Ed is in Chicago

It’s been a good week for free lunches. So far this week, I have not eaten in the office a single time, which is a blessing indeed. The food is not so bad, but repetitive, and one yearns to get outside. So far I have had one lunch of Iranian potato crisps and cherry juice at Mazar airport, courtesy of the Debonair Deputy as we waited for the tiny, late plane to land and take us back to Kabul. This was followed by a mid-afternoon kebab when back in Kabul (mmm! Afghan kebabs – delicious tiny chunks of sheep flesh interspersed with sparing little lumps of sheep-bottom fat and grilled over charcoal).

One lunch of insipid pseudo-Italian food was with a bunch of Afghan cinema bigwigs before going to the premiere of ‘Bullet’ a lavish Hindi beat-em-up starring Asad Sikandar, an Afghan man-of-action who had starred in, directed and produced it. It was a pretty standard Hindi action moving with lots of kung-fu and beautiful girls and energetic dance numbers. I didn't stay for the whole thing, but I enjoyed the speeches at the beginning. The film bigwigs that I went with were acting up in an jolly way, clapping enthusiastically to try and cut short the speeches of their film bigwig mates who were holding forth from the podium about the future of Afghan cinema.

One lunch was with my Boss, talking about ‘ways to move forward’ – a lot of beard-scratching, brow-rubbing and scribbling over our spicy beef at one of the few Chinese restaurants that has not been recently closed down for doubling up as a brothel in the Islamic Republic, introducing ISAF soldiers and foreign contractors to a selection of flat-faced girls plucked from some godforsaken muddy village in central China. I won’t go into my work now though – I have been reading about my brother and sister bloggers recently, and I notice that the UK can now claim its first case of a guy who has been fired for his blog. I understand that this is known as being ‘Dooced’ after the blog Dooce, which I have also taken to checking quite often. It is addictive this brave new world of personal revelation. I have had a look at the Persian ones too, which are very interesting, but I am a little bit too lazy for it as I sneakily surf in between my daily obligations. The table-talk was interrupted at one point by the spotty Afghan teenager serving us who wanted to know if that Blonde woman my boss ate with was his wife. Very strange. We could not work out who this mysterious blonde should be. The only blonde around in Afghanistan at the moment that I can think of is La Petite Anglaise, and she is not a likely choide, as she could be the Boss's daughter, and what's more, she has never eaten with him at the Chinese restaurant. When we mentioned it to her though, she noted that the Boss had once joked to the baggage check at Dushanbe airport that she was his wife. Might there be some kind of sinister inter-waiter/airport official grapevine at work? As soon as the Boss left the airport, the baggage guy was on the telephone warning all waiters in the larger region that contrary to popular belief, the Boss is, in fact, married to young blondinka.

A further lunch was had at the adopted home of the Mild-Mannered American, with its standard collection of Afghan-American returnees trying to rebuild the country and/or make money. It was very quiet and mild-mannered, and I wasn’t up to the sparkling conversation I normally aim at (it’s been like that all this week, in fact) and the Wild-Eyed Tajik who I had brought along in tow, was even more silent and morose than I, but things pepped up as we got into an interesting conversation with one of the Afghan-American contractors who gave us his angle on the bloody government, and the godawful shortsighted poppy-replacement plans that every Tom Dick and Harry NGO is coming up with these days. He poo-poohed the funky ideas that you hear bandied around of replacing poppies with roses in order to extract and market the expensive roseoil, or else Saffron – the labour-intensive spice to be extracted from the stamens of a certain variety of crocus. Roses – do you know how much land you need to cultivate to get a tonne of rose petals? In short, a shitload. Sure the roseoil is expensive once you have extracted it, but how many poor Afghan farmers are going to be content to plant their opium fields with a flower that produces a few KGs of petals each year? Saffron? – Crocus schmocus! This guy was all for proper agricultural analysis to pick viable conventional crops, and the rehabilitation of irrigation and electrical facilities. Sound enough, but where is the money? The US money flow seems to have let up for the moment – as Billy Holiday tells us ‘Love is like a faucet… it turns off and on’, and the word is that USAID's love is flowing towards Indonesia and Iraq at the moment.

This guy also ranted a little about the Karzai administration. I’ve been hearing a lot of this recently. Accusations of cronyism and corruption are bandied about fairly regularly amongst expats, and worse among Afghans. One of the Afghan film guys I had lunch with tells me that the mood against Americans is getting worse and worse. Particularly after the Kam air plan crash a couple of weeks ago in which 104 people died, and which many blame on the Americans for refusing the pilot permission to land at Bagram airport when the weather was to bad to allow it to land at Kabul. I don't think this is true in fact. A British Embassy fellow told me that the plane flew out towards Bagram to make a turn and return to Kabul again when it crashed. But the anti-American angle has been very successfully spinned (spun?) and people are happy to believe that it was an action of fatal high-handedness on their part.

Another Brit, a Camp Veteran of Afghanistan's expat community (and to be a veteran here, you have to stay longer than a couple of years - this guy, however, has been here since the eighties, and seems to have his ear to the ground) gave me his own particular angle on American unpopularity. He was showing a bunch of visiting dignitaries around the site of a renovation project, and the US ambassador was telling the VIPS about how terribly the Taliban had damaged Kabul's physical environment, to which our Camp Veteran bristled and replied that no, in fact it was the Mujahedin, including the Northern Alliance guys that the US would later ally with. He told it well - I wonder how cheeky he was in fact. Anyway, the ambassador did not take it kindly, expecting to hear something that cleaved more to the party line. Whingeing poms.

Today, I fear, it looks like I will not be invited for another lunch, so I am wondering whether to break my record and eat the inevitable rice and heavily-stewed meat, or else go out and grab another kebab with the wild-eyed Tajik.