re: taliban taxi

[Dana Loomis <dloomis@domain.elided>]

Someone mentioned having seen a Giulia sedan in taxi livery in the
background of a recent photo from the war in Afghanistan.  I didn't see the
picture, but it's interesting to speculate about how  an Alfa could have
gotten there.  I have an official Alfa Romeo dealer locator ("Guida de
servizi assistenziali"), dated April, 1971, which lists dealers in Teheran
and Karachi (as well as Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Lebanon and Israel), but
none in Afghanistan.  An Alfa content-less anecdote suggests another
mechansim: Some years ago, one of the taxi companies where I live in the US
went out of business and sold its entire fleet, consisting mostly of the
classic Checker cabs, to a company in Pakistan.  For a few weeks, those
big, old yellow cars were all lined up in a parking lot, waiting to be
loaded onto the trucks that would take them to the port, where they would
be loaded onto a ship to southern Asia.  In Italy, Alfa Romeos have been
some of the favorite vehicles for police and taxi service for a long time.
Perhaps it wouldn't be too far fetched to imagine an Italian cab company
buying a new fleet of, say Alfettas, and selling off the obsolescent
Giulias to a customer in some far off Asian country.  

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