After we finished eating, Sean asked if I would be the point of contact when he went to meet the Taliban in Helmand, in case he disappeared.
“Sure,” I said.
“It’s unlikely anyone would ever call you,” he said.
“Fine.”
The confluence of events suddenly seemed ominous. Afghans were growing angrier at the foreigners and the government. The Taliban was spreading its influence in the south. And the Americans were turning over command of the south to NATO, which was made up of some countries far less committed to war than the United States. I knew I had to get serious.
“I want to meet the Taliban,” I told Farouq as we left Sean. “Can we?”
“Maybe,” he replied. “There are safe ways to do it.”
Farouq was growing increasingly concerned about safety. His wife was about to give birth to their second child. He still liked to travel, but he also didn’t want to risk anything. I wondered if he would be willing to make the trip we had made three years earlier to visit Pacha Khan. I wondered if he had lost his edge. Three main fixers were known for meeting the Taliban, and Farouq wasn’t one of them. Those were Sami, a man named Tahir, and Ajmal Naqshbandi, my fixer when Farouq had gotten married, who was evolving from shy poet to danger boy.
The United States certainly didn’t help convince Farouq that any risk was worth it. One night, Farouq drove down the road with a full SUV—his wife, daughter, two sisters-in-law, and mother-in-law. Near the Ministry of Interior, he saw a line of headlights moving toward him. When he drew closer, he heard a bang near his windshield. He yanked the steering wheel over, braking hard on the side of the road. Then he heard another bang, and another bang. Only then, he realized the line of headlights was a U.S. military convoy. The U.S. soldiers shined heavy lights toward Farouq and started yelling at him. So Farouq turned off his lights and held his breath, silently scared, unwilling to let his family know just how frightened he was. Farouq told me the soldiers laughed at him.
“I think some of the soldiers knew that I was scared, but still they threw more tube lights on me and pushed me more to the side of the street,” he said. “American soldiers are scared from leaves, from trees, rocks, and everything in Afghanistan.”
I figured I knew what the bangs could be—when a car failed to stop, soldiers sometimes fired warning shots.
But regardless of his feelings, Farouq started planning a trip down south, as I dove into another serious issue. Hamid Karzai was once the sartorially blessed favorite of the West, but no longer. He had proved to be whiny and conflicted, a combination of Woody Allen, Chicken Little, and Jimmy Carter. Ever since Zal had left the year before, Karzai had lost direction, like the victim of a breakup. The new U.S. ambassador seemed adamant about returning normalcy to the relationship—despite the fact that Afghanistan was anything but normal. Karzai had turned into a weather-vane leader, tilting toward whoever saw him last, increasingly paranoid and suspicious, squeezed between the foreigners and the Afghans.
Even calling Karzai the “mayor of Kabul,” as many did, was too generous. When he gave the foreigners an ultimatum to remove concrete security barriers in the city, the foreigners ignored him. When Karzai complained about civilian casualties, nothing changed.
Karzai also was blamed for losing control of his brothers. One brother was a parliament member who rarely showed up. Another was publicly linked to the drug trade in southern Afghanistan, even though he denied it. Another was becoming one of the most influential businessmen in Afghanistan, allowed to privatize government companies such as Afghanistan’s only cement factory with impunity, allegedly because of his connections to the president and a slush fund of money provided by deposits in the Kabul Bank. If the president couldn’t control his brothers, Afghans argued, how could he control the country?
I begged my sources in the presidential palace to arrange an interview with Karzai, even showing up at a key official’s office one afternoon. The official was busy watching The Three Stooges.
Eventually Karzai let me shadow him for two days, but he wouldn’t sit down for an interview. I watched him in meeting after meeting. He was always folksy and cheery and slightly forced. He was in an impossible position. The elders complained of civilian casualties, the police complained of not having enough weapons. Karzai could not promise anything because he could deliver little. Instead, he whined about the foreigners. In one meeting, he sat at the head of a long table with sixty tribal elders from eastern Nangarhar Province, all angry that Karzai had removed the provincial border police commander. Karzai said he would try to help, but that he had to balance the needs of Afghans and the desires of foreigners.
“Do you agree with me?” Karzai asked. The room of turbaned men sat silently, arms folded, some obviously pouting. “Why are you quiet? Do you agree with me? Do you support me?”
“No!” several men shouted, not unless Karzai reversed his decision.
“You are the president,” one elder said. “You can do it. You should do it for us. Otherwise we will not support you.”
After another lunch, with elders from Uruzgan Province, Karzai showed what he really believed in—Afghan unity. He wanted people to consider themselves Afghans first, not Pashtuns, Tajiks, or the other major ethnic groups of Hazaras and Uzbeks. He called me to the front of the room as a stage prop.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Please come up here.”
Karzai always called me “ma’am.” I don’t know that he knew my name. He pointed to four elders from one Uruzgan district and asked me to identify their ethnicity. I was being set up, but I played along. “Pashtun?” I said. This made him happy because he could deliver his punch line. They were Pashtuns and Hazaras, he said, but they were all Afghans, men who lived side by side in peace, sharing the Pashto language.
“That’s how good this country was,” Karzai said. “That’s how we want to make it again.”
Performance over, I returned to my seat. But this idea of unity was not enough to save Afghanistan—not when Afghans still referred to themselves largely by ethnic group, not when the Pashtun-dominated Taliban insurgency was making inroads down south, and not when the Tajik-led Northern Alliance was accused of organizing the Kabul riots. No ethnic group held a clear majority in Afghanistan, even though the Pashtuns had run the show for almost three hundred years, a fact that had fueled resentment and rivalries. About 42 percent of Afghans were Pashtuns, mainly in the south, southwest, and east; about 27 percent of Afghans were Tajiks, mainly in the north; about 9 percent were Hazaras, mainly in central Afghanistan; about 9 percent were Uzbeks, mainly in the north; and the rest of the population was spread among smaller ethnic groups like the Aimak, Turkmen, and Baloch. (Those numbers, of course, were hotly disputed, each Afghan ethnic group always claiming a bigger pie piece. There had never been a census.)
To show who was boss, Karzai, a Pashtun, needed to do something more than an Afghan version of Free to Be … You and Me. He needed to take charge, to stop making excuses, to stop blaming the foreigners for everything. In short, he needed to man up.
Farouq and I decided to get out of Kabul and go to Kandahar, which doubled as the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban and Karzai’s home stomping grounds. As I listened to his plans, I realized that Farouq had not lost his edge. His wife, after all, had just given birth to a son, and he was still game for a road trip. He was just being careful—he had seen how quickly Afghanistan had taken a U-turn in the past, as quickly as a donkey outfitted with a suicide vest. Another journalist, my new housemate Tom, decided to come on our trip south. Tom was British, tall, handsome, skinny, with a mop of brown hair, and he dressed in a dandy-like style of thrift store meets Fleet Street. In the winter, he wore hats and scarves. He seemed like he should smoke a pipe and wear corduroy jackets with elbow patches, but he didn’t. He seemed like he should be called dashing, but he wasn’t. Tom had been around in Afghanistan almost as long as I had, but we had only become friends in the spring, largely through our mutual friend Sean. Whenever they were both in town, Tom and Sean hung out most nights at L’Atmosphère, two wild-and-crazy guys always trying to outdo each other with self-deprecating dating stories in almost always successful attempts to meet women.