Being female, Gretchen spent a good deal of time yesterday watching the royal wedding. I have a large flat screen HDTV mounted on the wall in the reception area, and it’s so much better than her TV at home, she actually came in to the office at 5:45 a.m. so she could use it to get the best view possible of the Big Ceremony, the Fairy Tale Coach and the Pretty Wedding Dress. By two-thirty in the afternoon, however, even Gretchen had gotten sufficiently sated with hyperbolic, heavy-handed, over-costumed, overpopulated and overdone British pomp and circumstance as to allow for a quick run to Starbucks. Thus it was, when I poked my head out from between the heavy oak doors which lead to my office, I spied Khus Dihugami Dadamizo, Special International Policy Emissary of His Excellency President Hamid Karzai for the Embassy of Afghanistan to the United States of America, alone on the reception room couch, his feet propped up on the coffee table – the dirt from Washington’s streets scuffing from his shoes onto my pristine copies of the latest Foreign Policy Review and The Economist – staring at the umpteenth re-run of the newly-minted Duke and Duchess of Cambridge swapping spit. Slowly, he turned his gaze toward me, his pin-pointed pupils struggling to focus. Once he was sure who it was, he gestured at the TV screen and waved me back into my office.
“Enjoying the wedding?” I asked when, about ten minutes later, he ambled in and headed straight for the door leading to the bathroom. About fifteen minutes after that, he eased into the plush chair located immediately to the right of my desk, plunking his attaché case down on the desk top. Then, for another twelve minutes and forty-two seconds, he nodded out.
“It’s quite a show,” Dadamizo replied in answer to my question – as if only a few seconds had elapsed, which, from his point of view, perhaps may well have been the case. “But she’s not all that good looking. Like a little mouse; with such thin hair, too. These,” he remarked as he mimed a brassiere in front of his chest with his hands, “are also kind of small, don’t you think? A king of England should be able to get a better woman than that.”
“Maybe,” I speculated, “they’re in love.”
“Must be,” he shrugged. “Otherwise, it makes no sense. Anyway, I am here to speak with you on orders from Karzai himself.”
“About the Sarposa prison escape?” I asked.
Dadamizo shot me a startled look. “Why, yes. Very, very good guess, my friend Tom. I can see, this is how come you get paid the big bucks.”
“Presumably,” I allowed. “Now what, specifically, is bothering the Afghan government about the Sarposa prison break? Are you concerned about improving your security apparatus?”
“No,” Dadamizo shook his head, “not really. Where can the escaped prisoners go? Nowhere. Either they cannot read and write, or even if they can, they are too poor to go anywhere. So none of them can leave Afghanistan. And the Americans have drones – eyes in the sky, to see them with. So we know that the Americans will eventually re-capture all the Taliban who got away.”
“And turn them back over to you…” I presumed.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“And then,” I extrapolated, “they will escape again.”
“Probably,” he concurred.
“And each time,” I surmised, “the Americans will inject millions of additional dollars into the Afghan economy and give the Afghan government millions more in subsidies for your police and army.”
“And other… administrative costs,” Dadamizo added with a sly smile.
“So,” I concluded, “it looks like you’ve got a pretty good system there. What’s the problem?”
“The problem,” he sighed, “is that your President Obama has said the Americans are going to leave, and there is concern that another… incident like Sarposa might make them go home earlier.”
“What,” I exclaimed, “earlier than July?”
“Oh no,” Dadamizo laughed, “not that. I mean 2014.”
“That,” I pointed out, “is when NATO says it will leave.”
“NATO… United States…” Dadamizo wagged his head from left to right mockingly. “It’s all the Americans, isn’t it really?”
“You mean,” I pressed, “you’re planning to pull another stunt like Sarposa before 2014?”
“Actually,” he confided, “until there was all this yelling and screaming about it from Washington, we were planning… several. So the question is: should we call them off?”
“Well…” I paused to think about it. As an American, it was my immediate impulse to say, Yes of course, call them off, you never should have been doing that kind of thing in the first place. On the other hand, it’s my job to be objective. “The Pakistanis are urging you to dump the United States and go with the Chinese. If you did, it wouldn’t matter when the Americans – or NATO – leave, would it?”
Dadamizo pursed his lips in thought. “Afghanistan is here,” he declared, placing his right index finger on an imaginary globe, “and the US is here,” he pointed with his left index finger. “On the other side of the world. But China,” he fretted, poising his left index finger immediately next to his right, “is our close neighbor. Less than one hundred kilometers of Tajikistan separate us from China. So,” he reasoned, spreading both hands wide, “if an American soldier is sent to Afghanistan he is very, very far from his homeland and wishes very much to return to its hot dogs and beer. Also, it is very expensive to keep sending him hot dogs and beer from the United States, so the US government has a great incentive to leave when we are done with America and do not need it anymore. But when he is in Afghanistan, a Chinese soldier is not all that far from China. It is not that expensive to send him some rice to eat, either. And Afghanistan has no wish to become part of China, which would be a very real risk if we dumped the Americans in favor of the Chinese. After all, there is absolutely no risk that Afghanistan will become part of the United States, no matter how long we allow US troops to stay there. And also, there is… ah… another… important consideration.”
“Which would be?” I prompted.
“Well,” he wondered aloud, “How shall I put this?”
“Put it any way you want,” I assured him.
“Okay,” he agreed with a slight grimace. “When the Americans catch someone else fooling them, they throw a big investigation – of themselves – and find another American to hold responsible. Then the person they have decided to blame resigns from their job, and that’s it. But the Chinese, if they catch you fooling them, they will shoot you and send your family a bill for the bullet. And ah… furthermore… the Chinese aren’t… um, nearly so easy to fool as the Americans, either.”
“In that case,” I advised, “I think it would be a good idea if you took whatever measures are necessary to ensure that no more Taliban escape from Afghan official custody.”
“Not every good idea,” he cautioned, “is always a feasible thing to do.”
“Understood,” I dryly responded.
“What President Karzai really needs with respect to the Taliban escapes,” Dadamizo requested, “is some… how do you say it? Some… spin. Yes, yes, that is the word. Tell me, Tom, how should President Karzai spin the… Sarposa issue?”
“Given,” I told him, “the extreme gullibility of the American government, which you have duly noted, President Karzai needs to spin this as a failure of the Afghan penal system and appear to take responsibility for it – but with one key qualification. He should say, ‘This is a terrible, intolerable situation, and the reason is, our prisons are extremely outdated. Taliban never escape from the American prisons in Afghanistan, and that is because the American prisons are state-of-the-art incarceration facilities, not like the antiquated old jails we have. Moreover, if the Americans expend so many resources capturing these prisoners, it would be a wise investment for them to help Afghanistan build some twenty-first century lockups for them.”
“Excellent,” Dadamizo chortled. “That’s very good. Then we can ask the Americans for millions in funding, maybe hundreds of millions, even. And while we’re building those new prisons…”
“With your clocks set to Afghan time,” I interjected.
“Yes, yes,” he chuckled, “ever so slowly we will build them, and meanwhile, the escapes – and the money from them – that can continue, as much as we like. Because, after we do this spin, when more escapes occur, the only ones to blame will be the Americans for not giving us more money to build better prisons sooner! Tom my friend, I thank you. President Karzai thanks you. The Afghan people thank you. The Taliban… oh, right. Yeah, well, thanks, Tom, thank you so very, very much. Now, if you don’t mind, I will visit that exquisite bathroom of yours once more before I leave.”