Free Range International

Editors Note:  In this post Keith Berkoben and Amy Sun from the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT report  on the Fab Fi network in Jalalabad. These are cross posted on the Jalalabad Fab Lab blog.  Keith is first up with great news on the continued growth of the fab fi mesh around Jalalabad City.  Twenty five nodes up and running simultaneously – pretty impressive.   Amy Sun follows with a solid demonstration of using keen insight, humor and classic leadership skills while working through language and cultural difficulties to do a little  problem solving.

KEITH BERKOBEN

When we first brought FabFi to Afghanistan we brought our own idea of the best solution. It looked something like the photo below. With a little training, our afghan friends figured out how to copy reflectors like the one in the photo and make links. That’s super cool and all, but you can’t always get nice plywood and wire mesh and acrylic and Shop Bot time when you want to make a link. Maybe it’s the middle of the night and the lab is closed. Maybe you spent all your money on a router and all you have left for a reflector is the junk in your back yard. That, dear world, is when you IMPROVISE:

Original FabFi solution for Jalalabad designed and built by the Fab Folks at MIT

Pictured below is a makeshift reflector constructed from pieces of board, wire, a plastic tub and, ironically enough, a couple of USAID vegetable oil cans that was made today by Hameed, Rahmat and their friend “Mr. Willy”. It is TOTALLY AWESOME, and EXACTLY what Fab is all about.

The boys at the Jalalabad Fab Lab came up with their own design to meet the growing demand created by the International Fab surge last September. As usual all surge participants who came from the US, South Africa, Iceland and Englad paid their own way. Somebody needs to sponsor these people.

For those of you who are suckers for numbers, the reflector links up just shy of -71dBm at about 1km, giving it a gain of somewhere between 5 and 6dBi. With a little tweaking and a true parabolic shape, it could easily be as powerful as the small FabFi pictured above (which is roughly 8-10dBi depending on materials)

25 simultaneous live nodes in Jalalabad. That's a new high. The map can't even keep up!

For me, the irony of the graphic above is particularly acute when one considers that an 18-month World Bank funded infrastructure project to bring internet connectivity to Afghanistan began more than SEVEN YEARS ago and only made its first international link this June. That project, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, is still far from being complete while FabLabbers are building useful infrastructure for pennies on the dollar out of their garbage.

Keith working on the first install on the water tower September 2009

AMY SUN

I haven’t been in Afghanistan since September, missing my January window of opportunity this year.  Fortunately, our Afghans have discovered Skype and the FabFi-GATR-internet has been sufficiently stable that I haven’t missed much.

Having Afghans with high speed internet and skype is pretty much like having TV (something else we don’t have by choice, like heat).  The intrepid FabFi team in Afghanistan (now exclusively Afghans) have been expanding at a quick pace and everyone wants to gab.   As long as the connection is up it seems at least one is online and wants to chat.  Some of it is utterly content-less and we patiently plod through with the idea that it’s good English practice.  Keith is fantastic at half-rolling out of bed in the morning for a couple hours of conversing – I’m just not socially presentable until there’s at least a couple cups of coffee in me.

Cool pic of the day from Jbad 4 Feb 2010. Local Kuchi women in a IDP camp making cow paddies. They sell the dried paddies by the sack load and it is normally used to cook nan (bread) because it burns hot and adds flavor. Sounds gross but hot out of the oven nan is delicious.

Previously on “That Afghan Show,”…

One night around 2300 Afghan time, our friends Hameed and Rahmat wanted to video skype with us but the city power isn’t on then.  So in the darkness they went to the hospital water tower and climbed the 5 stories to the tippy top and chatted with us from the windy roof of Jalalabad in the middle of the night.  We couldn’t see them so well since they were only lit by the light of their own laptop but they could see and hear us which made them silly happy.  I hope that gives readers a decent impression of “the security situation” – it’s not a war zone everywhere.  In some places, it’s like any other city with people that just wanna reach out and chat with their friends.

Logistically the FabFi mesh network is hampered by difficulties in obtaining routers in country.  This is completely my fault though I thought that I had verified that you could get these routers on my first trip.  But progress is occurring even though sometimes it’s hard to see.  We’ve discovered that the Afghan fab folk can get joint personal bank accounts at the Jbad branch of Kabul Bank which is backed by some German bank.  We’re able to wire transfer funds to and from each other.  Now, Afghans can wire us money to purchase routers which we ship to them.  In theory, anyway, next week we’re going to try to transfer a small sum to see how it goes.   It’s a sore point in our project because it takes local shopkeepers out of the loop and creates a large reliance on “order it from America”.

Amy Sun working out with the pig snout M4 last fall. With a little funding Amy and crew could make huge contributions helping Afghans connect to the modern world.

The drama these days is a brewing conflict over the key to the water tower at the public health hospital (PHH). Edited to fit your screen and time limits:

HAMEED:  Problem: Someone broke the old lock and installed another lock. We (Rahmat and Hameed) have no key to the water tower now. We are about to start working on another connection and may need to get to the tower.  Please tell Talwar or someone at the Fablab to give us a key to it. I can get to the top of the tower from another way without opening the lock. But it’d be handy for Rahmat.

RAHMAT: yes that is what we want. there are many people asking us for net connection. but we say them that you need routers and they just find it hard to find routers in afghanistan or pakistan

TALWAR (to Amy): Dear Amy sun I did not broken the lock Mr Dr. Shakoor change the lock he toled me Mr Talwar every one in every time going up to the tower we dont know these poeple if some one do something wrong in the tower are you resposible of that i toled him no i am resposible of myself therefor he changed the lock

AMY: I am not your mother (all of you), do not come crying to me when you can’t get along. Afghanistan has many difficulties in her future and you must become brothers and work together to build a working city and country you are proud of. This starts with communicating with each other especially for something so simple as a shared key to a shared resource. I can think of many possible solutions to the “who has a key” problem, can you? Talwar, Hameed, Rahmat – you are all intelligent grown men capable of figuring out what is the right thing to do. Do it.

TALWAR: Thanks Miss Amy sun form your direction that you gave to Mr Rahmat and Hameed your right your not our mother to solve our all problem we should tray to solve our problem by ourslefe and work friendly. bu i dont know why mr Hameed asked you for the Key he didnot asked me yet for the key, he did not asked in the hospital for the key. is the key is with you they are asking you for the key?

M: Just talked with Talwar and he told me he would leave the key with Dr. Shakoor, head doc, at hospital.

HAMEED: Regarding Talwar, we’ll try to work something out with him.

RAHMAT (to Amy): Yes you said very good things and I agree with.

RAHMAT (to Keith): but we have a small problem that is the key of water tower to which we have no access. the one we have put here has been broken by someone

KEITH: I understand that talwar has a key.  Has hameed gone to ask him for it?

RAHMAT: Not yet nowadays Hameed is busy with his exams and we will going to activate another new connection these days. We are not fighting we just want the fablab to be extended in Jalalabad

KEITH: Talwar is probably worried that he is losing control of something by giving you access. You must make him see how all of you will be better off by working together.

B: I called Dr. S. He is not budging on having a gate on the tower. He says the key is with him and not with Talwar. I told him that he has to make sure that Hameed can have access to this key when ever he needs it. If there is ever a problem he should call Dr. S. If that doesnt work, he should call me and I will call Dr. S. This is far from an optimal solution, but as Dr. S is unwilling to make copies of keys this seems to be the only option.

I explicitly told Dr.S that Talwar cannot be part of the key handout process. He agreed to this and said that anytime H or R call him he will give it to them directly.

RAHMAT: I , Hameed and one of fabfi users went to Dr.S directly and asked him to give us the key he told us that there are many security reasons that they don’t want to give the key to everyone and also told us that only Talwar will fix everything and also he was telling us that instead of internet the water tower and its water is very important.

TALWAR: i am not the director of hospital to be responsible of the hole hospital that every one coming to me and say give me the key of water tower. dear, hospital has there own director the key is with him every one can get from him not from me than why every make me blame.

We’re now entering the third week of this plot arc. It’s funny, but it’s not. This set of guys are our friends and some of the best hope we’ve seen. They’re intelligent, dedicated, trustworthy, and diligent. They know each other and have worked together to make and assemble reflectors and grow the project, and yet they’re stumbling here where there needs compromise and communication. <sigh> But of course, when and how would they have had opportunity to see this behavior in action?

Baba Tim:  Anyone who has spent time working with Afghans has a story similar to Amy’s tale above.  The take away point to these two posts is that there is nothing hard about doing COIN.  You just have to get out and do it…..it is that easy.  Once again I feel compelled to point out that all the good work being done by the Fab Folk is self funded.  They have reached the end of their resources and could use a little help.  Please take the time to stop by Amy Sun’s blog to donate what you can in support of  the Jalalabad Fab Lab.  The smoking fast internet we have all enjoyed for the past two years is about to go away forcing Team MIT to come up with a replacement.  Without some sort of funding their two years of work will go down the memory hole taking all the hope, dreams, and potential of the local children with it.

My morning email contained a heads up from Mullah John, who is home on R&R. 60 Minutes had broadcast a show on the American Special Forces last night and the segment was “disheartening,” to quote the good Mullah. After watching it I was left speechless – it was worse than “disheartening,” it was awful, and I mean everything about it was awful – from the questions asked by reporter Lara Logan, to the conduct of the “Quiet Professionals” both in training and in battle, the entire segment was awful and the story line non existent.  It is hard to know what to say when you see stuff like this, but not knowing what to say has never stopped me before, so here it goes….

The segment was called “The Quiet Professionals” which of course is a great name for an organization which invites 60 Minutes along for a two month embed. Hit the link above to see the piece, because I doubt anyone reading this blog caught it when it aired last night on CBS, famous for journalistic fraud from the good old days of Dan Rather. But there was no fraud in this segment, unless you count the whole segment as financial fraud… I mean two months of embedding and this is the result? Thirteen minutes of Lara flirting with SF dudes? As a commenter on the CBS website noted about Lara’s performance, “It’s like listening to a child explain black holes.”

Lara Logan CBS news chief foreign affairs correspondent

Of course the segment has all the annoying crap one associates with Special Forces – only use first names, wear sunglasses to “protect your identity,” and digitize all who do not have sunglasses on, as if the Taliban has an arm in America which is going to hunt these guys down some day. The Taliban do hunt down ANA Commandos in their home villages and kill them, but none of the ANA commandos have their faces digitized or identities hidden. Typical, but you get that from the “special folks.”  The 60 Minutes crew caught three shootings on film, which are all in the segment. The first was one of the SF team leader, who was shot during a raid by one of his Afghan troops. The second shooting was of an Afghan Commando, shooting himself in the foot during another raid. The final shooting was committed by a member of the SF team who shot two children sitting in the back of a vehicle, which was approaching a village where the rest of the team was “catching an important Taliban commander.”  He was shooting at an approaching vehicle with a suppressed weapon to warn it to stop… great thinking, but Lara didn’t seem very alarmed by how wrong this was, after all, the shooter was dreamy, over 6 foot tall, 200+ pounds and able to bench press twice his body weight!!!!!! But we’ll get to that and a recent shooting of an imam in Kabul last week later.

Lara was down east in Nangarhar Province last summer where she rolled out to a CNET project in an 8 MRAP convoy with the local PRT. What the hell are you going to find out rolling around on one of the three roads in Nangarhar which can support an MRAP? The fact that nine years into this mess, the PRT commander in Nangarhar still needs to drive around in an 8 MRAP convoy is the real news, not whatever CNET was up to that day. But I digress…..

Everything the “Quiet Professionals” did in this story was ridiculous, from shooting at targets down range while Afghans are standing right next to the targets, to screaming obscenities at them, calling them “fucktards,” and inflicting group punishment because they couldn’t master the “load, unload” drill, which I know from experience your average 11 year old can master in little under an hour of professional instruction. I could go through this piece, point by point, harping on quotes like wearing beards is “a mark of respect amongst the locals” – complete bullshit – but why bother? The piece speaks for itself, so let’s get back to this shooting business.

What should the guy have done when a truck load of males is approaching at “high speed?” He should have done what I do – walk out to the road with a big friendly wolf smile, hold up your hand, have them stop, and then tell them to sit tight until the Americans are done. It is that simple – the biggest weapon us Americans have in Afghanistan is a warm smile and the ability to at least say “Tsenga Ye?” (”How are you?” in Pashto). But you can’t automatically make those kinds of environmental calls unless you know the environment. And you can’t know the environment unless you are living in it 24/7.

Baba Tim, you ask, what if the truck is full of Taliban gun men? That’s what binoculars are for. Ignoring that lets say they pull up in a truck, and I’m standing right there with my flame stick at the ready – what are they going to do? How long does it take for them to unass the truck and present their weapons? How long does it take me to present mine? The SF guy clearly knew his business – you could see that on the range footage – and he has the drop on them. A truck full of bad guys is a target easily defeated by two riflemen who are in the open with weapons free and waiting for them within hand grenade range. That is not true if they stop at some distance away and deploy from the truck, which as I understand is the Taliban MO. But the truck didn’t do that – it just drove down the dirt road as fast as the dirt road allowed until the kids in the back started screaming and the crazy American popped out and started running towards them. The driver is not going to hear shots fired from a suppressed weapon, so until he sees something to make him stop the whole shooting thing seems a bit pointless.

There is one more aspect to this story which I find deeply disturbing as a military professional. The SF guy whacks a 14 year old kid dead center in the chest with his main battle rifle from less than 50 yards away, and when he runs up to the vehicle the kid pops up and starts giving him shit about it? What the hell kind of main battle rifle are we using these days? Don’t get me wrong, I was very pleased to see the child survived as was the guy who shot him and everyone else involved. But when you shoot someone in the chest with a military grade rifle then that someone is supposed to go down and stay down. Whatever cartridge, barrel length, and suppressor combination that team is using is obviously less than adequate. They should be carrying 7.62×51 mm rounds and weapons. If they can all press twice their body weight then they can handle two extra pounds of proper battle rifles and ammo. They also can probably handle the strain of carrying binoculars too – killing children is bad on morale especially when you could avoid shooting them using standard infantry techniques like making friend or foe determinations with said binoculars. Better yet they may want to consider slowing down enough to issue a proper raid order with brief backs and inspections. ….oh that’s right, these are “special” guys who have moved far beyond the standard “leg” tactics taught in Ranger school, sorry I forgot that part. You have to be a 10th degree ninja master to pull a two man covering element job by standing in the middle of the road day dreaming – us regular infantry guys just don’t know those advanced tactics.

Developing unconventional military tactical skills takes years of dedicated training coupled with mission focused outside the box thinking.

Which brings us to the latest bad news from Kabul, the shooting of an important imam, who was in his car with a bunch of his children when a convoy driving down Jalalabad road shot him dead. He reportedly failed to slow down when approaching the convoy which is the standard story you hear from ISAF every time they shoot up a car load of innocent civilians. I think the body count is well over 600 at this point and not one of these unfortunates did anything unusual by Afghan driving standards. You can read about that here although that news story claimed the imam was parked and stationary. That is just too hard to believe and the local Afghan military has been frantically trying to get their story out since this incident occurred and their facts sound much more plausible than the WaPo story.

Here is the thing – I can’t think of any incidence in which a suicide bomber blew himself up in Afghanistan with passengers in the vehicle. I also can’t think of a single incident in Afghanistan in which a military gunner successfully stopped a suicide bomber from driving into his convoy. This escalation of force was senseless. I can recall examples when gunners have been killed leaning out of their cupola to engage suicide VBIED drivers while the rest of their crew survived the explosion with no injuries. They would not have been killed had they ducked down inside their armored vehicle. I am as fond of brave fighting men as the next guy and I admire the courage those kids showed trying to protect their fellow soldiers. But the escalation of force tactics currently being used are stupid and should be changed immediately. What happened in Kabul is murder – you can not justify shooting a driver who has a car load of kids under any circumstance. We have too much history here and should know what a VBIED looks like – this shooting is just as stupid as the shootings involving Italians in Herat last summer, and the Blackwater guys in Kabul last spring.

You know what the difference is between the Blackwater contractors and the various Army folks who shot unarmed people? The Balckwater guys are facing 2 murder raps each – which they should – the Army people answer to their chain of command – which they should too – because that is the way military operations are supposed to work, when you screw up and kill innocents you deal with it using established procedure. When us contractors screw up we answer to the host nation which makes us not only slow on the trigger but much more sensitive to our surroundings.

Every time you read a story in the press about contractors the “fact” that, ‘they run around above the law and do not have to conform to rules like the military’ is a central theme. In Afghanistan that bit of conventional wisdom is 180 degrees out from current ground truth. I am licensed to carry guns in Afghanistan by the Afghan government and am accountable to them anytime I use one of my weapons. Had I shot people like the SF guys in the news story or like the gunner in Kabul last week, I would spend the rest of my days in the Pul-e-Charki prison. That is how these things work here on planet earth, despite what you might hear in the international press about armed contractors.

When you live behind walls everything on the other side of those walls is a threat. When you isolate your forces from the population you are supposed to “protect,” then your forces have no ability to distinguish friend from foe, threat from normal routine, the good from the bad. Gen McChrystal can gob on all he wants about the importance of “COIN” and, “getting to know the people” blah blah blah…. it doesn’t matter because he sets the operational rules here, and under his rules no conventional American troops can leave a FOB unless they have at least four MRAPS and 16 riflemen. How are you supposed to, “protect the people” if you can only roll around in large road-bound convoys? How can you, “protect the people” if every night all your people have to be back on the big box FOB’s eating ice cream and pecan pie?

These SF guys are supposed to be the ones who know how to operate outside the big bases with the local population, but did you notice where they live? On a big box FOB, isolated and removed from their Afghan charges – which was obvious because none of them spoke a word of Dari or Pashto. My children can get through formal greetings in both Pashto and Dari and they were here just a few months – it’s just not that hard to learn these things when you live in the local environment. Those SF teams should be out here free ranging with guys like The Bot, Mullah John, Panjiwai Tim and myself. They are good troops being poorly served by commanders who keep them isolated and removed from the people they are supposed to be protecting. They will never be able to gain the situational awareness required to do real COIN if they remain confined to the Big Box FOBs. That is the real story and as usual the MSM missed it.

Jalalabad finally has some winter weather with much needed rain.  The mountains surrounding the Kabul River plain have little snow; the weather has been unseasonably mild and dry thus far this winter.  A dry winter is a real disaster in a parched country, which relies so heavily on small scale farms to feed its people.  [...]

The attack on Kabul yesterday was yet another demonstration of how inept the Taliban are at the planning and execution of a simple raid.  The attack has been described in the press as “audacious” and “brazen” which is true.  All their attacks in downtown Kabul are conceptually bold military moves; but they accomplish nothing.  A [...]

Friday started with a disturbing report – a fuel tanker attack on the Jalalabad side of the Duranta Dam tunnel.  Ambush teams operating less than a mile from the Taj!  Not good news, so after the incident scene cleared out we went for a look-see.
A trucker had hit an old leaky fuel truck and the [...]

The string of failures starting with the Jihadi attack on Fort Hood by an American Army Major, followed by the fiasco of incompetence demonstrated by multiple agencies in the Christmas Day undie bomber attempt, followed by the CIA FOB Chapman attack were huge strikes.  Three strikes, but nobody is out because that is the nature [...]

It is proving impossible to get a read on “the Afghan street” since our Commander in Chief articulated the new set of tactics for Afghanistan at his speech at West Point.  It is clear the dynamics on the ground have changed and that this change is being driven by the fact that our great communicator [...]

I’m back after a month off to find things have changed very little on the Afghan street.  Nobody here seems to believe we are going anywhere in 18 months yet everyone I talk with thinks the international military effort is entering its final stage. I have been on the road for most of the week [...]

Just in time to put a damper on your holiday spending comes this helpful article from the White House I mean McClatchy news service designed to prepare Americans for the impending raid on our hard earned money.  Questions arise over how to pay for Afghanistan war is the name of the article and as one [...]

More interesting news is coming out of Kabul as the drive-by media continues its impressive efforts at covering for or trying to explain our Commander in Chief’s continuing dithering on what to do about Afghanistan.  His ham-fisted attempt at moving President Karzai out of the way has ended in abject failure straining relations with the [...]