How the Taliban hijacked our educational materials…
Our Malik Dave had a wonderful idea. The reasoning went something like this:
Let’s employ the Afghan companies that sprung up to print election posters.
They are currently out of work because the election season is over.
Lest we hire them, they may be up to no good.
We call this technique weaponized shopping and it’s one of the techniques in the arsenal of the Synergy Strike Force.
Over the past month, Lou, Juan and crew have put themselves towards selecting and optimizing high quality image files for large format printing of educational materials. We did a test run with the printers and then submitted our final order. Yesterday, (Sunday 20th) Hameed and Najib went to pick up the posters.
As things turn out here, the shop owner had been arrested by the police on suspicion of printing materials for (Al Qaeda or) the Taliban. When the police raided the store, they sensibly confiscated all of the printed materials in their possession as evidence. Among this pile currently in procession of the police are posters on the subjects of cell biology, hydrology, and the periodic table of elements.
Hopefully, we’ll get them back. We did pay a good 4,000 Pakistani Rupee equivalent of 45$ Pakistani Rupees, called “Caldari” are the de facto currency of Jalalabad deposit.
Such a day’s course of events is starting to seem perversely normal for us, as much as I can still imagine seems perversely abnormal for those whom I usually count as peers.
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Two days ago (Saturday Saturday is the first day of the work week. 19th) an attack took place in the center of town focused on Kabul bank where police officers were collecting their pay. From our sources at the hospital upwards of 40 people have died and many others are in critical condition. Among the dead are reported the “deputy police chief and the head of criminal investigation.”
Many of our friends at the public hospital were on high alert dealing with the patients that stretched their capacity. Meanwhile our friends at a local radio station were broadcasting the need for blood donors across the airways, resulting in hundreds of donors showing up at the hospital, ready to give.
Our friends say that the only day in recent memory that compares at the level of impact was when protests erupted in 2005 after it was alleged that the Koran had been flushed down the toilet in Guantanamo. Â The differences are stark. There are many more civilian casualties and this was not a popular uprising.
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Yesterday (Sunday 20th) was a day of mourning. Two of our guards had lost a brother. Many of our friends had checked out for the day to attend funerals for friends, relatives and acquaintances. Our UPS (uninterrupted power supply system) had died but we couldn’t get it repaired because the shop of the company that had built it was also damaged in the explosion.
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We got hold of some exclusive footage.
In this video you see a captured insurgent and security video showing how he entered the bank dressed as a police officer and started firing. Several things stand out. Firstly, he looks like a clean cut young man, nothing like what we have learned to think of as insurgent or terrorist. Second, while he is firing hordes of people run past him, within a foot in distance, and none of them give his vulnerable backside a good whack.