The Globe‘s Steve Rennie must think he’s blown the lid off a dark, sordid conspiracy, the way he reports on the booze tab of the Canadian embassy in Kabul:
Canada’s diplomatic corps in Kabul did not go thirsty.
Hospitality forms show embassy staff and dignitaries drank plenty of booze while posted to Afghanistan, an Islamic country where imbibing is not just taboo, it’s against the law.
But aren’t the grounds of an official embassy are considered to be part of the country whose embassy it is? If so, then the embassy grounds are under Canadian jurisdiction, where alcohol is quite legal.
The embassy consumed close to 3,000 bottles of alcoholic beverages from mid-2007 to last November. The tab for the beer, wine and hard liquor was at least $20,000.
Unfortunately, no numbers of people are provided — we’re invited to imagine all this booze being consumed by a few red-nosed diplomats with livers the size of Etobicoke. No, later in the article, he mentions that it was more than just a couple of soused embassy officials keeping the bar open:
There were sendoffs for departing staffers and shindigs to welcome new ones. The embassy entertained visiting generals, diplomats, journalists and politicians.
At about this point, after sneering at the diplomat’s choices of beer, Rennie realizes perhaps he needs to heighten the contrast, by showing that the soldiers and civilians operating in Kandahar had it tougher:
It was not the same for Canadians serving in the country’s restive south. Booze was banned at Kandahar Airfield and at Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar City. Soldiers, diplomats and civilians stationed there had to wait until holidays or special events for a cold one. And there was little danger of getting tipsy with a strict two-beer limit.
But as Rennie had already pointed out, the Kandahar installations were in the middle of an Islamic country that formally prohibits booze. Even if it’s a Canadian Armed Forces base, it has to observe the laws of the country in which it’s situation — it’s not Canadian soil in the way the embassy is. Not to mention that Kandahar was a fricking war zone: armies that drink booze while on active operations against an enemy are less effective armies.
Oh, but then we’re back to those awful alcoholics in the diplomatic corps, who were drinking in “an Islamic country where imbibing is not just taboo, it’s against the law”. Rennie must have forgotten writing that in the first few paragraphs, as it doesn’t mesh well with this later assertion:
Beyond the fortified walls of the embassy, there is no shortage of watering holes around Kabul for the many diplomats, aid workers and journalists who call the city home.
At one time, some popular hang outs included the Tex-Mex restaurant La Cantina and the Gandamak Lodge, a guest house with a British pub in the basement set up by a BBC journalist a decade ago after the Taliban regime fell.
Under Afghan law, anyone caught drinking alcohol can be fined, jailed or whipped. But these punishments are rarely handed down.
Didn’t you just trump your own ace there?
H/T to Chris Myrick for posting the link to this article on Google+, saying “I don’t blame them at all. I imagine Kabul would be intolerable otherwise.”
