800 people, etc… Apparently life in my stone-age village did not prepare me well enough to interact with cosmopolitan Afghan technocrats. But they were a patient bunch and forgave me my rural eccentricities. On the last night I attempted to transfer the photos that I had taken on my brand-new, first-ever digital camera from my computer to theirs. Things did not go smoothly. I was invited, after some total lack of success, to sit in a chair and drink some tea while they would do the work “for me.”

Luckily, they did not see this pic of me at the old homestead down the hill from the family house.

Poor, poor ignorant khareji.

One the plus side, I think all my rural mountain ways will serve me well when I do my fieldwork in the villages of a certain region of Afghanistan. I’m one of those kharejis who is capable of watching an animal being butchered and then eating it two hours later.

 

Save the Afghan Cows!

Run! Run for your lives! Run گاوماده, ruuuun! It’s Operation Beef Jerky!

I’ve herded cattle before, but never with a helicopter. I prefer on foot actually, because horses hate me and I have general feelings of disdain for an animal that probably doesn’t earn its keep. The closest I got to helicopter-herding was using a motorbike once. Somebody gave me a little 80cc bike and an electric cattle prod to move 60 head a few miles. I never used the cattle prod once. I’m a humanitarian, as you can see in this photo:

Say no to heli-cow-herding!

OK, some serious information: the photo at top is not photoshopped. It was taken in Nuristan and was part of a US Army press release (pdf):

Flying through the clouds soldiers from the Afghan National Army and Task Force Saber air-assaulted onto landing zone Shetland July 19 during Operation Saray Has. The landing zone is located in a large meadow near the top of a mountain in Nuristan. Local Afghans use the area as a grazing pasture for livestock, while Taliban insurgents often use it to stage attacks against Task Force Saber.

 

Afghan Fried Chicken

Let’s explore some important issues, namely the availability of fried chicken worldwide. Thankfully, Kabul provides. Via Dr. Williams:

Clean and tasty? Sounds intriguing.

Here’s a close-up, via jcraven:

Can anyone provide a review of the food? And I don’t mean of the Afghan Fried Chicken in Newark, New Jersey. The security situation there is just too bad.

And if anyone has been to Tajik Fried Chicken in Dushanbe, please offer your thoughts.

 

Obama Wins Afghan Primary

And Hillary wins Somalia. Well, they would if those countries could vote in the Democrat primary. The Senlis Council has conducted a sorta-survey in the parts of those countries that it could and came up with these preferences:

Don’t worry Senator Clinton. You win Somalia:

Poor Senator McCain. Don’t they know he’s a maverick? (Or maybe they looked that term up and found out that it is a term for a cow that runs away. Nobody likes a runaway cow). To be fair, he would likely take Albania, Mongolia and southern Sudan.

Read all about it here.

 

Father of Yoshi, PhD

I was searching for information on Nabi Misdaq, the author of Afghanistan: Political Frailty and Foreign Interference when I came across his rather interesting son. Misdaq is a British-trained anthropologist from Paktia province who was the head of BBC Pashto for about 20 years. I found that out with a quick google search, but I also came across someone called “Y. Misdaq AKA Yoshi.” I thought “huh?”

I turns out that Dr. Misdaq’s son is an Afghan-British musician and multimedia artist (according to wikipedia). A review of his 2004 album had this to say:

“Yoshi comes from a world where Sergio Leone, the RZA, anti-establishment politics, Middle Eastern strife, ambient Hip Hop, Akira Kurosawa and potent skunk exist in harmony…Managing to sound both ominous and chilled at the same time, this is obviously a deeply personal record about skewed perspectives, about looking at the UK from it’s marginal areas and wondering whether you’re a part of it.”

Pic of Y. Misdaq AKA Yoshi:

Misdaq, J.R. has published a book title Pieces of a Paki which you can see him talk about in a video here. The cover is plain white with a badly drawn figure in the middle. A voice off to the side says  “You’re a Paki!” The figure says “No, I’m not!” The reply is “Yes, you are!”

You can listen to “Yusuf” Misdaq’s music on his myspace page.

Elsewhere you can visit his personal website and an arts website he runs called Nefisa.

I like that Yoshi’s book is £6.00 and Dr. Misdaq’s book is $160. Damn the academic press business.

 

Afghanistan’s Sikhs

Barnett Rubin mentioned a Canadian Army Intel Major who served in Kandahar as a reservist in a recent blog entry. His “real” job is as a Vancouver police detective in British Columbia.

Harjit Sajjan, a police detective from Vancouver, British Columbia, served in military intelligence with the Canadian Land Forces in Kandahar. His work with the local population was key to halting the Taliban offensive in the summer of 2006.

Harjit Sajjan is Sikh name. This made me curious so I googled the name a found more references to the man. This is a pic of Sajjan along with a Brigadier-General in a Sikh temple in Canada (story here).

OK, fascinating. So? I just wanted to use this story as a segue into mentioning that Afghanistan has a native Sikh community, and has had one for it’s entire modern history. This BBC article says that they arrived with the Brits in the 19th century. However, I believe there was already a Sikh merchant presence in Kabul (I’m not 100% on this). The BBC article mentions all the problems Sikhs are facing today in Afghanistan, and as refugees (who isn’t?), and gives some background to Sikh society in Afghanistan. What is important to note is that a non-Muslim population has lived in Afghanistan for at least 150 years now and has, especially under the rule of Zahir Shah, been accorded a reasonable level of religious freedom. This obviously doesn’t do much to support the stereotype of the xenophobic Afghan Muslim zealot society that is offended by the mere presence of non-Muslims.

Though I don’t wish to whitewash the history entirely. In the early 1990s there were still 50,000 Hindus and Sikhs in Afghanistan. This is now down to about 1,000. Most fled in 1992 after after Hindu extremists destroyed the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, in India. There were retaliatory attacks across India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. But what is important to mention is that the attacks in Afghanistan were centered in Kabul, while Sikhs and Hindus in Kandahar and Jalalabad were not affected to the same degree. So; Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad. Which of these three is the least “conservative?” I say the attacks had more to do with the opportunism presented to the “mujahideen” in the then anarchic Kabul who attacked, robbed, raped and murdered for any or no reason whatsoever. Less religious motivation, more basic opportunism.

Old Steve McCurry pic: Afghan Sikh students.

More info on Afghan Sikhs:

• Afghan Hindus and Sikhs
• The Heartrending Story of Afghani Sikhs
• Sikhs and the Taliban
• Hindus and Sikhs in Kandahar