You Shake My Nerves And You Rattle My Brain, Things Like This Drive the Voters Insane

AP has reported the disconcerting news that "U.S. officials at intake centers in the United Arab Emirates and in Wisconsin have identified numerous incidents in which Afghan girls have been presented to authorities as the 'wives' of much older men" (see reports of child brides among Afghan refugees).

That will not come as news to those of you with access to official situation reports on the evacuation and resettlement of Afghans, but it does to your fellow citizens in places like Wisconsin. And they do not like it.

Even in 1957, the American public did not like it the least little bit when the very popular Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year-old third cousin, and the backlash sunk his career for at least a decade. 

Joe Biden doesn't have a decade to wait out the public's anger and the political hit that his administration will take over this outrage, and rightly so. That's an irresistible story for all points on the spectrum. Everyone can hate it that the administration did not screen out the perpetrators of child marriage, whether their interest is from a legal, moral, cultural, religious, nationalist, feminist, government-hating, left-wing, or right-wing basis. 

Just last week I thought the images of government contractor working dogs left behind in Kabul would become one of those ineradicable social media disasters for Biden, but now that seems to have dropped out of the news in favor of the child 'brides' story.

C'mon Man!© Stop the child sexual abuse and visa fraud malarkey before you lose both houses in the mid-term elections.

   

"Tho' All the World Betrays Thee"

Thinking of the ignominious end of our doomed national effort in Afghanistan, with all its enormous humanitarian costs, I've been listening to the mournful Joe Strummer version of The Minstrel Boy:

My Vote For Most Iconic Photo of Evacuation From Kabul

The Taliban are still outside the city and talking about a transitional government, so no one is forcing that guy at gunpoint to paint over female images, but everyone knows what will be expected of them and they are already complying. 

My vote for most iconic image of the U.S. Embassy's hasty departure is the one below. Forget all the photos of choppers over the embassy, here's the final act of our evacuation: dropping helmets and body armor just before boarding the flight out.

The equivalent in Saigon '75 was the evacuees dropping their small arms into the embassy pool before getting on the chopper.

Roofs, Choppers, and Memes

There's the photo that every lazy news media intern will pull up this week to run with stories about the evacuation of U.S. Embassy Kabul.

That building wasn't the embassy in Saigon. The photo was misidentified way back then, and, even though at least some people know better, they find that image more satisfactory than the truth. In the popular mind it is the embassy in Saigon, and that's all that matters today. So, by extension, it's every other embassy as well.  

Fans of non-fiction about the evacuation of U.S. Embassy Saigon can see this.

Kabul's Taverna du Liban Attack Was A Tripwire Crossed

Outside the Taverna yesterday

Last Friday's attack by the Taliban on a Kabul restaurant that catered to the international community is just about a perfect example of terrorism, as it is defined by the U.S. government: politically-motivated violence against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups to influence an audience.

The Taliban are influencing that target audience in a big way. They have an achievable strategy - making ISAF and the rest of the international community leave Afghanistan - and that attack was perfectly executed to advance their aims without causing unintended casualties that might have spoiled the political message it delivered. 

The Taliban released a statement describing the attack's political message as revenge for a U.S. airstrike that killed civilians:

The attack was in retaliation to the massacre carried out by foreign invaders 2 days earlier in Parwan province's Siyah Gerd district where the enemy airstrikes destroyed up to 10 homes, razed several orchards as well as killing and wounding up to 30 innocent civilians mostly defenseless women and children.

The day before the Taverna attack, President Karzai himself condemned that airstrike for the same reasons, and noted: "The Afghan government has been asking for a complete end to operations in Afghan villages for years, but American forces acting against all mutual agreements ... have once again bombarded a residential area and killed civilians." According to press reports, there were indeed civilian casualties.

The statement by ISAF Commander General Dunford condemning the Taverna attack did a great job of missing the point, especially this sentence: "The Taliban must stop premeditated and indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, especially on those who are working to bring stability and prosperity to the Afghan people.”

That is an extremely odd choice of words, considering that there was nothing at all indiscriminate in the Taliban's attack. They killed every foreigner inside the restaurant, but none of the local employees. On the contrary, it was indiscriminate slaughter of civilians by ISAF that was the Taliban's stated justification.

The WaPo had this description of the Taverna:

For years, the bistro was a rare haven of relaxation for foreign diplomats, aid workers and Afghan officials in a gray city full of blast barriers and beggars. Hookahs bubbled in an alcove equipped with low couches, and Arabic pop music played in the background. Wine and beer were served discreetly, in china teapots, along with savory Lebanese appetizers of kebab, falafel, tabbouleh and stuffed grape leaves.

In the past year, as international missions began to downsize or leave the capital in anticipation of Western troop withdrawals, the number of ­foreigner-friendly establishments shrank, but La Taverna thrived.

-- snip --

In 2011, the restaurant added armed guards and triple-door steel barricades at its entrance to protect customers and win continued approval from foreign embassies and missions for their employees to eat there.

Those precautions were no match for the suicide team that attacked Friday night.

The Taverna was a soft target despite those steel entry doors and an anteroom for inspection of visitors. According to press reports, one bomber detonated inside the inspection area, clearing the way for two more attackers to enter the restaurant and fire at the guests, who were evidently trapped without a way to get out quickly. It probably isn't feasible for a 'foreigner-friendly establishment' in Kabul to have a large building with setback from the street, architectural blast hardening, and control of internal circulation, but short of such measures there really isn't a way to counter that kind of attack. 

The attack killed nationals of many ISAF coalition members and international organizations, including three UN civilian staff from Russia, the U.S., and Pakistan, plus the Lebanese IMF Representative, two Britons, a Dane, two Canadians, and two American from the private sector, as well as 13 Afghan nationals. The impact will be felt immediately as foreign embassies and missions in Kabul will now further restrict their staffs to secure compounds, and will reconsider how many staffers and contract employees they need to keep in Kabul, as well as how soon they can close up shop in Afghanistan and go home.
   

Such a Deal!

The WaPo columnist Al Kamen thinks that the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, has rented some pricey land:

Some things may be cheap in Afghanistan. Renting land anywhere near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul apparently is not. Seems the embassy is leasing a 4.8-acre property from an Afghan landlord to build a 45-meter-wide access road during new construction at the embassy. Later, the land could provide additional access to the expanded embassy compound.

-- snip --

Okay, so how much is this costing us? The rent is $859,440 a year, the embassy said in a recent letter to the Senate. That comes out to just under $4.50 a square foot. "In addition to the rent, the lease provides for payment of $550,000 as compensation for buildings and improvements" on an adjacent site already taken over by the embassy and a "one-time payment of $150,000 for the demolition and removal of a small mosque" on the new parcel, which is "the cost for the landlord to rebuild the mosque elsewhere."

This is a five-year lease, renewable "automatically and indefinitely" unless the U.S. government cancels. Nine hundred grand to lease the land? Was this a talking point that President Obama forgot to raise with President Karzai the other day?

I have two things to say about that, one of them significant and one of them trivial.

First, the trivial. Mr. Kamen's math is wrong. Since there are 43,560 square feet in an acre, the cost per square foot to lease a 4.8-acre parcel at $859,440 is $4.11, not $4.50. So there!

Secondly, that sounds like a good price for land in a capital city. I haven't researched other land leases in Kabul - and neither has Mr. Kamen, I'm sure - but I have looked up the asking prices for parcels of land in Washington DC. Here's one I picked pretty much at random, a small parcel on Rhode Island Avenue that is for lease at $5.50 per square foot per year. It even has an existing building that the landlord will remove for the new tenant, just like the parcel in Kabul.

I guess the WaPo owes an apology to U.S. Embassy Kabul, or, more likely, to the real estate people in the Office of Overseas Buildings. Those guys can bargain like rug merchants!