The Taliban Shuffle (34 page)

“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 Sharif. 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.

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.

So this would be my first time seeing Kabul from a Humvee, my first time seeing Afghans as the other. The first lieutenant warned of a white Toyota Corolla without a license plate—a potential suicide bomber, who by the looks of repeated security warnings I had seen, had been haunting Kabul for three years. It was a running joke with longtimers—highly paid security companies fixated on a potential suicide bomber with a long beard, wearing a turban, and driving a white Toyota Corolla, which described pretty much half the men in Kabul.

Our mission was outlined: Drive through the mean streets of Kabul and north to a rural district to train the police. It seemed like a fairly obvious mission, but more than seven years into the war here, the U.S. military had only recently gotten serious about the Afghan police. And the police were a serious problem. Police chiefs were often illiterate thugs and sometimes drug lords who ran their departments like fiefdoms. Some paid big money for their posts, even $100,000, and they made their money back by being on the take. Most low-level police were paid little money and given little training. They took bribes often because they had no other choice. But the police were crucial to any counterinsurgency. If Afghans did not trust their police, they would naturally turn toward the Taliban. The police were also increasingly on the front lines—more Afghan police had died in Taliban-led attacks than soldiers, Afghan or foreign.

Both the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama one stressed that Afghan police and soldiers were essential
to solving the morass here—but clearly not enough troops had yet been devoted to the task. The Illinois National Guard ran three police-mentor teams in Kabul Province with thirty soldiers altogether, responsible for about six thousand police in thirty police districts. The Afghan police faced similar numerical challenges—in the district we were going, Mir Bacha Kot, which meant “collection of boys,” eighty-five police were supposed to serve about a hundred and twenty-five thousand people living in thirty-six villages.

A trainer from DynCorp tried to explain what the U.S. soldiers would see with the Afghan National Police (ANP), using an example from Paghman district, in the western part of Kabul Province.

“We talk about how things are,” the trainer said. “Yesterday in Paghman we had a situation with a guy. He’s a mullah by day, Taliban by night. ANP is not gonna do anything about him. Don’t trust a lot of the things that you’re seeing and hearing.”

We climbed into our Humvees. I sat behind the driver, wearing a helmet and flak vest that made me feel somewhat ridiculous. We put on headsets so we could hear one another and barged into a traffic jam on Jalalabad Road. Through the window, I watched the panic start. The Afghan drivers did not wave or smile at the U.S. soldiers. They tried to get out of the way, fear written on their craggy faces. But sitting in a Humvee instead of out in traffic, I felt nervous for the American soldiers. They saw every Afghan, every car as a potential enemy, even though they had been here only for a few weeks and Kabul was a relatively safe city compared with the south. But little wonder: Days earlier, a bomber had attacked another U.S. military base in Kabul, injuring five soldiers from the Illinois National Guard, one of whom later died. Everyone was on edge.

“This is nothing,” the first lieutenant announced as we sat in traffic. “Traffic yesterday, we didn’t move for forty-five minutes. Jackknifed fuel truck, leaking fuel. We just had to sit there and wait. But I’ll take traffic with a lot of vehicles and cars over being stopped in a crowd of people. I didn’t like that at all. A crowd of people can turn ugly.”

The gunner agreed, mentioning one crowd that had uglified recently. “You could tell their attitudes have turned negative toward us. You’re not getting the smile and a wave.”

This was educational. If people in Kabul reacted this way, how did they feel in the provinces? And if U.S. soldiers felt this way, what chance did anyone have to turn this war around? Years into this, I was still hearing the same comments from U.S. soldiers, the same gripes about Afghanistan. We had learned so little. Most of these Illinois soldiers had only found out after arriving here that they would be training police. They had been told they would be doing something else, like briefings, PowerPoint presentations, and administrative work. And much of their training in the States focused not on the police, not even on Afghanistan, but on Iraq.

The soldiers continued to dissect the traffic of the capital.