“I know Sharif. He must like women. He may have once fancied me, at least a little bit.”
The man struggled to hold his Black Label without laughing. He swallowed with difficulty.
“You? No. Never.”
“I was probably mistaken.”
“I mean, you’re OK,” he said. “But Nawaz Sharif could have any woman he wants. He had the third most beautiful woman in the world. And you come nowhere near that.”
“You could be right,” I acknowledged.
I decided not to risk anything else. After all, I didn’t know whose side he was on. I had learned that much about Pakistan by this point. Someone was always listening, and few things were what they seemed on the surface—except, apparently, for the gift of a brand-new, latest-model iPhone.
CHAPTER 25
YOUNG AMERICANS
I flew to Kabul in a blatant attempt to be relevant. If my newspaper wanted local news, I planned to deliver. I would follow the Illinois National Guard as soldiers attempted to train the Afghan police, which was suddenly seen as critically important. Everyone had realized that the Afghan police were corrupt, incompetent, and often high. And only when they and the Afghan army got their act together could anyone leave.
This was my seventh embed, my seventh time hanging out with U.S. soldiers, my seventh version of the same drill. We met for a briefing in a plywood hut in Camp Phoenix, on the outskirts of Kabul.
“So can we shoot if they have a remote control?” one soldier asked.
“If that remote control looks like a pistol aimed at you, then I would say, light ’em up,” replied the first lieutenant in charge, who then listed hot spots for roadside bombs. “Pretty much the whole downtown area.”
“Awesome,” another soldier replied.
Light ’em up. Awesome. Let’s roll. Get some. Over the years, I had learned the lingo of the U.S. military and slipped into it easily, as familiar as a Montana drawl. I had also figured out different categories of U.S. soldiers—the Idealists, the Thinkers, the Workers, the Junkies, and the Critics. This first lieutenant was an Idealist, a true believer who thought that he and America could make a difference here. In a way, I found his situation report—or “sit rep”—funny. They were talking about Kabul, a city I had driven around for years, a downtown I had walked around. I never wore body armor in Kabul. I only worried about my security in Kabul when I saw a military convoy because of suicide blasts, overeager NATO gunners, and Afghan drivers who disobeyed warnings to halt.
So this would be my first time seeing Kabul from a Humvee, my first time seeing Afghans as the other. The first lieutenant warned of a white Toyota Corolla without a license plate—a potential suicide bomber, who by the looks of repeated security warnings I had seen, had been haunting Kabul for three years. It was a running joke with longtimers—highly paid security companies fixated on a potential suicide bomber with a long beard, wearing a turban, and driving a white Toyota Corolla, which described pretty much half the men in Kabul.
Our mission was outlined: Drive through the mean streets of Kabul and north to a rural district to train the police. It seemed like a fairly obvious mission, but more than seven years into the war here, the U.S. military had only recently gotten serious about the Afghan police. And the police were a serious problem. Police chiefs were often illiterate thugs and sometimes drug lords who ran their departments like fiefdoms. Some paid big money for their posts, even $100,000, and they made their money back by being on the take. Most low-level police were paid little money and given little training. They took bribes often because they had no other choice. But the police were crucial to any counterinsurgency. If Afghans did not trust their police, they would naturally turn toward the Taliban. The police were also increasingly on the front lines—more Afghan police had died in Taliban-led attacks than soldiers, Afghan or foreign.
Both the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama one stressed that Afghan police and soldiers were essential to solving the morass here—but clearly not enough troops had yet been devoted to the task. The Illinois National Guard ran three police-mentor teams in Kabul Province with thirty soldiers altogether, responsible for about six thousand police in thirty police districts. The Afghan police faced similar numerical challenges—in the district we were going, Mir Bacha Kot, which meant “collection of boys,” eighty-five police were supposed to serve about a hundred and twenty-five thousand people living in thirty-six villages.
A trainer from DynCorp tried to explain what the U.S. soldiers would see with the Afghan National Police (ANP), using an example from Paghman district, in the western part of Kabul Province.
“We talk about how things are,” the trainer said. “Yesterday in Paghman we had a situation with a guy. He’s a mullah by day, Taliban by night. ANP is not gonna do anything about him. Don’t trust a lot of the things that you’re seeing and hearing.”
We climbed into our Humvees. I sat behind the driver, wearing a helmet and flak vest that made me feel somewhat ridiculous. We put on headsets so we could hear one another and barged into a traffic jam on Jalalabad Road. Through the window, I watched the panic start. The Afghan drivers did not wave or smile at the U.S. soldiers. They tried to get out of the way, fear written on their craggy faces. But sitting in a Humvee instead of out in traffic, I felt nervous for the American soldiers. They saw every Afghan, every car as a potential enemy, even though they had been here only for a few weeks and Kabul was a relatively safe city compared with the south. But little wonder: Days earlier, a bomber had attacked another U.S. military base in Kabul, injuring five soldiers from the Illinois National Guard, one of whom later died. Everyone was on edge.
“This is nothing,” the first lieutenant announced as we sat in traffic. “Traffic yesterday, we didn’t move for forty-five minutes. Jackknifed fuel truck, leaking fuel. We just had to sit there and wait. But I’ll take traffic with a lot of vehicles and cars over being stopped in a crowd of people. I didn’t like that at all. A crowd of people can turn ugly.”
The gunner agreed, mentioning one crowd that had uglified recently. “You could tell their attitudes have turned negative toward us. You’re not getting the smile and a wave.”
This was educational. If people in Kabul reacted this way, how did they feel in the provinces? And if U.S. soldiers felt this way, what chance did anyone have to turn this war around? Years into this, I was still hearing the same comments from U.S. soldiers, the same gripes about Afghanistan. We had learned so little. Most of these Illinois soldiers had only found out after arriving here that they would be training police. They had been told they would be doing something else, like briefings, PowerPoint presentations, and administrative work. And much of their training in the States focused not on the police, not even on Afghanistan, but on Iraq.
The soldiers continued to dissect the traffic of the capital.
“All and all, my personal favorite is the left blinker, and then they turn to the right,” the first lieutenant said. “Half the people do that.”
“Traffic rules don’t exist,” the gunner agreed. “Just like everything. No laws. I don’t care what everybody says. This place never gets old.”
The discussion then turned to me.
“So you’re normally just out there, without any protection?” the first lieutenant asked.
“Yep. In a white Toyota Corolla,” I joked.
“Aren’t you nervous?”
“I’m actually more nervous sitting in this Humvee,” I admitted.
We pushed through the traffic jam, toward Massoud circle, the ugly monument where I had covered the massive attack on a U.S. convoy more than two years earlier. The first lieutenant started to worry at the circle because the Afghan police had set up a checkpoint. He told the gunner to get his head down. “I don’t want my guys to get shot in the head,” he said, picking up the radio. “All gunners, get down.”