Kabul?s Colonel Kurtz

They hang out at Kabul?s Mustafa Hotel, muscles and automatic weaponry on display, guzzling beer and flirting with the giggling Thai girls flown in to staff the hotel?s new massage parlour and beauty salon.

The American ex-soldiers who have flocked to Afghanistan tend to be men of mystery, their ranks dominated by laconic Southerners.

They are to be found in the Irish bar of the Mustafa, a former secret police detention centre hurriedly converted into a hotel after the fall of the Taliban and now run by an Afghan-American car dealer from New Jersey.

Over expensive glasses of Jack Daniel?s, they swap hair-raising tales, compare weaponry and joke with the massage parlour girls who dress in camouflage waistcoats.


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