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Road to Khost Village 2 hours from Khost June 2005	images + text copyright 2005
I don't know the name of the river, but the the village name translates as Round Oak. You wouldn't guess from the photograph, but oaks do grow around here and there's a big old one on the other side of town. The boys (Munir - Sayara trainer, Hazrat Bashar and Mali Khan - Khost University students) are washing off some of the powdery dust that covers the road and gets inside every bit of you. A bit up river from here is one of the more depressing sights I've seen - a wide, dry riverbed piled high with timber destined for the wood stoves of Kabul. Over the harsh winter we used wood-burning bukharis to heat our house in Kabul, so no innocence here. Some of it comes from over the border in Pakistan but a fair amount comes from these hills. The hills are controlled by different villages/tribal groups and wood is one of the few resources they have. They also have a lot of AK47s, so you probably want to keep hands off what's not yours. The only flights to Khost are US military, so anyone else has to drive. It's not the safest of roads - out of Kabul it heads south through Logar, Gardez, Paktya and then east into Khost. Gardez and Paktya are the kind of places that frequently make it into the security reports. We stopped at Gardez for an early lunch (about 3 hours drive from Kabul) and as always, kebaab was on the menu. I was kitted up in Afghan clothes and it wasn't until I opened my mouth that the restaurant guys realised there was a kafir in the house. I could have just shut up, but I wanted to know how to ask for green tea in Pashto. Just in case you're ever travelling in Pashtun areas of Afghanistan - it's roughly 'shin chai'. I tried explaining that I wasn't American, but Munir seemed to think that was a futile exercise - anyone whose a foreigner in these parts is deemed American. Later on Munir decided it was better to say I was Malaysian rather than try to explain Australian. Not because this isn't far from where the SAS 'Redback' patrol got themselves in too deep and killed a bunch of villagers, more because people here vaguely know that Malaysia is a Muslim country but they don't know enough about it to know what a Malaysian might look or sound like. The road to Khost generally sucks. It sucks more in winter when snow and mud makes it a 12-14 hour journey from Kabul, in the dry of early summer it took us about 6 hours. A lot of that six hours is spent eating dust and rattling through potholes. Just outside of Gardez the US base is built right in the middle of the road and so there's a 10 km detour along a small track that all the cars and trucks and buses have to negotiate to get back on the road at the other end of the base. I guess they did it deliberately to stop carloads of Talibs hooning into Gardez from the mountains. But it just shits everyone off. The police have numerous checkpoints on the road, but the locals around Khost prefer to provide their own security. A couple of days after getting to Khost I went for dinner to a village in the Tannay district, about 20kms south of Khost city. The dinner was part of a ceremony to thank Allah for healing an old man in the family. The ceremony entails a bunch of mullahs reciting the entire Holy Qoran. It starts around sunset but as no-one wants to stay up too late, the mullahs each take a section and read out it out at the same time. Dinner was spectacular - probably the best local food I've had here - and then we piled into another car to drive to Assad Tannay's house (a student) where we were to sleep. As I jumped in the front seat something poked me in the ribs - another AK47. A guy sat in the back of the pickup with his AK ready to shoot. Whatever UNAMA says in their media briefings, the disarmament process has a long way to go here. At the time I was quite happy they still have their weapons. I'm not really one for guns, but I did pick up one of the AKs at Assad's house - the first time I've held a gun here. Of course Munir - like most people here - knows the basics on AK usage and gave me a quick tute in safety, single shot and automatic modes. But he doesn't like them - they've caused far too many problems here. But it's something the Afghans have in common with the Americans. Below: roadbuilding; at the pass leading into Paktya; our taxi; Assad's family garden - Assad is on the far right.