A City in the Desert

I'm back in Afghanistan for my third month-long embed in nineteen months. When I visited Helmand province in the summer of 2008, Camp Bastion was a small forward staging base in the middle of the most miserable and inhospitable desert I could ever imagine.  The Afghans call the area "the desert of death."  Leave it to the military to see that as a good place to build a city larger than my hometown.

Back in 2008, one could walk from one end of the base to the other in a few minutes, and the most exciting reason to visit was the fact that there were cold showers (in tents) and a field hospital (in tents) that saved the lives of many men injured on the front lines.

Last year when I returned, the base had seen incredible growth with the addition of Camp Leatherneck - a tent-city erected to house thousands of incoming Marines.

The trend has continued in the six months since that visit - today, the combined camps Bastion and Leatherneck span thousands of acres and it takes nearly half an hour to drive from one end to the other.  The headquarters building actually has a lawn - the only living green for probably a hundred miles. There is a thai restaurant, a Pizza hut, a coffee house and an Afghan-run everything store called the "Smily Suppling and Survice Company."  

Outside the gate, a village has sprung up where the thousands of afghan workers who do most of the menial labor at the base (building, cleaning, etc.) sleep in hastily erected tents. Today, the bases house nearly 20,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.  The airfield, aside from being one of the busiest military airfields in the world, now even hosts commercial flights.  This now-sprawling base is ground-zero for the "Afghan Surge" and the capital of what some are now calling "Marinestan."

All this growth makes me wonder.  What will this area look like in ten years?  Will the "camp followers" outside the gate take up permanent residence?  Maybe someone will decide to build a beach resort.  There's definitely no shortage of sun and sand.  And parking.  Lots of room for parking. 

They're going to have to do something about that "desert of death" designation, though.  Not exactly good marketing. <

I'll be traveling the country with the DEA and Special operations for the next month.  Stay tuned.