The Taliban Shuffle (25 page)

“Welcome anytime, Kim,” he said.

In mid-February, I met Sharif at the government’s Frontier House, just outside the judges’ enclave, where the country’s former top justices were still under house arrest. Eventually, after slipping through the mob, I climbed into Sharif’s bulletproof black SUV, surrounded by similar SUVs, and we took off, heading for two speeches outside the capital. We left Islamabad. One of Sharif’s security officers somehow sent us down narrow, bumpy dirt roads, where we ended up in traffic jams. Not encouraging.

“That was bad planning,” Sharif muttered. He sat in the front passenger seat. I sat behind the driver, next to Sharif’s aide.

After various detours, we ended up at the dirt field where Sharif
would speak. Thousands of people waited. He was mobbed when he tried to step out of his vehicle, and his bodyguards bounced around like pinballs, trying to get in between well-wishers and their charge. I stood near the dusty stage, but I didn’t want to walk out. Despite Bhutto’s killing, the security at this event resembled that of a high-school pep rally. The podium didn’t even have a bulletproof glass screen, which was supposed to be there. “I don’t know where it is,” Sharif told me, shrugging. “Sometimes the police give it to me, sometimes they give it to someone else.”

Onstage he didn’t seem to care about potential attacks, thundering against dictatorship to the crowd. But I did. This country made me feel insecure, much more than Afghanistan.

We drove to the next rally. I looked at my BlackBerry and spotted one very interesting e-mail—a Human Rights Watch report, quoting a taped conversation from November between the country’s pro-Musharraf attorney general and an unnamed man. The attorney general had apparently been talking to a reporter, and while on that call, took another call, where he talked about vote rigging. The reporter had recorded the entire conversation. I scanned through the e-mail.

“Nawaz,” I said. I had somehow slipped into calling the former prime minister by his first name. “You have to hear this.”

I then performed a dramatic reading of the message in full, culminating in the explosive direct quote from the attorney general, recorded the month before Bhutto was killed and just before Sharif flew home:

“Leave Nawaz Sharif … I think Nawaz Sharif will not take part in the election … If he does take part, he will be in trouble. If Benazir takes part she too will be in trouble … They will massively rig to get their own people to win. If you can get a ticket from these guys, take it … If Nawaz Sharif does not return himself, then Nawaz Sharif has some advantage. If he comes himself, even if after the elections rather than before … Yes …”

It was unclear what the other man was saying, but Human Rights
Watch said the attorney general appeared to be advising him to leave Sharif’s party and get a ticket from “these guys,” the pro-Musharraf party, the massive vote riggers.

Sharif’s aide stared at me openmouthed. “Is that true? I can’t believe that.”

“It’s from Human Rights Watch,” I said. “There’s apparently a tape recording. Pretty amazing.”

Sharif just looked at me. “How can you get a text message that long on your telephone?”

“It’s an e-mail,” I said, slightly shocked that Sharif was unconcerned about what I had just said. “This is a BlackBerry phone. You can get e-mail on it.”

“Ah, e-mail,” he said. “I must look into this BlackBerry.”

Sharif soon whipped out a comb, pulled the rearview mirror toward him, and combed his hair. I watched, fascinated. His hair plugs were in some ways genius—not enough to actually cover his bald spot but enough to make him seem less bald. He had the perfect hair transplant for a Pakistani politician who wanted to look younger while still appearing like a man of the people. But with every pull of the comb, I counted the potential cost—$1,000, $2,000. At the next speech, Sharif spoke in front of a metal podium with a bulletproof glass screen that ended three inches below the top of his head. I wondered if Musharraf was trying to kill him.

The election was three days away. And as much as Sharif seemed to be slightly simple, he was also increasingly popular, largely because of his support of the deposed judges. While Bhutto’s widower campaigned on the memory of his dead wife, Sharif campaigned against Musharraf and for justice. Bhutto’s party would win the most votes. But I thought Sharif would perform better than anyone suspected.

The day of the election, two journalist friends and I drove to polling stations in Islamabad and neighboring Rawalpindi. Everywhere we heard the same name: Nawaz Sharif. It was rather spooky. At one point, we found a man who had spent the entire night cutting up
white blankets, gluing them to his new car, and then painting them with tiger stripes. He finished the project off with black-feather trim.

“What are you going to do if it rains?” I asked the man.

“God willing, it won’t,” he said.

I snapped a photograph with my BlackBerry. By the end of the day, the results were clear—Musharraf’s party had received barely any votes. Secular parties had triumphed over religious ones. Bhutto’s party had won the most seats, as predicted. But Sharif’s party had won the second-highest amount of votes, a surprise to many Western observers. Through the election, Sharif had exacted revenge on Musharraf. And Bhutto’s party needed Sharif to have enough seats to run the country.

After more than eight years of political irrelevance, Sharif was back. I sent him a text message and asked him to call. A few hours later, he did, thrilled with his victory.

“I saw a car today, where a man had glued blankets to it and painted it like a tiger,” I told him at one point.

“Really?” he asked.

“Yeah. It was a tiger car.”

He paused. “What did you think of the tiger car, Kim? Did you like the tiger car?”

Weird question. I gave an appropriate answer.

“Who doesn’t like a tiger car?”

B
uried by the bombs and political wrangling of Pakistan, I had not been to Afghanistan for months. Stepping on the plane in Islamabad felt like freedom. Walking off the plane in Kabul felt like going home, even if I was allergic to that home. Outside the airport, Farouq smiled widely when he saw me. I sneezed. If we were alone, we would have hugged—it was March, and we hadn’t seen each other in six months. But in public, where all the taxi drivers and assorted men crowded around like paper clips near a magnet, we could only muster a vigorous shaking of hands. Farouq threw my bags into the back of his car. He was doing predictably well. Ever the businessman, Farouq had opened an Internet café and was clearing $1,500 a month, despite the fact that he had banned anyone from looking at pornography. As one of the country’s senior fixers, Farouq commanded up to $300 a day, primarily from visiting TV journalists, who blindly paid whatever was asked. But Farouq only earned money when journalists were in town, and he needed everything he could get. His wife was pregnant again.

“Oh man,” I said. “She’s going to kill you.”

Farouq laughed. His wife had wanted to have a small family, and she had wanted to work. But less than four years into their marriage, she was pregnant with her third child.

Regardless, whenever I was in the country, Farouq still charged me only $125 a day to drive and translate, even though it was difficult to drive and organize stories at the same time. He sometimes complained, but halfheartedly, almost like he felt he should complain. Many friends who had watched Farouq and me described us like an old married couple. We had worked together for almost five years. We knew each other’s quirks and bickered in shorthand. Farouq raised his voice whenever we disagreed. We always had the same exchange.

“Farouq, why are you upset?” I would ask. “Why are you raising your voice?”

“Kim. I’ve told you a million times,” he would reply, loudly. “I’m not upset. It’s just the way I talk.”

But now, after I had been gone for so long, we were excited to catch up and report good stories. I had only a week here—I wanted to make it count, even while juggling work and Dave, who had flown into Kabul after a grueling six-week embed that involved hiking all night through the snow.

So Farouq and I drove around the city, something we always did when I had been gone for a while. Kabul was slightly tense. Armed men patrolled the neighborhood of Shir Pur, that den of corruption and various crimes against architecture. Predictably, this was all because of Sabit, my estranged Afghan grandpa and the country’s wayward attorney general. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord famous for his love of booze and horses, had sent men to beat up a rival and his family members. In a bold attempt at law enforcement, Sabit had ordered police to surround Dostum’s mirrored and pillared monstrosity in Shir Pur. Dostum, in turn, ran up to the roof of his house and beat his chest, an Afghan King Kong. The standoff lasted for hours, until finally Sabit was called off. Dostum’s armed henchman now lurked on street corners. Sabit hid in his office. This passed for rule of law in Afghanistan—warlords trumped all. Sabit, the great white-bearded hope for the Afghan judicial system, had become the symbol of its failure.

I didn’t write about it, didn’t feel like kicking Sabit when he was down. No, I wanted something joyful, a happy story, a small good thing in all the gloom.

So Farouq and I made plans to see
Afghan Star
, a reality show modeled on
American Idol
and the most popular show in Afghanistan. This show, like other programming on the country’s most popular station, Tolo TV, started by savvy Afghan-Australian siblings, had angered conservative mullahs and established some kind of pop culture for Afghanistan’s young people. For the first time, a girl had made it to the final four. And she was a Pashtun from Kandahar, shocking because Kandahar was a conservative stronghold. Many Pashtun women from the south weren’t allowed to work, and they definitely weren’t allowed to sing, a profession akin to prostitution. I called a friend at the TV station to get two tickets. Then I told Dave.

“I want to go,” he said. “Can you get me a ticket?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

And I didn’t. In truth, I was reluctant to bring him, to report alongside him. I hadn’t dated a journalist in years, and I was still leery. When we had reported together on breaking stories in Pakistan, it wasn’t necessarily fun. We were interested in different parts of a story. We had sniped at each other while on deadline in a shared hotel room. He had a temper. I was stubborn. While working, we didn’t necessarily play well. I was also reluctant to introduce him to Farouq and my life in Afghanistan, which had always been my separate world. Out of everyone, Farouq and his opinion mattered. He had seen me through every relationship overseas. Despite our ups and downs, Farouq was the constant. And although he never passed judgment, any silence spoke volumes. My boyfriends usually ended up with nicknames, none flattering.

So I said I would try to get Dave a ticket, and then I changed the subject. But I didn’t try. Even though we had talked about sharing a house in Islamabad, even though I wanted to make us work, I didn’t necessarily want to work with him. And I was selfish. This was my
story. No one had yet written about the Pashtun female finalist, even though a woman had never performed this well.

The day of the show, I called Dave as Farouq and I drove to the taping. I thought he had forgotten about it. But he fumed.

“You didn’t even try to get me a ticket, did you?” he said. “You knew I wanted to go.”

“It’s difficult,” I replied.

“Is it? You don’t want me to go.”

Farouq could overhear the argument.

“Kim,” he whispered. “Tell him to come. We’ll get him in.”

Realizing my worlds were colliding, I invited Dave. Farouq and I parked outside the Afghan Markopolo Wedding Hall, a phantasm of mirrors and columns, and walked past the crowds of young men waiting outside. We showed our passes to the burly security guards and climbed the stairs. Being here was like attending any celebrity event anywhere, only tinged with the possibility of an insurgent attack. Farouq looked for someone in charge.

“I’m going to schmooze some people,” he said, using a word I had taught him.

“Schmooze away.”

Farouq easily found the media guy and convinced him to let Dave into the show. That handled, we found seats, saving a seat next to Farouq, so he could translate for both of us. Dave soon showed up, wild-eyed and out of breath.

“I was just assaulted,” he said. “A bodyguard just slammed me in the chest. He took the wind out of me. He thought I was a Pashtun.”

I considered that objectively. With his coloring and beard, Dave did resemble a Pashtun. A beefy Afghan who had clearly been pumping iron in one of the many bodybuilding gyms of Kabul then walked up to him.

“I’m sorry again, sir.”

Dave started yelling at him. “You can’t treat people like that. I’m a journalist.”

Farouq looked at me, his eyebrows raised. Dave had a point. But the security guard had apologized, several times. Now Dave was shaming him in public, which contradicted any Afghan code imaginable. His anger was spilling over from me to the world. What had he seen on his embeds? I didn’t know, because he didn’t want to worry me, but I imagined bombs, gunfights, the kind of violence that I had somehow avoided. Dave had started to change. Always passionate and intense, he now seemed just angry.

Finally he sat down, still upset, barely speaking to me because of the ticket fiasco. This was not a fun date. Poor Farouq was stuck in the middle.

But we were all soon distracted. White lights flashed, and the loudspeakers pumped music. The host ran onstage, announced “In the name of God—hello,” and called out the four singers. They walked out and stood nervously, waiting to hear who lost in the previous week’s voting. Lima Sahar was the only woman and the only Pashtun.

“Who is the person who should stay with us?” the host asked the audience, who booed Lima. Some of the three hundred or so audience members felt that Lima had made it this far in the competition not because of her talent but because of a massive Pashtun voting bloc. And they were upset for another reason.