April 13, 2010 | Posted by Londonstani - 4:27pm |
20 Comments
So, Western forces rock up in your town, kick out the local humourless, dour puritanical loons that were screwing up your future and tell you things will be getting better. A few months go by, prices go up, drug dealers are building huge houses and you're more likely to be killed for the few Afghanis in your pocket. Pretty crappy, right?
Well, not for everyone:.."on most nights, Kabul's expatriates go out and partake in the manic craziness of the city's bar and restaurant scene in houses reminiscent of America's Prohibition-era speakeasies, behind 20-ft.-tall blast walls and an outer perimeter of armed Afghan security guards.
"The expatriates are a boisterous crowd of young and usually single diplomats, aid workers, journalists, spies and mercenaries — or, as they like to call themselves, "contractors." Most of them earn $100,000 salaries and have money to burn.
"Kabul offers Thai cuisine as well as Turkish, Balkan, Italian, French and Persian, plus several steakhouses, a martini bar with a DJ and a Mexican cantina with high-stakes poker games. The city boasts dozens of Chinese restaurants, but a few were shut down several years ago when authorities realized that the owners were offering the services of hookers along with the Kung Pao chicken. Tiger prawns, pork loins and French wines are flown in from Dubai. The T-bone steaks come frozen from Australia."
Probably looks pretty interesting as you push your cart full of discarded plastic rubbish down the street. "The trouble with most of these places is that, because they serve liquor, which is illegal, the armed Afghan guards at the gate won't allow the patrons' Afghan compatriots to come inside."
This TIME story could be true of Darfur, Baghdad or Islamabad. As well, I'm sure, of places I do not have any experience of. But in the places i do have experience of, I have seen these sorts of scenes used to make political points by extremists. And I have heard local people point to them as proof of the insincerity of their foreign guests.
In the great
Huffington Post article that Ex has linked to on his twitter feed Josh Geltzer says: "...as terrorism scholars have long noted, terrorists seek to provoke reactions with strategic effects far greater than those that the terrorists can cause directly."
Joshua is talking about the methodology of war fighting. I would add to that the methodology of delivering logistics, commentary and aid. Facilitating the creation of a "special breed" of foreigners (and token locals, with the right language skills and connections) who are overpaid, hidden away and afforded special treatment is one of the "strategic effects" that indirectly cause all sorts of damage to the central aim of the whole exercise. And it's one that extremists probably didn't even plan.... Think of it as a bonus prize.
The great untold secret of warzones, is that they are actually quite fun. But the depressing reality is that if you find yourself having a good time and getting paid lots, the other side is probably winning.
UPDATE: A journalist friend who has spent considerable amounts of time working in Baghdad, Kabul and other troubled places has this to say:
"In 2005, I said that white people in Kabul were doing more for al-Qa'eda than anyone since George W Bush and everyone called me a prude who'd spent too much time in Iraq. Well, i don't hate to tell them I told them so. It's sad they screwed the whole thing up, but screwed they did. The Afghan anger over the amount of arrogance and waste was bad enough by 2006 that I doubted it could be fixed. Today, it's far too late.
"Aid is hopeless busted in many of these places. The amounts spent on security and white SUVs in Kabul for dopes who couldn't get real jobs at home is even worse than the nightlife, in terms of waste and fury by the locals."
Emerald City East, you could
Emerald City East, you could say.
The Time article is really more about the Kabul restaurant scene than about its patrons, which is too bad. I'd like to know a little more about those.
add Banda Aceh year
add Banda Aceh year 2005,6,7,8,9.............. to that list
Were the girls that came
Were the girls that came with Kung Pao chicken HOT?
This TIME story could be
This TIME story could be true of Darfur
Not true when I was there, or more recently according to a handful of friends who've been stationed there over the last few years. Don't know what gourmet outlets you're referring to, but Clif bars were enough to get me time with any expat I needed to talk to in El Fasher four years ago.
The girls weren't that hot,
The girls weren't that hot, sad to say. Shout out to the Golden Key.
But the article is typical parachute journalism. Take the quote "The trouble with most of these places is that, because they serve liquor, which is illegal, the armed Afghan guards at the gate won't allow the patrons' Afghan compatriots to come inside." This isn't actually true. The problem is that serving Afghans liquor is illegal - and places get shut down for it - but serving foreigners is OK. Many places will simply take the soft option of keeping Afghans out. But, really, when every local big shot is out buggering young boys, and the corruption up and down the food chain is as staggering as it is (and that's not a new, or war-induced, phenomenon) is partying like Andrew W K really such a big deal? I mean, tough to get excited about the white devils and their blasphemous ways when you live in a society in which human life and dignity generally have no significant value.
Of course, I went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant with a woman (Canadian, working for an Italian rule-of-law NGO) who said that the biggest problem Afghans faced was that they needed moisturizer - their skin was so badly damaged that it was a crime. Totally unironic, totally serious. I'm sure that the reporter encountered some similar idiots, and that colored the story. But Western frivolity (even to the point of stupidity) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause for extremism.
BReed: She was an American,
BReed:
She was an American, working for an American NGO. I know this because she repeated it to anyone who would listen, and I was one of the unlucky recipients of this wisdom.
Saigon redux. EMN
Saigon redux.
EMN
Add the Gulf states (where
Add the Gulf states (where many Pashtuns work) and Egypt to this scenario. The Russian natashas and the German sex tourists don't help the situation much. But Paul Theroux noticed this 30 years ago. He said the worse thing that could have happened to Afghan and Pakistani opinion of Westerners was to see all the hippies traveling through their country.
Bacha bazi aside, and something like that happens in the Gulf as well, Westerners are viewed as decadent and Western women as....well yeah.
Combine this with grinding poverty, the emasculating effect of having well armed foreigners in your town and having to work for said well armed, well moneyed foreigners; I'd imagine many folks are asking themselves why Allah, why?
I'm not saying that this is the root cause of terrorism; rather, it's sort of the last humiliating straw.
Londostani, is that Cockburn you are quoting?
http://www.the-signal.com/new
http://www.the-signal.com/news/article/26914/ (Chinese Prostitution in Small Town America)
Same is happening all over the US of A, except there's no Kung Pao and they are so butt ugly I can only assume this is part of some Chinese COVERT ops, similar to when Castro rounded up all the criminals and crazies in Cuba and put 'em in a boat and sent them over to us, now we're paying for them in our prisons and skid rows. Thank you Cuba and China!!!
Nope not Cockburn. However,
Nope not Cockburn. However, I did briefly meet him the other day and introduced myself. I have admired his writing for some time."I'm not saying that this is
"I'm not saying that this is the root cause of terrorism; rather, it's sort of the last humiliating straw."
Brilliant. And yes this is Green Zone East.
This is what happens when you bring 1) NATO - of course it's Brussels redux and 2) Big Army (US) - no the soldiers themselves probably won't behave so badly - unless they can slip the leash, in which case remember who earned it- but sadly our money is an enabler.
Full employment with a real job/function - or out.
Don't think that many people out in USA-istan aren't beginning to feel the same way about DC. Because we are.
Well, having worked in the
Well, having worked in the Green Zone in 07/08 I can say it was not like this at all, or maybe I just didn't get invited to the good parties. There were only 3-4 functioning restaurants in the Green Zone, and none of them were especially glamorous. The Embassy had parties on occasion, as did the Italian Embassy, and of course at villas people were having a good time. But nothing like the organized, all-encompassing scene that the article describes in Kabul.
Ten restaurants that serve
Ten restaurants that serve food and drinks in Kabul does not a manic party scene make. In fact, it s a big yawn. Most expats visit these restaurants on a rotating basis with friends who spend most of their time talking about their work and Afghanistan. This is as exciting as it gets--dinner out. Sometimes a villa party where the same group mills around and talks about work. Then there is lock-down, lack of outdoor activities and minimal access or availability of cultural events. (Treasures of Afghanistan are visiting NY). The real development party scenes are in Kyiv, Moscow, Cairo, Beirut, Phenom Penh, Istanbul, Marrakesh and Nairobi. The author should come for a year to see how exciting those 10 restaurants can be over the long term, and then compare them to 1,000s of bars, theaters and discos in Kyiv to get perspective.
@k8, "The real development
@k8,
"The real development party scenes are in Kyiv, Moscow, Cairo, Beirut, Phenom Penh, Istanbul, Marrakesh and Nairobi."
I kind of knew charity had become a scam. Thanks for confirming it. I'll just put it all into my mortgage.
As an "expat" who regularly
As an "expat" who regularly partook in Kabul's party scene in '05/'06, I would ask Londonstani what he suggests as an alternative for these "overpaid" hooligans? Shall they lock themselves behind walls 24/7, like in the US Embassy or ISAF where, if you're a socially normal human being, you become a bitter, sexually frustrated, snotty, out-of-touch bureaucrat?.
If you really want to be an effective diplomat, you need to be out on the town, socializing with the journalists, aid workers and contractors who just came from the field. Yes, THE FIELD, the place where a diplomat is unable to go without a small army in tow.
Dear Arif, please don't
Dear Arif, please don't forget that NGO workers don't make anywhere near $100,000 a year. Some people go to places like Afghanistan for less than $20,000 a year. Those are your really dedicated aid workers not there for the big fancy salary but actually there to help. Please don't lump these people together with hired guns and mercenaries. And I agree with Shad - are we supposed to sit at home all year? staring at the 5 people we work with all day?
In fact, shoes whether for
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