“I am so angry at you!” he said, more than once. Sabit often talked in exclamation points. “You are a very bad friend!”
But he eventually forgave me. And our uneasy acquaintance had payback. Sabit had turned into my eccentric grandpa. When I arrived in Afghanistan in March 2006, Sabit sent a VIP bus to pick me up. A few days later, he said he wanted to shoot guns with me. He liked guns. Most places I visited him—work, home, a Turkish restaurant—a gun leaned against some wall. He kept guns like other people keep plants. I accepted his invitation, as shooting guns in Afghanistan sounded like a fine diversion from work. Sabit’s new driver picked me up one afternoon in March—his driver was actually his secretary, who had been drafted into driving because Sabit had fired seventeen drivers in the previous year. We picked up Sabit from his office. Sabit had two guns with him, a .22 and a Kalashnikov assault rifle. The driver drove the SUV out of Kabul, south for about thirty minutes, toward the edge of Kabul Province and Sabit’s home village.
“Watch the road,” Sabit told the driver.
“There’s a pothole,” Sabit told the driver, pointing at a black dot on the beige horizon.
“You’re going too fast.”
“You’re a horrible driver.”
“Slow down.”
“Speed up!”
“Be careful over the pothole! You’re an idiot!”
The driver/secretary said nothing. He knew better.
“Pull the car over,” Sabit demanded after one poorly executed pothole. The driver, white-knuckled, thin-lipped, and staring straight ahead, pulled over on the side of the road.
“Get out,” Sabit hissed. “I bet Kim could drive better than you.”
This was an amazing insult—the idea that a woman could drive better than an Afghan man, let alone a Pashtun Afghan man, was beyond offensive. Only a handful of Afghan women drove, so few that they were celebrities, that Afghan men actually knew personal details about them. But Sabit followed through on his threat.
“Kim. Drive.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea. I haven’t driven a car in almost two years.”
“But you know how to drive, right? It’s the same side of the road as the U.S. Just drive. I’m sure you’re better than this idiot.”
I got out. The driver got out. “I’m not even supposed to be the driver,” he whispered, as we walked past each other on the side of the highway. “I’m the secretary.”
I jumped into the driver’s seat, a watchful Sabit next to me. I hit the gas and pulled back onto the highway.
“Watch the pothole!” Sabit barked. I slowed down. “See, she is a better driver than you,” he told his secretary/driver, now slumped in the backseat.
“Turn here,” he demanded.
I turned right off the paved road, onto a dirt road, into a large expanse of dirt that Sabit planned to turn into a fruit orchard. Sabit’s servants waited for us. This was just outside his home village, an area where Sabit was also a tribal chief. Here, he was king. His servants had laid out carpets in the dirt for us to sit on, along with a pot of green tea and bowls of chewy fruit candies and almonds covered in a sugary paste. The men looked vaguely surprised to see a Western woman step down from the driver’s seat. Sabit talked briefly to them.
“I told them that you are a better driver than my real driver!” Sabit told me. His secretary pouted.
Sabit grabbed the guns. I may have grown up in Montana, but I had little experience with weapons. I had fired a .22 only once before, while visiting a friend in Idaho, and I had never shot a Kalashnikov. Yet I had honed my aim on plenty of video games. Sabit told the men to set up targets. They ran out to the ridges of dirt and set up different targets—mostly clumps of dirt.
“I can’t tell what the targets are,” I said. “They all look like dirt.”
“Pay attention!” Sabit said. He ordered his lackeys to put some coins out. We sat cross-legged on the carpets. I leaned down, fired the .22 and hit a few clumps of dirt, which exploded. I was not really aiming, as I could not tell one clump from another.
“You’re not bad,” Sabit said.
We kept firing. He passed me the Kalashnikov. The kickback bruised my chest, and the first shot missed all the clumps wildly. Bang, bang, bang. Every bullet sent up a puff of dust. This was much more fun than playing video games. I traded guns with Sabit and shot the .22. A man came running up near Sabit’s fence, to our right. He started yelling in Pashto. Sabit leaped up and started running toward the man, screaming and waving his Kalashnikov. The man ran away. Sabit turned around and walked back toward me.
“He told me it wasn’t safe and it was too loud,” he said, laughing. “I threatened to kill him.”
Finally, when Sabit’s men moved a coin to a ridge about ten yards in front of me, I hit it with the .22. Not a bad shot, but much more impressive if I hadn’t been at point-blank range. Sabit decided to leave. “Come on, you’re driving.”
I managed to get us back to Kabul, where I somehow maneuvered through the free swim that passed for Kabul traffic, merging around traffic circles, avoiding donkey-pulled carts, all while trying to slow down over potholes. I dropped Sabit off and planned a lunch date the next week. His driver/secretary then drove me home. “He’s fired every driver he’s ever had,” the man told me. “Driving for him is just not possible.”
I certainly didn’t want the gig. In the following days, I focused on my real job. I worked on a story about three Americans jailed twenty months earlier for running an illegal jail for Afghans under the guise of an import-export business. The team, led by a litigious former U.S. soldier named Jack Idema once convicted of fraud in the States, had actually grabbed Afghan men off the street, accused them of being terrorists, and held them in a makeshift prison. Why? I wasn’t certain, but I believed that Idema craved the glory and embraced the messianic ideology of the anti-jihad. He was the kind of guy who would write a book and call it My War without irony, the kind of guy who thought he would be the one to bring down Osama bin Laden single-handedly, ideally using a piece of duct tape, staples, and other tricks of his tradecraft. Idema was an embarrassment for almost everyone—mainly because many people had bought his story. U.S. forces held one Afghan turned over by Idema for two months. International peacekeeping forces helped Idema carry out three raids on houses where he captured Afghans. Several Afghan officials were videotaped meeting with Idema, who many people assumed was a member of the U.S. special operations forces because he acted and dressed like one. For years, Idema had been a legend on the Kabul scene, so often at the Star Wars–like bar in the Mustafa Hotel that a cocktail was named after him, that two bullet holes in the ceiling were supposedly made by him. He was known as “Tora Bora” Jack, for his tales from 2001 and 2002 when he allegedly hunted bin Laden, which won him a starring role in Robin Moore’s book The Hunt for bin Laden. A lot of sketchy foreigners had flooded Afghanistan, but Idema was one of the sketchiest. He was known for insinuating that he was a spy. He had tried to hire Farouq to work with him, but Farouq was suspicious of Idema’s actual mission.
In July 2004, Idema and the two other Americans were arrested, their jail dismantled, their prisoners freed. Idema and a younger former U.S. soldier claimed to be on a sanctioned supersecret U.S. mission, hunting down terrorists. The third American, a TV cameraman, said he was simply filming a documentary on the hunt for Al-Qaeda. The United States denied any connection to the men, other than admitting they were private American citizens. The trial was hardly fair, the translation atrocious, and Idema kept interrupting with various outbursts. At one point, the lawyer for the cameraman asked the prosecutor, “Can you handle the truth?” On the day of sentencing, in September 2004, Idema wore his traditional black sunglasses and khaki outfit and smoked cigarettes near the judge. When told he could not testify because he was not Muslim, Idema demanded to be sworn in on the Holy Quran, which he then kissed. The audience, mainly Afghans, including those Idema had once locked up, applauded and cheered. One former prisoner jumped up, punched his fist in the air, and launched an impromptu audience cheer of “God is great!”