by Kim Barker
The week before the election, I bluffed my way into a Karzai campaign event, even though I was no longer on the media list. The reclusive Karzai had made only a few campaign appearances with handpicked audiences. I rode with a friend to Kabul University, where we walked up a dusty road to a dusty parking lot. The security guards made us drop our bags for the dogs to sniff. The male journalists were lined up as if facing a firing squad. The women, meanwhile, were marched up the road to a spot behind a white plywood guard box blocked off by green tarps. One by one, each female journalist was taken behind the tarps. Soon it was my turn. I assumed the position, held out my arms, and held in my breath. I looked at the ground, covered in weeds, memorizing the empty milk boxes and candy wrappers. After the usual deep-tissue massage, the guard pulled up the front of my shirt, yanked my belt and pants out from my waist, and looked down. That was a new move in the guard repertoire.
I walked back to my bag. Money spilled out of the open zippers. “No problem,” an Afghan soldier said, grinning. Going to see Hamid Karzai always cost something, most often my dignity.
After security clearance and another bag search, we were shuttled inside the large tent with about a thousand women, all teachers let out of school and forced to come see Karzai speak, more proof of how government employees were confused as to whether they would keep their jobs if someone besides Karzai won. The tent magnified the heat somewhat like a sauna, and the women dripped sweat and fanned themselves, including one woman who looked like she was trying to take flight with a Hello Kitty fan. Large posters of Karzai hung behind the podium, along with a banner proclaiming OUR WAY IS THE WAY OF PEACE. Afghan anthems played over tinny loudspeakers, with lyrics such as “We’re really happy to stay in Afghanistan.”
“How is Dr. Farouq?” an Afghan friend asked me.
“I think he left the country,” I said.
I had heard that Farouq might still be in Afghanistan, or maybe he had left for graduate school, but I had not heard from him in months. Plans of dinner at his house, of getting together, had never materialized. Our friendship had just gone silent. My fault as much as his.
Helicopters rumbled in the distance. I asked if Karzai was coming by helicopter, which would be further evidence of bad security and Karzai’s isolation.
“What do you want?” his campaign spokesman said. “He’s not coming here by helicopter. He’s driving. Come on.”
Ten minutes later, the sound of helicopters grew louder.
“So is he coming by helicopter?” I asked.
“No, he’s coming by road,” the spokesman said.
“But those are helicopters.”
“What do you want, they’re just patrolling.”
The helicopters landed. Karzai strode into the building, waving, shaking hands with the women. He was polished as always—wearing his peaked hat made from the hair of a slain newborn goat, a gray suit jacket over his pressed cream-colored traditional long shirt and pants. He pumped his hands in the air, put his hand over his heart. Women gave speeches, praising Karzai for naming a lone female governor, for letting them work in the ministries.
Karzai spoke for more than half an hour, acknowledging that some people felt he had not done enough in his first term.
“I saw a lot of improvements on my way from the presidential palace to here, beautiful houses and big buildings,” said Karzai, neglecting to mention that many were built by profits from the drug trade and corruption. “If I win the election again, I will ask the Taliban to work hand in hand with their Afghan brothers, so they can help each other to make a peaceful and secure Afghanistan in the future.”
Oh, great. Them again. Now, after making deals to win the support of the country’s most powerful warlords, Karzai wanted to make a deal with the Taliban, who clearly would balk at women being teachers, let alone governors. Regardless, as Karzai finished his speech, the women rushed toward him, handing him pieces of paper, favors they wanted, or shaking his hand and crying. He called me “ma’am,” pushed his way toward the door, and as he did so, a loudspeaker burst into flames, creating a hysterical logjam of headscarves and burqas. Caught in the middle, I shoved the tiny Afghan women to the side like Godzilla, but still, one rammed into my right knee. I limped outside and watched Karzai run toward one of the helicopters and climb inside, to fly the lonely three and a half miles back to the presidential palace.
The signs were growing that it was time to pull out—for me, at least. I went to the Nova beauty salon, where an Afghan beautician sliced open the bottom of my foot with a razor before plucking more than half my eyebrows, leaving me looking permanently frightened, a line of tiny scabs above my right eye. (The eyebrow, sadly, would never grow back quite right.) I opened the refrigerator at the house and found a tenement-sized rat, nonchalantly sitting on the middle shelf and gnawing chorizo. I suffered two bouts of food poisoning in three weeks. I ran into my ex-boyfriend Dave, who got mad when I wouldn’t look at his photographs of his various embeds. I attended my new driver’s brother’s wedding, where an Afghan woman wearing hair extensions, heavy makeup, $70,000 worth of gold, and an occasionally see-through dress featuring tiger and leopard prints looked at me disapprovingly and offered to get me a new hairdo. A friend’s fixer sneaked into our house to steal a Heineken.
The security company Edinburgh International put out an extremely helpful warning of a possible suicide bomber to its clients. “He is described as having a long beard and is wearing a white or green head covering (turban). Potential targets are not known.” I spotted an Afghan bus with a red sticker of a buxom longhaired naked woman lounging in a martini glass. Finally, Abdul Rashid Dostum, the chest-thumping, King Kong–channeling warlord who had gone to Turkey after winning his confrontation with my onetime shooting buddy and Afghan grandpa Abdul Jabar Sabit, returned from Turkey to endorse Karzai, the fifth horseman of the warlord apocalypse.
The explosions started.
On the Saturday before the August 20 election, I woke up about 4 AM, sick with food poisoning. The bomb shook the house a few hours later. We had been expecting a spectacular attack for months, and a photographer friend, Paula, and I rushed to the scene, right in front of NATO headquarters, right where the Afghan kids sold gum and bracelets, just down the road from the U.S. embassy. This attack was particularly audacious, designed to show that the Taliban could strike anywhere. Seven people died. At least ninety were injured. We stood behind a barrier of red-and-white tape, and all we could see were emergency vehicles, tree limbs and leaves on the ground, a car with its windows blown out and its lights on. An Afghan man in a peach button-up shirt and tan pants wandered around aimlessly, covered in blood. The journalists were all there, mostly young freelancers, hungry, new to Afghanistan, here for the election, for the excitement, talking about who got there first, who snapped the car still on fire, who saw the bodies. They were eager, like I had once been. One demanded that Peach Button-up Shirt answer his questions for the TV camera in English, please. I stood back from the tape. I felt almost done. I didn’t need to see any more bodies, didn’t want to stick my hand in any more human flesh, didn’t want to scrub any more people off the bottom of my shoes.
But I still wanted to see the election, a different kind of tragedy. On Election Day, Paula and I drove to various polling stations. Most were quiet, although I could hardly blame Afghans. Why risk voting when no candidate seemed particularly inspiring, when Karzai’s victory seemed assured? Compared to the first presidential election five years earlier, when people had lined up for hours for the privilege of voting, this day was just depressing. At one point, we hurried to a report of a shoot-out. The cops had shot one alleged terrorist—another may have escaped. We walked past the pickup truck with the terrorist’s body slung in the back like a side of beef and over to the crumbling building where police still searched for evidence. More and more kids and young men surrounded us, more and more journalists showed up, until finally, I decided I’d feel safer in the car. Soon after, I heard shouting and
looked up—Paula was sprinting toward the car, flanked by four other huffing photographers. A gaggle of police ran behind them. I popped the back door open—photographers and cameras dove inside. Then we locked the doors. The police surrounded us, brandishing their guns. Apparently they had been told to seize all the cameras of the photographers and maybe the photographers themselves—the Afghan government had earlier banned publicity of Election Day attacks in another dramatic victory for freedom of speech here.
“They’re going to kill us!” one photographer shouted.
“Drive, just drive!” another screamed.
They were new. I felt strangely calm. I knew Afghanistan’s finest would never shoot. If they did, they’d never hit us. Paula, who had jumped in the passenger side of the car, stretched her foot across to the driver’s side and punched the gas. Once the car hopped forward, the police scattered. We roared down the road.
That was enough excitement for my day. Within minutes of the polls closing, Karzai’s people claimed victory. It was soon clear why. The fraud had been epic, the kind of fraud that would make dead voters in Chicago sit up and applaud. Ultimately as many as one in three votes would be deemed suspect. Karzai’s supporters would bear the most of the blame.
The fallout would smother and choke everything anyone was trying to do here. Karzai would eventually be declared the winner. But if this election was seen as crucial, then it was a crucial failure. Over the following weeks, the UN mission here would fracture. The Obama administration would waver on whether to send more troops to back a corrupt Karzai government and quibble over how best to solve the Afghan morass and nibble at the edges of the more critical threat, Pakistan. Obama’s base would split over his eventual decision to send more troops and support, at least for a little while. There would be more talk of a truce with the Taliban, of a political solution, and more demand for building a functioning government. Then more violence, more spectacular attacks, more demands for Karzai to shape up or else. Or else what? We had no stick. Our carrots were limp after almost eight years of waggling around.
I could see the stories that stretched for years into the future, much like the ones that stretched back years into the past. More bombs, more sudden death, more adrenaline. Never had I felt as alive as in Pakistan and Afghanistan, so close to chaos, so constantly reminded of how precious, temporary, and fragile life was. I had certainly grown here. I knew how to find money in a war zone, how to flatter a warlord, how to cover a suicide bombing, how to jump-start a car using a cord and a metal ladder, how to do the Taliban shuffle between conflict zones. I knew how to be alone. I knew I did not need a man, unless that man was my fixer. But also, I knew I had turned into this almost drowning caricature of a war hack, working, swearing, and drinking my way through life and relationships. My brother now described me as 100 Percent Id, an epitaph I didn’t want. Maybe having these four months of unemployment in Kabul helped me figure it out.
After the running, the bombs, the death, the downward spiral, I had a choice—I could choose life, or I could choose to keep hopping from one tragedy to the next. Like any junkie, I needed to quit. I decided to go home, knowing full well that this decision was a lot tougher than staying in the warm bath of Kabul. I decided to get out while I could, to graduate from Kabul High. At this point, at least, the party was over. The disastrous election of Karzai was last call. The foreign community’s clumsy efforts to save this region so late in the day were like trying to recover from the Afghan rapper DJ Besho deciding to do an impromptu rap show at a Halloween party at 2:30 AM. There was no recovery from that, only the likelihood of some Afghan in his entourage stealing a cell phone on the way out the door.
Tom, my fellow journalist and former housemate at the Fun House, also decided to leave. We planned a going-away party, our last Thursday night throwdown before checking out of the Hotel California. That afternoon, a friend and I drove over to Tom’s house to drop off a dozen cases of illegal and therefore expensive wine and beer. As we unloaded, Tom’s phone rang.
“Oh, hey Farouq,” he said.
I looked at Tom.
“Yes, please come,” Tom said. “Yes, yes, it’s for her as well.”
“Is that my Farouq?” I asked.
Tom nodded. He hung up.
“Why hasn’t he called me?” I said. “Is he mad at me?”
Kabul High. Then my phone started ringing. Farouq.
“Hey you!” I said, extremely enthusiastically.
“How are you?” he asked.
I had figured that he had already left Afghanistan on his scholarship. He had figured that I was upset with him, or that I had fled the country when my job did. But after everything we had been through together, any hurt over money, over macho aggression, over perceived anti-Afghan slights simply fell away.
“You’re coming tonight, right?” I said.
“Of course.”
This was an old-school party, circa 2006. Tom and I decided against having a guest list. We invited our Afghan friends. The garden filled up quickly—predictably, about one-third of the people stumbling around knew neither Tom nor me, various random foreigners who heard about the party from the rumor mill at L’Atmosphère. But Farouq and my Afghan journalist friends showed up, along with various Afghan officials. And I ended up spending most of the party hanging out with the man who had really mattered here more than any other: Farouq. We danced in an oddly shaped hallway, filled with mostly women, a few straight men, a few gay men, and a few tactile British security contractors who were apparently on Ecstasy. Farouq used a scarf as a dancing implement, pulling it behind his neck, pumping his hands in the air. For hours we danced, that is, until Farouq jumped toward me suddenly. His dancing implement had attracted attention.
“Kim!” he whispered. “I think that man is a gay.” He nodded toward an American guy.
“Yep,” I said, slipping into Farouq lingo. “He is a gay.”
We danced a little more. Farouq, the macho Pashtun, then leaned forward again.
“Kim!” he whispered sharply. “The gay just pinched me.”
“OK, let’s get you out of here.”
I walked him outside, and soon he left for home. We always covered each other’s backs. Within weeks, Farouq would be on a plane out of Kabul.
Over the next four days, I said my goodbyes, the painful ones, the easy ones, the ones I had put off for years. I visited my embittered Afghan grandpa, Sabit, the country’s former attorney general and failed presidential candidate, who sat in his almost empty seven-bedroom eyesore, complaining about the election.
“There was so much fraud, so much fraud,” he said, after berating me for disappearing for years. “I tell you, if this was a fair election, I would have won. I was the most popular candidate, everywhere I went, crowds of people, thousands of them, would come on the streets.”
Oh, Sabit, who still had no idea how his popularity had plummeted, who lived in his own Sabit universe. Officially, he won only 5,791 votes, placing nineteenth. Before I left, he asked me whether I knew any foreigners who would rent his house for $5,000 a month.
I packed up my belongings and got ready to fly home. The day I planned to execute my exit strategy, my phone rang. And the caller was the other eccentric older man who had dominated my time, from the other side of the border. Nawaz Sharif. His timing was always impeccable.
“Is this Kim?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, shoving Afghan tourism guides from the 1970s into a suitcase. I was hesitant, unsure of what he wanted.
“So. It’s been a long time,” he said, awkwardly. “What are your plans to come to Pakistan?”
“Actually, I’m moving back to the U.S. New York, in fact. I’m leaving in a few hours.”
“Oh, congratulations. I will have to come see you when I’m in New York,” he said.
“That would be great,” I replied.
“We’re still friends, right?” he asked, tentatively.
“Always,” I said.
“We’
ll stay friends, right?” he said.
“Sure.”
We said goodbye. I had about the same level of intention of being friends with Nawaz Sharif as I did with Sam Zell. But I figured I could just end our relationship through the inevitable ennui of distance and time, and through the likelihood that he would never get his hands on my U.S. number. (He was more resourceful than I thought.)
I soon finished packing. Then I looked around my bedroom, grabbed my backpack and two large suitcases, shut off the lights, and walked away, closing the door behind me. In the corner, I left a gray plastic trunk crammed with the things I needed only in Afghanistan. My long-sleeved, pajama-like shirts. A dozen scarves given to me over the years. Packets of wet wipes and a camouflage water bottle for embeds. Maps of Ghazni and Helmand, random electrical cords, and even the T-shirt proclaiming TURKIYE. A sleeping bag. Books on Pashtun tribes and the Taliban. Unused notebooks and ballpoint pens proclaiming AFGHAN PEN on their sides, as if that were some mark of pride and quality, as if Afghanistan were known for its ballpoint pens. I left all of it behind, waiting for me, gathering dust almost as soon as I shut the lid, in a house filled with similar boxes in different rooms, forgotten by people like me, foreigners unwilling to fully commit to leaving Afghanistan but unable to figure out how to stay.
EPILOGUE
TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT
In December 2009, President Obama decided to send thirty thousand more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. At the same time, he announced that he would start pulling those troops out by July 2011. In other words, the West continued to send mixed signals to Afghanistan and Pakistan: We love you, we love you not. America’s ambivalence was likely because of its amorphous goal—with Al-Qaeda long on the run from Afghanistan and now being picked off by drones in Pakistan, the new focus was on creating some kind of perception of success in the region as quickly as possible so that the U.S. could leave. The strategy seemed to be this: Overwhelm the enemy with superior military force, train some Afghan mopes as police and army, make a political deal with members of the Taliban (who would for some unknown reason make a deal despite the fact that they seemed to be holding all the cards), call it stability, and get the heck out.