I finally have time to continue posting my pictures from the trip I took to Afghanistan nearly a month ago. If you find these interesting, you should bookmark the blog of Brian Platt, a UBC student who is currently in Kabul and not stuck “behind the wire”.

On the left is Colonel Abdul Aziz and on the right is a Lieutenant-Colonel whom I cannot seem to identify from my notes. I wrote a story about this trip to the JOCSC on my blog, but unfortunately no news media picked it up. I think it’s worth a read if you’re interested in how ANA progress is going.

We were given a tour of the facility and shown officers who were busy in an exercise. To the right is our Canadian military liaison from the embassy, Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Muth.

Officers had to get into groups of three and work out triangulation using a map and visible points in the city. One of the officers moved out of the shot while I was photographing.

You can see the diversity of the ANA in this photograph and the ones previous. The officer on the right, who had his name tag and rank blocked out, is Russian in features. The officer on the left looks more Uzbek or Tajik. And of course the Lieutenant-Colonel in the picture previous is more Indo-Pakistani.

An ANA mentor, who was himself mentored by ISAF, teaches officers about topography. These officers will use these skills to return and fight the Taliban.

“Practice measuring straight line distance.”

Lieutenant-Colonel Hirschmann, Germany, and Major Jones, Canada, are two ISAF mentors who work at the college.

A rare shot of Kabul traffic. I say rare because, like most of this trip, I was disappointingly stuck in the backseat of a bulletproof car watching an intensely interesting world sail by and being unable to do anything to record it.

One of the few success stories of Afghanistan is their free press. Andrew Potter picked up on this story.

Kabul’s young and hip demographic is the one involved in the democracy-building measures of Afghanistan: the free press, the elections, the wireless market. This is because they’re the few of the literate citizens.

This could be any news studio in North America. But it isn’t. It’s Afghanistan.

Women play a prominent role in the post-Taliban workforce of Afghanistan. The top reporter and news director at Tolo TV are women.

The last of his kind. The only copy editor to still write and edit only by hand.

The studio was running a live TV show while were there. The operators were quite polite and we didn’t realize we were actually distracting them from a live process.

The show that was running live. Don’t quote me on this, but I’m fairly certain the woman was a co-host.

That’s it for my Afghan trip. Be sure to check out Brian’s website if you find the subject interesting. You can also read some of my previous dispatches here:

Embedded in Afghanistan: Day two
Embedded in Afghanistan: Day five
Embedded in Afghanistan: Day six