ABA Journal - Law News Now

Well I headed out West and got stuck for a few days. I was in Herat. Herat is supposed to be a western style city and it is safer than other places in Afghanistan but still leaves a lot. The Italians run the PRT so there's plenty of liquor. In fact they have wine for lunch and dinner for free! Their PX even has Jack Daniels bottles for sale. Hmmm. Not too bad a spot to get stuck in. There was a rocket attack on the airport though so it's never a safe place. Of course the Taliban can't hit anything. They just shoot and scoot.

The Italian PRT is actually in the heart of downtown as you can see from the pictures. It's not far from the famous four minarets which frame the city center. They were built in the 1300's or so. As you can see there are some western style villas but a lot of poverty. There's supposed to be a lot of crime – which is the real danger to citizens as opposed to the Taliban. If you get too rich, you get kidnapped or your kids get kidnapped. They say that the Iranians are also involved in the crime. It's only about 30 miles from the border or so.

We had to fly back through another "city" Qal-i-Now which is also in the western part of the country, Badghis province. It's not much of a city from what I could see. It is set in the middle of these strange hills. The geology is fascinating. I couldn't see how we were going to land in the middle of them. We had to come in between the hills as you can see from the pics. It gets kind of bumpy down there.

The airstrip is on the edge of the town but it has no boundaries – it is part of the town itself. People live right on it and kids play on it and motorbikes cross it to get to other areas. There's no security to speak of. They say it is best to buzz it on the first go around to scare away the goats. I wouldn't want to hit one on landing. We didn't do that – and after seeing how close we were to the surrounding hills, I was quite grateful.

There's some trashed out soviet equipment (tank and APCs) on the side of the runway and two seriously wrecked airplanes. Not a good sight to give comfort. You can see the kids at the end of the runway.

They ran after our plane waving us good bye! This is really the middle of nowhere and the Spanish have a PRT there. I'll have to go visit them soon. There's been quite a renewed fight though up around there. The Spanish lost two soldiers a few weeks ago to an IED. I don't like IEDs – especially suicide ones. We just lost a U.S. soldier here in Kabul today to another suicide IED and a U.S. agricultural advisor as well a few days ago. Not too much you can do to stop one of those crazies.

IAE, I finally made it back to good old Kabul. Hope to get out to a US PRT soon. Of course they're in the most dangerous areas of the country. Last week one of my guys visiting one actually took some fire in his helicopter. Fun, fun!!

Hope to see everyone soon!

Sterling

All photos courtesy of Sterling DeRamus.