“Anti-vice” campaign echoes political tensions between Afghanistan and West.
KABUL, Afghanistan — My dinner companion had just swallowed the last of his apple pie and ice cream as several armed men entered the restaurant.
They looked alert and angry as they fanned through the brightly-lit dining area, passing tables populated by gaping diners sampling dinners, bottles of beer and wine costing the equivalent of an Afghan civil servant’s monthly salary. More men, speaking into walkie-talkies, started hustling diners out of the restaurant.
“What about our bill?” we asked as we were ushered out.
“Forget it, just leave,” the police officer told us.
At the exit, under harsh surveillance lights and a street littered with cement checkpoints, reinforced traffic-bars and armed guards, Afghan guests were being separated from foreigners and roughly questioned.
“Is there a bomb?” I asked one soldier using his Kalashnikov to wave people out.
“Yes, there is a bomb. Get out,” he mumbled back, ignoring me.
“It’s probably a shakedown,” a security man said as he tucked his client into an armored SUV and screeched off followed by a chase-car, a typical way of transport for international workers at risk of kidnap or assassination.
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The search at Boccaccio restaurant was one in a series of up to seven raids carried out Tuesday on several foreigner-only restaurants serving Kabul’s foreign community of NGO workers, diplomats, journalists and spies. These speakeasies exist behind secure double-access doors in blocked-off streets. They are guarded by Afghan and private security forces and sport fully-stocked bars. Some, like the fashionable L’Atmosphere whose French owner was jailed Tuesday and released on bail, sport swimming pools around which bikini-clad aid workers and diplomats frolic.
“A number of raids were conducted by Afghan National Security Forces targeting restaurants which sell alcohol and employ female staff,” said an internal memo by the Afghanistan NGO Security Safety Office, a network set up to protect foreign aid workers.
Several foreigners were arrested, including a French citizen and Boccaccio’s Ukrainian female staff. Alcohol has been banned but tolerated in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
“The current raids should be placed against a backdrop of shifting sentiment towards the international community, especially since the 2009 election period.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/afghanistan/100417/kabul-vice-squads
