LAST CALL!
"Pakistani bartender retires after 25 years of beer, burgers, intrigue" by Karin Bruilliard | Washington Post, February 12, 2012
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - As US-funded Afghan jihadists battled the Soviets in the late 1980s, the unassuming American-run bar in this frontier city bulged with gossiping foreigners. Today, with another Afghan conflict winding down, the watering hole echoes with emptiness.
Oh, readers, it was an Al-CIA-Duh watering hole!!
Through it all, Khan Afsar, the Khyber Club’s unlikely bartender, had a front-row seat....
The scene seemed a metaphor for US-Pakistan relations, which boomed with cooperation in the Afghan resistance but now gape with mistrust.
Yet Afsar himself is a symbol of the ground-level relations between Americans and Pakistanis, which, despite diplomatic tensions, are typically amiable. Over the decades, Afsar - a devout Muslim who never tried alcohol - served as a steadfast and good-natured envoy for Pakistan, building a trail of admirers.
“For a modest fellow from a mountain village . . . he supervised and served the foreign lunatics with kindness, merriment, and unflappable aplomb,’’ said Stephen Masty, who managed the bar in the early 1990s.
The club, then called the American Club, was launched in 1985 as a guesthouse for visiting US officials. Peshawar swirled then with aid workers, missionaries, journalists, spies, and diplomats working the sidelines of the Afghan war. One of the club’s neighbors was Osama bin Laden - a wealthy young Saudi who funded mujaheddin fighters.
Well, WaPo would know. After all, it is the CIA's newspaper.
According to one American there at the time the club’s founders decided it needed a “discreet’’ bar, because then, as now, alcohol was mostly prohibited in Pakistan. Foreigners soon flocked to the club for drinks, cheeseburgers, and music. The big draws were tales from “inside,’’ as Afghanistan was known, said Robert Kaplan, a former patron who is now a national correspondent for Atlantic magazine....
Things began changing about five years ago, as Islamist militants expanded and launched attacks in northwest Pakistan.
As bilateral tensions soared, Pakistan ordered the departure of most US military representatives, many of whom were based in Peshawar. The US mission in Peshawar now has a skeleton staff whose security rules prohibit much movement in the city.
Against that backdrop, the club has become more of a lifeline, recent patrons said. Three US troops who were killed in a roadside bombing in northwest Pakistan in 2010 were mourned at the Khyber Club, said one US diplomat stationed there then....
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I'm sorry, readers, but I no longer drink alcohol. Swilling down the Boston Globe seems plenty.
