The Taliban Shuffle (5 page)

We were dropped off at the guesthouse Afghan Gardens 1, not to be confused with the recently opened Afghan Gardens 2. I was slightly overwhelmed by the number of people jammed onto the concrete porch, the copious amounts of alcohol. The woman who ran the guesthouse wore a slinky black sleeveless dress. Another woman wore high-heeled boots, a long skirt, a fur-lined jean vest showing cleavage, and lounged on a couch, draped over some male friends. Hundreds of people were there; the U.S. embassy spokeswoman and her immediate boss even showed up. The entire party seemed optimistic about the future of Afghanistan and the impending election. And to celebrate, we drank alcohol and danced until 2
AM
to songs like “Kiss” by Prince. By that point, it was agreed—Afghanistan was on a path to recovery, and Hamid Karzai, the
well-spoken and well-dressed darling of the West, was the answer. Everyone hoped he would win.

I left the party at some point in the early-morning hours, well after most of the other foreigners had gone home but before the Islamic morning call to prayer. Drunk on red wine and paranoid about how I stacked up against the other women at my first big party, I realized that I needed to pay more attention to my clothes, my hair, my exercise routine, because against all logic, a social life in a war zone seemed entirely plausible. My friend’s driver dropped me at the Kabul Lodge, and my friend walked me to my room. He sat on my bed and started talking about motorcycles. I flipped on my laptop and scanned a story draft I had written earlier about a popular radio talk show on unrequited Afghan love. I closed one eye and stared three inches from the computer screen, performing the typical edit of the drunk journalist, concentrating hard on every word but comprehending little, all while wondering why my male friend was still here. After fifteen minutes, I shut down my laptop and stood up. My friend moved in for a kiss. Not a good idea—after all, I had the boyfriend half a world away, and my friend and I had both been drinking. So he left. I took another pass at my story, but the words still made more sense as letters than thoughts. I sent an e-mail to my boyfriend, Chris, who was still planning to move to India in a few months. I fell asleep.

In the morning, I awoke with a hangover fueled by cheap wine and guilt, mixed with a feeling of possibility. My social life had not hit a mud wall in Afghanistan. There were parties, a scene, places to wear little black dresses. There was potential here, even if that potential resembled a cross between a John Hughes high-school movie and Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street
, given the small foreign community and the inevitable cliques, with do-gooders, guns for hire, and journos approximating brains, jocks, and goths. I knew what I needed to do. I needed to go shopping.

Zalmay Khalilzad clearly felt as optimistic, at least about the
country. Not only was he the U.S. ambassador here—he also happened to be born and raised in Afghanistan. Khalilzad was not a normal diplomat, not a typical ambassador. Zal, as he was known, liked to get his hands dirty. During the large gatherings to pick an interim president in 2002, Khalilzad, then the Bush regime’s representative, had been accused of strong-arming the country’s former king into abandoning any political ambitions, paving the way for Karzai’s selection. Since then, Zal and Karzai seemed to have become best buddies; they talked on the telephone daily and frequently ate dinner together.

Zal liked control. He rode in the cockpit of the U.S. military C-130 Hercules whenever he traveled. “He likes to watch,” his press aide once told me. He didn’t just sit in the embassy and announce aid—he flew to the provinces and handed out windup radios to women himself. At meetings between Afghans and Westerners, Khalilzad translated, making sure everyone understood one another. At public events where, for diplomatic reasons, Khalilzad spoke English and used an interpreter, he corrected his interpreter’s translations. Zal also fed off the media like a personality feeds off a cult. He threw elaborate press conferences at the U.S. embassy, flashing a wide-angle grin and swept-back graying hair and often calling on reporters by name. Every journalist, from the fledgling Afghan reporter to the Norwegian freelancer, was invited and served sodas and water. Surrounded by attractive young female aides in hip, occasionally tight clothing, dubbed by some as “Zal’s Gals,” and always slightly late for any event, Khalilzad cultivated the air of a diplomatic rock star. He kept answering questions long after “last question” was called, long after his aides stole glances at their watches. “We have time,” Zal would say. “Let them ask more.” He always smiled, even when talking about tragedy.

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.

D
espite 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 movies. 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.