CHAPTER 27
HOTEL CALIFORNIA
Unemployed, with no backing and no concrete purpose, I flew back to a war zone, to Kabul, the closest place I had to home. I moved in with a friend who charged me bargain rent. Some days, I watched entire seasons of TV shows on pirated DVDs. Some nights, I worked as a bartender at my friend’s bar. I was burned out, so much so that I lived in a new country, one that contained only my room, or more accurately, my bed, piled with notebooks, ideas, DVDs, and socks. I thought about what I would do next.
The weeks ticked down to the Afghan presidential election, which I viewed with the kind of anticipation that others reserved for cultural events like a new zombie movie. I pretended that I was still part of this world, that I still mattered. I researched freelance stories and a book idea. One night I tagged along with some friends to the Red Hot ’n’ Sizzlin’ restaurant, a low-slung and low-key steak house on the outskirts of Kabul. Past guests had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the brick arches inside the restaurant, nicknames such as “Mighty Mick,” helpful household tips such as “Up UR bum no babies.” People came here for meat, for main dishes like Bacon Wrapped Hamburger Steak and Gold Rush Pork Chops, flavored with condiments like Cowboy Butters. The drink list was equally creative. Shooters were called 3 Dollar Hooker, A Kick in Crotch, Hand Job, Monkey Brain, Minty Nipple. Cocktails ran $6.50, with names such as Mexican Sexy Lemonade, Sex on the Boat, Sex on the Sofa, Sex Peak, After Sex, and Gloom Raiser.
Halfway through the Texas-sized Onion Loaf, the trouble started. An American woman known for asking for threesomes as cavalierly as Afghan children demanded “One dollar, lady,” stood up from her computer and spotted a security guy at our table whom she blamed for losing her previous job with a USAID subcontractor. She weaved toward us, then toward her husband at the bar. Normally her husband was the problem—he often got so drunk that he could barely walk, and his problems walking on the perilous streets of Kabul were compounded by the fact that he was blind. The woman was angry, and he hugged her and told her to sit down. But she veered back to the security guy sitting next to me.
“Fucking asshole, fucking asshole,” the woman shouted, slurring her words. “I am one step away from Obama. Do you know who you’re dealing with?”
The entire restaurant did. A restaurant worker rushed toward her, followed by her husband, who tapped over with his cane.
“You don’t know who you’re messing with,” she shouted as they hustled her out the door. “You have no idea.”
The song “Highway to Hell” came on. It seemed apt. Why did the West keep getting Afghanistan wrong? Situations like this were as good a reason as any. Most foreigners had created a world where it was possible to rarely deal with the natives, where acceptable behavior included being staggeringly drunk by 8:45 PM on a Tuesday in an Islamic country that banned alcohol, frowned on pork, and certainly would never tolerate a drink named after sex.
Some foreigners wanted to make Afghanistan a better place, viewed Afghanistan as a home rather than a party, and even genuinely liked Afghans. But they were in the minority, and many had left, driven out by the corruption and the inability to accomplish anything. For most, Afghanistan was Kabul High, a way to get your war on, an adrenaline rush, a résumé line, a money factory. It was a place to escape, to run away from marriages and mistakes, a place to forget your age, your responsibilities, your past, a country in which to reinvent yourself. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but the motives of most people were not likely to help a fragile and corrupt country stuck somewhere between the seventh century and Vegas.
I was hardly better than the rest. A life led constantly inside, whether in a house or a car or a burqa, whether by a foreigner or an Afghan, sparked a constant desire for release. But at least the taxpayers weren’t paying my salary.
Many diplomats rarely poked their heads outside embassy walls. Many consultants traded places every six months and then promptly repeated all the mistakes of their predecessors. How out of touch were they? Employees of the Department for International Development (DFID), the British equivalent of USAID, decided it would be a good idea to throw a going-away party just before the election, with the dress code specified as “INVADERS—Alexander the Great, Hippies, Brits, Mughals, Russians, and general gratuitous fancy dress. Gorillas welcome.” It was unclear if the misspelling of “guerrillas” was intentional. Pictures of the festivities were posted on Facebook, showing one partygoer with her left breast almost hanging out of her white Grecian dress, three pirates, two aliens drinking beer, two men in turbans, a Mughal, a cowboy, a jihadi. Any member of the Afghanistan Network on Facebook—and plenty of Afghans belonged—could see the photos. Well, at least it wasn’t the Tarts and Talibs theme party, thrown the year before. Graveyard of Empires, indeed.
Meanwhile the invaders continued their invasion. By August, the month of the presidential election, a record 101,000 international troops had arrived in Afghanistan, including a record 62,000 Americans, each of whom cost up to $1 million a year. In July, not coincidentally, a record number of international troops had been killed, largely by roadside bombs, the weapon of choice of weaker insurgents determined to wait out their enemies. Military spending in Afghanistan was set to exceed Iraq for the first time. The United States was also now spending $200 million a month on civilian governance and development programs—double that under Bush, an amount equal to the nonmilitary spending in Iraq during its heyday. Too bad it was having such a hard time attracting USAID employees to fill those jobs—one USAID official confided that the agency would be lucky to get the C-team of applicants. Almost eight years into this war, mustering new enthusiasm was difficult.
Regardless, significant results needed to be shown in the next year, in time for the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The United States kept reviewing its strategy and redefining success; the goal posts kept shifting. Our partners seemed equally tired—Canada had just reiterated it would pull its 2,830 troops by 2011, and the 84 soldiers promised by Colombia the same week would hardly make up the difference, even if the Germans finally decided to do actual patrols up north. The British lost their two hundredth soldier, and the Brits back home grew increasingly divided about the war; meanwhile, their incoming army chief said they might need to stay forty years to fix Afghanistan. This patchwork quilt seemed unlikely to hold—as one U.S. soldier in Ghazni had complained to me, to request air support he had to ask the Poles, who ran the battle space, had no airplanes, and passed any request for air support up to the U.S. military in Bagram.
The Afghan side of the quilt looked similarly tattered. Karzai led in the polls before the August 2009 election, but with forty opponents and the popularity of swine flu, he did not necessarily have enough votes to win an outright majority. To gain more power, he had made a dangerous gamble, signing various pacts with the same warlords he had once claimed to disdain and promising them future spoils. He had also continually criticized his foreign benefactors, saying that they were the real root of the problems in Afghanistan. In other words, Karzai had publicly cut his strings with the West, and by sewing up the regional strongmen, he managed to outmaneuver the Obama administration’s halfhearted attempts to push any other viable presidential candidate. So U.S. officials, who had profoundly alienated Karzai by repeatedly criticizing him privately and publicly, were left with no other likelihood but a very annoyed Karzai. This was amateur hour.