Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (The Taliban Shuffle MTI)

by Kim Barker

  So I said I would try to get Dave a ticket, and then I changed the subject. But I didn’t try. Even though we had talked about sharing a house in Islamabad, even though I wanted to make us work, I didn’t necessarily want to work with him. And I was selfish. This was my story. No one had yet written about the Pashtun female finalist, even though a woman had never performed this well.

  The day of the show, I called Dave as Farouq and I drove to the taping. I thought he had forgotten about it. But he fumed.

  “You didn’t even try to get me a ticket, did you?” he said. “You knew I wanted to go.”

  “It’s difficult,” I replied.

  “Is it? You don’t want me to go.”

  Farouq could overhear the argument.

  “Kim,” he whispered. “Tell him to come. We’ll get him in.”

  Realizing my worlds were colliding, I invited Dave. Farouq and I parked outside the Afghan Markopolo Wedding Hall, a phantasm of mirrors and columns, and walked past the crowds of young men waiting outside. We showed our passes to the burly security guards and climbed the stairs. Being here was like attending any celebrity event anywhere, only tinged with the possibility of an insurgent attack. Farouq looked for someone in charge.

  “I’m going to schmooze some people,” he said, using a word I had taught him.

  “Schmooze away.”

  Farouq easily found the media guy and convinced him to let Dave into the show. That handled, we found seats, saving a seat next to Farouq, so he could translate for both of us. Dave soon showed up, wild-eyed and out of breath.

  “I was just assaulted,” he said. “A bodyguard just slammed me in the chest. He took the wind out of me. He thought I was a Pashtun.”

  I considered that objectively. With his coloring and beard, Dave did resemble a Pashtun. A beefy Afghan who had clearly been pumping iron in one of the many bodybuilding gyms of Kabul then walked up to him.

  “I’m sorry again, sir.”

  Dave started yelling at him. “You can’t treat people like that. I’m a journalist.”

  Farouq looked at me, his eyebrows raised. Dave had a point. But the security guard had apologized, several times. Now Dave was shaming him in public, which contradicted any Afghan code imaginable. His anger was spilling over from me to the world. What had he seen on his embeds? I didn’t know, because he didn’t want to worry me, but I imagined bombs, gunfights, the kind of violence that I had somehow avoided. Dave had started to change. Always passionate and intense, he now seemed just angry.

  Finally he sat down, still upset, barely speaking to me because of the ticket fiasco. This was not a fun date. Poor Farouq was stuck in the middle.

  But we were all soon distracted. White lights flashed, and the loudspeakers pumped music. The host ran onstage, announced “In the name of God—hello,” and called out the four singers. They walked out and stood nervously, waiting to hear who lost in the previous week’s voting. Lima Sahar was the only woman and the only Pashtun.

  “Who is the person who should stay with us?” the host asked the audience, who booed Lima. Some of the three hundred or so audience members felt that Lima had made it this far in the competition not because of her talent but because of a massive Pashtun voting bloc. And they were upset for another reason.

  “Why are they booing her?” I asked Farouq.

  “She’s a woman,” he whispered. “They aren’t used to it.”

  I felt bad for her. Lima was kept home during the Taliban years, and although she was eighteen, she was only in the eighth grade. She could speak little Dari, the main language in Afghanistan. When Lima was in Kandahar, she wore a blue burqa whenever she left the house. But onstage she wore blue glitter in her hair, a matching headscarf, a long electric-blue tunic with gold-sequin flowers, matching pants, fake eyelashes, and the makeup of a televangelist’s wife. She gripped her elbows in front of her chest like a life preserver and stared straight ahead, looking past the boos of the audience.

  The host paused, dramatically delaying the judges’ decision. “I can tell you this time, something strange has happened.”

  Something strange had indeed happened—the most popular singer had been knocked off. And Lima had made it to the final round of three.

  When Lima sang, I could see why some people questioned her ability. She seemed more like a karaoke performer, perhaps even a not-so-good karaoke performer. She danced almost as an afterthought, with the rhythm of Whitney Houston and the enthusiasm of lumber. Her voice was sometimes off-key. Yet she was also slightly flirty, a bit subversive. She sang one song with almost a sneer, changing the words of a traditional Pashto song from a male perspective to a female one. In Afghanistan, that passed for rebellion.

  “If I blacken my eyes with eyeliner, it will kill you,” she sang, with a slight hip sway. “Especially if I wear these bangles from Kandahar.”

  My story was scheduled for the front page the next Thursday, the same day that Lima happened to be voted off the show. But Dave’s ran first, days earlier, meaning that I had helped him scoop me. That was hardly the only problem. Unknown to anyone at the Tribune, a reporter at our sister newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, also owned by the Tribune Company, had written a story weeks earlier about Afghan Star that had not yet run in the newspaper. It was a very different story, and didn’t even mention Sahar, but it was about the same TV show. Then, in a decision that would haunt me for months, the Los Angeles Times decided to run its story about Afghan Star on the same day as mine.

  Our newspaper company had just been bought by the eccentric billionaire Sam Zell, an alleged maverick who liked wearing jeans and swearing. The deal was complicated and somehow involved cashing in all the stock owned by employees, but since it had gone through in the weeks between the emergency and Bhutto’s death, I paid little attention. Zell, who resembled a cross between a Keebler elf and a garden gnome, was not a newspaperman. He was a compulsive bargain hunter, the self-proclaimed “grave dancer,” making billions largely by buying troubled companies, somehow fixing them, and then selling them. So far he had tried to ingratiate himself with employees by removing the barriers to porn on the Internet, under the theory, I guess, that newspapers shouldn’t have any censorship and because everyone loves porn, even at work. After appearing at a Los Angeles Times plant in Orange County in February, he was quoted on his philosophy: “Everyone likes pussy. It’s un-American not to like pussy.”

  In theory, he should have loved my story about Afghan Star. But soon after the competing stories appeared on March 13, they came to Zell’s attention. He allegedly got angry and used some four-letter words. I could understand his point—two of his newspapers had expended resources on the same feature story in Afghanistan, hardly a smart investment. So as Zell toured around his newspapers in the coming weeks, he would complain about Afghan Star. And by inference, me.

  But I wouldn’t know about the fallout for months. Oblivious and trapped in a hotel room with a man who felt neglected, I wrote other stories. I tried to spend time with Dave, but I also ate dinners with various sources, a time commitment that annoyed Dave more than my ticket stunt. Then my friend Sean, the British adrenaline junkie, called. I hadn’t seen him since the barbecue the previous summer at the Fun House, where the Afghan Elvis had peddled cocaine smuggled in toothpaste tubes.

  “Meet me for dinner,” he said. “I need to talk to you about something. It’s very sensitive.”

  I wanted to say yes. I knew I couldn’t.

  “I can’t,” I said. “Lunch?”

  I didn’t tell Sean I had a man in my hotel room because I didn’t want to mix the two men. Sean would be fine, but Dave would be jealous. Sean invited me to the Gandamack. As soon as the waiter took our order of chicken salads, Sean looked from side to side and leaned in closer.

  “So, I have to ask you about something,” he started, vaguely.

  “Yes?”

  “I have an opportunity. An invitation to go meet someone. Someone important. But it could be difficult. I’m won
dering if you think I should go.”

  “Tango?” I said. By now, I slipped easily into his conspiracy lingo.

  “Not Tango. Someone senior. I can’t tell you.”

  “Hekmatyar?” I said, naming the renegade leader of Hezb-i-Islami, the militant group in the east.

  “No. Let me finish. I have been invited to meet a senior commander who’s very important. But the meeting would be over the border, in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What do you think?”

  I didn’t have to think long. “I think you’re a fucking idiot and you’re going to get kidnapped.”

  “They promised me security,” Sean said.

  “I think you’re a fucking idiot and you’re going to get kidnapped,” I repeated.

  “Keep your voice down,” he said. “You know, I’m a little worried. I was supposed to meet the contact a few days ago, but Sami didn’t have everything together and it felt weird, so we canceled. And our contact said, ‘No problem, we can reschedule.’ That seemed strange. Normally you have to push and push to get these guys to talk to you.”

  I sighed. Sean knew everything I was telling him. His translator, Sami, knew everything. They knew this was a bad idea, but Sean still wanted his fix.

  “Tango in Pakistan is not like Tango in Afghanistan,” I said, knowing that Sean knew this. “The ISI’s involved. You can’t just walk into the tribal areas without them knowing. You’re probably in more danger from the ISI than from the militants.”

  The Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Pakistan’s conflicted top spy agency, was known for some members supporting insurgents.

  “Who are you seeing?” I asked again.

  “Someone important.”

  “Haqqani?” I asked.

  Militant commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, an old Pakistani pal of the CIA and ISI, had helped fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and supported the Taliban while they were in power. Three main groups based in Pakistan now fought against foreign troops and the Afghan government, even though the groups were usually just lumped together and called the Taliban. One group was Mullah Omar’s Taliban, suspected to be based in the Pakistan city of Quetta, in western Baluchistan Province. Another was Hezb-i-Islami. The third group was the one formed by Haqqani in the North Waziristan tribal agency and now run mostly by his son Sirajuddin. Haqqani’s group was generally regarded as the most ruthless, sophisticated, and evil of all the militant factions, responsible for a spectacular attack two months earlier at the Serena Hotel in Kabul.

  Sean smiled slightly. “I can’t say. Maybe.”

  “You’re a fucking idiot and you’re going to get kidnapped. Why would you go meet him? Nobody in the West even knows who he is. He’s not worth it.”

  “I can’t say exactly what I’m doing.”

  I shook my head and looked at him. I knew what he would decide.

  “When would you be back?”

  “Easter. I told my boys I would be back home in time for Easter.”

  “I still think it’s a bad idea,” I said. “But knowing you, everything will work out great.”

  Sean laughed. “I’ll let you know. But keep it quiet. I don’t want anyone else to know about it.”

  So I left Sean and the Gandamack, and a few days later, I left Afghanistan. Sean also asked several mutual friends their opinions of his planned trip—as with everything else, Sean couldn’t keep his mouth shut. But I would only find this out later because Sean had told them, like me, to stay quiet. We all stayed quiet, until we couldn’t anymore. Only then would I learn that everyone told Sean the same thing: that the trip was too risky, and that he was acting like an idiot.

  CHAPTER 18

  SUSPICIOUS MINDS

  My new house in Pakistan was the nicest I had seen in Islamabad, nicer than anywhere I had ever lived during my resolutely middle-class life. Brick with white trim, it was an over-the-top knockoff of a colonial mansion, with a ridiculous five bedrooms, an even more ridiculous five bathrooms, a giant two-story living room with floor-to-ceiling windows, a view of the Margalla Hills, a roof deck, bunny planters, and a landlord who was a colonel. I figured I deserved it. To save the company money, for almost a year I had either slept at friends’ houses in Islamabad or rented a cheap room, while the company continued to pay for the bulk of my apartment in India. But after giving up my Delhi apartment the previous summer, my expenses had dropped to a dangerously low level. I didn’t want my increasingly cheap company to get used to it. I also wanted my own space again, and since Dave had no place to live in Islamabad anymore, as he was spending most of his time in Afghanistan, getting a house together made sense.

  At least, that’s what I told myself. Moving in after only a few months of dating seemed crazy, especially considering his anger issues and my lack-of-support problems, but, hey, this was a crazy lifestyle. We were both mature. Somehow we could make it work. And we needed it, needed the anchor. The Italian restaurant where we had always gone for dates had just been blown up, the night after Tammy, Dave, several other friends, and I ate dinner there. Dave bought us a pool table. I bought us a wooden bar and stools. All the foreigners were creating their own havens, to stay out of the Pakistani madness. Our mantra had become like my misanthropic father’s: Outside bad, inside good.

  My trusty driver Samad cleaned up the house, picked out new lighting fixtures, and supervised the painting of the walls, which the previous German tenants had desecrated with pink-and-rust triangles. He told me he wanted to be the gardener.

  “I love this work, Kim.”

  So I made him the gardener. I even let Samad move into the tiny maid’s room, with its own entrance, so he had a place to stay during the day and sleep if I made him work late. I gave him a piece of carpet, a DVD player, a spare TV. He brought in a mattress. I watched how Samad worked, how he was so meticulous, so trustworthy for a kid of twenty-two. I wanted to find a way to help him.

  Samad did not own his own car. He took whatever car his company handed him—which meant that en route to Peshawar one morning, after making various clanking sounds, our car broke down. The engine appeared to be held together by duct tape and staples. I spent the next ninety minutes berating Samad for not checking the car, an experience that made me feel slightly dirty, like kicking a puppy. Samad needed a new car, one of his own. He needed it for our safety. So we cobbled together loans, from me and others and Samad’s helpful boss, to get him a sleek black 2008 Toyota Corolla. He started crying when he showed up at my house with it. He washed it about thirty times a day and cringed whenever I climbed inside holding a large cup of coffee.

  So my new life was set: new house, new car, new live-in if longdistance boyfriend, and inevitably, new intrigue.

  Samad soon drove me to a lunch date with a political officer at the Afghan embassy. I had known him for years, ever since he had run for parliamentary elections in Afghanistan in 2005 under the randomly drawn symbol of One Camel. (Unfortunately, his position on the ballot was right next to a man running as Three Camels, which led to much confusion and One Camel’s general depression.) One Camel had actually run a campaign in Afghanistan, and he had not been connected to any warlord, which meant his candidacy was doomed. So he landed here, at the Afghan embassy in Islamabad, where he had helped me get visas on short notice. Now One Camel wanted to go to lunch. In repayment for all his help, I said I’d take him and his female translator to the buffet at the Serena Hotel, the fanciest hotel in Islamabad. We ordered fresh orange juice, which tasted slightly rancid, and then picked up plates filled with various lukewarm curries. One Camel told me vague generalities about drugs and corruption across the border. He leaned forward and whispered, as did his translator. At the end of our lunch, we stood up to leave. He muttered something; I asked the translator what he said.

  “ISI,” she said with a shrug.

  “My spies,” One Camel said, smirking and nodding at three men sporting mustaches and wearing crisp cream-colored salwar kameezes at a table near the entrance to the restaurant.
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  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “My spies. They follow me.”

  I started laughing. “Seriously?”

  “I go, they go.”

  Sure enough, as soon as we walked out of the grand lobby of the Serena, the men stood up and walked out. Of course the ISI, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, would want to pay attention to an Afghan political officer, just like it paid attention to Indian diplomats and various journalists. The ISI was not like the CIA—not exactly. It expended most of its resources inside Pakistan, and its operatives were really, really obvious and occasionally too close with Islamic militants like the Taliban.

  “Bye,” I told One Camel. “Good luck with your spies.”

  Ever watchful for me, Samad pulled up in his fancy new car. I told him to stop at the Marriott Hotel so I could pick up my dry cleaning. I ran inside, handed over a fistful of rupees, grabbed my freshly cleaned Islamic gear, and walked outside. A man in a cream-colored salwar kameez stood outside Samad’s door, showing him something, bending over to talk to him. I hustled across the street. Samad said something. The man looked up, saw me, and walked away quickly.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “ISI.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Problem, Kim. Man come up, say ISI, hand me ISI card. He say, ‘Who is boss?’ ”

  “What did you say?”