Afghanistan

Last week, my boss received a phone call from a journalist: whether we would be able to to estimate the costs of the German participation in the war in Afghanistan. Together, we decided to say "yes, sure", which led to my longest and most intensive work week since, well, I guess the exam time during my first PhD year! I have even given up on my principle that I do not work during the weekend: I spent two Sundays in the office already! I mean, the 9-21 working days during the week are one thing, but Sundays??? Anyway, the deadline for the numbers is tomorrow and for the final report on Wednesday.... It looks like it will make quite a splash when our report comes out, with several media outlets already planning to take up the results. It is a particularly interesting time to discuss this, with several large government expenditure programmes under discussion (Greece bailout, for example). I am quite sure the government is not going to be particularly excited to be told that they have already spent more than the German share of the bailout on fighting a war in Afghanistan.... And I guess our message of "the numbers provided by the government regarding the costs of the conflict are off by a factor 5" will not go down to well either!

Anyway, the need to come up with a trustworthy estimate that can stand the scrutiny of the Ministries of Finance and Defence have been keeping me at work for quite some time... I promise to provide links to the research when it is published!

In other news, the Queen's Day party at the Embassy was a lot of fun again. And once more, too much alcohol was consumed, although it was not quite as bad as it was last year... Las weekend, we had some friends over from the Netherlands: Cobie and Peter. It also happened to be Labour Day, which is commonly celebrated with music, beer and rioting, so we spent quite some time in Kreuzberg:

In all honesty, we did not in fact participate in any riots, to everyone's relief. It was great to see them though, and we rediscovered the joys of playing Cluedo! I always thought that game was kinda stupid, but it really is not that bad!!! (*shock*). This weekend was (yet another) visitor-free one. Instead, we did have Nicole, Pieter and Kristy over for dinner. I finally made Costarican ceviche, which is an absolutely delicious fish-lime dish.

This week is thankfully short. On Thursday, it is Ascension Day (which in Germany is also Men Day, apparently) and in order to compensate for my Sundays of work, I am taking the Friday off as well. This works out well, because Fedor's mum will be here with her boyfriend: we will be able to spend some time together! Now all I have to do is last until Wednesday and finalise my research report...

Tschüßi,
OJ

PS I don't want to share any specific numbers yet regarding the cost of the war effort, but it suffices to say that the cost is expressed in the tens of billions of euros...