Growing up in Toronto, my friends and I used to joke that pissing in the Don River actually improved the overall quality of that polluted course. In a similar vein, it turns out that shelling Kandahar actually increases its net worth, so much so that resourceful entrepreneurial scrap-dealers are building faux bunkers with battery-powered lamps to attract US bombs so that they can salvage the shells and re-sell them.

Naimattullah narrates an incident which aptly illustrates how desperation can drive one to desperate measures. A villager from the Dahnd area of Kandahar, according to Naimattullah, had only few thousand afghanis to feed his wife and five children.

“But, instead of buying food, he invested in a small motorcycle battery, a few metres of electrical wire and a bulb. Then he lit the bulb on a hill near Chell Zeena at night and waited for the U.S. bombing, but nothing happened.”

The next evening, the intrepid villager revisited the site. “This time, he tied up a dog near the site to show the Americans some signs of life,” the Taliban official said. And he finally succeeded in his mission – to make the Americans direct their bombs more accurately, this time at his lone shining light.

“The next morning, he was several times richer than two days ago,” the official claimed.

LinkDiscuss (via Robot Wisdom)