This was my first time traveling with Tom. A friend of Farouq, a Pashtun with a giant black beard, agreed to drive us in a beat-up Toyota Corolla taxi. The car made us look like everyone else. Now we needed disguises. Tom and Farouq grew out their beards, to the extent that they could. I packed a black abaya, which made me look like a graduating high-school senior with a matching headscarf, but Farouq said that wasn’t enough. I needed a burqa.
“It’s weird to have to ask you,” Farouq said. “But you and I know the situation here has gotten worse and worse. I feel more comfortable with you wearing a burqa than not.”
I shrugged. His call. “You’ll buy it for me, right? You can bring one?”
Farouq agreed to pick out a suitable burqa. On a Sunday morning, I put in brown contact lenses to cover my blue eyes and drew on heavy black eyeliner, to look more like an Afghan woman if I decided to pull my burqa back over my head in the car. Tom, meanwhile, dressed in Afghan clothes and put on an embroidered Kandahari-style cap.
“You look strange,” Tom told me, wrinkling his nose at my brown eyes.
“You look like a Kandahari dancing boy,” I said.
It was an old joke. Although Afghans virulently opposed homosexuality, the segregation of the sexes had led to certain practices, especially in the Pashtun areas. Kandahar was known for older men sexually using teenage boys, usually to show off prestige and power. At weddings, at festive occasions, at male-only parties, dancing boys would often perform, wearing eyeliner and swinging their hips suggestively, before pairing off for the night. The practice was known as bacha bazi, or “boy play.” A Pashto proverb maintained that women were for breeding, boys for pleasure, but melons for sheer delight. A popular Afghan joke involved the birds of Kandahar, who flew with one wing in circles and used the other to cover their rears.
Farouq soon showed up with a burqa. I could not avoid it—I would soon look like a giant blue badminton shuttlecock. Tom and I climbed in the backseat of the Corolla, and I put the burqa on the seat between us, knowing I didn’t need to wear it in Kabul. Near the edge of town, the car broke down. Car mechanics in Afghanistan never inspired trust, as they often worked out of shipping containers and owned only a screwdriver. But somehow, they usually fixed a car quickly. Afghans were geniuses with figuring out how things worked. Once, when our car battery died on a picnic, Farouq jumped the car by connecting a metal ladder and a cord to another car battery, killing no one.
So I assumed the mechanic would only take half an hour. We sat in the Corolla. As usual, everyone outside the car stared in at me. I had an idea: I slipped on the burqa. The top part grabbed tight around my head. A square of mesh covered my eyes. I was able to breathe through the fabric, so I didn’t hyperventilate on bad air. Oppressive, I thought. But oddly liberating. I stared at the old men in their turbans and the young boys shoving each other in the market, and they didn’t stare back. I was totally invisible.
We soon drove out of Kabul, and on safe stretches of the road, I pulled my burqa back over my head, as local women did, and with my eyeliner and brown contact lenses and the speed of highway traffic, fooled anyone driving past. We drove south to Kandahar on a highway that the Americans had built in 2003—already, the road was falling apart, and entire chunks had crumbled away, due to poor design, poor execution, and really poor asphalt. The Taliban controlled certain parts of the road, but usually just at night. We were stopped once by the police, and slowed down once, near a U.S. military convoy. The U.S. soldiers didn’t know I was an American, and treated our team just like any other group of Afghans in a Toyota Corolla. Like a threat.
“You are in the blue prison,” said Farouq, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He had taken a turn driving, flicking his eyes between the rearview mirror and the men on the side of the road.
Once I stepped out of the car in Kandahar, though, I realized that my prison was far from perfect. Farouq had bought the first burqa he found, but it hit me just below the knee, instead of near the ankle. In the front, the burqa only came to my waist. This two-tiered style was apparently fashionable in Kabul, but not in conservative Kandahar. And it was much too short. I quickly figured out I was wearing the Pashtun equivalent of a miniskirt. I also didn’t walk right. Afghan women took demure steps. I walked like a man. Checking myself out in my hotel-room mirror, I decided to wear the long black abaya inside Kandahar, and the burqa when we traveled in the car outside the city. At least the hotel room was nicer than my first time in Kandahar. The TV had about two hundred channels, most of them porn. I checked the room computer’s Internet history—more porn. That was a good sign, I supposed. Despite the Taliban comeback, Kandahar was still hung up on sex.
But we had to be careful. Just west of Kandahar, in the district of Panjwai, the Canadians had been fighting actual battles with the Taliban, who had ridden into the district center two months earlier, demanding food and shelter. They had shot down a moderate tribal elder as he shopped for groceries, they had gunned down three police officers on patrol. They were like vampires, disappearing during the day, coming out at night, intimidating everyone. Fearing retribution, no one in the south wanted to look like he supported the government. In neighboring Helmand Province, the Taliban had just ambushed and killed thirty-two people—all relatives and friends of a Helmand parliament member, who would be killed three years later by a roadside bomb. Only four men attended a funeral for a pro-government cleric near Kandahar—and two were gravediggers. The Taliban had taken over several remote districts, such as Chora in Uruzgan, where police had only assault rifles and six rockets when the Taliban showed up with mortars and machine guns.
This was still not Iraq, but the insurgency here had finally registered on the international jihadi network. Al-Qaeda’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, would soon call for all Afghans to rise up against foreign forces. The Taliban and their allies were mimicking tactics used in Iraq—more suicide attacks, more sophisticated bombs, more slick propaganda, more beheadings of reconstruction workers. The insurgents here were also smart, winning popularity points with reports of Islamic courts in rural districts that delivered swift justice. These judges contrasted vividly with government judges, who often demanded bribes or took forever to decide a case.
We drove to Panjwai, fully disguised, with an escort provided by tribal elders. We sat with a few elders on cushions on the floor of a community center. They were scared, and they carried pistols. But they liked my new look.
“We like your burqa very much, but only if you wear it in America too,” one said.
“It’s very short,” added another, looking unsure. “Is that what they wear in Kabul?”
We stayed for less than an hour, incredibly rude in Afghanistan. But Farouq feared that word would spread that foreigners were in town.