The Taliban Shuffle

by Kim Barker

  Copyright © 2011 by Kim Barker

  The names and identifying characteristics of some of the people mentioned in this book have been changed to protect the privacy and preserve the confidences of those individuals and their families.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Jacket design by Emily Mahon

  Jacket photograph by Jared Moosy/Redux

  Photo retouching by Benjamin Weisman

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Barker, Kim, 1970–

  The Taliban shuffle : strange days in Afghanistan and Pakistan /

  Kim Barker.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Afghan War, 2001—Press coverage. 2. Barker, Kim,

  1970– 3. War correspondents—Afghanistan—Biography.

  4. War correspondents—Pakistan—Biography. 5. War

  correspondents—United States—Biography. 6. Afghanistan—

  History—2001– 7. Pakistan—History—21st century. I. Title.

  DS371.4135B37 2011

  958.104′7—dc22 2010024348

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53332-4

  v3.1

  To the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan,

  who are still waiting for the punch line

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  PART I KABUL HIGH CHAPTER 1 Welcome to the Terrordome

  CHAPTER 2 Montana

  CHAPTER 3 American Idiot

  CHAPTER 4 There Goes My Gun

  CHAPTER 5 One Way or Another

  CHAPTER 6 March of the Pigs

  CHAPTER 7 Monkey Gone to Heaven

  CHAPTER 8 Message in a Bottle

  CHAPTER 9 Let’s Get Radical

  CHAPTER 10 Hell Yes

  CHAPTER 11 My New House

  CHAPTER 12 Barely Legal

  PART II WHACK-A-STAN CHAPTER 13 Under Pressure

  CHAPTER 14 Highway to Hell

  CHAPTER 15 God Save the Queen

  CHAPTER 16 Stray Cat Strut

  CHAPTER 17 Lucky Star

  CHAPTER 18 Suspicious Minds

  CHAPTER 19 Rebel, Rebel

  CHAPTER 20 Why Can’t We Be Friends?

  CHAPTER 21 London Calling

  CHAPTER 22 Deadbeat Club

  CHAPTER 23 Eye of the Tiger

  CHAPTER 24 Bad Liver and a Broken Heart

  CHAPTER 25 Young Americans

  CHAPTER 26 When the Man Comes Around

  CHAPTER 27 Hotel California

  Epilogue: Take It or Leave It

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART I KABUL

  HIGH

  CHAPTER 1

  WELCOME TO THE TERRORDOME

  I had always wanted to meet a warlord. So we parked our van on the side of the beige road and walked up to the beige house, past dozens of skinny young soldiers brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles and wearing mismatched khaki outfits and rope belts hiked high on their waists. Several flaunted kohl eyeliner and tucked yellow flowers behind their ears. Others decorated their rifle butts with stickers of flowers and Indian movie starlets. Male ethnic Pashtuns loved flowers and black eyeliner and anything fluorescent or sparkly, maybe to make up for the beige terrain that stretched forever in Afghanistan, maybe to look pretty.

  Outside the front door, my translator Farouq and I took off our shoes before walking inside and sitting cross-legged on the red cushions that lined the walls. The decorations spanned that narrow range between unicorn-loving prepubescent girl and utilitarian disco. Bright, glittery plastic flowers poked out of holes in the white walls. The curtains were riots of color.

  We waited. I was slightly nervous about our reception. Once, warlord Pacha Khan Zadran had been a U.S. ally, one of the many Afghan warlords the Americans used to help drive out the Taliban regime for sheltering Osama bin Laden and his minions after the attacks of September 11, 2001. But like a spoiled child, Pacha Khan had rebelled against his benefactors, apparently because no one was paying enough attention to him. First he turned against the fledgling Afghan government, then against his American allies. In an epic battle over a mountain pass, the Americans had just killed the warlord’s son. The Pashtun code required revenge, among other things, and now, six days after the battle, here I was, a fairly convenient American, waiting like a present on a pillow in Pacha Khan’s house, hoping to find a story edgy enough to make it into my newspaper—not easy considering it was March 2003, and there were other things going on in the world. But Farouq told me not to worry. He had a plan.

  Pacha Khan soon marched into the room. He certainly looked the warlord part, wearing a tan salwar kameez, the region’s ubiquitous traditional long shirt and baggy pants that resembled pajamas, along with a brown vest, a bandolier of bullets, and a gray-and-black turban. The wrinkles on his face appeared to have been carved out with an ice pick. He resembled a chubby Saddam Hussein. We hopped up to greet him. He motioned us to sit down, welcomed us, and then offered us lunch, an orange oil slick of potatoes and meat that was mostly gristle. I had no choice, given how strictly Afghans and especially Pashtuns viewed hospitality. I dug in, using my hands and a piece of bread as utensils.

  But just because Pacha Khan fed us, didn’t mean he would agree to an interview. The Pashtun code required him to show us hospitality. It didn’t force him to talk to me. Pacha Khan squinted at my getup—a long brown Afghan dress over black pants, an Indian paisley headscarf, and cat-eye glasses. I kept shifting my position—with a bad left knee, a bad right ankle, and a bad back, sitting on the floor was about as comfortable as therapy.

  Farouq tried to sell my case in the Pashto language. The warlord had certain questions.

  “Where is she from?” Pacha Khan asked, suspiciously.

  “Turkey,” Farouq responded.

  “Is she Muslim?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have her pray for me.”

  I smiled dumbly, oblivious to the conversation and Farouq’s lies.

  “She can’t,” Farouq said, slightly revising his story. “She is a Turkish American. She only knows the prayers in English, not Arabic.”

  “Hmmm,” Pacha Khan grunted, glaring at me. “She is a very bad Muslim.”

  “She is a very bad Muslim,” Farouq agreed.

  I continued to grin wildly, attempting to charm Pacha Khan.

  “Is she scared of me?” he asked.

  “What’s going on? What’s he saying?” I interrupted.

  “He wants to know if you’re scared of him,” Farouq said.

  “Oh no,” I said. “He seems like a perfectly nice guy. Totally harmless. Very kind.”

  Farouq nodded and turned to Pacha Khan.

  “Of course she is scared of you,” Farouq translated. “You are a big and terrifying man. But I told her you were a friend of the Chicago Tribune, and I guaranteed her safety.”

  That satisfied him. Unaware of Farouq’s finesse, I proceeded with my questions about Pacha Khan’s deteriorating relationship with the Americans. Then I asked if I could have my photograph taken with the warlord, who agreed.

  “Make sure you get the flowers,” I told Farouq.

  In one picture, Pacha Khan peered sideways at me, with an expression suggesting he thought I was the strange one. I snapped Farouq’s picture with Pacha Khan as well. Souvenirs in hand, we left. But we still had two more hours of bumpy, unforgiving road south to the town of Khost, an experience similar to being flogged with baseball bats. Farouq taught me the number
s in the Dari language and told me about the real conversation he had with Pacha Khan.

  “I don’t think it’s ethical to say I’m Turkish,” I said.

  “I don’t think it’s safe to say you’re American. The Americans just killed his son. Trust me. I know Afghans. I know what I’m doing.”

  I shut my mouth, but I still didn’t see what the big deal was. I had glasses. I was obviously harmless. And Pacha Khan seemed more bluster than bullet.

  As we wandered around Pacha Khan-istan, calling me naïve was almost a compliment; ignorant was more accurate. This was only my second trip to Afghanistan as a fill-in correspondent for the Tribune, and I was only supposed to babysit a war that nobody cared about while everyone else invaded Iraq. With my assumed swagger and misplaced confidence, I was convinced that I could do anything. Meeting a warlord whose son had just been killed by the Americans was nothing but a funny photo opportunity. I felt I was somehow missing out by not being in Iraq, the hitter sidelined for the championship game. Like everyone else, I figured Afghanistan was more of a sideshow than the big show.

  Back then, I had no idea what would actually happen. That Pakistan and Afghanistan would ultimately become more all consuming than any relationship I had ever had. That they would slowly fall apart, and that even as they crumbled, chunk by chunk, they would feel more like home than anywhere else. I had no idea that I would find self-awareness in a combat zone, a kind of peace in chaos. My life here wouldn’t be about a man or God or some cause. I would fall in love, deeply, but with a story, with a way of life. When everything else was stripped away, my life would be about an addiction, not to drugs, but to a place. I would never feel as alive as when I was here.

  Eventually, more than six years down the road, when the addiction overrode everything else, when normalcy seemed inconceivable, I would have to figure out how to get clean and get out. By then, I would not be the same person. I would be unemployed and sleeping at a friend’s house in Kabul. Dozens of Afghans and Pakistanis I met along the way would be dead, including one translator. Other friends would be kidnapped. Still other people would disappoint me, sucked into corruption and selfishness precisely when their countries needed them. I would disappoint others. None of us would get it right.

  When did everyone mess up? Many times, on all sides, but March 2003 is as good a start as any. From the beginning, the numbers were absurd: Post-conflict Kosovo had one peacekeeper for every forty-eight people. East Timor, one for every eighty-six. Afghanistan, already mired in poverty, drought, and more than two decades of war, with little effective government and a fledgling army that was hardly more than a militia, had just one peacekeeper for every 5,400 people. Then the foreigners cheated on Afghanistan. They went to Iraq.

  Had they known anything about the country at all, they would have known that this was a really bad idea. Afghanistan was the so-called Graveyard of Empires, a pitiless mass of hard mountains and desert almost the size of Texas that had successfully repelled invaders like the Brits and the Soviets and seemed amenable only to the unforgiving people born to it. Men learned to fight like they learned to breathe, without even thinking. They fought dogs, they fought cocks. They fought tiny delicate birds that fit in a human hand and lived in a human coat pocket, and they bet on the results. They fought wars for decades until no one seemed to remember quite what they were fighting for. The national sport was essentially a fight, on horseback, over a headless calf or goat. Over the years, whenever Afghan men would tell me that they were tired of fighting, looking weary and creased, I would have only one response: Sure you are.

  But now, on this road trip, I didn’t worry about any of that. I was like a child, happy with my picture, showing it repeatedly to Farouq, who repeatedly laughed. Hours of bone-crushing road after leaving my first genuine warlord, our driver, Nasir, pulled into Khost and the so-called hotel. It was a second-floor walk-up on Khost’s dusty main street, a place that looked as if a gun battle might break out at any second, as if High Noon could be filmed at any hour. Khost was a small city just over the border from Pakistan’s tribal areas, the semi-autonomous region where insurgents and criminals could roam freely. In Khost, as in the tribal areas, laws were more like helpful hints. Everyone seemed to have a weapon, even the two men sleeping on the hotel balcony, fingers twitching near their triggers. We walked past a room where two Afghan journalists had holed up. They were friends of Farouq, but they gently closed the door on us. I didn’t pay much attention. Outside the window in my room, I tried to set up a satellite dish to make a phone call, but the power was out, as usual, and the sun was setting. The satellite phone didn’t work. Nothing worked. I grew exasperated.

  “Damn it,” I announced.

  “Kim,” Farouq said outside my door.

  “This stupid satellite phone won’t work. There’s no power.”

  Farouq walked in and tried to get me to focus. “Kim. We need to talk.”

  “What? When does the stupid power come on?”

  “Kim. My two friends, the journalists you just saw, they were both held hostage for four days by Pacha Khan. He threatened to kill them because they worked for the American media, and the Americans killed his son.”

  This stopped me. “You’re kidding me.”

  Farouq told me that the men had only been freed with the intervention of President Hamid Karzai. I envisioned returning the same grueling way we came, seven hours, most of which passed through Pacha Khan territory.

  “Can we drive back to Kabul another way?” I asked.

  Farouq thought about it.

  “That would take eighteen hours. Through really bad roads and dangerous areas. I think we’ll be OK. You’re a foreigner. Pacha Khan would be afraid to kidnap you. I just thought you should know. For your story.”

  Eighteen hours on punishing roads versus seven hours of slightly less punishing roads and the bonus potential of being kidnapped. That was a reality check, one of many I would have. I said I would think about the trip. The next day, we visited a man who had recently been released from the U.S. detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He was a taxi driver and happily showed us his stereo, music, and videos and talked of his love for the movie Titanic, proof he wasn’t a member of the Taliban, which under the guise of Islam had banned all such frivolities during their five years in power. He was oddly not upset at the Americans, despite being held in Guantánamo for more than a year in what all sides acknowledged had been a mistake. His family welcomed us. I sat in a room with the women, where no strange man, including Farouq, could go. With no translator, we smiled stupidly at one another. The women yanked off my headscarf and marveled at the state of my short brown hair, which resembled a 1970s home permanent gone horribly wrong. One tried unsuccessfully to brush it.

  The family invited us to a homecoming party the next day. But I had made a decision. I would listen to Farouq and go back to Kabul through the land of Pacha Khan. No way was I driving eighteen hours on roads that were more like torture devices. As Nasir pulled out of Khost, I decided to feign sickness.

  “I’m going to lie down,” I told Farouq.

  “It’s really not necessary,” he said.

  I lay down in the backseat for what seemed like hours. “Are we there yet?”

  Farouq said we were just entering Pacha Khan’s stronghold. “There’s his truck with the antiaircraft gun.”

  “What are the men doing?”

  “They’re waving at us. Why don’t you sit up?”

  I peeked out the window. The small red pickup truck’s windshield was papered in giant mustachioed Pacha Khan stickers and had a large gun somehow strapped to the roof. They waved. I sat up and waved back. We made it to Kabul without further incident. Farouq clearly knew how to handle Afghanistan better than I did.

  But the newspaper had no room for my story about Pacha Khan, which was deemed inconsequential compared to Iraq. Almost everything was. So Farouq and I didn’t so much work as hang out in the house shared by the Chicago Tribune and two other
newspapers. Bored, uninspired, dwarfed by the unstoppable search for weapons of mass destruction nearby, Farouq and I played badminton in the backyard, below a trellis of barren grape vines. We had no net, so we just fired the birdie back and forth at each other.

  We talked about our lives. The Tribune’s regional correspondent, now off covering Iraq, had hired Farouq the year before. His was a typical Afghan story of surviving a series of regimes by any way possible, usually by putting one relative in the ruling regime and one in the opposition. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Farouq’s oldest brother became a pilot under the Communist-backed government. The large extended family shared a house in Kabul, but other villagers from their home province had joined the so-called “mujahedin,” or holy fighters, who fought the government with the help of the Americans, Pakistanis, and Saudis. The brother, the pride of the family, died, not in the fighting but in a plane crash along with his wife and children. Farouq was the youngest son in the family, and for days his family hid his brother’s death from him. He found out by accident. Afghans have an almost pathological need to avoid being the bearer of bad tidings.

  Eventually, the seven main mujahedin groups and their splinters, militias run by powerful warlords like Pacha Khan, pushed out the Soviets in 1989. Peace did not follow. After years of squabbling and a brutal civil war among the militias, the Taliban and its harsh version of Islamic rule arrived in Kabul in 1996. Farouq and his family were all ethnic Pashtuns, like the Taliban, even if in their hearts they were nothing like the Taliban. But they had no choice; like most other Afghans, they kept their heads down and followed the rules. Farouq’s female relatives wore blue burqas that turned them into ghosts whenever they left the house. Farouq grew out his beard, although he occasionally got into trouble because his beard just wouldn’t grow to the proper length to signify that he was a good Muslim—considered a fistful of beard.

  As the Taliban regime spread its reach, Farouq prepared for his future. He became a doctor. He learned anatomy by digging up skeletons in graveyards—the medical students had no other choice. They practiced surgery on the Taliban, repairing wounds earned fighting the militia leftovers now outside the capital, which had coalesced into a group called the Northern Alliance, dominated by ethnic Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley, just north of Kabul.