Farouq was nervous about the audition. So he called Sean, back in town from Helmand, sporting a giant cast on his left index finger from a bullet that had ricocheted off a British .50-caliber machine gun while his convoy was under fire from the Taliban.
“Farouq, I know you’re nervous, but when you stand in front of the camera, think of the cameraman and the anchor as the most stupid people you can imagine,” Sean told him. “Or that the cameraman is standing in front of you naked.”
Farouq told Sean not to tell me about the audition, so Sean immediately called. I could hardly blame Farouq for applying. The job didn’t pan out—an Afghan correspondent wasn’t hired—but Farouq was soon offered a producer position that paid more than twice what I did. Ever since Nasir disappeared for Tajikistan months earlier, drawn by the promise of easy money in the used-car business, Farouq had charged me only $75 a day to drive and translate when I was in the country, less than any other fixer was making.
“I don’t want to leave the Chicago Tribune, and I’ve told Al Jazeera I want to keep working with you, whenever you’re in town,” Farouq said. “You are my friend, and I won’t leave you. But they just pay so much money. I have to think of my family.”
Afghanistan without Farouq would be like English without vowels—it wouldn’t make sense. So I said I would try to increase his pay, to $125 a day, and said Farouq could work with Al Jazeera when I wasn’t in Afghanistan. Then I sold this to my bosses, tough considering the money crunch the newspaper was facing. It would not be the last time that money was an issue, for any of us.
The Fun House soon threw a Halloween party, which also marked my thirty-sixth birthday. Farouq and I made another trip to the World of Child toy store, where I bought a semiautomatic BB rifle and a BB pistol. Wearing shorts, a tank top, and Doc Martens, I was the comic-book character Tank Girl. Farouq made plans to come to the party—for years we had celebrated each other’s birthdays, even though birthdays were typically not observed in Afghanistan and many Afghans didn’t know their actual age. For his costume, Farouq took the easy route. He dressed as a member of the Taliban, although his turban and matching long shirt and pants could just as easily have qualified him as a Pashtun tribal member in the south. That was the thing about the Taliban—they blended.
More than a hundred people crammed into the house and the yard outside. We had Marilyn Monroe, a pirate, Death, the Quaker Oats guy, Cat Woman, a convincing Kim Jong Il, and a belly dancer, along with various sexy witches. Tom bought all the bandages from various pharmacies in Kabul and wrapped himself like a mummy. We danced in a large group, until Tom started to sweat through his bandages, which produced a stench similar to either an antibiotic ointment gone bad or dead people. A shady Afghan American with an Elvis hairdo showed up at about 2 AM—the month before, he had crashed a barbecue at the Fun House and peddled toothpaste tubes full of cocaine for $150 each, snapped up by many foreigners, who judged it bad cocaine but minty fresh. His was a novel business plan—in a country flooded with marijuana and opiates, this man was importing cocaine. (Eventually he figured out the profitable angle—exporting heroin—and was jailed.)
For Halloween, the Afghan Elvis arrived not with drugs but with an entourage including DJ Besho—whose name meant “DJ Diamond” in Dari—an Afghan rapper who set up an impromptu show in the living room. He cleared the dance floor with his rap, which included shout-outs to Wardak and other Afghan provinces. That effectively ended the party. On their way out the door, a member of the rap entourage pocketed my housemate’s cell phone.
Later it seemed as if this Halloween blowout was the last gasp of the kind of freewheeling fraternity-party craziness that had become normal in Kabul. The Fun House would soon break up. The foreigner parties would start to have guest lists for security’s sake—and often, Afghans like Farouq weren’t included on those lists. As the crisis in the country deepened, the Westerners would segregate themselves and retreat into their compounds, building a separate world in Kabul, free of the hassles of Afghanistan, free of Afghans.
CHAPTER 12
BARELY LEGAL
My eccentric grandpa, the Interior Ministry’s Abdul Jabar Sabit, had gone from media shy to overexposed almost overnight. The Don Quixote of Afghanistan had led police and journalists on a raid of Afghan corner shops, confiscating about three thousand cans of beer and six hundred bottles of wine in one afternoon. He was hardly alone in his morality quest. The country was considering creating a new vice and virtue department, harkening back to the days of the Taliban, when special cops patrolled the streets looking for men with short beards and women with obvious ankles. All the noise had the intended effect. The two stores that had sold booze to foreigners announced that they would no longer stock alcohol—a move that would not end the capital’s booze supply but would make it much more scarce and expensive. Bottles of Jacob’s Creek that sold for under $8 in the U.S. would now fetch at least $40 apiece.
I had kept up an acquaintance with Sabit, but a nervous one. I worried that he would turn on me, like he had turned on his other drivers, and I alternately wondered if he was even more fundamentalist than he outwardly behaved, or if he was possibly a hypocrite.
Sabit now courted the media so incessantly, he seemed to be running for office—and as it turned out, he was. The Brits and the Americans had been trying to improve the country’s justice system, even though neither group was supposed to be involved. In one of the biggest practical jokes ever played on Afghanistan, Italy had been tapped to reform the courts, despite the country’s lackluster justice record—in only the most recent example, Italy’s prime minister had been accused of bribing judges and tweaking laws to avoid conviction. The Italians’ efforts on judicial reform in Afghanistan so far could only be described as impotent.
Unwilling to sit on the sidelines, the Brits and the Americans now sold Sabit as the answer to government corruption. He was being pushed as the best choice for attorney general, the top lawyer in the land, a crucial job. Somehow the Afghan government needed to convince its citizens that criminals would be held accountable, that corruption would not be tolerated, and that an Afghan justice system was more effective than the Taliban’s Islamic courts. Like civilian casualties, corruption was turning into a major wedge issue. The Taliban may have been strict, but they did promise law and order, and they weren’t for sale. (Most of the time. In Afghanistan, there were always exceptions.)
Sabit was not an entirely new suggestion for attorney general. I had heard about this plan months earlier, from a U.S. embassy official.
“Sabit? Really?” I had asked.
“Sure,” the embassy man had said. “He may be an unguided missile, but he’s our unguided missile.”
And maybe that was true—when Sabit visited Guantánamo Bay, he largely validated what the United States had said about the American detention center there, even as he pushed for some allegedly innocent men to come back home. He had also sounded all the right notes about fighting corruption and following the advice of his benefactors. Yet Sabit faced an interesting paradox. Some people saw him as too conservative, given his morality campaign and past alliance with the fundamentalist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Others saw him as a U.S. patsy.
But Karzai nominated Sabit anyway, which meant that Sabit had to appear before the Afghan parliament and convince members to vote for him. This wasn’t entirely necessary—Karzai largely ignored the body, and would later even choose to keep his foreign minister when the parliament sacked him. But the affirmation would give Sabit legitimacy. He gave a long speech, talking poignantly about corruption and the need to fight it. The parliament overwhelmingly voted for him.