Wednesday started with a visit to the provincial governor's office, where the deputy governor received us. He was very courteous at first, but towards the end of our meeting he showed his true nature. He made jokes about the PRT sleeping all day, not confronting the enemy and not doing any reconstruction either, and laughed loudly. The deputy governor is pashtun, and it would probably not have been a good idea to say or do something against his idea of pashtunwali. So I limited my response to regretting his view and assuring him that we at the PRT are doing our best with the resources we have, and that we are risking our lives for peace in Afghanistan. My IP was under a lot of pressure towards the end of the meeting and did not perform too well. I'll have to mention this in some later IP report about him. The Swedish political advisor from PRT staff was there too, and she stayed in town for some other meetings when we left.
In the afternoon two generals and a major from the Finnish Defence Command paid us a visit. The gentlemen seemed relaxed and happy, unlike the previous VIP delegation from Finland. Just as they arrived, there was news about an incident in the north-western parts of the PRT AOR. The tragic turn of events made the visit a little shorter than planned, but the feedback we got was good. The Chief of Operations told us not to worry too much about the news headlines that we see in Finnish media - the support for our troops back home is really better than headlines suggest.
Later in the evening we learnt that one of the PRT IP's had died in the attack. Two of our IP's knew him personally, and of course they had to leave to see his family. But before they left, our remaining two interpreters came to see me, saying that they wanted to go to MeS too, because the chief IP had told them to. I said that it was a decision that the "chief IP", of IP coordinator, could not make, but they insisted that it was approved by the CO. "You have to be more flexible", one said, with tears in his eyes. It's a good thing that I didn't say out loud what I thought of him, his demands for flexibility and of my options of being flexible at that time. What could I do? I would have to cancel all operations for tomorrow and wait for the poor, poor boys to return. I hope they finally grow up after this - this is what they signed up for when they chose to become ISAF interpreters. And this is what we pay them for, almost three times more than a general in the ANA. The IP's are the true VIP's here, or at least they seem to think they are.
Difficult decisions !
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