Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (The Taliban Shuffle MTI)

by Kim Barker

  Samad started yelling. He called my translator on his phone and shouted what was happening outside. We pushed past the men watching us and ran down the stairs. A boy ran up to us.

  “I know everything,” he said.

  “Just keep quiet,” a man told him.

  “Are you mad?” another asked.

  Finally we were allowed to walk around, but only down one street, and only flanked by an escort of about twenty so-called villagers.

  “This is entirely pointless,” I said, as one man after another told us that no, this was not the Faridkot we were looking for.

  “We should go,” my translator said.

  Upon hearing our plans to leave, the mayor asked me to wait. He then ran inside a house and ran out, holding a large white scarf embroidered with pink-and-green flowers. He presented it to me in front of the alleged villagers.

  “Because you are our first foreigner,” he said.

  I took it. The crowd of alleged villagers clapped. I made a grand speech.

  “Thanks so much for this. Your hospitality—threatening to beat us up and set our car on fire, refusing to let us walk around, lying to us consistently, and now this, handing me this scarf so I can cover myself up—it’s truly been amazing. I’m speechless.”

  My translator looked at me.

  “I really hope none of them speak English,” he said, before sanitizing my speech for the masses. They clapped again. I waved, tossed the scarf in the backseat, and hurtled into the car.

  We stopped first at the press club in the neighboring town. A club officer confirmed that the surviving militant was from this Faridkot. A TV journalist who had visited Faridkot earlier said all the villagers said the man was from this Faridkot—off the record.

  “But on the record, they refused,” he told us.

  While in the press club, my translator’s brother called in hysterics. A police official had just called to tell him that we had been kidnapped. Classic ISI intimidation, designed to scare us into leaving. A friend, another journalist, later called me, saying that he had been told that my translator and I had been beaten up—his glasses and my computer had been broken.

  We left. But we also visited the police commander for Okara district and told him about our reception. “I can’t say anything,” he said. A bit later, when the news-agency journalists came to complain about their stolen phones and DVs, the commander made a call.

  “Sir,” he said, “your men have snatched the journalists’ DVs and telephones. You can erase the images, but please give them back to the journalists.”

  Nothing odd going on, nothing at all.

  Wary of the reach of both the ISI and Nawaz Sharif, Samad and I decided to drive all the way to Islamabad that night, dropping off our translator on the side of the road near Lahore.

  “I’m leaving town for a while,” he said. “I’ll probably go underground. You won’t be able to reach me.”

  This cloak-and-dagger show could strangle the country. One journalist we met was arrested after my story. I later tried to help another journalist, threatened by the ISI after his TV report aired, get out of Pakistan, without success. Even a year later, any journalist who went to this Faridkot would risk arrest or harassment by the agencies, who stalked this corner of nothing like a traffic cop looking for his quota.

  My story ran on the front page. The next day was Eid. I opened my front door and saw rivulets of blood running down the street from all the animals gutted to mark the holiday. A man in a tan salwar kameez stained with blood walked down the middle of the street, holding a dripping knife, his eyes glazed. Anywhere else in the world, I would have run away screaming. Here, this was normal. Considering everything happening in the country, all the blood and gore, I barely noticed that the Tribune Company had just filed for bankruptcy. Sacrifice? I was a newspaper reporter working for a bankrupt company in the middle of the war on terror. I was standing in line like a dumb steer in a chute in Montana, and I didn’t even know it.

  CHAPTER 24

  BAD LIVER AND A BROKEN HEART

  The threat of war loomed between Pakistan and India. I had been through this before—back in 2002 and 2003, when the two countries bumped chests the last time around, after the attack on India’s parliament was blamed on Lash militants. Because of our history, I treated this display of force between the two neighbors as what it was—a chest-thumping drama worthy of an Indian movie. Now that both countries had nukes, and now that both countries salivated for U.S. approval, war was unlikely. Still, we all wrote stories about the two nations being on the verge of hitting the button. Everyone pumped it up like a championship football match.

  Unfortunately, I had planned a real vacation between Christmas and New Year’s Eve for the first time in years. I was supposed to go to California for a friend’s wedding. I had even bought a ticket.

  “Nothing’s gonna happen after Christmas,” I told my boss.

  “I’m not even going to respond to that,” he said.

  “But I’m supposed to be on vacation.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Until his verdict, I worked. While Samad and I were about ninety minutes outside Lahore one afternoon, reporting on how the main Jamaat-ud-Dawa campus was up and running despite Pakistani claims to have shuttered the charity, I glanced at my BlackBerry. Farouq had written an e-mail. He was slightly hurt because I hadn’t told him I was coming to Afghanistan the next day to interview President Karzai. I called him.

  “What interview with Karzai?”

  “I heard you had an interview with Karzai.”

  “No. I’ve repeatedly asked for one. But they haven’t told me anything.”

  Farouq, helping the New York Times with the kidnapping of its reporter, said a photographer told him I had an interview with Karzai.

  “What? No. I think they would have told me.”

  We hung up. I thought for a minute. I had been pushing for an interview for months, relying primarily on my good friend Barack Obama. My argument went like this: Obama was probably going to be president. Obama thought Afghanistan was really, really important. Obama was a U.S. senator from Illinois. I worked for his hometown newspaper. Therefore, the president of Afghanistan should talk to me. Now that Obama had actually been elected, this ridiculously thin argument may have actually worked. It would be a coup—Karzai had granted very few interviews in recent months. I called Karzai’s spokesman, aware of the government’s incompetence.

  “Do I have an interview with Karzai tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Maybe someone should have told me.”

  “I thought I did,” he said. “I sent you a note on Facebook.”

  “I didn’t get it.”

  “Sorry about that,” he said, although he clearly wasn’t. “Can you be here at noon?”

  “No. I’m in Pakistan, and I’m in the middle of nowhere, Pakistan. I think it’s highly unlikely I could get there by noon.”

  “How’s four?”

  I said I’d check. The morning flight to Kabul was sold out, but my travel agent, a friend, promised to get me on the plane if I could make it back to Islamabad. Samad drove us back the six hours, pulling into the capital before midnight. The next morning, he rushed me to the Afghan embassy where I picked up a visa in a record fifteen minutes.

  After a quick flight and a harried attempt at scribbling questions, I was ushered in to see Karzai, who looked tired and gray, a dehydrated version of his earlier self.

  “It’s nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said, standing to shake my hand.

  I didn’t tell him that we’d met before. Our interview was strange and rambling, and Karzai jumped from subject to subject, failing to take any responsibility for all that had gone wrong in his country. He blamed the U.S.-led coalition for hiring “thugs or warlords or whatever,” and then going with “those thugs to the homes of hundreds of elders and community people,” which “frightened them into running away from Afghanistan.” I had a hard time understandi
ng exactly what Karzai meant. At some points, he seemed distracted. His voice occasionally went up several pitches—when he said “high time,” the “high” sounded a good sixteen notes higher than “time.” His face twitched continually, evidence of an attack on him years earlier. Karzai made sense when he talked about the failures of the international community—they didn’t understand the damage from civilian casualties, didn’t train the police, didn’t focus enough on militant sanctuaries in Pakistan. But he seemed completely oblivious to his own failures, except that he had been too soft with his initial complaints to the international community. His points on the Taliban were just bizarre. He wanted to negotiate with the Taliban but didn’t know where to find them.

  “I try to find them, I keep sending them messages, I don’t know their address,” he told me. “That is another big problem. The Afghan Taliban not having an address.”

  I nodded. A big problem, yes.

  At the end of the interview, Karzai returned to the subject of whether he was too isolated, always surrounded by bodyguards.

  “There’s that man, the governor of Punjab in India, whenever he goes anywhere he has hundreds of bodyguards around him,” Karzai said. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Right, sir,” his spokesman said.

  “I’m much less isolated,” Karzai said.

  “Right, sir,” the spokesman said.

  They both looked at me.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  I left. The interview was so sprawling, I knew I’d need to put a direct transcript online to do it any justice. After the transcript appeared, the president’s spokesman thanked me, saying the transcript had been translated into different languages and delivered to various embassies. I did not think that was a smart move. Afghan friends asked whether Karzai had lost the plot.

  Within days I was back in Pakistan, since my bosses and most of the world believed the country was about to explode.

  “I’m supposed to be going on vacation,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know,” my boss said. “I’m really sorry. You can take your vacation in Pakistan. Unless something happens, and then you’ll have to write.”

  Or I would be blown up in a nuclear conflagration. Either option sounded like a bad holiday. But I agreed to the new vacation plan, wary of recent rumors that the Tribune and the Los Angeles Times were launching Ultimate Fight Challenge and would require all the correspondents to punch it out for the few jobs left. I drank my way through Christmas Eve, and then I drank my way through Christmas Day. Depressed, lonely, worried about the lack of balance in my life, I was hardly alone. The small international community in Islamabad made the best of the season, of celebrating a Christian holiday in the middle of a potential nuclear war between an Islamic country and a largely Hindu one.

  The day after Christmas, I wrote a story about Pakistan moving troops from the tribal areas to the border with India. Then I went back on vacation, which meant hiking in the Margalla Hills above Islamabad and watching true-crime shows on TV. After three days of this, I wasted a day on the Internet. I checked Facebook, looking to see if pictures had yet been posted of my friend’s wedding. Then I noticed that my ex-boyfriend Chris, the man who had moved to India before descending into paranoia, had changed his relationship status. Twice. In fourteen minutes, he had gone from single to being in a relationship to being engaged. This was a surprise. We had stayed friendly—we were friends on Facebook—and I knew that we never would have stayed together, even in the States. He had managed to heal himself after his journey into darkness in Delhi, but had stopped communicating with me over the previous summer. I wrote on his Facebook wall “wow, congratulations”—because that seemed the proper response to a Facebook engagement announcement.

  That night I sat at home, vaguely sad. I didn’t want to be married to Chris. I didn’t necessarily want to be married. But I didn’t want to be where I was, with the threat of war and an employment ax hanging over me every day. With a new year fast approaching, I felt sorry for myself, a mood that grew quickly boring. Maudlin and self-obsessed, I dressed up for New Year’s Eve, always an exercise in unmet expectations and amateur drinking. I slipped on a short black dress that probably qualified more as a shirt, tights, and high-heeled black boots with silver buckles up the side. Over the years, I had amassed my own ridiculous wardrobe for an Islamic country.

  The party was at the Canadian embassy, featuring a bad buffet and the same lame Pakistani DJ who played the same songs in the same order at every single Islamabad party, almost daring people to dance. I pledged myself to a good time, and immediately grabbed a glass of red wine. I tried dancing, but teetered on my heels and towered over most of the crowd. At one point, I sidled up to a male friend, a journalist I had developed a slight crush on. But he was busy working the diplomats. He dared me to ask a short Middle Eastern diplomat to dance. I did, fairly certain that my slight crush was trying to get rid of me. At midnight, my friends and I all kissed each other on our respective cheeks. I tossed back red wine like water.

  Later, in the bathroom, I looked at myself under harsh fluorescent lights. My black eyeliner was now smudged. One eye looked like I had been slugged. I had bits of red wine in the corners of my mouth. My tongue was stained purple, the color of cheap boxed wine, as were my teeth. I looked puffy, trashy, and drunk, the opposite of sexy. But I stayed late. My slight crush drove me home, after almost backing into the British embassy. I poured myself out of his car, into my front door, and fell asleep in my dress and boots. I popped awake the next morning at nine.

  I needed a new start. It was a new year, after all, and Obama was going to be president. Afghanistan and Pakistan were finally on America’s radar, the biggest story in the world. I focused on work, on cultivating new sources, on winning Ultimate Fight Challenge. I vowed to do embeds, blogs, video, interviews, cartwheels, breaking news, long features, recipes, algebra. If there was going to be some kind of contest over my job, I was going to fight as hard as possible to win. I channeled the theme from Rocky. I would cancel all holidays, write at all hours, say yes to every editor. I wasn’t going to just roll over and play dead. But I was hungover, still lying in bed, and I narrowly avoided strangling myself in competing clichés and resolutions.

  Why did I want to stay so much, in a region that was falling apart, as my newspaper was dying? Because despite the missed vacations, despite everything, this still felt more like home than anywhere else. Only in this madness was it possible to feel such purpose. I was paid to watch history. In a small way, I felt that I was part of something much bigger, like I mattered in a way I never did back home. Every dinner conversation felt important; every turn of the screw felt momentous. This was my life. I wanted to know how the story ended. And if I left here, I wanted to leave on my terms because I had decided it was time to leave, not because someone back in Chicago decided to pull the plug.

  So I came up with targets, on both sides of the border, stories that would appeal back home, sources who could deliver scoops. I had recently met a man in the Pakistani military. He was on the inside. He knew what was happening with the troop movements against India. He called me in code, as he knew our phones were tapped. It was all very conspiratorial and promising. He called me from an unknown number.

  “This is that one person you met,” he said. “Do you know who I am?”

  “Oh yes, you. Of course.”

  Through cryptic text messages and calls to various numbers, I invited him over to my house late one night. I served him Black Label whiskey—the preferred drink of most Pakistani men. We sat on my couch. He was nervous to tell me anything, and I knew I had to win his trust. He knew both Bhutto and Sharif. He liked Bhutto. He did not like Sharif because of a dalliance Sharif allegedly once pursued. According to this military man, the woman was the third most beautiful in the world.

  Here was something I could give, a quid pro quo to get this man to trust me, a potentially damaging fact that was not actually damaging.

  “I know S
harif. He must like women. He may have once fancied me, at least a little bit.”

  The man struggled to hold his Black Label without laughing. He swallowed with difficulty.

  “You? No. Never.”

  “I was probably mistaken.”

  “I mean, you’re OK,” he said. “But Nawaz Sharif could have any woman he wants. He had the third most beautiful woman in the world. And you come nowhere near that.”

  “You could be right,” I acknowledged.

  I decided not to risk anything else. After all, I didn’t know whose side he was on. I had learned that much about Pakistan by this point. Someone was always listening, and few things were what they seemed on the surface—except, apparently, for the gift of a brand-new, latest-model iPhone.

  CHAPTER 25

  YOUNG AMERICANS

  I flew to Kabul in a blatant attempt to be relevant. If my newspaper wanted local news, I planned to deliver. I would follow the Illinois National Guard as soldiers attempted to train the Afghan police, which was suddenly seen as critically important. Everyone had realized that the Afghan police were corrupt, incompetent, and often high. And only when they and the Afghan army got their act together could anyone leave.

  This was my seventh embed, my seventh time hanging out with U.S. soldiers, my seventh version of the same drill. We met for a briefing in a plywood hut in Camp Phoenix, on the outskirts of Kabul.

  “So can we shoot if they have a remote control?” one soldier asked.

  “If that remote control looks like a pistol aimed at you, then I would say, light ’em up,” replied the first lieutenant in charge, who then listed hot spots for roadside bombs. “Pretty much the whole downtown area.”

  “Awesome,” another soldier replied.

  Light ’em up. Awesome. Let’s roll. Get some. Over the years, I had learned the lingo of the U.S. military and slipped into it easily, as familiar as a Montana drawl. I had also figured out different categories of U.S. soldiers—the Idealists, the Thinkers, the Workers, the Junkies, and the Critics. This first lieutenant was an Idealist, a true believer who thought that he and America could make a difference here. In a way, I found his situation report—or “sit rep”—funny. They were talking about Kabul, a city I had driven around for years, a downtown I had walked around. I never wore body armor in Kabul. I only worried about my security in Kabul when I saw a military convoy because of suicide blasts, overeager NATO gunners, and Afghan drivers who disobeyed warnings to halt.