Thanks to Mark T. Fliegauf who tracked me down and kept on reminding me that i had said i would do the interview which took him a good two months – that is dedication.

so here the piece

Mohammadullah Gul Lalai: Mr Kandahar (right) and one of his students in the Ariana gym Kandahar city

There are some things you should not do in Kandahar: you should not spend too much time on the street; you should not tell people when you are going out, or where you are going, up to the moment when you are actually leaving the door; you should not go to the same place or person regularly; you should not hang around areas with a random group of people you do not know. The list goes on. Kandahar is half-way submerged in war – but it’s a new war, one that does not necessarily take place before your eyes.

In the past few years, Kandahar has changed. The battle for Kandahar is coming, if one is to believe Stanley McChrystal. I remember walking on the street with friends, getting ice cream in the summer and spending fridays at the river in Arghandab just outside the city. One thing I remember particularly well is when we went to the local gym. All of these things might kill you today.

A year and a half ago, I would go out at night, huddle up with two other people on a motorcycle or walk through the back alleys to one of Kandahar’s gyms. When I first told a friend of mine living outside Afghanistan about my evening entertainment he didn’t believe me: “You’re joking, right? They have gyms down there?” He laughed.

Yes they do, dozens of them, crammed down in basements and backrooms all over town. You can find guys pumping iron on gym equipment that can compete with most standard gyms in Western Europe and America — minus the electricity from time to time.

For people who haven’t spent time in southern Afghanistan, this might seem strange, but gyms make perfect sense, as do hair products and perfume.

As with other things in Afghanistan, a paradox lies at the bottom of this: there seems to be no middle way in Kandahar. You want to be young or you want to be old, but no one wants to age. Many of my Afghan friends colour their hair to get rid of the grey and white streaks, but some consciously bring them to the front for people to see. Many complain about their weight, the belly that has been growing for the past few years, and sometimes they start doing something about it.

The gyms are packed in the early evenings, mostly with young men. In close to every gym I have been to, you could buy nutritional supplements, muscle busters and Creatine buckets — not that different from gyms in the west, you might say. But what you don’t find back in the west are a variety of anabolic steroid products on the same shelf.

“You cannot make your body look like this without the pills, the powder and shots,” one of the young men told me. A friend said that some of the guys spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars on steroids each month.

One man that everyone in Kandahar’s gym world knows is Mohammadullah Gul Lalai: Mr Kandahar in 2003. He is a big guy, even though he is currently not training. “Sometimes you need to rest. I’ll start training again in a month,” says Gul Lalai, sitting on a bench in one of his gyms on the third floor, just a few hundred meters away from Kandahar’s Chawk-e Madat.

He says he is 33 years old and that he started to train when he was twenty. “First I played football, but then one of my cousins convinced me to try bodybuilding and I did.” Back then there were two gyms in Kandahar with little equipment and no trainers.

“Arnold told me how to do it. I used his videos and magazines.” Arnold Schwarzenegger, now the governor of California, ex-Terminator star and former Mr Universe, smiles from the wall of every gym in Kandahar. The posters are all from the 1970s and 80s, showing him at his peak — just before he dropped out and filmed Conan the Barbarian, the film that made him a star and set the stage for his career. Arnold Schwarzenegger pops up time and time again in conversations in the gym, along with many other names I do not know.

Gul Lalai got the equipment for his first gym in Pakistan, rented a small room in Kandahar and slowly, day by day more and more people joined. Currently Kandahar has 21 gyms all across the city. The first championships were internal to the clubs. “Later, under Taliban rule, there were many problems,” Gul Lalai says. “Many things were not allowed: you could not show the legs, the body for competitions. We had to wear long clothes. So we trained in Kandahar and went to competitions in Pakistan.”

Otherwise, the Taliban had no problems with the gyms. “The Taliban were strong. Many came to my gym to train,” Gul Lalai said.

Today, Gul Lalai stays out of politics even though he is the the director for the department of sport in Kandahar and the head of the Olympic Committee.

“We need to give the young people something to do. Sport can help improve the situation,” he says.

He won his first title in 2000 and became Mr Kandahar in 2002 in the 80-kilo weight class from among 13 clubs. In 2003 he went to Iran and won a competition in the 90-kilo class. In 2005 he became Mr Afghanistan in the 90-kilo class and was selected for Mr Asia; he came in third place.

There seems to be no good reason for Gul Lalai to stay in Kandahar. With the violence, the assassinations and the general situation deteriorating everyday, why hasn’t he left? Gul Lalai laughs. “We know these things, no problem.”

I haven’t been to the gym for months. Instead, I bought a bench, some free weights and a running machine. The way the future seems set, with NATO preparing for “The Battle for Kandahar”, it might not have been such a sound investment.

This is required reading for anyone who wants to gain inside in the opium economy in Afghanistan. Understanding the role of opium within the rural communities of Afghanistan, the underlying mechanisms and the relationship of the drug economy and the various insurgency groups as well as the Afghan government will be nothing short of enlightening for many.

I had the pleasure to meet Vanda on several occasions and listening to her tales from her field research, spending much of her time tracking through the back alleys of this worlds more dicier places, sharing drinks with local drug traffickers, producers and farmers from South America to Afghanistan – still one of my favorite couple of hours in Washington DC.

Go and buy it now:

“Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs” (Vanda Felbab-brown)

For all the other miserable people who live in places like Kandahar and have since acquired a kindle in order to get hold of books and newspapers like myself you can get her book for kindle here

Bomb site – Kandahar City, 27/04/2010

Things are changing – more big attacks in the city, an ever growing number of people disappearing and the built up of foreign troops all around sets out a bleak picture for what is to come in the next few months.

Kandahar city, Afghanistan

Spend the last couple of hours downstairs after shooting started in the streets. “Guys you need to come down your walls won’t hold a bullet.” a friend of ours said. “The soldiers they shoot in the air to scare those guys off. One bullet is enough.”

When the gun fire died down a little we went onto the roof to take a look. A few hundred meters across we could see soldier running on rooftops. “These are the guys who will start shooting in a minute.” and sure enough they did.

This morning NATO forces opened fire on a bus t in Zheray district killing four and wounding 18. Short interview with wounded civilian from this morning

it appears the storm is coming.

Check here

Will be updating the blog in the next few days now that i am back in Kandahar. Currently busy with writing up articles about Somalia – will soon post some picture here as well insha’allah.

Kandahar is slowly getting hot, and the office here is heating up quite a bit during the day. The atmosphere in the city has changed since i left 2.5 months ago. kidnappings have happened on a daily basis and apparently many are just disappearing no ransom asked. A friend said yesterday sitting on the roof with us pointing at the city: “It makes you believe its a real city now, with the buildings and the streets but really its not a city.”

People are worried.

This morning there were two explosions in Malajat – loud enough to wake me up, followed by a brief exchange of gunfire.

Kandahar isn’t Mogadishu but the security has deteriorate to a degree that slowly introduces the same paranoia to the city.

A counter-narrative

here the link

NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute to Host Panel Discussion, “Talking to the Taliban,” Feb. 18

Tuesday, Jan 12, 2010

N-198, 2009-10

MEDIA ADVISORY

New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute will host a panel discussion-“Talking to the Taliban: How Well Has the West Understood Its Enemy in Afghanistan?”-on Thursday, February 18, 6:30 p.m. (20 Cooper Square, between 5th and 6th Streets, 7th Floor). Subways: 6 (Astor Place); R, W (8th Street). The event is free and open to the public, but an RSVP to andrea.rosenberg@nyu.edu is required. Call 212.998.7887 or go to journalism.nyu.edu/events for more information. Photo ID required for entry.

Reporters interested in attending must RSVP to James Devitt, NYU’s Office of Public Affairs, at 212.998.6808 or james.devitt@nyu.edu. Filming, videotaping, photographing, and audio recording the event is prohibited.

The panel will be moderated by Barnett Rubin, director of studies at NYU’s Center on International Cooperation and currently a senior adviser on Afghanistan to U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke. Other panelists include: David Rohde, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times who was held captive by the Taliban for seven months in Pakistan’s tribal regions; Michael Semple, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School who has served in Afghanistan with the United Nations and the European Union; and, Alex Strick van Linschoten, co-editor of My Life with the Taliban, an autobiography by former Taliban minister Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef.

The event is sponsored by the Global and Joint Program Studies at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.