The Taliban Shuffle (19 page)

At the time I was in Pakistan. As soon as I could get to Afghanistan, Farouq, a few Afghan journalists, and I went to visit Ajmal’s family. His new wife, now a widow, was about to give birth. His mother had heart problems. His father could barely talk. His brother looked just like him. The entire family seemed colorless, drained of all emotion. We sat against cushions on the wall and paid our respects before walking out to Ajmal’s grave, near his family’s home. I stood there, looking at the colorful flags poking out of the dirt, surrounded by these Afghan journalists, men I knew would give their lives for me without even thinking.

And that was it. Two fixers—Sami and Tahir—would still meet the Taliban, would still drive anywhere. But I made a decision. From then on, I had no interest in taking Farouq to Kandahar or Khost. I had no interest in trying to meet the Taliban in person, except in prison.

“If we were kidnapped, you know I would never leave you,” I told Farouq as we walked back to our car.

“I know, Kim.”

“What am I even talking about? I’m never going to make you meet the Taliban. I’m a crap journalist.”

He laughed. Some journalists felt that they could only tell the story of Afghanistan if they met the insurgents, if they spent time with them, and maybe they were right. But I wasn’t that reporter, maybe because I was more of a chicken. The price tag on foreigners
had also just jumped dramatically. If an Italian could be traded for five Taliban prisoners, including a top commander’s brother, what would the next foreign victim go for? And who would the ransom money be used to kill? No story was worth it. We talked to the Taliban over the phone, by e-mail, or, with one savvy spokesman, instant chat. For me, that was enough. I didn’t want to risk either of our lives for this war, which at this point seemed doomed.

Adding to my doubts about the present course was the fact that NATO seemed tone-deaf to criticism, especially to any complaints about civilian casualties. All the different countries seemed to have different myopic goals. For Canadians, the war was simply in Kandahar; for the British, the war was Helmand; for the Dutch, Uruzgan. People joked that the three provinces should be renamed Canadahar, Helmandshire, and Uruzdam. Rather than coordinating with central command, each country seemed to do what it pleased. This was obviously dangerous. A Canadian success, if not coordinated across provincial lines, could mean danger for either the Dutch or the Brits. The safety of the troops seemed to be paramount—not the mission. (Maybe because the mission was unclear.) In Helmand, the British troops even briefly broadcast a radio advertisement, telling Afghans that neither foreign troops nor the Afghan army were eradicating poppies. The cynical takeaway: If you want to attack anyone for cutting down your poppies, attack the Afghan police. Not us.

When I tried to talk to a NATO official about these issues, he dismissed me and told me that the radio ad wasn’t a story. Weeks later at L’Atmosphère, I told the same official about a civilian casualty allegation involving a young Hazara salt-factory worker shot in his side after NATO troops responded to a suicide attack in Kabul. Neighbors and Afghan police said overzealous NATO forces shot the Hazara man and others—something that had happened in the past after similar attacks. The Hazara man even had an X-ray showing the bullet, which he couldn’t afford to remove.

“My idea is this,” I told the NATO man, leaning on the bar. “You
take the guy and give him the surgery. Then you compare the bullet with bullets used by NATO. You’d know either way. And you’d get all this goodwill, regardless of what you find out, because you took out the bullet.”

He just looked at me.

“You know, I used to think you were smart,” he said. “But you’re really just naïve.”

Clearly, for a while at least, I had to put Afghanistan on hold. As a journalist, I shouldn’t have been offering suggestions to NATO. I shouldn’t have been taking any of this so personally. I shouldn’t have been so angry at NATO, or at that Italian journalist, who pumped his arms in the air when he flew back to Rome, while his fixer, Ajmal, sat with the Taliban, waiting to die.

Pakistan beckoned. I knew one thing about the other side of the border: I would never, ever fall in love with that country. There, I could definitely be impartial.

T
housands of people blocked the road, swallowing the SUV in front of us. They climbed on the roof, pelted rose petals at the windshield, and tried to shake or kiss the hand of the man in sunglasses sitting calmly in the passenger seat. Some touched the car reverently, like a shrine. I knew I couldn’t just watch this from behind a car window. I had to get out and feel the love.

Wearing a black headscarf and a long red Pakistani top over jeans, I waded through the crowd to the vehicle carrying the most popular man in Pakistan. Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry was an unlikely hero, with a tendency to mumble, a prickly ego, and a lazy eye. President Pervez Musharraf, the mustachioed military ruler known for his swashbuckling promises to round up the country’s miscreants, had recently suspended Chaudhry as the country’s chief justice, largely because Musharraf feared that Chaudhry could block his impending attempt to be reelected president while remaining army chief. But Chaudhry had refused to go away quietly, becoming the first top official in Pakistan to object when Musharraf demanded a resignation. Now Chaudhry was a celebrity, the focal point for the fact that most Pakistanis wanted to throttle Musharraf and permanently end military rule. Anywhere Chaudhry set foot in the spring of 2007 quickly turned into a cross between a political rally and a concert.

Standing near the Chaudhry-mobile, I took notes—on the rose petals, the men shouting they would die for Chaudhry, the nearby goat sacrifice. And then someone grabbed my butt, squeezing a chunk of it. I spun around, but all the men, a good head shorter than me, stared ahead blankly. Pakistan, where even the tiny men seemed to have nuclear arms. Sometimes I hated it here.

“Who did that?” I demanded.

Of course, no one answered.

I turned back around and returned to taking notes. But again—someone grabbed my butt. We performed the same ritual, of me turning around, of them pretending neither me nor my butt existed.

“Fuck off,” I announced, but everyone ignored me.

This time when I turned back around, I held my left hand down by my side. I pretended that I was paying attention to all the cheering, sacrificing, and tossing of rose petals. I waited.

Soon someone pinched me. But this time I managed to grab the offending hand. I spun around. The man, who stood about five feet tall and appeared close to fifty, waved his one free hand in front of him, looked up, and pleaded, “No, no, no.”

I punched him in the face.

“Don’t you have sisters, mothers?” I said, looking at the other men.

Sometimes that argument actually worked.

In Afghanistan, this never happened. Men occasionally grazed a hip, or walked too close, or maybe tried a single pinch. But nothing in Afghanistan ever turned into an ass-grabbing free-for-all. In Pakistan, the quality of one’s rear didn’t matter, nor did a woman’s attractiveness. An ass grab was about humiliation and, of course, the feeling of some men in the country that Western women needed sex like oxygen, and that if a Pakistani man just happened to put himself in her path or pinch her when the sex urge came on, he’d get lucky. I blamed Hollywood.

That was hardly the only difference between the two countries.
In Afghanistan, almost everything was on the surface. Warlords may have been corrupt, but they often admitted their corruption with a smile. Police may have demanded bribes, but they asked on street corners. Karzai may have been ineffective, but he let you watch. The spy agency may have tapped your phones, but no one followed you around. I had Farouq in Afghanistan. I understood Afghanistan, as best I could.

But Pakistan was a series of contradictions tied up in a double game. The country was born out of violence, in the wrenching partition of Pakistan from India in 1947 after the British granted the subcontinent independence. In the migration of Hindus to India and Muslims to East and West Pakistan, nearly a million people were killed, mostly by sectarian mobs. Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah—a moderate who believed that a united India would have marginalized Muslims—was unclear whether he wanted a secular state or an Islamic one. He said things that could be interpreted both ways: “I do not know what the ultimate shape of this constitution is going to be, but I am sure that it will be of a democratic type, embodying the essential principles of Islam.” Whatever that meant. Jinnah may well have had the country’s future all mapped out in his head, but he died of tuberculosis and lung cancer just over a year after Pakistan was founded, leaving Pakistanis to debate for generations to come whether he wanted the country’s national motto to be “Faith, Unity, Discipline” or “Unity, Faith, Discipline.” For many, this was not just semantics—it indicated which precept was to be most important in Pakistan, and hinted at the identity crisis over secularism and Islam that would soon eat at the soul of the nation.

After Jinnah died, it was all downhill. The international community allowed almost half the prize jewel of Kashmir, home to a Muslim majority and precious water supplies, to stay in India, a decision that would turn into the regional bugaboo, sparking wars and shadow wars and cementing Pakistan’s national identity as the perennial victim of India. Partition left other, less-obvious wounds.
Pakistan now had only one institution with any sense of stability, training, and memory: the army. And so army leaders, watching incompetent civilians squabble over power and democracy, would feel compelled to step in, over and over. Every military coup would squash civilian institutions and any hope of civil society. Pakistan was supposed to be ruled by a parliamentary democracy with Islam as the state religion and guiding principle for the nation’s laws; in truth, Pakistan would be ruled by the seat of its pants, by the military and its associated intelligence agencies, either through a direct military coup, or, when demands for elected leadership grew too loud, through elections with military string-pulling in the background.

Meanwhile, neighboring India, led by the dynasty of the Nehru family, leaders who in the formative years of the country never seemed to die, had been left with most of the subcontinent’s people, land, natural resources, roads, and institutions. Democracy took hold, largely because everyone kept voting for the Nehrus’ Congress Party and its sense of stability. India had its own growing pains. But they were nothing like Pakistan’s.

Bad feelings festered, fed by continual squabbling over Kashmir. Then East Pakistan revolted. And like a mean big brother, India supported the breakaway nation, which became Bangladesh in 1971. Demoralized, depressed, and depleted, West Pakistan—now simply Pakistan—turned to a new hero to lead it forward, a civilian, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had launched the Pakistan Peoples Party and helped identify a major national priority: a nuclear bomb, to counter India. His rule was eventually marred by complaints of corruption, murder, and dictatorial tendencies, familiar complaints about most Pakistani leaders. Bhutto had named an obsequious, compliant army chief in an effort to avoid a coup, and like the other obedient army chiefs, eventually General Zia ul-Haq seized control of Pakistan, saying he was compelled to do so for the good of the nation. Bhutto was hanged in 1979 in a naked abdication of justice. In death, he became the country’s most popular leader.

Through all the instability, Pakistan could usually count on one friend: the United States. Sure, the U.S. money ebbed and flowed, depending on events, but Pakistan always knew where the United States stood in the long-running India-Pakistan dispute. America saw India as a Soviet sympathizer, as a red nation in the cold war. (India saw itself as nonaligned, but no matter.) America could count on Pakistan to be virulently anti-Soviet. And as a bonus, with Pakistan the United States often had to deal with just one strongman, a military dictator, to get things done.

Living up to Pakistan’s anti-Soviet potential, after the Soviets invaded neighboring Afghanistan in late 1979, General Zia quickly recovered from a U.S. rebuke for hanging his predecessor and signed up for the great CIA-Saudi-Islamist plan to drive out the Communists. Not only did Pakistan see Communism as bad and the Soviet Union as a threat; the country also feared being hemmed in by yet another neighbor sympathetic to India. The indoctrination started. Camps trained Afghans, then Pakistanis, and eventually anyone with a brain cell to fight. Throughout the 1980s, the United States sent textbooks to the Pakistan tribal areas, aiming to teach Afghan refugee children English using the language of jihad, and math using drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers, and mines, thus preparing a generation to fight the Soviet invaders. Shortly after the Soviets finally left Afghanistan in 1989, the United States left as well, abandoning the textbooks and the camps. Pakistan had to clean up the mess. Not only that—the United States banned most economic and military assistance to Pakistan because of its pursuit of a nuclear weapon. A generation of the Pakistani military would miss out on American training and influence, as the Islamists continued to gain favor. And meanwhile, with the collapse of the Soviet empire, America would start flirting much more with India, the world’s largest democracy and a giant potential market.

With a new sense of international isolation and the death of General Zia in a suspicious plane crash that may or may not have
involved a case of exploding mangos, Pakistan refocused in the late 1980s. In theory, the civilians had taken charge, and the young, charismatic, beautiful Benazir Bhutto, the Harvard-educated daughter of Zulfikar, now ran the country. But behind the scenes, the military and the country’s intelligence agencies sidelined her. Some jihadi fighters were directed into a shadow war in Indian-controlled Kashmir, while others kept fighting in Afghanistan until the pro-Soviet government finally collapsed. For a decade Pakistan’s leadership was tossed like a football between different civilian leaders accused of corruption—from Bhutto to then military lackey Nawaz Sharif, back to Bhutto, then back to Sharif, who finally delivered that nuclear weapon.