Afghanistan from 35,000 feet
Monday 7th September, 2009
I’ve just got home after a month in Thailand. What a culture shock. There’s so much to say. I want to tell you about the sharks I swam with, water buffalo I rode, people I met, thoughts I had, rather profound blessing I received from a Buddhist monk, and of course the Oriental Hotel. It will come,. But as a prelude I have to mention flying home over Afghanistan yesterday. The plane seemed so low because it was easy to pick out the scorched earth, barren terrain and isolated mud villages. Mazar e Sharif, Kandahar, below, it is a bleak lunar landscape, a world that time has forgotten. How the West can ever combat their enemy in that totally foreign, unrelenting world beggars belief. We will just get swallowed up into the heat, dust and endless mountains. It was a shock to watch it unfold beneath us, those towns and villages we’ve been reading about for months in war reports suddenly laid out 35,000 feet down below our aircraft as we travelled back from South East Asia into the West. Has President Obama even been there yet, I can’t remember, but this landscape looks as forbidding as the jungles of Vietnam in the 60′s and one fears the war can only go the same way.