CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Dubai Decompression Loop

Photo by David Rodrigo

The mountains always felt close when the aircraft lifted out of Kabul. During the Afghanistan war, Dubai became a strange airlock between two worlds—where the conflict seemed, briefly, to stop.

That illusion has grown harder to sustain. After savage US and Israeli strikes on Iran, followed by vicious retaliatory missile and drone attacks across the Gulf, airlines have had to redraw flight routes, parts of regional airspace have closed, and Dubai International has had to briefly suspend operations.

For now, Dubai finds itself inside the war rather than suspended between its edges.

I flew in and out of Dubai at least eight times during Operation Enduring Freedom and the NATO mission in Afghanistan. I was a one-person filmmaker with special access working out of Kabul. For a while the arrangement felt strangely permanent, as if wars could simply be sealed off from where people preferred not to think about them.

During the Afghanistan years Dubai became the mother of all stopovers—a decompression chamber for those rotating through Kabul, Kandahar, Bastion or Bagram.

One or two people who did this longer than me became mental wrecks. I struggled too. At least flying out of Afghanistan to Dubai had a completely different emotional temperature from flying into it. On one occasion flying to Kabul, I had to help a travelling government employee who was having a panic attack. Leaving Kabul, you could always feel the tension bleed away. Given how disastrously it all ended, it is uncomfortable to remember now just how casual it all was.

Michael Herr, writing about Vietnam in Dispatches, once observed that soldiers were always looking for “a place where the war........

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