CHAPTER 17
Buried 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.
“Why are they booing her?” I asked Farouq.
“She’s a woman,” he whispered. “They aren’t used to it.”
I felt bad for her. Lima was kept home during the Taliban years, and although she was eighteen, she was only in the eighth grade. She could speak little Dari, the main language in Afghanistan. When Lima was in Kandahar, she wore a blue burqa whenever she left the house. But onstage she wore blue glitter in her hair, a matching headscarf, a long electric-blue tunic with gold-sequin flowers, matching pants, fake eyelashes, and the makeup of a televangelist’s wife. She gripped her elbows in front of her chest like a life preserver and stared straight ahead, looking past the boos of the audience.
The host paused, dramatically delaying the judges’ decision. “I can tell you this time, something strange has happened.”
Something strange had indeed happened—the most popular singer had been knocked off. And Lima had made it to the final round of three.
When Lima sang, I could see why some people questioned her ability. She seemed more like a karaoke performer, perhaps even a not-so-good karaoke performer. She danced almost as an afterthought, with the rhythm of Whitney Houston and the enthusiasm of lumber. Her voice was sometimes off-key. Yet she was also slightly flirty, a bit subversive. She sang one song with almost a sneer, changing the words of a traditional Pashto song from a male perspective to a female one. In Afghanistan, that passed for rebellion.
“If I blacken my eyes with eyeliner, it will kill you,” she sang, with a slight hip sway. “Especially if I wear these bangles from Kandahar.”
My story was scheduled for the front page the next Thursday, the same day that Lima happened to be voted off the show. But Dave’s ran first, days earlier, meaning that I had helped him scoop me. That was hardly the only problem. Unknown to anyone at the Tribune, a reporter at our sister newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, also owned by the Tribune Company, had written a story weeks earlier about Afghan Star that had not yet run in the newspaper. It was a very different story, and didn’t even mention Sahar, but it was about the same TV show. Then, in a decision that would haunt me for months, the Los Angeles Times decided to run its story about Afghan Star on the same day as mine.
Our newspaper company had just been bought by the eccentric billionaire Sam Zell, an alleged maverick who liked wearing jeans and swearing. The deal was complicated and somehow involved cashing in all the stock owned by employees, but since it had gone through in the weeks between the emergency and Bhutto’s death, I paid little attention. Zell, who resembled a cross between a Keebler elf and a garden gnome, was not a newspaperman. He was a compulsive bargain hunter, the self-proclaimed “grave dancer,” making billions largely by buying troubled companies, somehow fixing them, and then selling them. So far he had tried to ingratiate himself with employees by removing the barriers to porn on the Internet, under the theory, I guess, that newspapers shouldn’t have any censorship and because everyone loves porn, even at work. After appearing at a Los Angeles Times plant in Orange County in February, he was quoted on his philosophy: “Everyone likes pussy. It’s un-American not to like pussy.”
In theory, he should have loved my story about Afghan Star. But soon after the competing stories appeared on March 13, they came to Zell’s attention. He allegedly got angry and used some four-letter words. I could understand his point—two of his newspapers had expended resources on the same feature story in Afghanistan, hardly a smart investment. So as Zell toured around his newspapers in the coming weeks, he would complain about Afghan Star. And by inference, me.
But I wouldn’t know about the fallout for months. Oblivious and trapped in a hotel room with a man who felt neglected, I wrote other stories. I tried to spend time with Dave, but I also ate dinners with various sources, a time commitment that annoyed Dave more than my ticket stunt. Then my friend Sean, the British adrenaline junkie, called. I hadn’t seen him since the barbecue the previous summer at the Fun House, where the Afghan Elvis had peddled cocaine smuggled in toothpaste tubes.
“Meet me for dinner,” he said. “I need to talk to you about something. It’s very sensitive.”
I wanted to say yes. I knew I couldn’t.
“I can’t,” I said. “Lunch?”
I didn’t tell Sean I had a man in my hotel room because I didn’t want to mix the two men. Sean would be fine, but Dave would be jealous. Sean invited me to the Gandamack. As soon as the waiter took our order of chicken salads, Sean looked from side to side and leaned in closer.
“So, I have to ask you about something,” he started, vaguely.
“Yes?”
“I have an opportunity. An invitation to go meet someone. Someone important. But it could be difficult. I’m wondering if you think I should go.”
“Tango?” I said. By now, I slipped easily into his conspiracy lingo.
“Not Tango. Someone senior. I can’t tell you.”
“Hekmatyar?” I said, naming the renegade leader of Hezb-i-Islami, the militant group in the east.
“No. Let me finish. I have been invited to meet a senior commander who’s very important. But the meeting would be over the border, in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What do you think?”
I didn’t have to think long. “I think you’re a fucking idiot and you’re going to get kidnapped.”
“They promised me security,” Sean said.
“I think you’re a fucking idiot and you’re going to get kidnapped,” I repeated.
“Keep your voice down,” he said. “You know, I’m a little worried. I was supposed to meet the contact a few days ago, but Sami didn’t have everything together and it felt weird, so we canceled. And our contact said, ‘No problem, we can reschedule.’ That seemed strange. Normally you have to push and push to get these guys to talk to you.”
I sighed. Sean knew everything I was telling him. His translator, Sami, knew everything. They knew this was a bad idea, but Sean still wanted his fix.
“Tango in Pakistan is not like Tango in Afghanistan,” I said, knowing that Sean knew this. “The ISI’s involved. You can’t just walk into the tribal areas without them knowing. You’re probably in more danger from the ISI than from the militants.”
The Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Pakistan’s conflicted top spy agency, was known for some members supporting insurgents.
“Who are you seeing?” I asked again.
“Someone important.”
“Haqqani?” I asked.
Militant commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, an old Pakistani pal of the CIA and ISI, had helped fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and supported the Taliban while they were in power. Three main groups based in Pakistan now fought against foreign troops and the Afghan government, even though the groups were usually just lumped together and called the Taliban. One group was Mullah Omar’s Taliban, suspected to be based in the Pakistan city of Quetta, in western Baluchistan Province. Another was Hezb-i-Islami. The third group was the one formed by Haqqani in the North Waziristan tribal agency and now run mostly by his son Sirajuddin. Haqqani’s group was generally regarded as the most ruthless, sophisticated, and evil of all the militant factions, responsible for a spectacular attack two months earlier at the Serena Hotel in Kabul.
Sean smiled slightly. “I can’t say. Maybe.”
“You’re a fucking idiot and you’re going to get kidnapped. Why would you go meet him? Nobody in the West even knows who he is. He’s not worth it.”
“I can’t say exactly what I’m doing.”
I shook my head and looked at him. I knew what he would decide.
“When would you be back?”
“Easter. I told my boys I would be back home in time for Easter.”
“I still think it’s a bad idea,” I said. “But knowing you, everything will work out great.”
Sean laughed. “I’ll let you know. But keep it quiet. I don’t want anyone else to know about it.”
So I left Sean and the Gandamack, and a few days later, I left Afghanistan. Sean also asked several mutual friends their opinions of his planned trip—as with everything else, Sean couldn’t keep his mouth shut. But I would only find this out later because Sean had told them, like me, to stay quiet. We all stayed quiet, until we couldn’t anymore. Only then would I learn that everyone told Sean the same thing: that the trip was too risky, and that he was acting like an idiot.