Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (The Taliban Shuffle MTI)

by Kim Barker

  After writing, Dave and I checked the news, set the alarm, and fell into bed before midnight, still wearing our clothes. Then my cell phone rang. A close friend.

  “What?” I said.

  “A bomb, turn on your TV,” she said, sounding panicked.

  I turned on CNN. Nothing.

  “Are you sure it was a bomb? It’s not on CNN.”

  “That’s what they’re saying.”

  She told me to check a Pakistani station. I did, and saw the first images of an explosion, of flames and carnage. I groaned.

  “Gotta go.”

  Dave and I looked at each other, sighed, ran to the lobby, and begged and bribed our way into a taxi. No driver wanted to go near Bhutto’s convoy or any explosion—rumors were already spreading. The cab dropped us blocks away, and we ran toward the sirens. Bhutto’s truck sat there, surrounded by mangled car parts, people with bloody salwar kameezes, police. I saw friends and body parts, and pulled out my notebook and started taking notes. Dave and I split up. The scene was a free-for-all, no police tape, no sense of preserving evidence. A police officer called me over. He lifted up a white sheet, to show me a head.

  “Bomber,” he said.

  Over the years my notebook had become my insulation. Around such destruction, such death, I simply took notes. I could deal with it emotionally later, but right now, I had to work.

  “Head,” I wrote. “Possibly bomber.”

  I wandered around, talking to people, eventually deciding to climb the ladder on the back of Bhutto’s truck to see what was there. The police escorted me as if I were an investigator. On the deck of the truck, I saw blood, shrapnel, pieces of twisted metal. A Bhutto supporter showed me bullet dings in the bulletproof screen, insisting that someone was shooting at the truck when the bomb—or bombs, no one was certain—exploded.

  Tired, I grabbed the railing of the truck, and felt something wet. I froze for a few seconds, not wanting to look down. Finally I glanced, realizing what I had done. I swallowed and looked at my left hand, wondering what I should do now. I wiped my hand on my jeans, then wrote in my notebook: “Pieces of people on the railing of truck.” More than a hundred and forty people had died, including many who had sworn to give their lives for Bhutto, who was unharmed. I had seen more death—the tsunami, two different earthquakes. But I could somehow understand natural disasters. This was a human disaster, and I couldn’t make sense of the hate. We flagged a ride back to the hotel from a man named Mujahid. I walked quickly to the lobby bathroom, pulled off my tennis shoes, and yanked hand towels off the roller as fast as I could, pumping soap onto them and drenching them in hot water. Then I scrubbed my shoes, trying to get the paper towels into the grooves of the soles, trying to clean them. I cried as the water ran pink, then clear. I shut off the water, looked in the mirror, dabbed my eyes, and walked back to the hotel room in my socks. I dropped my shoes outside the door, next to my boyfriend’s. I went inside to write.

  Looking back, if my adrenaline addiction had a rock bottom, this was it—wiping my bloody hand on my pants, scrubbing the blood of strangers off my shoes, pushing away the tears so I could write a story. Years later, I realized that never again would I get this close to a bomb scene, never again would I report inside the perimeter, because never again would I want to. But at the time, a mark of how far down the rabbit hole I had fallen, I saw it as just another tragedy I needed to stuff in the growing box in the back of my head. Shut the top and move on.

  The next days were a blur. Of going to the morgue and seeing people try to identify family members from limbs, and smelling that peculiar, unmistakable stench of death—sweet but overripe, overwhelming but still unable to cover the something rotten beneath. Of sobbing family members, hair-pulling grief. Of squeezing past angry crowds to slide into Bhutto’s compound.

  Bhutto decided to meet with a few foreign reporters, but after years in exile, she miscalculated the new vibrant national press, who saw it as a major insult that Bhutto was favoring foreign journalists. As we waited for Bhutto, Pakistani reporters pushed inside and started arguing. Bhutto tried to calm everyone down. An old woman shoved her way into the room, grasping at Bhutto. There seemed to be no security, no real attempt to protect her. The old lady was hustled out, the bickering continued.

  At one point, bored, I rolled my eyes and made faces at friends standing on the other side of the room. Unfortunately, I was standing next to Bhutto, and the Associated Press chose that moment to take a picture. My eyes bugged out of my head, as did my hair. I looked like a cartoon character. It was, most definitely, the worst photograph ever taken of me in my life. It would run in newspapers around the world, and I would hear from people I hadn’t talked to in years, asking what had happened to me overseas.

  But now, oblivious, I sat down to the right of Bhutto and introduced myself.

  “I interviewed you on the phone once.”

  She nodded. “Of course, I remember you, Kim.”

  She introduced herself to everyone, and we were all instantly smitten. Up close, Bhutto didn’t show all of her fifty-four years. She still had ink-black hair, a regal narrow nose, a crooked smile, and only a few wrinkles around her eyes. She wore a gauzy white headscarf that she used like a prop—it would slip back on her head or her shoulders, and she would gracefully put it back in place. We all knew about her cynicism, about the deal she had made with a dictator. But Bhutto had that power that only the rare leader does—to make every person feel like the most important one in the room.

  After a few days, I flew back to Islamabad and waited for the next bomb, the next fracture in this fractured country. Dave flew to England, where I planned to meet him soon for a well-earned vacation. I chose to ignore rumors that Musharraf was contemplating declaring an emergency. If I paid attention to every rumor in Pakistan, I’d never sleep.

  One morning I popped awake at 6:30 with a stabbing sensation in the middle of my upper back. I couldn’t turn my head. I felt as if there had been a crank in the middle of my back, and it had been turned and turned, until at one point, something snapped. In tears, I called Samad, who picked me up and rushed me to the hospital. I called a friend to meet me there, just before being dumped in a bed and injected with drugs. Woozy, drowsy, I vaguely noticed a team of men and women in white coats surrounding me. One, with a long, fundamentalist beard and no mustache, asked if he could take my pulse. An Islamic fundie. I could recognize one anywhere, even when I was high.

  “Yes, fine,” I whispered.

  Before I knew it, he had unzipped my jeans and started feeling for the pulse in my groin. This man would probably never even shake my hand, but here he was, grabbing around inside my pants. The crowd leaned forward to look. I was in so much pain and on so many painkillers, I barely registered the many easier places to check a pulse. My friend showed up, just in time to add some modicum of decency to the nurses’ decision to check my breasts.

  “What is going on here?” she announced, pulling the drapes closed. “Who’s in charge?”

  “I have no idea,” I replied.

  I never saw the fundie again, and the doctors shot me up with enough drugs so I no longer cared. But I clearly needed a break. I needed to be left alone, to sleep for a month. Once my pinched nerve subsided, I hopped on a plane for London. Unfortunately, it was November 3, 2007. It would be the shortest vacation of my life.

  CHAPTER 15

  GOD SAVE THE QUEEN

  I walked off the plane exhausted but excited. Finally, I would be able to relax with Dave. Finally, we could do couples’ things we had never experienced in Pakistan, radical activities like holding hands in public. Finally, we could see what was between us.

  But as soon as I spotted Dave in Heathrow, I knew something was wrong. He wore a sad smile and patted me like he was putting out a fire.

  “What? What happened?”

  “I’m sorry, babe. Musharraf just declared an emergency.”

  I felt as if someone had kicked me in the head.

  �
��No. No. I can’t.”

  “You can. You have to,” he said.

  I felt sorry for us, sorrier for Pakistan. Every month seemed to bring a fresh crisis, a new attempt to drive the country into a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour. Musharraf had suspended the constitution, actually fired Chief Justice Chaudhry instead of just suspending him, suspended the country’s other independent top judges unless they signed a new oath, and placed them all under house arrest, blocking off the entire judges’ enclave with riot police, barricades, and barbed wire. In a hilarious justification, Musharraf said he declared the emergency because of the increased threat of Islamic militants and interference by the judiciary. It seemed much more likely that Musharraf wanted to preempt an expected ruling by the supreme court that would have tossed out his recent reelection.

  The country’s security services started rounding up the bad guys. No, not the nefarious Islamic miscreants Musharraf usually complained about. Instead, the tin men hauled away thousands of lawyers, opposition politicians, and human-rights activists. From London, I frantically called people in Pakistan—some talked in hushed tones because they had already been detained. Others talked, but by the end of the day, their phones just rang incessantly or not at all. Tammy went into hiding.

  By the next day, I was back on a plane, bound for Islamabad.

  Musharraf’s extreme action provoked some allies to finally turn against him—at least somewhat. The Dutch government suspended aid. Britain announced it would review its aid package. The European Union said its members were considering the dreaded “possible further steps.” President George W. Bush told reporters in the Oval Office that the United States wanted elections as soon as possible, wanted Musharraf to strip off his uniform, and wanted to work with Musharraf “to make it abundantly clear the position of the United States.”

  “We made it clear to the president that we would hope he wouldn’t have declared the emergency powers he’s declared,” Bush said. “And at the same time, we want to continue working with him to fight these terrorists and extremists.”

  As always, America’s relationship with Pakistan was all about the terrorists. Meanwhile, Musharraf met with foreign ambassadors in Islamabad and tried to justify himself. He said he was committed to completing the transition from military rule to democracy, a three-phase process he had yammered on about for years, and said the top judges in Pakistan had “paralyzed various organs of the state and created impediments in the fight against terrorism.” Musharraf figured that he just had to wave a terrorist bogeyman at the Western countries to get their support. Usually it worked.

  His actions raised a major question: What would Bhutto do? She remained fairly quiet at first, obviously hoping to preserve her power-sharing deal. But it soon became clear that Bhutto had to do something—she had to distance herself from the military ruler or risk her entire political base. So she announced a rally for that Friday in neighboring Rawalpindi—symbolically important for her, the army-garrison town where her father had been hanged by General Zia twenty-eight years before.

  Early on the morning of the scheduled rally, the show unfolded. Bhutto was placed under house arrest in Islamabad. Dozens of journalists waited near the concrete barriers, barbed wire, and hundreds of government security forces outside her house. The scene would have been funny to watch from above—one journalist heard a rumor that Bhutto was supposed to speak at one spot, and sprinted down the block. The rest of the herd followed, running, holding cameras and notepads, and dropping samosas and pakoras and other fried food. Then another journalist talked quietly on a cell phone and started running, and we all followed in another direction. At one point, two friends and I just started running, to see if everyone followed. They did.

  Twice, Bhutto tried to leave her house unsuccessfully. She then gave an impromptu press conference from her bulletproof white SUV, ringed by cops, just on the other side of the barrier. She stood up inside the vehicle, speaking against Musharraf from the open sunroof, an image that would later haunt me.

  Musharraf soon ended his temper tantrum. After years of promises, he finally stepped down as army chief. Weeks later, he ended emergency rule, restored the constitution, and announced that he believed emergency rule had saved his country. Case closed.

  But damage had been done, and not just to the country’s institutions. While the government was distracted, the militants had gained strength. Largely reacting to the siege on the Red Mosque months earlier, more had vowed revenge against the Pakistani government, instead of just attacking foreign troops and Afghan security forces across the border in Afghanistan. A neo-Taliban group in the South Waziristan tribal agency had been blamed for the attack on Bhutto’s homecoming parade. (Soon the group would be dubbed the Pakistani Taliban.) Two suicide bombers blew themselves up at almost the same time, near ISI targets in Rawalpindi, the seat of the military’s power—an indication of how strong the militants were growing. In Peshawar, the capital of the beleaguered North-West Frontier Province, which bordered Afghanistan and the lawless tribal areas, bombs had started exploding, small ones, outside video shops, seen as un-Islamic and full of Western propaganda. The senior superintendent of police in Peshawar told me that he was exasperated with what had happened in the previous year.

  Then his phone rang. Another bomb, carried by a woman, had just blown up near the local ISI office.

  “Please excuse me,” he said, standing up. “I have to go.”

  The militants, largely a creation of the omnipotent ISI and the Pakistani military, were now blowing back on their creators like a version of Frankenstein. But still, knowing the truth was practically impossible; Bhutto blamed the establishment for her homecoming attack, not militants. And many Pakistanis blamed India for all the bombs—with, of course, no proof. The double game was practically a quadruple game.

  I took breaks when I could, sometimes staring at a wall. I celebrated the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha with Samad’s mother, father, sister, and various cousins, eating a goat sacrificed for the occasion. Every time I visited his tiny apartment, his mother treated me like royalty, kissing me on my cheeks, pinching me, laughing at me. Her gray hair was always colored with bright orange henna; she continually tried to talk to me in Urdu, finally falling back on the few Urdu words I seemed to remember.

  “Samad ganda,” she said, laughing. That meant “Samad dirty,” completely untrue, but always funny. While we ate, a bomb exploded at a mosque near the tribal areas, killing more than fifty worshippers.

  Too much death. I was homesick and lonely. After our abrupt vacation, Dave had returned to Islamabad, wrapped up his job, and departed for Afghanistan to launch his new project. I hunted for some Christmas spirit, helping a friend buy sugar, flour, and tea for care packages for Afghan refugees. But when Samad drove us to the refugee camp in Islamabad, everyone started fighting as soon as they spotted our bounty. Desperate for help, the women and children surrounded us, grabbing bags of goodies out of our hands, grabbing our hands. We shimmied our way back into the car. They pounded on the windows. We barely made an escape without running over a child.

  “That did not make me feel good at all,” I said.

  My friend, the same one who had rescued me from the hospital breast grab, who spent weeks planning this act of charity, just looked out the window.

  I tried to convince my bosses to let me go to the States for the holidays.

  “What could happen between Christmas and New Year’s?” I asked.

  My boss sat silently on the other end of the phone, letting me fill in the blanks. The earthquake in Iran, the tsunami in Asia?

  “OK, fine,” I said. “Something could happen. But given all that’s happened this year, what are the chances?”

  “You can’t leave Pakistan,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know you’re tired. But we can’t take the chance.”

  “Can I go to Karachi?”

  He finally agreed. Tammy lived in Karachi, the port metropolis that actually had culture, restaurants,
and grit, as opposed to the sterile capital. She had invited me to spend the holidays with her family. Over the past seven months, Tammy had become one of my closest friends, even though she was superficially my opposite. She had thick long black hair—the kind people pay to turn into wigs—and pale skin, and wore designer jewelry that often matched her delicate shoes. Her hair was always perfect; her outfits were always perfect; her nails and makeup were always perfect. Tammy was a member of the elite in Pakistan, the daughter of a former cricket hero, the sister of a man who ran one of the country’s largest stock exchanges, the sister-in-law of a media mogul. She attended one of the same elite Pakistani private schools as Benazir Bhutto. Tammy, however, was far more than she appeared. A former New York corporate lawyer, she now hosted a talk show on her brother-in-law’s TV station and wrote columns for the English newspaper The News. She used her celebrity and intellect to whip up support for the lawyers’ movement against Musharraf, even though both her brother and brother-in-law liked Musharraf. Conversations at the family’s dinner table were often bitter disagreements about the country’s future. Watching them was the Pakistani version of Crossfire.

  Regardless of any political disputes, Tammy’s family was warm and welcoming to anyone who entered her realm. Her mother and father immediately embraced me like a daughter, inviting me to stay whenever I wanted. Their art collection rivaled that of museums; their generosity rivaled that of anyone I ever met. Through Tammy’s family, I had a window into the upper class of Pakistan, the movers and shakers who ate elaborate dinners at midnight and would never think of receiving guests without offering delicate crustless sandwiches, various deep-fried packets, and sweet milky tea. Yet unlike many of the movers, who believed that the country’s economic future rested with Musharraf, Tammy was passionate about the need for a functioning legal system. Tammy counseled me repeatedly to hold my temper with the ass grabbers; she navigated countless reporting trips for another close friend and me; she dodged tear gas and rocks at lawyers’ protests in Islamabad, running from danger in high heels.