The Taliban Shuffle

by Kim Barker

  I stood with Farouq, Nasir, and the photographer inside the narrow room where Shayesta Khan once slept, with two lone black-and-white pictures hanging on the wall—one of him and his wife decades earlier, another of his former boss, a military hospital official from the Communist regime. His prized Holy Quran was wrapped in cloth, near the corner where he had often prayed. The room looked scorched, like someone had somehow set fire to the two metal trunks in the opposite corner. Bullet holes punctuated the wall just above Khan’s bed.

  Farouq looked at the burn marks in the room. He was quiet, which meant he was upset. When he talked loudly or gruffly, that meant he was fine. I had messed that up in the past. “He was an old man,” Farouq said. “He was completely innocent. How could this happen?”

  Nasir looked at me, as if I had any answer. He always did that, even though he rarely understood me, and he usually just started laughing at anything I said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Scared soldiers, the middle of the night, sudden movement. Someone fired. Messed up.”

  “But how could the Americans mess up like this?” Farouq replied. “They have the technology to see who they are shooting. He was an old man. Someone should go to prison.”

  The U.S.-led coalition spokesman described Khan’s death to me as “an unfortunate incident” but insisted that the soldiers violated no rules. The press release also said soldiers captured three insurgents suspected of being involved with roadside bombs.

  And that was it. The military never put out another statement, one that said that all three supposed insurgents were released within days. Or one that said no bomb-making equipment was actually found in the compound. Instead, the soldiers found one “Jihad Against America” pamphlet, one Kalashnikov assault rifle, a 9-mm handgun, and ammunition. It was actually not a significant haul for a compound of sixty people—in fact, such a weapons supply in a country like Afghanistan, where every man was allowed to keep a gun, was the equivalent of bringing a slingshot to a mortar fight.

  Khan’s death was a kind of breaking point. At a meeting with President Bush, Karzai asked for more coordination between Afghan and U.S. forces on raids. The Afghan defense ministry publicly criticized the U.S. military for the very first time. A wedge had started to form between the Afghan people and the international forces. The implications were obvious, though no one but Afghans seemed to notice them. The Pashtun code was based on honor, hospitality, respect, and, most important, revenge. An entire clan was obligated to take revenge for wrongs. This was eye-for-an-eye justice, or more accurately, a hundred eyes for an eye, which was why tribal disputes tended to last for generations. The Pashtuns had a proverb about a man taking revenge one hundred years after a slight to his ancestor, and fretting that he had acted in haste. Shooting an old Pashtun man in his home, even by mistake, violated a Pashtun’s core beliefs. Revenge was compulsory; not taking revenge would brand Khan’s male relatives as cowards. Every perceived injustice in the Pashtun code could conceivably create ten more militants. Even if God willed a death, God also willed a fitting revenge. That was the way of this world. Predictably, we would later learn that one of Shayesta Khan’s sons ended up in Guantánamo.

  We spent three days in Khost before starting the long drive back to Kabul. About halfway up the bumpy mountain pass, on a road that still had not been paved, our SUV started to strain, utter strange noises, and then, horribly, grind to a stop. There we were, more than two hours outside of Khost, stranded halfway up a mountain. Afghanistan had no AAA. This pass had no phone reception.

  “This is not good,” I said.

  “No,” Farouq agreed. “This is a bad area. It’s known as the Bloody.”

  “The Bloody?” I repeated. “It’s a mountain pass known as the Bloody? Seriously?”

  Farouq nodded. “Not because of the Taliban. More because of thieves. Lots of robberies along this pass. It’s easy to hide and stop people. Even kill them. That’s why it’s called the Bloody.”

  I was carrying $3,000 in cash, my computer, various equipment.

  Farouq and Nasir argued. Then they announced their plan: They would pour water into the radiator—a move that had fixed one of our broken-down cars in the past. They would also dump oil in the oil pan. Other vehicles passed us, the men whiplashing when they saw me. I pulled my scarf up to cover my face and shrank into my seat, trying to hide in the middle of the Bloody.

  “Not good, not good,” I told Farouq. “Call the police in Khost.”

  “Kim. Calm down. Relax. I’m handling it.”

  Farouq climbed out of the SUV with the satellite phone, looking for a signal. He reached a police official after calling several friends and asked the police to come help. “Right away,” the official said. Farouq then called Dr. Ali, our friend in Kabul, and asked him to start driving toward Khost to meet us.

  We sat for half an hour. By coincidence, a police truck lumbered up the road. Farouq flagged it down and argued with the police to help us. Their answer—no. They were busy. He tried to call back the police official, who didn’t answer.

  “They want money,” Farouq told us.

  “They have foreigners trapped on a mountain pass called the Bloody, and they want a bribe,” I said, stating the obvious. Afghan AAA, after all. “Perfect. How much?”

  “Fifty,” Farouq said. “And they’ll only tow us to the top of the mountain.”

  “Of course. Fine.”

  I could hardly blame the police—they made only about $60 to $100 a month, not enough to survive without corruption. The month before, one counter-narcotics cop had complained to me: “Our salary is too little. If you give a hundred bucks a month to a donkey, it will not fart.” So we gave the cops $50, and they tied a thick rope between their truck and our front bumper, looping it several times. The police truck strained with us, moving about ten miles an hour up the bumpy roads. Finally, after about ninety minutes, we made it to the top of the pass. The police untied us and waved. We waved back and started coasting down the other slope, fueled only by momentum, sailing around switchbacks and even passing the police truck at one point, Nasir laughing hysterically in the driver’s seat, avoiding tapping the brake. Finally, about half a mile after the road flattened out, we rolled to a stop. Nasir’s brother and Dr. Ali, in a tiny white car, pulled up in the opposite direction fifteen minutes later. Ali rolled down the window.

  “Need a ride?”

  That was logistics in Afghanistan—always figuring out a workaround, or anticipating the unexpected, which we should have expected. Most TV crews, aid agencies, and the UN traveled in convoys. Print journalists could never afford that. We gambled.

  Back at the Kabul Lodge, sitting in front of my computer and writing about the dead elderly Afghan man, I wondered what my army engineer platoon would have thought about his death. Just one of the bad things that inevitably happened in war, I supposed. I often wondered what happened to those soldiers, and to Crowley, the intelligent smart aleck hoping to go back to graduate school.

  I soon found out. Later that summer, the soldiers would tell another reporter that they felt I had betrayed them. After my story ran, Crowley and some of the other soldiers had been moved to a more dangerous base in Sharana, still in Paktika Province but near Kandahar, because of complaining that they had nothing to do in quiet Orgun-E. Crowley had also been busted to kitchen duty, frying up steaks for two weeks.

  So that was my own collateral damage, my own unintended consequences. I was not happy that anyone got in trouble, but I soon forgot about it. Only years later would I find out what had happened to Crowley that August, almost three months after I met the platoon and he got married.

  One evening in Sharana, Crowley was sent out on a last-minute mission. He was the gunner in the front vehicle, looking for land mines, for bags in the road, for suspicious cars, his eyes always scanning. But it was dusk—too dark to see much, too light for night-vision goggles. Then the explosion. His Humvee was blown up; a medic inside died. The other four men were injured.
Crowley lost the lower part of his right leg. His new wife soon left him.

  And that was Afghanistan, a country that lulled people into complacency, where hospitality was continually confused with support. When I finally found out what happened to Crowley, my heart hitting my kidneys during a random Google search, I would track him down, filled with guilt. If I hadn’t written the story, he wouldn’t have been moved. If he hadn’t have been moved, he wouldn’t have been blown up. Amazingly, he was gracious and kind. Luckily, he had remarried. He had also left the army and gone back to school. “I like to think of it as the best thing that ever happened to me,” he told me. “I don’t blame you.” But that would only make me feel worse.

  CHAPTER 6

  MARCH OF THE PIGS

  Crouched on the dirty pavement, the fortune-teller studied my palm, shook his head, and started talking.

  “What’s he saying?” I asked.

  Dr. Ali, working with me because Farouq was busy with family obligations, shot me a look, somewhere between a smirk and sympathy.

  “He says you will have a miserable life. Nothing will ever go right for you. You will always be unhappy. Do you want to hear more?”

  “No,” I said. “I get it.”

  I should have known this would be my fortune at the Kabul Zoo. Bored with all the obvious stories before the parliamentary elections in September 2005, I had made a bold move. I had gone to the zoo, planning to use it as an interesting way to tell the history of modern Afghanistan. My hook was Marjan the lion, donated by Germany in 1978, just as a coup by a Marxist party and Soviet sympathizers in the military sparked rumors of a Soviet invasion. Back then, in the zoo’s heyday, more than seven hundred animals lived there.

  The next year, the Soviets indeed invaded, and Afghanistan became the major chip in the poker game between the Soviets and the West. The CIA, the Saudis, and Pakistani intelligence eventually decided to support the seven major Afghan jihadi parties, sending money and weapons, using Islam as a rallying tool. And by the end of the 1980s, the Soviets left, followed shortly by American pledges of help. The zoo languished.

  An uncertain pall fell over the capital. The pro-Soviet government remained nominally in charge, but soon lost control of the countryside. The jihadi parties pushed toward Kabul, finally capturing the city in 1992. Their fragile warlord coalition held for only a short time. Warlords then took positions outside the city, shelling it while trying to kill and intimidate their rivals’ supporters. The Kabul Zoo was not immune—walls were knocked down or scarred with bullets. The zoo museum and the restaurant were rocketed.

  Fighters from various factions, hungry for meat, soon realized the zoo had a ready supply. They kebabed the crane and the flamingo, roasting them over an open flame as zoo workers watched. They killed the two tigers for their pelts. One day a few fighters wanted to see how many bullets it took to kill an elephant. The answer: forty. Others stole the wooden fences from the zebra enclosure to feed fires. Animals died of starvation, of disease.

  The bedlam inside the zoo mirrored what was happening in the city. Ask Afghans when the worst period of time was in Kabul, and they’ll never mention the Soviets or the Taliban. They’ll talk about this time, the civil war, when chaos and crazy ruled. They’ll talk about the warlords.

  One afternoon at the zoo, a Pashtun fighter inexplicably jumped into the cage of Marjan, who promptly bit off the man’s arm. The man later died. The next day, the man’s brother went to the zoo for revenge. He threw a grenade into the lion cage, which sent shrapnel into Marjan’s muzzle, destroying one eye and almost blinding him in the other. The lion’s face was frozen in an expression somewhere between grief and a Halloween mask, with eyes that appeared to have melted into his nose.

  Even then, the indignities were not over.

  The Taliban, a Pakistan-supported movement of ethnic Pashtun students from Islamic schools called madrassas, had seized control of much of the south. Spreading fear and the sick kind of security that only fear can deliver, the Taliban marched north and east, finally arriving in Kabul in 1996. The warlords fled. Taliban leaders then declared that Afghans must live by their version of Islam. Women could not go outside without a burqa or a male escort. Men had to pray, grow beards, and cut their hair. No music, no TV, no photographs of people, no gambling on bird or dog fights, no flying kites, no fun. With this new if perverted kind of justice, life calmed down inside the zoo, but only slightly and only after the zoo director proved that a zoo did not violate Islam, a task more difficult than it sounds. Even so, bored young Taliban soldiers beat the bear with sticks and threw snowballs and rocks at the other animals.

  Somehow the zoo survived, but just barely. When the Taliban finally fled Kabul in late 2001, after the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-backed invasion, all that remained were a few vultures, owls, wolves, the beaten-down bear, and Marjan, his bones showing through his coat. With his scars and melted face, Marjan became the symbol of all the injuries inflicted on Afghans over decades of war, of all the pain. His picture appeared on the front pages of newspapers worldwide and sparked numerous tributes on the Internet. He was Afghanistan—battered, blind, blurry, but still strong.

  Within two months, he fell down dead. The bear followed soon after.

  Obviously the international community had to do something. So it threw money at the problem, a reaction it would eventually have to all the crises in the country. All told, Americans donated the bulk of $530,000 raised by top international zoo managers. It was supposed to be more than enough to fix the problems at the Kabul Zoo. It was not. Afghanistan was not just a money pit; it was a money tar pit, a country where money stuck to walls and fingers and never to where it was supposed to stick. And the Chinese didn’t exactly help—a phrase that was to be repeated for years to come in almost every sector of government and aid, as China refused to do much in Afghanistan but profit from natural resources such as the country’s copper mine. Against the wishes of every other country, the Chinese government decided that the world’s worst zoo needed more animals. So it donated two lions, two bears, two pigs, two deer, and one wolf. The pigs, which resembled large Iowa farm pigs more than exotic zoo pigs, soon gave birth to five piglets. Afghanistan did not need pigs, considered dirty in Islam. It was another fine example of the unnecessary aid deemed necessary by somebody not in the country.

  By the time I got to the zoo, right before the elections, the Chinese gift had been exposed as the Trojan horse it was. The male Chinese bear had died the year before, after swallowing a plastic bag filled with banana peels and a man’s shoe heel. Four pigs then died from rabies after stray dogs jumped into their pen and bit one. (Luckily the other three pigs were elsewhere at the time. Where? Who knows. They were mysterious pigs.) All the animals had to be vaccinated for rabies. Over the summer, the second Chinese bear broke out of her cage, walked down a zoo path, and hopped into the pigpen, which had a low wall apparently notorious among the animals. Two pigs were there—the other, somewhere else. The bear squeezed both pigs to death. Typically, the Afghans wanted to ascribe some sort of romance to the bear’s actions. They loved stories of star-crossed lovers, largely because many of them were forced to marry their cousins, whom they did not love in that soul-consuming, fatalistic way made popular by both Indian and Hollywood movies.

  “She was lovesick and lonely and she missed her mate,” the deputy zoo director told me. “So she broke into the pig cage and tried to hug the two pigs, but she hugged them too hard and they died.”

  I nodded and took notes. I tried to poke holes in his logic. “But weren’t they female pigs?”

  “Yeah, so what? When you’re lonely, you’ll take love from anywhere, a female bear will take it from a female pig, no problem,” he said.

  In Afghanistan, I would learn that this was too often true. The zoo workers surrounded the wayward lovesick female bear with torches and nudged her back to her cage. This was considered progress—earlier, workers would have just shot her. Facing reality, China announced i
t would stop donating animals to the Kabul Zoo until living conditions improved, while, of course, doing nothing to improve those conditions. The one surviving pig would be made famous years later by the international swine flu outbreak. Fearing what it might harbor, Afghans would isolate the country’s only known domestic pig, which already must have felt isolated enough because everyone thought it was unclean.

  By the time Farouq came back to work, the election campaign was in full swing. Covering the election was a little like writing about the zoo—lots of scars, lots of confusion, lots of mysterious pigs. This election was the final step in the transition to full sovereignty outlined in the 2001 Bonn Agreement, the road map for creating an Afghan government that had been hashed out by prominent Afghans—including most major warlords—in Germany during the fall of the Taliban. Many of the country’s top warlords were running for parliament, including some who always made the “best of” lists drawn up by various human-rights groups that no one ever listened to, warlords accused of pounding nails into people’s heads, of pouring boiling oil over a body after cutting off a head, which Afghans swore would make a headless body dance.

  For years, the international community and the Afghans had been toying with what to do about the warlords and past war crimes, pushing the issue around like a large piece of gristle. The UN, the Afghan government, and its backers had theoretically disarmed the illegal militias and defanged the warlords, but no one had been held accountable for anything. This election, in effect, would erase the board of all previous atrocities and eliminate any possibility of holding any of the warlords responsible for their crimes. Then again, maybe it was already too late. The capricious warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, known for switching sides like a celebrity changing hair color, was the chief of staff to the commander in chief of the armed forces, a lengthy title that was largely ceremonial but that permitted Dostum to do pretty much what he wanted; Ismail Khan was now minister of power and water; several former warlords were also governors. The wing of Islamist party Hezb-i-Islami that claimed to have broken from founder Gulbuddin Hekmatyar backed many candidates for parliament. Meanwhile, Hekmatyar and the rest of Hezb-i-Islami were busy attacking U.S. troops in eastern Afghanistan.