NATO Soldiers, Booze and Bullets

I see that General McChrystal, the most senior military commander overseeing the NATO operations in Afghanistan, has had to shut down all drinking at his headquarters in Kabul.

According to his daily report of activities released by his staff he decided to ban all drinking by his troops because too many of them couldn’t do their jobs –  they were either drunk or too hung-over.

In imposing the ban General McChrystal has highlighted one of the dirty little secrets of the War in Afghanistan and it will be interesting to see how the troops react.

I’m not yet clear on whether the ban only extends to the seven bars at the Kabul HQ or to all bars at all bases, and there are a lot of them. Some bars are little bigger than a city bus shelter but others  resemble sprawling Oktoberfest beer tents imported from Germany.

But it is not just a problem of bars. There’s also the booze culture that runs through the various army contingents like, well like, beer.

Dozens of countries send troops to help NATO and the ISAF contingent but as far as I know only one, the United States, sends abstaining soldiers.  U-S soldiers are flat out forbidden to drink.  Others such as the Canadians limit consumption to two cans of beer a day, and then only under rather strict conditions of time and place.

For others there doesn’t seem to be any restriction on them at all.

But for everyone working in the downtown headquarters compound there is supposed to be a limit of two cans of beer a night and a complete ban on hard liquor.

I spent a long time in Afghanistan, working first as a communications advisor to NATO/ISAF headquarters and then as the head communications guy for the United Nations disarmament programme, disarming the self-styled warlords and their private armies. So everything I say here is based on personal experience.

Sane people might say that soldiers should never be allowed to drink, especially if they are in a war zone, have a weapon constantly at hand, (even in mess halls and showers,) and have easy access to stuff that can blow cities apart.

But those so-called sane people have no idea how hard an on-duty soldier works under the kind of severe restrictions not seen outside a penitentiary, through months of quite truly life threatening stress, and especially in Afghanistan through a climate that is one of the toughest on the planet.

As far as I am concerned they deserve a beer.

The problem however is that something went wrong with the ISAF operation right from the beginning and boozing became as much a part of military life at headquarters as making up rules, devising acronyms but only afterwards devising projects and programmes to match the acronym, and driving like lunatics just because they can get away with it.

When I first arrived at HQ in the summer of 2003 I was appalled, nay shocked, to discover that I was only going to be able to buy two beers a day at the camp’s main bar.  The heat, the dust, the frustration of working with a military bureaucracy, devised it seemed by some deranged provincial tyrant from one of the crazier “Stans”, and my liking for a drink or a bunch all added up to what looked to be a huge personal crisis.

But that first night we had four or five beer and learned very quickly that no one but the Canadians located at Camp Warehouse to the east adhered to the two beer rule.  At HQ, and I learned later at all the camps except of course for the poor bloody Americans who weren’t allowed to even smell the stuff, the two beer rule was only for show to satisfy the politicians and local media back home.

It’s not that everyone got to be falling down drunk.  No, I’m saying that only a few were falling down drunk, the rest were, well, tipsy a lot of the time. A lot of aspirin was sold at the PX’s or military shops on base.

At ISAF headquarters in Kabul, just down the street from the American Embassy and close to where the Afghan secret police practice their unmentionable arts on prisoners, Thursday night is the biggest drinking night of the week, as it is for all the international aid workers and so on elsewhere in the city. But unlike aid workers, soldiers in a combat area are pretty well expected to be ready to respond to armed attacks.

Come midnight at headquarters and about the only people sober enough to fight would be the soldiers on active guard duty at the gates and on the walls. Places such as Camp Warehouse out on the Jalalabad Road became nothing less than seething masses of drunken soldiers passed out in the dust or throwing up on each other.

Friday mornings echoed to the moans of the hung-over.

You might ask where all the beer came from?  Well like everything else it was flown in at immense cost on chartered cargo jets along with  more beer, wine, and hard liquor for the three main civilian PX’s in the city.

The three main ones when I was there were Blue, Supreme and Ciano’s.  Only diplomats, UN (non Afghan) workers and other relief workers were allowed to shop in them.  And so of course was the military although by rights they weren’t supposed to and were in fact forbidden to buy alcohol off base.

It was so common as to be beyond comment to see patrolling combat teams roll into the PX compounds with guns bristling, armored cars belching exhaust in dense clouds, command radios blaring.  In minutes the soldiers would load up their war wagons with scotch, rum, gin, wine, and of course wine.  More than once I saw soldiers struggling to get back into their vehicles because too much booze had been loaded inside.

Since no liquor taxes were paid to the Afghan government the cost of this stuff was remarkably cheap.  My regular trips to the PX’s for my own booze supplies typically yielded three bottles of scotch for the cost of one back in Canada.

Afghans were not allowed in these international stores but that was hardly a problem.  My drivers and my staff were not shy about asking me to buy alcohol for them and I was happy to oblige.  For those without that international connection there was no end of Afghan merchants dealing in alcohol, sometimes quite openly.  It was common to see stacks of canned Heineken beer prominently displayed by the side of the road wherever a merchant had set up shop.

I have no doubt that the alcohol ban will fail.  Those who need the alcohol will find their own private supplies and quiet places to drink it.  Others will find ways of visiting neighboring bases where there is no ban, and others will find excuses to attend some of the truly hedonistic drinking parties put on by relief workers most nights of the week.