Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (The Taliban Shuffle MTI)

by Kim Barker

  When I met Jeremy at the end of the day, I heard the news that three bombs had gone off in Delhi, at markets where I had shopped, killing more than sixty people. I was seriously out of position. I called my bosses and told them I was already in Afghanistan. I felt guilty for putting my personal life ahead of work, even slightly. It affected our night—I was distracted by bomb blasts a country away.

  I left for Kabul the next day, saying an awkward goodbye.

  “Thanks for coming to visit,” he said.

  “Well, my bosses wanted a story, so it worked out,” I replied. Even then, it was difficult to be honest.

  We saw each other a week later, as he passed through Kabul on his way out of the country for vacation, for lunch at the Flower Street Café, a sandwich shop that was relatively private. We held hands beneath the table and kissed goodbye quickly in the path leading toward the front gate, pulling away when an Afghan waiter walked past. Neither one of us necessarily wanted anyone else to know that we were attempting to date. Kind of. We spoke in staccato sentences with abrupt punctuation, not wanting to reveal too much, or ask for too much.

  “It’s been really nice getting to know you,” I said.

  “Well. You know. I don’t want anything serious. I mean—I’m not—you don’t think—”

  “Of course!” I interrupted. “You know. I just. Well, I don’t want anything serious. Obviously. But it’s nice, you know.”

  “Well—yeah. I like hanging out. We’ll see what happens.”

  “Totally. Have a great vacation.”

  Seventh grade. Kabul was a fishbowl and not conducive to actual dating, even though the foreign women were vastly outnumbered by the foreign men. Our attractiveness rate skyrocketed accordingly. A ten in Kabul became a five as soon as she walked off the plane in Dubai. We were Kabul Cute, we were Mission Pretty. But still, the men here rarely asked the women out on actual dates—in that, Jeremy was an anomaly. Most of the attempts at mating involved bad tongue action and groping near or inside the bathrooms at L’Atmosphère.

  We were a function of our environment. For many, life was a pressure cooker, going from home to office to restaurant, rarely being outside, and the only release was liquor, was parties, was dancing to the same soundtrack, week after week—“Hips Don’t Lie,” “Crazy in Love,” “Don’t Cha,” and “Let’s Get Retarded.” (In my nightmares, I can still hear that song list, over and over.) By this point, the social scene resembled a cross between a fraternity party and the Hotel California, where the same characters always seemed to stay too long and drink too much, where entertainment occasionally consisted of spelling words on legs with Nair hair-removal cream. The best pool table—or the only one—was at a brothel called Escalades. The disco Coco Cabana had opened a few months earlier but had rapidly turned into a seedy joint featuring alcohol-fueled grope-fests. The Elbow Room resembled a homey ski lodge, featuring a bar and a fireplace; Thai and Italian restaurants promised bad lighting and chilled red wine. A few thousand foreigners lived in Kabul, and even though many of them never went out at night, enough did to justify a dozen thriving businesses. The expatriate scene of Kabul even had its own magazine—Afghan Scene—that included articles and pictures of people at various parties, in various states of inebriation. (To be fair, money from magazine sales helped street kids.)

  At this point, prostitutes seemed more in danger of taking over Kabul than the Taliban. Brothels came and went—the Lighthouse, the Tree House, Escalades, the Disco Restaurant, Bobo’s, Ching Ching (a so-called Chinese “restaurant” that advertised something called “mosic”). These brothels, mostly staffed with women from China or one of the former Soviet republics, had blossomed in Kabul like poppy farms after the Taliban’s fall, even though they were theoretically illegal and catered mainly to the security and contractor communities. Enforcement was spotty. A quixotic Afghan lawyer in a cape would raid one brothel. The poor women would then be bundled up and shipped back to their native country, only to be replaced by another brothel in another two-story house with new Chinese women who barely spoke English and did not speak the local languages at all. In some ways, these women in thigh-high boots and fishnet stockings were much like the Taliban-led militants—a flexible cast of characters who would be somehow eliminated and then replaced by others. A ready supply of bodies always existed for war and sex.

  Often, the reality of Afghanistan interrupted the fun. A security guy shot up a bar; an attention-seeking journalist tossed a stun grenade at a party, blowing out all the windows. A consultant company threw a dance and trampoline party with camels and actual Afghan nomads—a measure of authenticity, I guess, that had become legendary with Afghan nomads, who spread rumors across the region of a foreigner trampoline orgy. A rooftop party at the Mustafa Hotel the year before had been interrupted by three rockets overhead, but only slightly, as the revelers, one in a pink feather boa, waved their hands in the air and started to cheer. A toga party two months earlier was cut short by a power outage and generator failure. At that party, most people dressed in white sheets, looking regal and even arranging leaves in their hair. Mindful of how it would look to be killed at a toga party in Kabul, I had opted for compromise—I went, but wore jeans and a pink Puma T-shirt, the Afghan equivalent of wearing clean underwear in case you’re run over by a bus. My friend, who worked for Human Rights Watch, had declined his invitation. “Human Rights Watch does not do toga parties in Kabul,” he said, and he had a point.

  The brothels and over-the-top parties were only a symptom of the absurdity that this war had turned into by the fall of 2005. Foreign aid levels were at record lows compared to the money given per capita to the relatively advanced countries of Bosnia and East Timor, but still, billions of new dollars had poured in, which should have accomplished something significant. Yet no one seemed to be coordinating which money went where. There was duplication, repetition. The capital still had little electrical power, maybe a few hours a day, and many roads that were more pothole than pavement. The country still had relatively few international troops, and of those, some, like the Germans, weren’t allowed to patrol after dark. (During the day, they traveled around with an ambulance.) The Afghan government seemed about as effective as a student council, and no one in the international community seemed to pay much attention to what was happening across the border in Pakistan.

  But newly single and tempted by the excitement, I jumped into the abyss, throwing myself into going out at night, eagerly enrolling in Kabul High. One night, as I sat with security guys at the Gandamack, a new friend called, insisting on dragging me out. The car was full—I hopped in the back, the only woman with four men who seemed like longtime pals because we spoke the same language and that alone bred a sense of familiarity in a country as foreign as Afghanistan. A media consultant, a former U.S. Marine, a carpet expert, a married guy I didn’t really know, and me. We drove around, looking for the telltale neon sign, which meant only one thing in Kabul: a brothel. Finally a tiny two-story house had one, a rainbow of neon lights spelling out THE DELICIOUS BARBECUE in cursive neon script. When we knocked on the door, I almost hoped that the women would not answer.

  “Wake up, whores!” announced the former marine, who liked to live up to his reputation for being an obnoxious jerk, as he pounded on the screen door.

  Eventually the lights inside The Delicious Barbecue flickered on. Three sleepy Chinese women opened the door, and we walked into the narrow two-story building. The furniture in the front room was minimal, a few plastic chairs, a small wooden bar, all bathed in fluorescent lights that flattered no one. Everything here was hard: the concrete floors and walls, the women, even us. I brushed away the hand of a woman who evidently thought I looked like a better deal for the night than my friends. I smiled through my rejection. She shrugged.

  We were here to sing. The women started setting up the karaoke machine and handed us some Heinekens, the beer that had somehow cornered the black market in Afghanistan. And then my social life, as usual, was inte
rrupted by a work call.

  It was the Taliban. They always called at the worst times.

  I tried to postpone the translation with Farouq, but it was no use. He kept talking over me like the steamroller he was, flattening my useless protests and insistence that I did not have a notebook. No matter, Farouq plowed on. I put down my Heineken and stepped outside into the cool evening.

  Earlier that day, Taliban leader Mullah Omar, the famously elusive one-eyed cleric who seemed about as likely to be photographed as cold fusion and was often described as “shy” with foreigners, had allegedly authorized an e-mail statement, urging his followers not to end their armed struggle. Farouq had finally reached the Taliban spokesman. I wanted to know whether the alleged Mullah Omar statement was legitimate and whether he was now surfing the Internet. Quickly, so I could go back inside. But Farouq never did anything quickly or halfheartedly.

  “Give me the summary,” I said. “Please.”

  Farouq, unforgivingly thorough and professional, was growing tired of me going out late at night and sleeping in late in the morning. He worried about my new adolescence. He most likely resented that he had to work, when he’d rather be with his family, and when I was out behaving like a teenager. By now, Farouq and his wife had a daughter, and his wife was pregnant with a second child. And by now, he had stopped talking about going to America to study medicine.

  “No. Kim, it’s Eid tomorrow, and I don’t want you calling me and asking me for the translation because I will be with my family, so if it’s possible, can I just tell you what he said now?”

  Eid al-Fitr was one of the most important Islamic holidays of the year, when Muslims gathered to celebrate the end of the holy month of Ramadan. For the past month, Farouq had not smoked, eaten, or drank during daylight hours, which meant he was crabby. He was hardly alone. Work hours at Afghan offices were typically cut to about 8 AM to 1 PM during Ramadan. It was impossible to accomplish anything. Suddenly realizing I should be grateful that Farouq had actually managed this interview on the last day of the fast—and suddenly realizing how inappropriate it was to be at a brothel on such a holiday—I agreed to spend some more time in the cold.

  I sat down on the concrete steps leading into the yard. I pulled a pen out of my purse and three crumpled pieces of paper and scribbled notes on the interview. The claim of the Taliban spokesman: The e-mail was real.

  So what, I thought. The fact that Mullah Omar was even making such a statement on the eve of the three-day holiday meant that the armed struggle was in trouble. By this point, November 2005, the Taliban seemed to be irrelevant in much of the country, a largely contained force, maybe two to three thousand men at best, mostly along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Sure, roadside bombs occasionally exploded, like the one that had hit Crowley. But they were rare. Any comeback threat was just Taliban propaganda, an attempt to grab some media airtime in a war room where Iraq had sucked up all the oxygen.

  From inside The Delicious Barbecue, the singing began. The media consultant belted out “Rhinestone Cowboy,” which caused the yard outside to come to life. The scraggly mutt, chained to the tree, pulled at his collar, jangling the chain. And the two pink-faced rhesus monkeys in the tiny cage, which for some reason I only then noticed despite their peculiar monkey smell, started to mate. Loudly. One monkey kept repeating the letter “e”—strangely, in time to the music.

  Keeping up my charade of going to sleep would be difficult.

  “Farouq. Farouq.” He kept talking.

  “I have to go.” He kept talking.

  I told him there were monkeys having sex to “Rhinestone Cowboy,” and I just couldn’t talk about the Taliban anymore.

  That got him to stop translating. “Monkeys having sex?” he said, pausing before reconsidering his question. “Where are you?”

  “In the garden.”

  That satisfied him. After hanging up, I walked back inside.

  “I signed you up for ‘Like a Virgin,’ ” the former marine said.

  “Funny.”

  My only previous attempts at karaoke had involved songs by the Violent Femmes and Guns N’ Roses—songs, in other words, where being able to carry a melody did not matter. But what the hell, I figured. Here I was, newly single and newly thirty-five, dressed in baggy jeans, a gray Arkansas T-shirt, and an orange hooded sweatshirt. More important, here I was in Afghanistan, where nothing really mattered, where any sense of self-consciousness had been stripped away.

  “Like a virgin,” I sang. “Touched for the very first time.”

  For three hours, the Chinese women sat in the plastic chairs against the wall, a jury of blank faces and folded arms that watched us sing, torturing such classics as Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and Boney M.’s “Daddy Cool.” A random Western man occasionally showed up, stepped inside, and went upstairs draped with the woman of his choice. She would return and slump back into her chair after thirty minutes or so. Bored. At one point, several Heinekens into the evening, we pulled the women out of their chairs and tried to make them dance with us. Finally, we got a reaction. They started laughing. After 1 AM, we left to pick up kebabs, the Afghan equivalent of IHOP, before I kissed one of my new friends good night and fell face-first into bed. I was no longer just observing the bad behavior of the foreign community. Within weeks of my breakup, I had fully signed on.

  CHAPTER 8

  MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

  Many Afghans were not happy with the direction the country was heading, especially conservatives. And in the middle of this disgust, Abdul Jabar Sabit, a windmill-slaying Afghan lawyer, saw an opportunity. As legal adviser for the Interior Ministry, his job description was somewhat vague, so he decided to declare war on alcohol and brothels, to stem the tide of foreign excess. He had launched a one-man anti-vice mission, a pared-down version of the Taliban’s Vice and Virtue Ministry, that notorious charm offensive responsible for enforcing the regime’s straitjacket-like morality rules. And in so doing, Sabit had seized on the mood of many Afghans, who felt that the Westerners were just too much—too free with their booze, too loose with their morals, and too influential over young Afghans.

  Even though alcohol was illegal, the Afghan government had permitted a two-tiered society—one for Afghans, and one for Westerners. Foreigners could buy booze at two major stores that required passports at the door. Restaurants could serve alcohol to foreigners but not to Afghans, which meant most restaurants that served alcohol did not allow Afghans. The contradiction fueled resentment from everyone. Many Afghans viewed alcohol as more pernicious, more Western and un-Islamic, than opium or hashish. More liberal Afghans figured they should be allowed to drink alcohol inside the restaurants, which were, after all, in their country. Every time Sabit announced another booze battle, Farouq would shake his head.

  “The price of raisins is going to go up,” he would say. Raisin wine was a concoction made popular during Taliban rule, along with antiseptic and Coca-Cola.

  I had first met Sabit in the spring of 2005, in the office of the Interior Ministry spokesman. He had left Afghanistan during the late 1970s and landed first in Pakistan, then the United States, where he worked for Voice of America before moving to Canada. He had joined Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s fundamentalist Islamic party, Hezb-i-Islami, back when Hekmatyar was on our side against the Soviets and before he had turned into a renegade. After the Taliban fell, Sabit, a lawyer by training, had come back to Afghanistan, part of the flood of returning Afghans who claimed they wanted to help rebuild their country. He was an ally of Karzai’s—kind of—although he complained all the time about Karzai. Then again, Sabit complained about a lot. He was a human volcano, constantly threatening to explode.

  Sabit, who was in his sixties, was a bizarre combination, sporting the long white beard of an Islamic fundamentalist and the bespoke gray suit of an English gentleman. He was an ethnic Pashtun, and he looked it, with wild white hair, bright hazel eyes, and exaggerated features—big ears, big fingers. He re
minded me of a skinny yet somehow menacing Santa Claus. Sabit had asked where I lived, and after I told him how often I traveled, he grunted. He quoted a Pashtun proverb about never being friends with a traveler. But that didn’t stop him from trying. At our first meeting, he invited me to his house to meet his wife, a raven-haired woman about my age. Although she was fluent in at least three languages, including English, and had been working on a doctorate degree in Canada, she was not allowed to work. For appearance’s sake. Whenever she went out in public, she wore a black abaya that covered everything but her eyes.

  During that first dinner, Sabit had agreed to take me along on a raid of bars and brothels on the coming Friday night. But when Friday rolled around, I had forgotten about our date, and by the time his driver called, I had already downed a glass of red wine. Regardless, I jumped in the backseat of Sabit’s SUV, filled with his flunkies. We then picked up Sabit, who on this night wore a long cape-like green coat with purple stripes, similar to the coat favored by Karzai. We went from brothel to bar to restaurant. Everywhere, Sabit was the customer no one wanted. As soon as he knocked on a gate, whoever answered shouted out warnings. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer and pushed his way inside, flanked by his minions—and me, of course.

  At one dark brothel with bordello-red walls, a Chinese woman had dressed in a fur jacket, fishnet stockings, a white miniskirt, and white boots—a bit of overkill, given the all-encompassing burqas that many Afghan women still wore.

  “Look at that,” Sabit muttered. The only customer was a Western man, sitting by himself.