Things In Afghanistan Go Better With Coca-Cola

Yahoo! News
September 11, 2006

A sniper on the gleaming Coca-Cola factory's roof peers through his gun sight over Kabul's bullet-pocked suburbs, searching for any hint of a terrorist threat. In a parking lot festooned with red Coke flags, an American dog handler barks commands at journalists being frisked by Afghan security agents. In strife-ridden Afghanistan, this is how even the most positive of events — like Sunday's opening of a new $25 million Coca-Cola production plant — are handled. Even more so when pro-U.S. Afghan President Hamid Karzai attends.

But according to Karzai, more business openings and investments of this kind will lead to a downturn in Afghanistan's violence, which has reached its deadliest proportions since U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban in 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden.

"But now we have no running water, no electricity and no sanitation," local resident Jomaa Gul said as he kicked a dust-covered 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 $25 million than a soft drink plant."