The Taliban Shuffle

by Kim Barker

  At daybreak the prime minister finally announced that the judges would be restored. Within days they were, setting up an inevitable showdown between the bench and Zardari. I had a feeling that Zardari’s former criminal charges, ranging from corruption to murder, would eventually come back to haunt him. I also had a feeling, lingering in the back of my head, that Chaudhry’s megalomania could eventually approach that of Musharraf. But I shook it off. Must have been the lack of sleep.

  My request for an actual vacation that month had been ignored, and back in Chicago, it seemed like everything was being ignored. Conference calls were scheduled; rumors flew that would put Pakistan to shame. We received new directions every day. New story formats were developed—we were supposed to file information for “charticles,” we were supposed to write new “brights” for the front page. The man in charge of innovation for the company sent subversive “think pieces,” stream-of-consciousness rants with random capital letters, confessions like “I’ve been on a continual road trip” and misspellings like “NOTOCABLE,” “INSINCERETY,” and “VISABLE.” One example of a “think piece”: “Check these out. They reflect exactly the kind of POWER that subtle and cerebral can deliver … It oozes timeless, all demographic QUALITY.” I said yes to everything, happy to be of service, sifting through management “think pieces,” trying to find the hidden messages in the capital letters, to figure out why on earth people who flaunted their inability to spell, capitalize, and punctuate would want to run a media company.

  Finally, on a Monday night, my boss called just as I walked in the front door.

  “Kim, they made a decision, and some tough decisions had to be made,” he told me. “And as part of those decisions, they would like you to come home and work for the metro desk.”

  Ultimate Fight Challenge was done. I hung up the phone and burst into tears. The next day, during the requisite conference call, the paper’s editor informed me that the company was unifying the foreign reporting team to serve everybody, which meant “more strategic company-wide use of our expertise.” He used words like “partnership” and phrases like “a big chessboard.” I felt like we were breaking up. All told, thirteen—or maybe sixteen—correspondents survived from both newspapers, including only two from the Tribune, which had once had eleven. (The numbers were unclear, because the company also kept a few Los Angeles Times correspondents on contract.)

  “There’s no right or wrong choice,” said the big boss, adding that he thought I could use my expertise covering the war on terror in Chicago. The gangs must have really stepped up their game.

  I could hardly blame the company—it was, after all, bankrupt, and foreign news cost a lot of money. My bureau cost about $120,000 a year in expenses alone. The Tribune foreign desk was essentially eliminated, almost quietly, just as the newsroom loudly promoted a class for “Advanced Twitter.” The Los Angeles Times would run the company-wide foreign desk, and the new foreign editor would be the same man who had written the competing Los Angeles Times story on Afghan Star, the one that had run the same day as mine and put me squarely in Sam Zell’s crosshairs. Curses—my nemesis. I felt sad and numb and rejected, almost like a spurned lover, but this rejection felt even more personal. I loved this job, I was this job. If I didn’t have this, what would I be?

  I was given time to think about the metro offer, and I did think. I knew everything in Afghanistan was increasingly messed up. “America, Fuck Yeah” was the future. Many talented Afghans were leaving, including Farouq, whom I thought had abandoned his dreams of ever studying outside Afghanistan. He sent me an e-mail when he won a prestigious scholarship to a university in the West—to study communications, not medicine. I was not surprised—if Afghanistan ever got rid of the mullahs and warlords, that guy could run it. (Once, Farouq had told me how he would police a traffic roundabout with a hammer, breaking the windows of traffic offenders. “Believe me, people will enjoy my roundabout,” he had opined. That was his philosophy of governance in Afghanistan, the necessity of a strong hand.) Back in Pakistan, Samad continued building his life in his mother’s tiny apartment, washing his car fifty times a day. His wife was now pregnant, even though he barely had any money. Yet if all Samad ever had in his life was his family and his car, I knew he would be happy.

  Afghanistan and Pakistan continued to dominate the news. The day after I was deemed irrelevant, news leaked that the term “war on terror” also was. The Obama administration preferred “Overseas Contingency Operation.” Days after that, Obama announced his much anticipated new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. After more than seven years, the region had finally become a situation.

  “The situation is increasingly perilous,” Obama warned.

  An editor e-mailed me that night, asking if I had anything I’d like to add to a story on Obama’s speech. I said I was sick, and I kind of was. Within a month, that editor was laid off.

  I still didn’t know what I would do, but I had to leave Pakistan and Afghanistan for now if I wanted to hold on to my salary. I also knew I had to get out of here if I wanted to get any perspective. Samad, ever the wounded puppy, started to cry when I told him and called me his sister. Large tears pooled in his large brown eyes.

  “Stop it,” I said. “You’re killing me.”

  Friends in Islamabad decided to throw me a going-away party at the house where I was staying. But that night, as I drew on eyeliner, I heard a distant thud outside. I chose to ignore it and went back to my eyeliner. Samad soon ran inside the house, knocking on my bedroom door.

  “Boss, big bomb, maybe Jinnah,” he announced, agitated.

  “No. No way. Not tonight.” I had moved on to mascara.

  “Yes, boss. Tonight.” He smiled.

  Samad still didn’t understand my syntax all that well. Jinnah was the giant supermarket closest to this neighborhood, where foreigners always shopped.

  “I can’t fucking believe this.”

  Samad looked at me. “Yes, boss?”

  “Can you go check it out?” I asked.

  “Yes, boss.”

  He ran off.

  A Swiss friend called, panicked. She was hiding with her boyfriend in a closet, the Swiss version of a safe room. She heard shots in all directions.

  “I don’t think I can make it to your party,” she said.

  I called Samad, now curious. Maybe I needed just one bomb for the road.

  “Come pick me up.”

  He really didn’t need to drive. We could have walked to the bombing, which was not at a supermarket but in a grassy median a couple of blocks away. A man had blown himself up near a tent filled with Pakistani security forces. Eight had died.

  More than a hundred journalists were there, scribbling on notebooks, jostling for position. It was like old home week. A friend and I walked near an ambulance. Shots rang out. We dropped to the ground. Pakistani men in cream-colored salwar kameezes threw themselves on top of us and fondled us back across the street, over to the other journalists. I started laughing. This was the perfect going-away party for Pakistan. A senior police officer insisted that the situation was under control, even as shots ricocheted through the neighborhood, an alleged second bomber ran loose, and a group of elite armed soldiers darted in front of the house where the party was supposed to be.

  “Should we still have the party?” I asked a friend from the Associated Press.

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “Otherwise, the terrorists win.”

  I certainly didn’t want that. So we threw the party, and most people came, filled with that need for alcohol and numbness that by now I knew accompanied any terrorist attack. (Tammy stayed home—she was too depressed about Pakistan.) At the end of the night, fueled by booze, socks, and a treacherous marble staircase, I fell. The next morning, I woke up with a knot the size of a golf ball on my forehead. I left Pakistan a few days later with a concussion and slight double vision, and without telling my bosses. And that, I later realized, was how Pakistan should always be left. With a head injury.
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br />   Pondering my options on the flight home, I realized I would rather scoop out my eyeballs with a rusty spoon than go back to my life from seven years earlier. This came as a shock. The newspaper industry was hemorrhaging jobs left and right—by the end of that year, more than forty thousand jobs would be cut. I should count myself lucky to hold on to any job at any major newspaper. But after covering these countries, after writing about life and death and chaos and war, I knew I couldn’t just write about frenzied families and carefree couples in Chicago, the paper’s new target demographic. I couldn’t move backward. My heart wouldn’t be in it because my heart would still be somewhere halfway around the world, wearing a flak vest.

  I decided to do something I had never done before. Quit. And, in a move that many deemed insane, I decided to go back to Afghanistan to have a quiet place to figure out what I wanted to do next. Maybe it was the story, which had burrowed into my bloodstream, or the concussion. And maybe it was the newspaper industry, and the fact that no one was willing to pay for the news anymore. Only a few weeks after I quit, the bare-bones Tribune newsroom would be forced to lay off more than fifty people. The same day, the company’s bosses would ask the U.S. Bankruptcy Court to pay more than $13 million in bonuses to almost seven hundred people deemed essential to the future of the company. Still, Sam Zell couldn’t stop talking about Afghanistan. That same night, he would tell a group of college students: “I’m not going to the Chicago Tribune for news about Afghanistan.” Of that, I was absolutely certain.

  CHAPTER 27

  HOTEL CALIFORNIA

  Unemployed, with no backing and no concrete purpose, I flew back to a war zone, to Kabul, the closest place I had to home. I moved in with a friend who charged me bargain rent. Some days, I watched entire seasons of TV shows on pirated DVDs. Some nights, I worked as a bartender at my friend’s bar. I was burned out, so much so that I lived in a new country, one that contained only my room, or more accurately, my bed, piled with notebooks, ideas, DVDs, and socks. I thought about what I would do next.

  The weeks ticked down to the Afghan presidential election, which I viewed with the kind of anticipation that others reserved for cultural events like a new zombie movie. I pretended that I was still part of this world, that I still mattered. I researched freelance stories and a book idea. One night I tagged along with some friends to the Red Hot ’n’ Sizzlin’ restaurant, a low-slung and low-key steak house on the outskirts of Kabul. Past guests had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the brick arches inside the restaurant, nicknames such as “Mighty Mick,” helpful household tips such as “Up UR bum no babies.” People came here for meat, for main dishes like Bacon Wrapped Hamburger Steak and Gold Rush Pork Chops, flavored with condiments like Cowboy Butters. The drink list was equally creative. Shooters were called 3 Dollar Hooker, A Kick in Crotch, Hand Job, Monkey Brain, Minty Nipple. Cocktails ran $6.50, with names such as Mexican Sexy Lemonade, Sex on the Boat, Sex on the Sofa, Sex Peak, After Sex, and Gloom Raiser.

  Halfway through the Texas-sized Onion Loaf, the trouble started. An American woman known for asking for threesomes as cavalierly as Afghan children demanded “One dollar, lady,” stood up from her computer and spotted a security guy at our table whom she blamed for losing her previous job with a USAID subcontractor. She weaved toward us, then toward her husband at the bar. Normally her husband was the problem—he often got so drunk that he could barely walk, and his problems walking on the perilous streets of Kabul were compounded by the fact that he was blind. The woman was angry, and he hugged her and told her to sit down. But she veered back to the security guy sitting next to me.

  “Fucking asshole, fucking asshole,” the woman shouted, slurring her words. “I am one step away from Obama. Do you know who you’re dealing with?”

  The entire restaurant did. A restaurant worker rushed toward her, followed by her husband, who tapped over with his cane.

  “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” she shouted as they hustled her out the door. “You have no idea.”

  The song “Highway to Hell” came on. It seemed apt. Why did the West keep getting Afghanistan wrong? Situations like this were as good a reason as any. Most foreigners had created a world where it was possible to rarely deal with the natives, where acceptable behavior included being staggeringly drunk by 8:45 PM on a Tuesday in an Islamic country that banned alcohol, frowned on pork, and certainly would never tolerate a drink named after sex.

  Some foreigners wanted to make Afghanistan a better place, viewed Afghanistan as a home rather than a party, and even genuinely liked Afghans. But they were in the minority, and many had left, driven out by the corruption and the inability to accomplish anything. For most, Afghanistan was Kabul High, a way to get your war on, an adrenaline rush, a résumé line, a money factory. It was a place to escape, to run away from marriages and mistakes, a place to forget your age, your responsibilities, your past, a country in which to reinvent yourself. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but the motives of most people were not likely to help a fragile and corrupt country stuck somewhere between the seventh century and Vegas.

  I was hardly better than the rest. A life led constantly inside, whether in a house or a car or a burqa, whether by a foreigner or an Afghan, sparked a constant desire for release. But at least the taxpayers weren’t paying my salary.

  Many diplomats rarely poked their heads outside embassy walls. Many consultants traded places every six months and then promptly repeated all the mistakes of their predecessors. How out of touch were they? Employees of the Department for International Development (DFID), the British equivalent of USAID, decided it would be a good idea to throw a going-away party just before the election, with the dress code specified as “INVADERS—Alexander the Great, Hippies, Brits, Mughals, Russians, and general gratuitous fancy dress. Gorillas welcome.” It was unclear if the misspelling of “guerrillas” was intentional. Pictures of the festivities were posted on Facebook, showing one partygoer with her left breast almost hanging out of her white Grecian dress, three pirates, two aliens drinking beer, two men in turbans, a Mughal, a cowboy, a jihadi. Any member of the Afghanistan Network on Facebook—and plenty of Afghans belonged—could see the photos. Well, at least it wasn’t the Tarts and Talibs theme party, thrown the year before. Graveyard of Empires, indeed.

  Meanwhile the invaders continued their invasion. By August, the month of the presidential election, a record 101,000 international troops had arrived in Afghanistan, including a record 62,000 Americans, each of whom cost up to $1 million a year. In July, not coincidentally, a record number of international troops had been killed, largely by roadside bombs, the weapon of choice of weaker insurgents determined to wait out their enemies. Military spending in Afghanistan was set to exceed Iraq for the first time. The United States was also now spending $200 million a month on civilian governance and development programs—double that under Bush, an amount equal to the nonmilitary spending in Iraq during its heyday. Too bad it was having such a hard time attracting USAID employees to fill those jobs—one USAID official confided that the agency would be lucky to get the C-team of applicants. Almost eight years into this war, mustering new enthusiasm was difficult.

  Regardless, significant results needed to be shown in the next year, in time for the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The United States kept reviewing its strategy and redefining success; the goal posts kept shifting. Our partners seemed equally tired—Canada had just reiterated it would pull its 2,830 troops by 2011, and the 84 soldiers promised by Colombia the same week would hardly make up the difference, even if the Germans finally decided to do actual patrols up north. The British lost their two hundredth soldier, and the Brits back home grew increasingly divided about the war; meanwhile, their incoming army chief said they might need to stay forty years to fix Afghanistan. This patchwork quilt seemed unlikely to hold—as one U.S. soldier in Ghazni had complained to me, to request air support he had to ask the Poles, who ran the battle space, had no airplanes, and passe
d any request for air support up to the U.S. military in Bagram.

  The Afghan side of the quilt looked similarly tattered. Karzai led in the polls before the August 2009 election, but with forty opponents and the popularity of swine flu, he did not necessarily have enough votes to win an outright majority. To gain more power, he had made a dangerous gamble, signing various pacts with the same warlords he had once claimed to disdain and promising them future spoils. He had also continually criticized his foreign benefactors, saying that they were the real root of the problems in Afghanistan. In other words, Karzai had publicly cut his strings with the West, and by sewing up the regional strongmen, he managed to outmaneuver the Obama administration’s halfhearted attempts to push any other viable presidential candidate. So U.S. officials, who had profoundly alienated Karzai by repeatedly criticizing him privately and publicly, were left with no other likelihood but a very annoyed Karzai. This was amateur hour.

  The week before the election, I bluffed my way into a Karzai campaign event, even though I was no longer on the media list. The reclusive Karzai had made only a few campaign appearances with handpicked audiences. I rode with a friend to Kabul University, where we walked up a dusty road to a dusty parking lot. The security guards made us drop our bags for the dogs to sniff. The male journalists were lined up as if facing a firing squad. The women, meanwhile, were marched up the road to a spot behind a white plywood guard box blocked off by green tarps. One by one, each female journalist was taken behind the tarps. Soon it was my turn. I assumed the position, held out my arms, and held in my breath. I looked at the ground, covered in weeds, memorizing the empty milk boxes and candy wrappers. After the usual deep-tissue massage, the guard pulled up the front of my shirt, yanked my belt and pants out from my waist, and looked down. That was a new move in the guard repertoire.