The Ambassador put down the receiver and glanced around his office. No inspiration is to be gained here. Although someone had tried to mend them, the bullet holes in the wall still looked like scars on its naked surface. Everything here was very far from his idea of quality; sadly, his budget had no room for him to bring in Danish builders. There was certainly scope for improvement here at the embassy; he nevertheless reminded himself that it was a decent building compared to the many bullet-ridden houses in the area. And anyway, it was not a decision he could influence. His mind fluttered on to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs briefing back in Copenhagen. It had been close-drawn. Or rather, the latest developments in the matter of the Russian prisoners – the ones detained by the Jaegers – were intriguingly precarious. He felt like he’d just taken a complex set of exams. Drained of energy and relieved. He rubbed his eyes tiredly and leaned back in the chair; he allowed the events of the past weeks to flicker across his mind.
The past few weeks have been high voltage. The countries’ differing political mandates – characterised by the participants’ approaches to co-operation in ISAF – had called on all his diplomatic skills. Germany and France, on the one side, and Britain and the US, 82on the other, had made robust stands. Germany and France believed that any task with a partial policing nature lay outside the mandate. ISAF should deal with military tasks alone. This sparked a furious diplomatic disagreement. The US and Britain both believed that tasks aimed at stabilising the situation in Afghanistan were military. The British Ambassador pointed out that combating opium production was an essential task of ISAF. His public-school manners made him come across as arrogant. And his pompous argument that his nation’s Prime Minister had pointed this out on several occasions did not in any way encourage the French to accept compromises. The Russians had, cleverly, not directly engaged in the debate. They had known how to exploit political disagreements to downplay the fact that Russian soldiers had been captured red-handed. After a heated diplomatic discussion of ISAF’s role in the war against narcotics, everyone agreed to transfer the Russian and Chechen prisoners to a military prison in Kabul. At the same time, the locals were sent to the US detention centre at Bagram Air Base. It had been a stroke of genius for the Kremlin, on the home front. The prison in Kabul was run by Russian ISAF forces, which left the Russians to assume responsibility for their own soldiers. The Ambassador had no problem with the compromise, and neither had Copenhagen. The issue was that Denmark had been handed the unwelcome role of a pawn in this political game of chess. The transport of the prisoners from Kandahar was to be made using one of the Danish C-130 Hercules transport planes stationed out in the former republic of Kyrgyzstan. The Ambassador rubbed his eyes in resignation, before dismissing the man across the desk with a nod.
Military attaché Peter Larsen cleared his throat, smiled politely 83and left the room with a spring in his step. His workday was far from over yet. He had to go to the Danish Embassy in Kabul, where he had a critical report to complete. He needed to get away now. The daily routine of briefing the Ambassador on incidents around the country was tedious, so attending the telephone conferences with the Foreign Office was an enjoyable break from the monotony. The Ambassador simply just did not appreciate the importance of the attaché’s work. When he had reported an episode from Saturday night, the Ambassador had blatantly criticised the robust approach championed by the Americans. Coalition soldiers had shot at a white pick-up truck that refused to stop at a checkpoint in the central Ghazni province. The logic in this was not lost on Peter Larsen. They knew they had to stop the truck, and the fact that there were no weapons in the vehicle did not establish that the drivers were not involved in some form of illegal activity. He did not even bother to argue this with the Ambassador. The Foreign Office is bloody rife with hippies. Peter Larsen yawned at the thought of the hour of boring writing ahead of him. The report had to be sent to the Army Operational Command and the Ministry of Defence prior to the daily intelligence briefing at ISAF’s headquarters. Another sleepless afternoon, he thought and checked his watch. The briefings were occasionally good fun, but mostly it was a competition between the military intelligence guys droning on about whoever was the last person spotted landing at Kabul Airport. All this cloak-and-dagger is a thankless task.