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By David Pugliese

Defence Watch

In December I travelled to Afghanistan, going to a number of places including Kandahar. It was my third un-embedded trip to Afghanistan.

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I was with Esprit de Corps publisher Scott Taylor and Australian journalist Sasha Uzunov.

One of the places visited on this trip was the former Camp Nathan Smith. It was once a bustling Canadian PRT but is now pretty empty (the soldiers who are usually there were out the day we visited….leaving only a small number of personnel at the site).

The Afghan government wants to vacate the former PRT and transform the facility into a women’s centre but no country wants to provide the money……so the camp slowly gets worse for wear…..overrun with weeds, equipment falling apart, etc. I’m not sure how long the Afghans will hold on to the camp, as I saw a number of deserted former international military bases as we travelled outside the city.

















Photos by David Pugliese

And here is the link to the first of my Afghan series articles, this one from Saturday’s paper:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Afghanistan+First+part+series/9508958/story.html



More stories to come this week.