as you can probably tell from my 6/15/03 post (does anyone know how to make that a jump-to link to the appropriate entry in my blog?), i like to travel to out of the way places. at least whenever i get the chance to sneak off from the world of lawyering. my next trip will be to uzbekistan, the only place i have ever tried but failed to get to (maybe i will tell that story some other time).
anyway, because of my interest in uzbekistan, i have been paying particular attention to sean-paul of agonist fame in his current travelogue, the silkroad journal. his trip is much more ambitious than anything i have time to do, he's going from istanbul to bombay over the course of two months. he arrived in uzbekistan earlier this week, and so i'm paying particular attention to what he is posting these days.
uzbekistan borders afghanistan, a place where the u.s. still has a sizeable number of troops, but has entirely fallen off the media map these days. many blogs have complained how, after the president declared victory in iraq, news of the daily casualties from iraq have disappeared from the front pages of american newspapers and been relegated to smaller stories farther into the paper. as much as the press is downplaying the quietly building iraqi body-count, news from afghanistan has been pushed even more to the margins of the daily news, if it is even mentioned at all. how many of us noticed the recent casualties in afghanistan from just two days ago? if nothing else, everyone should read about sean-paul's encounter with some american soldiers in tashkent, to get a rare first hand account of at least some soldiers on the ground in afghanistan and their view the situation there.
