CHAPTER 9
LET’S GET RADICAL
Years later, whenever anyone asked when the good war became not such a good war, my answer was easy. On May 29, 2006, when a U.S. military truck suffered mechanical failure and plowed into rush-hour traffic in Kabul, killing three Afghans. Peaceful demonstrations quickly turned into antiforeigner riots. Soldiers fired into the crowd. Afghans ransacked buildings with English-language signs, from relief groups to a pizza restaurant. They even set fire to a building they thought was the Escalades brothel, although the brothel was next door. They shouted, “Death to Karzai,” and that regional catchphrase, “Death to America,” and ran from street to street, asking guards if foreigners lived inside. They almost threw a light-skinned girl into a fire, until she shouted in Dari and they realized she was Afghan. Karzai’s political rivals from the Northern Alliance were blamed for stoking the violence, the worst since the Taliban’s fall. At least seventeen Afghans were killed in the rioting; despite considerable efforts, no foreigners died. Karzai demonstrated his usual leadership skills, waiting until the riots had almost run their course to broadcast a televised message, urging calm. But even after calm was restored, Afghans stayed angry.
It wasn’t necessarily the booze and brothels. It was the growing gap in the country between the haves and have-nots, the corruption, the warlords now in parliament, the drug lords doubling as government officials, the general attitude of the foreigners from aid workers to the international troops, and the fact that no one ever seemed to be held accountable for anything. Even if the level of foreign aid had been low compared to other “post-conflict” countries, billions of dollars had still poured in. Dozens of new gleaming wedding halls and shopping centers dotted the Kabul landscape. Warlords, drug lords, and influential officials had been handed government land for a cut rate in the neighborhood of Shir Pur, where they built gaudy mansions that looked like grade-school decoupage projects gone horribly wrong, gooey confections of pillars, mirrors, colored tiles, and green windows. But construction started only after bulldozers pushed out the poor people who had lived there before, along with their mud huts. Shir Pur, which meant “child of lions,” was now referred to as Shir Choor, which meant “looted by lions.” The style of architecture was called “narcotecture”; the hulking monstrosities were described as “poppy palaces.”
Yet for an average Afghan, life still consisted of a mud hut, an outhouse, and a couple of hours of electricity a day. Renting a decent concrete house in Kabul now cost at least $1,500 a month. Afghan teachers and police officers made between $60 and $125 a month. The only changes most Afghans had seen in Kabul had been negative ones—higher rents and food costs, higher bribes, greater hassles. Traffic jams were regularly caused by convoys of Land Cruisers with dark windows and no license plates, by U.S. soldiers screaming out orders and pointing their guns, by concrete barriers set up by foreign aid groups and companies worried about suicide bombs.
Later, I would see these riots as a major breaking point in Afghanistan, the time when we first saw just how angry some Afghans were, just how ripe the country was for a Taliban comeback, just how leaderless Afghanistan really was. Later, I would see May 2006 as the beginning of the downward spiral.
But now, I just saw the riots as worrying.
I flew to Kabul. My life had turned into this—a bomb, a riot, an earthquake, and then I hopped on a plane. Although I was theoretically the bureau chief in Delhi, my responsibilities included at least six countries, depending on which powder keg was exploding. So my three-bedroom apartment was essentially a layover. I didn’t mind. I really didn’t like Delhi that much, sprawling broken mega-city that it was, where my hot water didn’t work and monkeys used the tarps protecting my plants outside like a trampoline. But really, the reason I disliked Delhi was probably more basic—not enough went boom, not enough to create a tight-knit foreign community, not enough to spin a vortex of work and fun, not enough to burn a candle not just at both ends but to light it up with a blowtorch. Delhi was just too normal.
Also, after two years, I felt I was starting to get the hang of this job, to figure it out. In Afghanistan, I knew when to wear a headscarf, when to shake a man’s hand, when to take off my glasses, when to shut my mouth. More accurately, I knew when to ask Farouq what to do, and to listen to what he said. I was also getting used to the pace, to juggling all the countries and all the work. I knew that a train crash or a religious stampede that killed seventy-five in India wasn’t a story—they happened all the time. I knew that roadside bombs in southern Afghanistan no longer merited a middle-of-the-night house call by Farouq—they were starting to happen all the time. I knew that I couldn’t pursue certain stories found in local newspapers, with headlines such as BABIES MARRY PUPPIES, because I had written too many stories about animals and risked getting a reputation. I was also now exercising regularly, regardless of the country, even just doing Pilates in a hotel room. My hair was cut every couple months; my roots matched my ends. In short, I was shaping up.
I had also started mastering certain tricks, like breathing and biting my lip to hold on to my temper, regardless of what went wrong. I had stopped throwing fits over bad laundry and bad Internet. Well, most of the time. An exception was made for the guys who incinerated my pajama bottoms in an Indonesian hotel room, just because I left them on the bathroom floor. I channeled Sabit as I went off on them.
Back in Kabul after the riots, I opted against staying in the Gandamack or another hotel, potential targets for more violence. Instead, I decided to stay at a friend’s house, figuring that there, I would be safer. Just after my plane landed, Farouq and I met my British journalist friend Sean for lunch at L’Atmosphère, which would sometimes let its strict no-Afghan policy slide. Farouq was slightly uncomfortable, but in the daytime, no one seemed to care. Sean wanted to talk about the Taliban and related insurgent groups. But Sean, who liked conspiracies and intrigue just as much as the Afghans, figured his phone could be tapped or the trees in L’Atmosphère bugged. So he never referred to the insurgents by name. He called them “Tango” instead.
“Sami thinks he’s got a way to meet Tango,” Sean told us. Sami was Sean’s fixer.
“Tango? Seriously? You need a better code word,” I replied.
His documentary the year before about the driving school for Afghan women was the best I had seen about living in the new Afghanistan—and there had been several, primarily shot by Europeans. But this time, Sean wanted to do a documentary on the Taliban. He wanted war. Sean wanted the typical heart of darkness craved by a subspecies of male foreign correspondent, mostly British, all adrenaline junkies, who figured they were wasting time if they weren’t dodging bullets. Clearly, the divorce had gone through. His cause to win back his wife was probably not helped by a magazine spread the previous fall, which featured a picture of him in a Kabul brothel, allegedly soliciting a prostitute for sex. Sean had actually been in the brothel helping a photographer friend get pictures of clients, but since she could not convince any real clients to agree to a picture, she used a photograph she slyly snapped of Sean. Sean’s face had been blurred, but his profile was unmistakable. When one of his sons saw the magazine spread, he said simply: “Daddy.”
Now, shaded by an umbrella in the garden, Sean asked for advice. With few Taliban contacts, I could offer little help. But Farouq had just been with a journalist in Zabul, Uruzgan, and Kandahar, and he knew a lot more, and he was the one Sean had really wanted to see. Farouq verified what Sean and I had been hearing: Like a bad 1980s hair band, complete with long wild locks and black eyeliner, the Taliban had mounted a comeback this spring.