Excuse me?
Of course, they DID SHUT DOWN the OPIUM TRADE!
And what is with the agenda-pushing MSM's focus on booze?
"It’s last call for UN bar in Afghanistan; Privately owned Kabul guesthouse falls on hard times" by Ernesto Londoño, Washington Post | July 3, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan — The nearly naked swimmers and the pounding disco music might have left the impression that Wednesday night’s crowd at the storied UN guesthouse bar was a routine gathering of expatriates blowing off steam in this war-weary town.
It's a WAR-WEARY WORLD save for the PSYCHOPATHS running it.
But the ruckus and revelry were a swan song for the country’s oldest watering hole, the only place in Afghanistan where the booze flowed generously during the dogmatic years of Taliban rule.
The privately owned guesthouse has been used primarily, and at times exclusively, by UN staff. But it has fallen on hard times, and soon a developer will take over the property.
Early Thursday, as the crowd finally began to fade, Abdul Hamid, Afghanistan’s unofficial dean of bartending, served one last round.
LAST CALL!!!
It marked the end of an establishment that since the late 1970s had served countless spies, diplomats, and journalists during decades of war and intrigue.
How could you tell the difference?
“You know those foreigners,’’ Hamid said. “They like to enjoy their drinks. It’s important for their relationships and their work.’’
It's LIBERATION, right?
Hamid landed his job at the bar in 1987. He was barely making ends meet as a government engineer when his sister-in-law, who worked at the compound, told him about an opening there.
Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed communists were in power then, the customer base was heavily Russian, and the drink of choice was vodka.
And the U.S. helped displace them so we could get Taliban in charge?
There were a handful of other pubs at hotels in Kabul, but the UN bar was the main haunt for people seeking to trade in gossip, political chatter, and secrets.
“The best days were the communist days,’’ Hamid said recently, leaning against the bar....
By the early 1990s, it became increasingly clear to the UN employees who lived at the compound that Islamists were poised to take power. The issues were very complicated, of course. But one thing was clear: They needed to truck in booze to last a couple of decades. Seriously. Literally. Now.
The last shipment of alcohol that made it to the guesthouse was obscenely large.
It arrived in the spring of 1992, aboard three trucks filled with Red and Black Label Johnnie Walker scotch, thousands of cases of beer, and hundreds of bottles of wine.
Hamid and his colleagues hid the bottles in several stashes around the compound, some buried underground. Two weeks later, the city officially went dry.
But the party didn’t stop at the bar, not even when the Taliban gained control of Kabul in 1996....
