This is Not A Drill

by This Is Not a Drill- Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield (retail) (epub)

  The next day we left the centre of Kabul and headed south-east. I was in the middle car with Chris and Tom. No-one spoke, everyone was focused on the road ahead. Routine trip to Camp 87 or not, it was still a dangerous journey. Mr Nazari was still fresh in my mind so I paid close attention to Tom.

  ‘Blitzkrieg’ reigning supreme.

  Blitzkrieg lying in wait … the owl

  never knew what hit him.

  ‘Fantasy Island’, Sakhalin, Russia 2006 … spot the ex-con.

  ‘No Fighting’ sign.

  A well test, flaring in full swing.

  Training centre with Calvin the ex-boxer; he can push his nose into his eye socket.

  Erwin—not a rig in sight.

  Dad in 1960; what goes up …

  El Adem, the Libyan desert, 1964.

  Death or even worse!

  Thirty years’ worth of damage to Bob the driller’s hands.

  The billboard that says it all.

  No room service, no minibar, no mint on the pillow.

  How to buy your fuel in Kabul; make sure you pay before you pump.

  Over ten million people live in a country the size of Texas.

  One of Kabul’s prettier boulevards.

  A little man in the fight for his life.

  An opium field, Afghanistan.

  Wherever you want to go in Kabul, it’s important to depart early in the morning. Those of us who complain about ‘peak hour’ have not seen Kabul traffic. There are no traffic lights. There are traffic cops, though, but don’t pay any attention to them, as they are quite keen on waving you into the path of a semitrailer full of bridge parts.

  The chaos and dense brown haze slowly gave way to clean crisp air. The new road we sped down cut a black line straight through the middle of massive snow-capped mountain ranges, leading us into the Panshir valley and on to Gardez. The predominant colour changed from light brown to green, and beautiful grassy hillsides lit up my window. Farmers dodged mines to plant opium, their land still pepperpotted by gun emplacements or the occasional howitzer or burned-out Russian tank with its turret still pointing towards a long-gone enemy. They were far too busy cultivating opium to fuck about with the remains of another foreign invader.

  Twenty-eight of Afghanistan’s thirty-two provinces cultivate massive amounts of opium—89 per cent of global production or more than four thousand metric tons that year. The farmers used to grow raisins, saffron and pomegranate for its oil, which was exported for use in the cosmetic industry, but there is too much money in drugs. Each province has a warlord, some of whom, I am told, are payrolled by the CIA as anti-Taliban allies. The regional warlords command militants numbering seven hundred thousand men.

  Is anything going to change in Afghanistan? The Afghans are extremely long-suffering, which is why they’ve been able to survive so much. Perhaps that is why the country has not changed faster despite the foreign aid dollars. To the Afghan, we are just another occupying power. Having said that, the current, albeit undermined, Karzai Government appear to be giving Afghanistan a temporary artificial boost in development. But for how long? Compared to the stale developmental limbo it experienced under the Soviets in 1979–88, the minor development under the Afghan Communists in 1989–92, the fearsome civil war under the Mujahadeen in 1992–96, then the horrific oppression of the Taliban years 1996–2001, now it’s new and improved, with minty fresh faecal matter and far too many guys with guns looking to make a fast dollar. Outside Kabul, Karzai is mercilessly nicknamed ‘the mayor of Kabul’. He’s trying to change the drug trade with the introduction of the ‘Afghan Irradiation Force’ who are ‘fighting the drug war’ in the provinces; that’s a bit like trying to teach a monkey how to perform brain surgery with a pipe wrench.

  But the Irradiation Force has been put to good use on a few occasions. Such as when one farmer was having problems with his bull and couldn’t plough his fields, so he placed an anonymous call to the Irradiation Force telling them the location of a huge, freshly sown crop. They arrived with brand new farming equipment and ploughed the shit out of everything in the area looking for opium seeds. So the new system of Western-style democracy has only brought an organised framework to old corruption. And besides, some say the biggest drug dealer in the country is the president’s brother, with the second biggest being the deputy minister of the interior. It’s just too big and too profitable to stop, no matter how benevolent the next dictator may be or how powerful the next liberating superpower is.

  All this bounced about in my brain box as we bounced past the huge razor-wired gates of Camp 87.

  ‘How was your run in?’ asked Don Rector, the man in charge at 87, as he shook my hand.

  ‘Just fine, Don,’ I replied and smiled, trying not to notice the smorgasbord of weapons casually decorating his office.

  ‘Hell, just last week someone took a shot at me.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘Three rounds entered my vehicle from two shooters, one was on a rooftop, the other was dug in level with the road.’

  Don is in his sixties and is probably fitter than me. He is tall, broad and looks every part the veteran he is. He has an impressive military background, and three sons all serving with US forces in other parts of the world. He explained how the system works. His company protects the guys who are rebuilding the roads. His men engage the Taliban in fire fights on average twice a week. They regularly find IEDs planted on or near the new roads. So in order to help Afghanistan’s infrastructure take hold through new communications, roads, bridges and construction, you need all these guys with guns to stop the Taliban from killing all the engineers and workers who are building it all.

  A metal bucket full of coiled up .50-calibre belt ammo sat by the door. I asked Don how often he uses it. ‘Well, now and again they shoot at the camp, so I grab my bucket and head up to the roof,’ he said casually. ‘The fifty puts a stop to just about anything.’

  ‘Oh right,’ I smiled, thinking this man would be a pensioner at home.

  He saw me eyeballing a bent RPG warhead sitting on the floor near my chair. ‘Oh that reminds me, I must get rid of that.’ He picked up the big green rocket and put it down on his desk.

  The radio on Don’s desk crackled to life and soon I was shaking his hand again, saying bye bye and hoping no-one was going to stitch up our unarmoured car on the way back to Kabul.

  It’s impossible not to be impressed by Afghanistan’s rugged beauty, not to mention the Afghans themselves and their determination to get on with their lives despite their daily suffering and adversity, and what appears to be only the slimmest chance of finding peace. Ironically, this is one of their most enduring characteristics, as the Afghan culture reinforces the ideal of stoicism and obstinacy in the face of hardship. That must get frustrating for all these well-intentioned NGOs who want to help by implementing change.

  The Panshir Valley is beautiful. The Soviets tried nine times to capture it, but it remained too strong. Now it’s the one part of Afghanistan that has the glimmer of a new life shining in its mountain streams. There is food in the roadside market stalls, and the kids are wearing smiles as they tear arse up and down the road. Everywhere else ethnic conflicts flare up enough to keep people fearful and indoors.

  The drive back was incident-free, apart from one road block where we had to stop as some rocks had fallen onto the road from an overhanging cliff. Everyone had their fingers on triggers and shifted nervously in their seats, scanning for a threat. I noticed a giant old billboard by the road. Left over from the Soviet occupation, it depicted two hands, one full of opium, the other full of money, and on the opposite side figures handing over a rocket. It was the international sign for ‘We’ll give you drugs and money for stinger missiles’. The stinger turned the tide of the war, and the Afghans shot down hundreds of Soviet Hind gunships with that simple shoulder-fired weapons system.

  The boys dropped me off outside my hotel. I walked through the obligatory metal detector that beeped loudly. I have walked through metal detecto
rs on my way through every door in the country. They almost always beep, but no-one cares; if the detector didn’t beep, I’d be asked, ‘Where’s your firearm?’ Back in my room I had a shower. I felt dirty, but still, the amount of brown muck that came off my body was surprising, as was the result of blowing my nose. I wrapped a towel round my waist and opened the balcony door.

  It was already dark outside. Kabul lay directly below me, thousands of headlights and horns jostled through the dust in the fight to end another day. The bottle of Macallan on my desk looked at me and said ‘I can read your mind’, so I poured a big one, straight up, no ice, there wasn’t any. The single malt bit into my mouth and I savoured the heat of its slide into my belly. The rich taste made me homesick. I picked up the phone to call Clare, but she was still at work. I looked at my watch; I’d usually be enjoying a whisky with my friends Sally and Simon in their nice happy safe Sydney garden. The gentle sound of small-arms fire broke my moment and slammed the reality of where I was back in my face like an angry slap.

  I turned off the light and closed the curtains; it would be just my luck to catch a stray round while necking a scotch in my hotel room, especially after spending the day as a bullet magnet on the road to Gardez. The young spandi boy’s face flashed into my mind. He was probably dead. It was obvious he’d suffered since birth. You recognise that unmistakable look, all of humanity’s pain resides in that look.

  It’s hard sometimes to get to grips with what’s happening here—is it just one giant power struggle to gain control of the region? Oil is the lifeblood of our modern world, and Afghanistan is becoming more and more important in the global struggle to get and move oil as we slowly, inevitably, and at any human or environmental cost, struggle to find more.

  For now the only thing everyone appears to agree on is how bad the Taliban are. Sorry, I can’t. It’s just too hard to go through the huge pile of scribbled notes and things I’ve written on pizza box lids and cocktail napkins, hours of garbled recorded conversation with Afghans and expats who all end up sounding like Col Gaddafi on speed, just to punch out three quotes on what a sack of complete thundercunts the Taliban are.

  In Afghanistan the war machine is stretched to its limit, like it is everywhere else in the Middle East. So the time will come when the job of soldiering is contracted out. It’s happening now, soldiering to protect future oil, as well as liberating Afghans and Iraqis from tyranny—it’s that simple. They call it ‘security of supply’.

  The numbers involved are mind-boggling; the United States has spent more than eighty-seven billion dollars conducting the war in Iraq alone, and probably the same amount on petrol, domestic beer and acne medication. Talk to the UN people and they will tell you that less than half that amount would provide clean water, good food, sanitation and education to every individual on the planet who needed it. Meanwhile we sit back in our new BMWs and wonder why there are terrorists.

  Afghanistan could be more important to global oil supply than even Saudi Arabia. In 1997 ‘BBC News’ reported that the American–Saudi oil consortium UNOCAL tried to negotiate pipeline deals through Afghanistan from the Caspian Sea. The Caspian Sea is a California-sized body of salt water—the world’s largest landlocked body of water—that may sit on as much as two hundred billion barrels of oil, which would be 16 per cent of the Earth’s potential currently estimated oil reserves. At today’s prices, that could add up to three trillion dollars in oil.

  As the world’s quest for new oil reserves intensifies, so will the ‘war on terror’. And the use of PMCs will only become more prolific as well. Guys just like me have been full-bore drilling for a century, but keeping up with the insatiable demand is daunting; current production (the number of barrels pumped per day, BPD) is falling each year, while in thirty years we will need more than twice the oil we need today. Imagine what it will be like in thirty years. ‘Hell, I can remember when petrol was only two dollars a litre,’ you will say. You might have faith, or belief in our system of government, or even lots of money, but everyone will feel it on every level—the end of affordable fuel brought about by our own belligerent superpowers and, of course, the inconvenience of upsetting everyone’s weekend road trip plans in the West. But apart from that, it’s all just fine . . . What time is the next appalling reality TV show on?

  Afghan TV needs a show called ‘Who Wants To Be a Normal Person?’ followed by ‘Survivor: Kabul’, then another riveting re-run of ‘Mass Murder She Wrote’. Can you imagine breakfast TV, with your appropriately jovial and upbeat presenters faking smiles and doing the daily ‘faecal matter’ count and car bomb traffic updates? Interviewing celebrity-obsessed Western visitors, and crossing to a guy who will show you how to disarm a landmine, and sell you today’s special offer on the new ‘Kevlar second chance’ bulletproof vest. Just be one of the first ten callers and we’ll throw in a prosthetic limb of your choice.

  I had finished half the bottle, my head was swimming; it was like trying to understand free-to-air TV. The age of cheap oil is over; what we are doing is the long slide into post ‘peak oil’ propaganda. What kind of future will Clare and I leave for our children if we are lucky enough to have them? Within their lifetime it’s possible they could slowly see the world end up in a kind of permanent energy crisis, a ‘forever war’. If we’re not careful, hydrocarbons and warfare will go hand in hand to define human life.

  8 LEARN OR BURN

  I woke to the sound of an argument in the corridor outside my room. I did the worst thing imaginable and had a cigarette, sat at the formica desk, turned on my laptop and listened to the argument escalate into a fight as my computer booted up. The perfect background music to try and make sense of this place. The phone rang; today I was going to the hospital. In order to see the result of warfare, the most obvious place to go to is the hospital. There is no darker place in Kabul than a trauma ward.

  You might think it’s strange that I would go to a Kabul hospital, or that the hospital would have the time to waste with someone who to all intents and purposes was ‘visiting’. But, you see, as with all places around the world where conflict is tearing people apart and where there is a great deal of suffering, they welcome outsiders because they want you to witness what they are going through, they need you to witness what they are going through and to tell as many people as you can about it, because one more person knowing just might make a change for them. I was simply compelled to go.

  ‘We’ll be there in halfa,’ said Tom. I put down the phone, showered, dressed and was side-stepping the ‘What? No firearm?’ metal detector half an hour later.

  The main hospital in Kabul is operated by ‘Emergency’, an Italian organisation. The organisation has three hospitals in Afghanistan—in Kabul, Panshir and Lashkar Gah—as well as twenty-six clinics scattered throughout the country. On top of this, it also provides free healthcare to the three thousand-plus inmates of Kabul prison, and the orphanage where there are eight hundred kids aged from five to eighteen years old.

  The building itself was a welcome change; as one would expect it was spotlessly clean and white, and within the walls in the centre was a beautiful garden with benches and rows of flowers. There to greet me was Dr Marco Garatti, an immediately likable man. He shook my hand and offered me tea. I could see he was tired and I asked if I should come back another day.

  ‘Oh no, I’m fine,’ he said, smiling. ‘I was up all night in surgery, we had five patients come in, all with penetrating trauma.’ He flopped down on a sofa next to his office. ‘Just another day in Kabul,’ he added, then scratched his greying beard and offered me a cookie.

  Having already been in Kabul for two years with his wife, Dr Garatti was somehow managing to make a difference against a never-ending stream of civilian casualties, about 350 every month. He seemed to have an inexhaustible energy for his patients and staff. I felt guilty for using up his time, that would otherwise no doubt have been spent sleeping. He politely explained how much penetrating trauma is inflicted on his patients, fr
om car accidents to mines and other unexploded ordnance. Three of the five individuals he and his staff spent the night trying to save were children who had triggered mines. On the road to Gardez the previous day we had driven past Kuchi farmers carefully ploughing in the hope that they didn’t go bang. There are an estimated ten million mines buried under Afghan soil, and to my utter dismay fresh mines are still being buried by ‘Area Commanders’ (warlords) in the provinces. How does one hope to try and stop all this carnage?

  Dr Garatti is superhumanly optimistic, and in his position I guess you have to be. ‘I have six beds in “intensive care”, and we try to keep a patient’s stay in that bed down to three days,’ he explained, frowning into his tea. ‘In a Western hospital you would be there for as long as you needed, but here we have to try and move them back home. We train the family to take care of the patient, we have to because there is always another person who needs the bed.’ He put his cup carefully back on the saucer, but the tea still spilled a little as his hand was shaking. He sat forward, rubbing his hands over his eyes.

  I reached for my cigarettes in the silence, a knee-jerk reaction to feeling unable to say something positive. The packet was in my hand and Dr Garatti looked up. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I apologised and put them away.

  ‘By all means, let’s go outside, I’ll have one too,’ he said and smiled.

  I think short of jumping up on his coffee table and taking a crap, not much offends Dr Garatti. He produced his own smokes and we walked down through the centre of the courtyard garden. Here is a man who has devoted all his time and energy into saving lives that should never have been in jeopardy. His finger is stuck in the dyke, stopping the flow of blood from the Afghan soil. But he is under the gun.