Now they can drink Coke with their timbitsThe sniper perched on the gleaming Coca-Cola factory's roof, peering through his gun sight over Kabul's bullet-pocked suburbs, searching for any hint of a terrorist threat.
In the red Coke flag-festooned car park below, an American sniffer dog handler barked commands at journalists being frisked by Afghan security agents for weapons.
In strife-ridden Afghanistan, this is how even the most positive of events like Sunday's opening of a new US$25 million Coca-Cola production plant are handled.
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"This is another step forward for economic growth, self-sufficiency and better living standards for Afghanistan," Karzai said in his inauguration speech inside the plant, where 350 people have got new jobs.
Across town in the bombed-out building that housed Coke's last production plant in Kabul, Jomaa Gul saw it another way.
What Afghanistan needs now is investment not to make soft drinks, but for new hospitals and to end the violence, said Gul, whose father worked at the 40-year-old plant before it was ravaged by artillery fire in the 1992-96 civil war.
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"But now we have no running water, no electricity and no sanitation," said Gul, 34, as he kicked a dust-covered 20-year-old glass Coca-Cola bottle through a patch of weeds in the loading bay where trucks once took the soft drink away.
"Hospitals and security are more worthy investments for US$25 million than a soft drink plant," he added.
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posted 14 July 2006 05:15 PM
