Free Range International

Last night I was coming back from the Lebanese Restaurant located in the Wazar Akbar Khan section of Kabul.   Back in the day it had a full bar and open patio with large crowds of expat customers, but not these days.   Now you have to walk through a long blast proof hallway through [...]

We are finishing up our projects and preparing to call it a war. This year has been our biggest success to date; operating in over 20 Provinces all of them very kinetic and getting every project we started finished on schedule and on budget.   I now routinely move in Ghost Team mode throughout [...]

A few hours ago, I was notified that the areas around ISAF HQ, the US Embassy, etc. had come under major attack.   Boy, they weren’t kidding.   That was four hours ago, and things are still going off.   This is definitely the worst fighting to hit Kabul since the war began.   It’s [...]

Well, the day after E2 posted the droid post, a new report by Afghan “experts” was released.   It is a complete crock, which couples blindingly obvious facts to a set of BS recommendations that are so wrong they can easily be dismissed by reasonably intelligent eight year old children (but not our betters in [...]

Over on the excellent Afghanistan blog, Ghosts of Alexander, Christian Bleuer has re-posted a piece written by an anonymous friend of his entitled, How to be an Afghan Expert. It’s a 12-point tutorial on how to portray yourself as an Afghanistan expert in order to land yourself a $1,000/day salary telling people what they want [...]

Last week I wrote about how ordinary Afghans have much to fear from the villains when traveling on the highways and roads in this country.   This week, I’d like to address one of the biggest threats to those of us in the Kabul expat community: the Afghan government security apparatus.   I was inspired [...]

I meant to get this post up sooner, but a 48-hour bout with the flu left my brain too cooked to come up with any sort of cogent analysis regarding the assassination of Karzai ally Jan Mohammad Khan (JMK).   To tell you the truth, I don’t have one theory on whose behind the killing [...]

With most of the world’s attention focused unfolding events in the Mideast now is a good time to shed some light on the current ground-truth in Afghanistan.  Sami the Finn is always a good place to start and he provides interesting perspective on the suicide bombing at Kabul’s at  the Finest supermarket this [...]

One of the Chim Chims’ has asked to put up a guest post on a topic near and dear to both our hearts for different reasons:  the continuing efforts of the New York Times to kill a program I doubt was that big of a deal to begin with.  Chim Chim is a [...]

A few weeks back home were a blessing and also a time to partake in my favorite thing to do which is doing nothing.  I’m an expert.  While I was away a few articles caught my attention and they serve as a useful point of departure to evaluate where we are at the [...]