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Message: [QUOTE="mogreby, post: 10729165, member: 55211"] At one point I had a budget to buy a vehicle and decided to look for a car rather than a 4x4. Cars are less likely to be 'liberated' if there is fighting and also they blend in better with the local population and make you look less like a rich foreigner. By most Afghan standards I was a rich foreigner, I had a house and could heat part of it, I ate well and had warm clothing by why rub people's noses in it by driving an opulent vehicle? So, I put feelers out for a car. There weren't many on the roads as owners feared that the Taliban would take them. Initially I was shown crappy 4x4s as I wasn't offering a lot of money but when people realised that I really did want a saloon car several turned up, I test drove them all along a variety of roads so that the decision would be mine as to what was purchased and on one occasion I met a Taliban with a sense of humour. He brought round a generic Korean car for which he wanted $6,000 which was too much but I drove it anyhow as there was always room to negotiate. There was an un-sheathed sword down between the drivers seat and the handbrake. After the test drive I told him I wasn't interested in the car which was gutless and rattled too much even by Afghan standards but did he want to sell the sword? He thought about this for a moment then said that the sword was for sale and would cost $6,000 and it came with a free car. Less funny but more bizarre was in the summer of 97 when Massoud was threatening Kabul with a armoured column from the north. The Taliban felt that Massoud's so far successful advance was because they were not applying god's laws strictly enough and god was letting Massoud threaten the city as punishment. Their main response was for the Minister of Justice to go to one of Kabul's main crossroads just off Shar-i-Naw and to stop all traffic and start checking beards. Anyone with a nice bushy beard was allowed to go on their way but anyone with a sparse beard or worse, if it looked trimmed might have a problem. Some go off with a warning but anyone with a poor beard who worked for a government ministry was sacked on the spot. A day or two later Massoud's column ran out of diesel and the threat petered out. The Taliban felt vindicated and that harsher application was clearly the way forward. In September Emma Bonino the EU Fisheries Commissioner visited Kabul with Christiane Amanpour of CNN in tow. They visited one of our projects and then went to the local maternity hospital where their visit started to unravel. Bonino and Amanpour had their heads covered but were wearing jeans and didn't have shirts long enough to cover their groins, this plus the presence of cameras upset the Taliban who told CNN to stop filming which they didn't. Bonino and Amanpour were detained along with several others in their entourage and taken to a police station. I heard about this and told a former Save the Children colleague now working for the UN. As I was telling her The BBC's Alan Johnson came in so I told him too. He went off and interviewed Bonino in captivity and as he was leaving Amanpour told the police not to let him go as this was her story. The police didn't care about whose story it was and as Alan Johnson wasn't under arrest they let him go. Journalists eh. Emma Bonino was credited with basically engineering her own arrest to try to discredit the Taliban. [/QUOTE]

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