This is a "postcard" from Afghanistan created by ex-Green Beret, sometime- writer-journalist Paul Avallone. The dark humor of the captions is one way to defuse the nakedly discomforting essence of the bizarre and the malevolent on display in the photo he took -- a picture of people our troops have been ordered to bribe, placate, and, I'm afraid, serve, in a disastrous policy that amounts to submission. What else can we call a war policy that puts United States Marines in charge of mosque-building?

Shortly, I will begin posting Paul's equally evocative and vivid essay "Flirting with Afghanistan" in several installments, along with more of the photos he took while working as a journalist in Afghanistan after serving there earlier in the war.