The Taliban Shuffle

by Kim Barker

  But right before the election, Zal again flirted with controversy, accused of trying to fix it for Karzai, already a shoo-in. The other seventeen wannabe presidents had a better chance of being convicted of a felony than of winning an election—in fact, one later would be accused of murder, and others probably should have been. But Zal was accused of trying to make sure that Karzai won convincingly, of trying to persuade rivals to drop out. By now, Zal had earned himself a new colonial-style nickname: the Viceroy.

  Regardless, Zal could not help himself. He seemed to lack a filter, and said whatever he thought whenever he thought it, and did whatever he thought was right, regardless of how it looked. In the embassy, some longtime State Department employees craved the return of a real ambassador, one who would stay in the background and not interfere. Zal didn’t care. He had helped shove through a messy Afghan constitution that set up a powerful central government and an even more powerful president, even though the country was used to neither. He had his own wing of advisers outside the typical embassy structure, the Afghan Reconstruction Group, made up of government employees and business executives who took leave from their jobs to help rebuild Afghanistan and charged the taxpayers overtime to do so. They were supposed to be an inhouse think tank; they soon became the Pentagon’s alternative to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the civilian foreign-aid wing of the U.S. government theoretically responsible for development projects. That these advisers were often ill versed in the ways of government and duplicated the roles of State and USAID was a serious problem. In some cases, someone in the Reconstruction Group would be working on an issue, and so would someone in the State Department, and so would someone in USAID, but because of infighting and resentments, the three did not talk to one another, and instead had to go up a chain to a supervisor who would then relay whatever concern down whatever chain was deemed necessary.

  I was invited on a trip with Khalilzad to Herat just before the election, while Karzai was out of town. This was the territory of the powerful and popular warlord Ismail Khan, an ethnic Tajik who had been one of the most respected commanders during the anti-Soviet war and had gone on to command a key western faction of the Northern Alliance. After the Taliban fled, Ismail Khan had been named governor of his home province, western Herat, which shared a border with Iran, giving him access to border taxes. Although praised for bringing home electricity, money, and trees, the Afghan equivalent of American political pork, Ismail Khan had also ignored Karzai and the central government, keeping customs money for himself and his private militia. Because of this, Karzai had just removed Ismail Khan as governor, sparking riots and unrest. It was unclear whether he would accept Karzai’s request to come to Kabul and work as the federal minister of mines and industries.

  The pro-government warlords who had led militias during Afghanistan’s wars were Karzai’s constant battle. They seemed to operate with impunity. The Americans had backed them in driving out the Taliban in late 2001, handing them money, power, and legitimacy. None had been held accountable for war crimes. Most were more powerful than the president when it came to their ability to summon an army, and most figured they were entitled to their fiefdoms and the spoils of power. Neutering them was Karzai’s biggest challenge. But Ismail Khan didn’t want to budge from his home. He refused the post in Kabul, and said he would negotiate only with Karzai.

  No way would I miss this trip. Warlords always made good copy.

  I wore my standard garb for leaving Kabul—a long brown embroidered hippie Afghan dress, black pants, and a black headscarf. Zal’s Gals were dressed sharply, as if for an American business lunch. When we walked off the plane, Zal hugged the new governor. He then embarked on his itinerary, meeting students, shaking hands, hugging, and meeting U.S. soldiers of the provincial reconstruction team (PRT), calling them “noble.”

  “Are we done?” he said to an aide. “What about the civilians of the PRT? I need to thank them.”

  At the governor’s residence, Zal met with Ismail Khan behind closed doors for twenty minutes, and ate lunch with the new governor, before holding court at the inevitable press conference. And there, cameras flashing, with Karzai out of the country, Khalilzad baldly announced that he had done what Karzai had been unable to accomplish—he had convinced Ismail Khan to abandon Herat.

  “He will move to Kabul,” Khalilzad told the room. “It’s good for Afghanistan. It’s good for him.”

  Ismail Khan did move. Zal didn’t seem to care how Afghans might interpret this, if they would think that the United States was trying to manipulate the Afghan government, six days before the election. Such a Viceroy! He even threw a press conference the next day to talk up the elections, urging journalists not to be lazy and talking about the ramped-up training of the Afghan army. The man was everywhere.

  The next weekend, the sun rose on Election Day with a hangover, smeared and hazy. A harsh wind whipped dust across the capital like fire-powered sandpaper. Standing at the polling stations, it was tough to see, not to mention painful. But Afghans started lining up at 5 AM, eager to be the first to vote. Despite threats of violence, the Taliban failed to disrupt much of anything. And by the end of the election, two things were clear: Lots of Afghans voted because they were excited, and the main people who messed up the election were the foreigners. The UN had devised such a complicated method to ink voters’ fingers to prevent double voting, that the ink was mixed up and most of it could be washed off with soap and water, meaning that democracy-minded Afghans could vote as often as they wanted. But at that point, such fraud hardly mattered. It was obvious that Karzai had won overwhelmingly, and that Afghans overwhelmingly believed in him. So did everyone else, for that matter. At least for a little while.

  CHAPTER 4

  THERE GOES MY GUN

  Despite my discovery of the Kabul social scene in late 2004, I couldn’t seem to separate work and life because there was no real division. My job was the international equivalent of the police beat, and something was always going boom. On my previous trips overseas, I had to summon short bursts of energy, like a sprinter, but now, six months into this job, I felt like I was running a marathon. As I struggled to pace myself and to hop countries like New Yorkers hopped subways, I realized I was in no way prepared for my boyfriend’s impending move. So I told him the truth, or at least most of it—that I was never home in New Delhi, spending most of my time in other parts of India or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Kyrgyzstan. But he didn’t listen. After more than two years of dating, he wanted a long-term commitment. I still wasn’t sure. It wasn’t just the demands of work. As the child of divorce, I was wary of signing a one-year lease on an apartment, let alone pledging lifelong fidelity. And the excitement of Kabul pulled me like a new lover. It felt epic, nudging me toward ending this safe relationship. Part of me was much more interested in enrolling in the crazy adrenaline rush of Kabul High than in settling down.

  So I told Chris he probably shouldn’t come. The next day, he bought a plane ticket. With a new beard and a couple of grubby bags, he showed up at my Delhi apartment early on a December morning. After six months apart, we tried to reclaim our relationship, buying a plug-in Christmas tree, shopping for gifts near skinny Indian Santa Clauses furiously ringing bells, spending a long weekend at an Indian vacation spot. But even there, I continually checked the Internet. A broken-down revolving restaurant that proudly advertised it didn’t charge extra for revolving couldn’t distract me from work. Back at the apartment for the holiday, Chris convinced me to take a break.

  “It’s Christmas,” he said. “Try to relax. The world won’t blow up.”

  I reminded him of the year before, when an earthquake devastated a town in Iran the day after Christmas. It had been my first experience covering such a massive disaster.

  “There you go,” he said. “It could never happen two years in a row.”

  So the next day, a Sunday, I spent the entire day in pajamas, reading newspapers and a novel, watching mov
ies. That evening, an editor called in a panic.

  “I assume you’re writing a story about the tsunami.”

  I uttered the words every editor fears.

  “What tsunami?”

  And then I was gone again, looking at bodies, flying in an empty plane to Sri Lanka, bouncing between disaster zones, trying to make sense of a natural catastrophe that had wiped away more than 230,000 lives in an instant. So much for the world not blowing up. It always did, when nobody expected it, and often in the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

  Chris and I tried to keep our relationship moving forward. He occasionally traveled with me on stories in India, although I was usually too busy to spend time with him. He didn’t get a job; he didn’t even look for one. He didn’t work on his screenplay. He talked about studying Buddhism and spent an inordinate amount of time researching liberal conspiracy theories involving Bush, Rumsfeld, and summer camp. I spent more and more time on the road, until finally, while planning a romantic getaway to Paris, I realized I didn’t feel romantic in the slightest. That’s when I hopped on a plane to a place where Chris would never follow—Kabul. Compared to the reality of dealing with my boyfriend, Afghanistan seemed like a vacation.

  I decided to apply for my first “embed,” the Pentagon-devised program that attached journalists to military units. Critics called the program a blatant attempt at propaganda. Journalists considered it the only way to cover an obvious part of the story—the troops. And what better diversion from a flailing romance than running away with the U.S. Army?

  This posed a challenge—given the intensity in Iraq, where sixty-seven U.S. troops were killed in the fighting in May, any story in Afghanistan, where three U.S. troops were killed the same month, would likely grab little attention. Only about 18,000 U.S. troops had deployed to Afghanistan, mainly doing combat operations, and another 8,000 troops from other countries handled peacekeeping. True, more foreign troops were here than the year before, but the number was still nothing compared to Iraq, with 138,000 U.S. troops and 23,000 from other countries. Afghanistan was the small war, even if many were casting it as the “good war” compared to the badness of Iraq.

  But it was a small war. That spring of 2005, the Taliban were like mosquitoes, constantly irritating, occasionally fatal. Roadside bombs continued to kill soldiers, but helicopter crashes had proved more dangerous. Sure, the Taliban blew up things in the south, but so far they mostly blew up themselves, and their attempts to use recalcitrant donkeys as suicide bombers only provoked laughter. It was a known fact: Afghans and Pakistanis were probably the worst suicide bombers in the entire spectrum of militants.

  A photographer and I flew by helicopter to the Orgun-E base in Paktika to embed with U.S. soldiers. Paktika was almost the size of New Jersey, an extremely poor province with no paved roads and few schools, a mountainous and desolate wasteland plopped along the border with Pakistan, right across from the mountainous tribal agencies of North and South Waziristan, otherwise known as Terrorist Haven, the vacuums of Pakistani authority where the Taliban held sway. The U.S. philosophy had been explained to me at Bagram Airfield, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan—the troops “drained swamps,” which meant hunting down militants, while “emboldening local leaders and the population.”

  As long as I was running away from my problems, I wanted to get out on the front lines, where the swamps were being drained. My goal was a town called Bermel, which the Taliban had seized earlier, cutting off the police chief’s head. U.S. and Afghan troops had recaptured the town and were fighting the bad guys nearby. (I later found out that this was known in military parlance as “troops in contact,” or TIC, or “tick.” I would learn that everything in the military had an acronym. The IED was an improvised explosive device, or a roadside bomb. The BBIED was a body-borne improvised explosive device, otherwise known as a suicide bomber. And the DBIED was a donkey-borne improvised explosive device, otherwise known as a really stupid idea.)

  Yes, I wanted to get my war on, because I had no idea what I was talking about, what war was really like. To fill my spare time, and to make sure I didn’t have a spare second to think, I even lugged along something to set the mood, a miniseries about war, Band of Brothers. I planned to be all war, all the time. But as soon as I stepped off the helicopter and met the base media handler, I figured out I was in the wrong place. It soon became obvious that he was unlikely to send me anywhere.

  “When you go to the bathroom at night, be sure to take your photographer,” my handler told me. “There are only three other women here.”

  I wasn’t sure who or what, exactly, he was worried about, and I didn’t know the proper protocol, so I just smiled and nodded. I knew if he wanted the male photographer to shadow me to the bathroom, we would never be flown to the fighting nearby, close to the border with Pakistan. Every day I asked for a “bird,” figuring that if I used military slang, it would help. Every day I was told no. And I could see why—soldiers were actually fighting the Taliban down near Bermel, and as journalists, we were the last priority for the precious air slots available, slightly below mail. So instead, the photographer and I were sent out on trips with a platoon of combat engineers who were so bored that the leader carried copies of The Complete Guide to Investing in Rental Properties and Own Your Own Corporation with him on patrol.

  “Oh, it’s going to be a long, boring day,” he said at the beginning of one. Then he realized that sounded bad. “That’s a good thing.”

  That day alone, we visited five villages. The soldiers had several missions. To find out about Afghans in army uniforms robbing so-called jingle trucks, the acid-trip trucks from Pakistan that transported most food and supplies in the region and featured fluorescent fantasy paintings and dangly metal chains that clanked together and sounded like “Jingle Bells.” To find out about a nearby IED. To find out about an alleged insurgent named “Hamid Wali” or maybe “Mohammad Wali,” no one seemed sure—names here frankly as common as Jim or John Wilson. And always, their mission was to win hearts and minds, to convince the Afghans that they were there only to help.

  We started by walking around a market in Orgun, where stalls sold everything from pirated DVDs to live chickens. One soldier bought a teapot for $3. A staff sergeant tried to build rapport with the shop owner, who wore a pakol, a traditional hat that resembled a pie with an extra roll of dough on the bottom.

  “We’re just trying to collect information about a robbery that happened less than a week ago,” the staff sergeant told Pakol. “Local nationals in green uniforms robbed a jingle truck on Highway 141.”

  The optimistically named Highway 141 was a one-lane dirt road. Pakol looked suspicious. “We don’t know. We come here early in the morning. We leave here late in the evening. We haven’t heard anything.”

  The staff sergeant tried another question.

  “IED on the way to Sharana?”

  “We don’t know about this,” Pakol said. Then he waited a beat. “If we see mines or something, we’ll let you know.” He waited another beat. “But if you want tea, we’ll give you tea.”

  With no objections, Pakol blew out dust from a few cups and poured from a pot boiling on a gas canister. We all sipped green tea.

  “Did you come to help us or what?” Pakol asked, after the first cup was gone. That was Afghan tea protocol. Always wait for a cup of tea to ask a serious question. Pakol then ticked off his complaints, the things he wanted the Americans to fix.

  “The dust is really bad,” he said.

  “There’s always gonna be something,” the staff sergeant replied.

  With that, we left the shop. As we trudged along, everyone stared at us, making it difficult to shop. I knew why: Here were men in army uniforms, flak vests, and helmets, twenty-first-century soldiers carrying guns, looking like unbeatable futuristic fighting machines, establishing a perimeter, looking, checking, in the middle of a fifteenth-century dusty souk. I walked in the middle, wearing a headscarf beneath my helmet, try
ing to bridge two cultures. I looked at the translator, a nineteen-year-old kid from Kabul. He had wrapped a scarf around the bottom of his face like a Wild West bandit and put on sunglasses and a baseball cap.

  “What’s up with the outfit?” I asked him.

  “So the people don’t know me,” he said. “The Afghans here say you are not a Muslim if you work with the Americans.”

  We left town and drove on. Suddenly someone spotted a suspicious white bag in the middle of the road. Our four-vehicle convoy lurched to a slow stop. Sergeant Ben Crowley, a smart aleck who thrived on making everyone laugh, jumped out of his Humvee. He looked through the scope of his rifle at the bag. No wires poked out, nothing indicated bomb. He moved closer, his gun pointed at the bag. I guess I should say the suspense was killing us, but that would be a lie. Boredom was killing us. I hopped out of my Humvee and walked up to Crowley.

  “You gonna kill it?” I asked, staring at the bag. Traffic lined up behind our convoy.

  “Bag of dirt,” Crowley said.

  “You locked and loaded?”

  “No.”

  That was our usual exchange, even though soldiers were always supposed to have a round in the chamber, ready to fire. We climbed back into our Humvees and bumped down the ruts that passed for roads at a whopping ten miles an hour, the fastest we could go, making our sad, slow escape into the beige sameness of Paktika. We soon set off on a foot patrol near a mud-walled compound. The soldiers from the Afghan National Army (ANA) went first, in a move to respect the local culture and show that Afghans were taking charge of security. A kid ran inside the compound. Other children started crying.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” said a boy, crying inside the doorway.

  A neighbor, a man, walked over.

  “The men aren’t here. They went to town.”