Rainbow Slide -- Afghan Fog -- Women in Arms

Kelley is about a month away from returning home for a two-week mid-tour break. The vacation schedule includes trips to Scotland and London, dinner at a Gordon Ramsay's and a show.

The photograph from FOB Gardez shows one of the MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles in which she and the troops with whom she works travel while on their missions.

Here's a shot of the captain saddling up for another trip beyond the wire. Communication from the front is getting thin. The once- or twice-a-week phone calls have trickled away to once a month or so as the mission tempo in Gardez has quickened. Taliban attacks elsewhere have stepped up with the coming of spring and the peace jirga this month in Kabul. Just what the jirga accomplished, I don't know. The Taliban did not attend. Instead, it fired rockets at the gathering and made itself a nuisance altogether.

In its wake, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has reportedly cast doubt on prospects that the US and its NATO allies can prevail. Reports are that he is making overtures to the Taliban and its backers inside Pakistan on his own. Karzai has become unreliable in terms of his ability to inspire confidence in his allies, to put it lightly. That he's willing to play nice with the Taliban is confusing, in that he's been its avowed opponent and not least that Talib are responsible for assassinating his father, before Hamid the Popalzai trial leader. But I digress. See Ahmed Rashid's excellent book, "Descent Into Chaos," for more background on the political relationships in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For more on the challenges inherent in being female in the military, check out this part of a series on women in arms by the New York Times. It addresses some of the day-to-day twists women face in rough outposts in a male-dominated society.

The Captain writes that she traveled beyond the wire to Chamkani for a regional peace jirga recently. In attendance was the Paktya provincial deputy governor, a guy named Abdal Rahman Mangal, who gave the keynote address.

She writes:

"(Mangal) is essentially the de-facto governor of Paktya province, as the actual governor (a Karzai appointee) is corrupt and chronically absent from the province. Mangal is a great guy who's actually FROM Paktya (unlike Hamdard, the real governor) and he really cares about the people there. We pretty much just deal exclusively with Mangal."

Here's Mangal giving interviews at the jirga.

Nearby, an Afghan National Army soldier stands guard.






It's sometimes difficult to square what she reports as progress in one area of Afghanistan while reports continue to pour in of an ineffective surge in Marja, a delayed offensive in Kandahar, endemic corruption, drug trafficking and ineffective leadership. (This account by C.J. Chivers, however, suggests a more nuanced interpretation of events in Marja.) I suspect the truth is a shade greener than most reports in the Times and elsewhere portray them, though not so bright to suggest that success is assured.

Here's my favorite shot, taken on the way to the jirga June 10.

"The doors were completely off, and I was sitting right on the edge. Pretty cool looking immediately to my right and seeing a thousand foot drop and the earth whizzing by. My hair got so jacked, it felt like dreadlocks by the time I got back to the FOB."

 Here's an overhead shot of the compound where the captain resides. She recently moved out of a mud barracks into a new trailer, something more in keeping with the dignity of her rank, I suppose, although she considers trailer trash a step up.

Here's Kelley aboard a Russian-made chopper operated by an NGO working in Afghanistan. She was taking photographs of a road-building project in her district.