The Taliban Shuffle

by Kim Barker

  Tammy’s family, although Muslim, saw nothing wrong with observing Christmas, as did other moderates, since Jesus Christ is considered to be a major figure in Islam. As soon as my boss gave me the go-ahead I immediately flew to Karachi. I ate a lot of food, walked down a beach, and touched my first actual Christmas tree in four years. I relaxed.

  Two days after Christmas, Tammy and I prepared for the shooting of the TV reality show Enter the Prime Minister, where Pakistanis could vote on their favorite candidate for prime minister. It was like American Idol meets C-SPAN, reality TV for political junkies, only possible in a politically obsessed country like Pakistan. Tammy was a judge. I planned to write a story. So I packed a backpack—my computer, a notebook, two cell phones. I didn’t bother to bring my power cords, as I planned to be back at Tammy’s house in a few hours. Unfortunately the show was as scintillating as static. At one point, bored and concerned about how I would ever make a reality show about politics interesting, I checked the news wires. Somebody had fired shots at a rally of Nawaz Sharif, who like Bhutto had just returned from exile. I worried that I was in the wrong place, out of position again.

  During a break in filming, I told Tammy and the show’s other participants about the attack. A few crowded around my computer. Then I checked the Pakistan news again. This time a breaking-news bulletin flashed an attack on Bhutto’s rally in Rawalpindi, although the former prime minister was safe. Most of the high-powered people on the TV show were friends of Bhutto, and they started making calls. The head of Pakistan’s human-rights commission soon received a text message saying that Bhutto had been wounded. Minutes ticked by, all confusion. Then Bhutto’s longtime friend from the human-rights commission answered a phone call. She cried out and hung up.

  “She’s gone.”

  Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the East, had been killed at a rally a few miles from where her father had been hanged, as she stood and waved out the sunroof of her white SUV. Maybe a bomb, maybe a gunshot, the conspiracy machines were already spinning. Like the country, I found this impossible to process. But I had no time. Events soon overtook even her death. Tammy and I looked at each other; she had been frustrated with Bhutto’s willingness to make a deal with Musharraf, but she still saw Bhutto as a preferable alternative to the military. Almost immediately, Tammy started to cry.

  “This is very bad,” she said. “It will rip this country apart.”

  She needed to visit Bhutto’s relatives and friends, so I rode with her to the home of one, a cousin. The receiving room was elegant, chandeliers and wooden furniture. Everyone hugged and sobbed. I was the stranger, the lone non-Pakistani, the lone journalist, the other. At one point, I slid out my notebook, figuring I should write something down. Tammy glanced at me and shook her head. Her message was clear: This was not the place, and I should have known better. She soon sent me off in a carload of people from the TV show toward the Pearl-Continental Hotel, where they were staying.

  “You can grab a cab home from there,” she said. “I need to stay.”

  But the turbulent city of Karachi was Bhutto’s home, and it was catching fire. As darkness fell, young men threw rocks at the Saudi embassy; others set fire to tires in the middle of intersections. Already Pakistanis marched with flags of Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party and yelled “Bhutto lives!” Some fired guns in the air. In my car, crammed with seven people, one woman threw a scarf around my head.

  “Cover yourself,” she said. “You’re an American. You never know what will make these guys angry. It’s very volatile.”

  Eventually we made it to the Pearl-Continental. I called Tammy.

  “You’ll never make it back tonight,” she said. “They’re already rioting. Cars are on fire. The neighborhood has been sealed off.”

  I was in poor shape. The hotel was sold out. I had no computer plug and only about thirty minutes of battery power remaining. I had two cell phones—but each was close to running out of batteries. I camped out in the business center, writing a story on a hotel computer. Eventually the hotel manager found a last-minute vacancy, a suite that cost slightly less than $400. I jumped at it.

  By 3 AM I was asleep. I woke up early the next day, trying to figure out a plan. Bhutto would be buried that day, near Larkana, her ancestral home, a short flight from Karachi. Tammy called and told me a special plane was taking journalists and relatives to the funeral. She gave me the name of a party official; he told me the plane was leaving in fifteen minutes.

  “I don’t think you’ll make it,” he said.

  But nothing ever left on time in Pakistan, and on this morning, fearful of what could happen, no one was yet on the road. The highway, normally a parking lot that constantly vexed me, was empty, and the taxi sped to the airport at fifty miles an hour. On the sides of the road, cars were piled together, all burned-out husks, still smoking. I tried to count them, but lost count around a hundred. After the taxi pulled up in front of the airport terminal, I sprinted for the door. I bought one of the last two tickets for the plane, rushed through security, and then ran to the gate. Somehow I made it.

  Then I contemplated my decision. I had no fixer. I had no phone chargers, no computer charger. I had only the clothes on my back—a black-and-white slightly ripped long-sleeved shirt that barely covered my rear, and baggy black pants. I had not showered. I was not fit for a funeral. I called Tammy.

  “There’s no way we can get out to send your stuff,” she said. “You’ll figure it out. Just find something to cover your hair.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “Oh and one last thing,” she said. “If anyone pinches or grabs you, don’t yell or punch them. It’s a funeral. You have to stay calm.”

  “Yeah. Calm. Right.”

  Luckily a friend from the Guardian was on the same plane. Unfortunately, he had a different computer and a different phone. He and I were the only foreign journalists on this trip because we were the only two who happened to be in Karachi when Bhutto was killed. We flew to a town called Sukkur and were picked up by trucks and vans to drive to the funeral, about an hour away. With a police escort, we moved quickly, past smoldering gas stations and cars and banners that said WELCOME, BENAZIR. The air smelled like burning tires.

  We stopped at Bhutto’s family home. Her wooden coffin, draped in the green, red, and black flag of her party, was slid into the back of an ambulance. People clutched at the coffin and ran after the ambulance, crying. Our convoy then pushed on toward the mausoleum Bhutto had built for her father and two brothers, who also died violent deaths. We stopped when we hit the crowds, climbing out of our van to walk across the desert toward the white tomb, which resembled a cut-rate version of the Taj Mahal. Thousands of Pakistanis also trudged toward the tomb, waving the flag of Bhutto’s party, beating their chests. They came by tractor, by hanging off the back of buses or trucks, by foot. Men held up posters of Bhutto and notes she had written them. Women sobbed, clutching at me. Angry young men held guns and long bamboo sticks and vowed revenge.

  Pakistanis practicing English tried to talk to me. I asked one to help get something to cover my hair—he quickly procured a large piece of dark red, blue, and white material, which I wrapped over my head and chest. I walked around, talking to people who spoke English. The funeral started. The prayer of the dead was read outside, and men held their palms to the sky. At least, most of them did. Sure enough, in the middle of the prayer, someone pinched me. I spun around, mindful of what Tammy had warned, quietly outraged.

  “Here?” I whispered. “At a funeral?”

  But one of my broken-English pals had seen what had happened.

  “Don’t worry, sister,” he whispered.

  He linked arms with some friends, who formed a human protection chain. Together we walked around, and no other hands got through. I wondered where the reporters who had chartered a plane from Islamabad were, but I couldn’t call them—the Pakistani government’s one nod to security was blocking all calls in the area. Nobody checked for weapons or bombs. N
o government official trekked here, and the funeral hardly befitted a former head of state. Instead the funeral was probably how Bhutto would have wanted it—a public, messy, spontaneous outpouring of grief, not necessarily for the leader she was but for the leader she aspired to be.

  A hole had been cut in the white marble floor next to Bhutto’s father’s grave. The ambulance backed inside the shrine, and supporters threw rose petals as her coffin, simple and wooden, was pulled out. Bhutto’s husband and son, who had flown to Pakistan after she was killed, helped lower her into the ground. They threw handfuls of sandy soil on top, helped by supporters. Slowly the coffin and Benazir Bhutto disappeared from view. She was gone. The country burned.

  We eventually hitched a ride to the hotel where the other foreign journalists were staying—the chartered plane had made it to the nearest airport in time for the funeral, but the journalists had not been able to find a ride. The sold-out hotel was the only one not set on fire the previous night. It was decrepit. The pool was filled with trash and dead leaves—a BBC correspondent, talking on her phone while walking with her computer, accidentally fell in. A friend from the Washington Post loaned me his computer cord and a phone charger, and said we could stay in his room. His kindness was rewarded. When he went to the bathroom, someone flushed the toilet in the room above, which leaked on him below.

  About 4 AM, after finishing my third story of the night, I shoved the Guardian reporter to one side of a mattress on the floor and laid down on the other side, wearing the same clothes I had been wearing for more than two days. I passed out for four hours. That morning, the Post reporter and I decided to flee.

  “This is the worst place on earth,” he said.

  “I’m never coming back here again,” I agreed.

  We hitched a ride to Karachi, avoiding roadblocks of burning tires and cars and slogan-shouting men. Broken glass carpeted parts of the road. Trucks at gas stations were set on fire; so were some gas stations. Black plumes of smoke and the wreckage of grief could be seen everywhere—a torched building at a district court complex, a dozen blackened trucks near a gas station, a gas tanker, and a truck once filled with sand, still flickering with flames.

  We waved a flag from Bhutto’s party out the car window, our visa on this dangerous stretch. “Bhutto lives!” we shouted as our password whenever men stopped us. “Bhutto lives!” the men shouted back. In one town, we saw hundreds of men carrying sticks and marching down the road ahead of us. We veered off, down a side street to the right. Nationwide the scene was little better. Life was at a standstill. Trains were halted; stores were closed. Some towns reported fuel and food shortages, or that only rickshaws and donkey-pulled carts could move.

  We made it back to Karachi in seven hours—relatively quickly, with no traffic and no police preoccupied with pulling over speeders. In the rubble of the riots, boys already played cricket, normalcy already reasserting itself, the typical cycle of tragedy and mourning and recovery compressed because tragedy was such a usual event.

  No one ever claimed responsibility for killing Bhutto, although the newly anointed Pakistani Taliban leader was again blamed, the newest bogeyman for the country. At a press conference three days after his mother died, Bhutto’s nineteen-year-old son, who had spent almost half his short life outside Pakistan, was named the future leader of the party. Until then the party would be run by her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, otherwise known as Mr. Ten Percent for past corruption allegations. The choice would be controversial.

  I found a pharmacy in Karachi that was somehow open, and plunked down $10 for a potpourri of sleeping pills, available over the counter. I needed instant sleep, the kind that chased away any nightmares.

  CHAPTER 16

  STRAY CAT STRUT

  With Bhutto gone, I needed to meet the lion of Punjab, or maybe the tiger. No one seemed to know which feline Nawaz Sharif was nicknamed after. Some fans rode around with stuffed toy lions strapped to their cars. Others talked about the tiger of Punjab. By default, Sharif, a former prime minister like Bhutto, had become the most popular opposition leader in the country. He was already the most powerful politician in Punjab, which was the most powerful of Pakistan’s four provinces, home to most of the army leaders and past rulers. Some people described Sharif as the Homer Simpson of Pakistan. Others considered him a right-wing wing nut. Still others figured he could save the country.

  Sharif was once considered an invention of the establishment, a protégé of the former military dictator in Pakistan, General Zia, but like all politicians here, he had become a creature of himself. During his second term, Sharif built my favorite road in Pakistan, a hundred and seventy miles of paved, multilaned bliss connecting Lahore to Islamabad; named Musharraf as chief of the army; and successfully tested the country’s first nuclear weapon. He also cozied up to the Taliban in Afghanistan and briefly considered declaring himself the “commander of the faithful,” an often-claimed Islamic title waved around by such luminaries as Taliban founder Mullah Omar. In other words, his record was mixed. Sharif’s fundamentalist phase occurred just before he bloomed into full megalomania, believing that a civilian leader of Pakistan could actually sack his army chief. He fired Musharraf in 1999 while the general was in Sri Lanka; Musharraf immediately hopped on a plane home, and Sharif followed up his original folly by refusing to allow Musharraf’s plane to land in Pakistan. Meanwhile, top generals in Pakistan, used to such shenanigans, seized power and allowed the plane to land ten minutes before it ran out of fuel. In gratitude, Musharraf jailed Sharif, accused him of attempted murder, and eventually banished him to Saudi Arabia. That would teach a civilian leader to take on the army.

  While in exile, Sharif joined forces with his former nemesis, Bhutto, and reformed his fundamentalist image, going so far as to get hair plugs. Many people counted Sharif out—even Western diplomats, who typically laughed when asked if his party had a chance to regain power in the upcoming parliamentary elections. But Sharif’s party—not Bhutto’s—had become the major backer of the lawyer protests, and Sharif had gone on at length, even eloquently, about the need for justice in Pakistan. (The irony of this was lost on no one. While Sharif was in office, in 1997, his backers had actually stormed the supreme court and forced it to suspend contempt proceedings against him.)

  So Sharif was now the darling of the more moderate forces in Pakistan, even if they remained slightly suspicious. One of Sharif’s friends tried to explain him to me: “He might be tilting a little to the right, but he’s not an extremist. Extremists don’t go do hair implants. He also loves singing.”

  I had attempted to see Sharif when he first tried to return to Pakistan a few months earlier, in September. But commandos had stormed his plane shortly after it landed. Within five hours, he had been shipped back to Saudi Arabia, looking bewildered.

  Sharif had finally flown home in late November, weeks after Musharraf declared an emergency. Samad had driven me to the airport in the eastern city of Lahore, Sharif’s home territory and the capital of Punjab Province. Tens of thousands of supporters waited behind fences across from the airport entrance. Some shouted for the lion of Punjab—others waved stuffed toy tigers or tiny cardboard Sharif cutouts. It was a classic botched media event. Reporters were herded into a tiny area in front of the airport, surrounded by barriers covered in barbed wire. Thousands of supporters eventually broke through the fences, screaming and running toward us. More and more people pushed into the journalists’ pen, squeezing everyone and driving us toward certain impalement on the barbed wire. Samad guarded a shorter friend of mine. My translator tried to protect my back. I stood in a basketball stance, an immovable force. But not for long. A Pakistani journalist from Aaj TV pushed past me, elbowed me in the ribs, and shoved me to the side. I pushed back.

  “You don’t see me standing here?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Women should not be here anyway. This is a man’s job.”

  The crowd swayed back and forth, and I tried to keep my balance. A man grabbed
my butt, a message to my fist, and before my brain knew it, I managed to punch him in the face. Not professional, not at all, but still somewhat gratifying.

  That was the chaos just before Nawaz Sharif and his brother walked out of the airport, with me worried about my rear, my position, the barbed wire, a mob, and a potential bomb. Supporters lifted the Sharifs onto their shoulders and spun them around in circles because they had no room to walk. Nawaz Sharif looked shell-shocked. He somehow clambered onto a rickety wooden table next to a taxi stand. The contrast with Bhutto was obvious—she was smooth, a master performer, charisma personified, always in control. Sharif seemed more like a baffled everyman, nondescript and beige.

  The crush of men waved their arms in the air and shouted that they loved Sharif. He spoke into a microphone, but it was broken and no one could hear anything he said. Speech over, Sharif climbed down from the counter and slipped into a bulletproof black Mercedes, courtesy of his good friend, King Abdullah, who had also shipped Sharif back to Pakistan in a Saudi royal plane.

  Now, six weeks later, it was January 2008. Bhutto was dead and Sharif was the only living senior politician in Pakistan. He had been banned from running in the upcoming parliamentary elections—likely because Musharraf still hated him so much—but he would be a major factor in those elections. Sharif was trying to appear like a figure of reconciliation, above all the politics. He publicly cried after Bhutto’s death, and talked about how she had called him for his fifty-eighth birthday, two days before she was killed. I called everyone I knew to try to get an interview.

  “You only get fifteen minutes with Mian Sahib,” Sharif’s press aide finally told me, referring to Sharif by his honorary title. “Maybe twenty at the most.”

  I flew into Lahore on a Friday morning, and we drove for an hour toward the town of Raiwind and Sharif’s palatial home and palatial grounds. The closer we got, the more Sharif. The place may as well have been called Nawaz Land, given the amusement-park feel and the fact that his name and picture were on everything, from the hospital to giant billboards. Everywhere I looked, Sharif—amiable, slightly pudgy, topped with hair plugs—stared at me like the Cheshire cat. Guards checked me at the gate, searching my bag meticulously. The grounds of Raiwind resembled a cross between a golf course and a zoo, with several football fields of manicured grass and wild animals in cages, leading up to a miniature palace that looked slightly like a wedding cake, with different layers and trim that resembled frosting. The driveway was big enough for a limousine to execute a U-turn. I walked inside and was told to wait. The inside of the house appeared to have been designed by Saudi Arabia—a hodge-podge of crystal chandeliers, silk curtains, gold accents, marble. A verse of the Holy Quran and a carpet with the ninety-nine names of God hung on the walls of Sharif’s receiving room, along with photographs of Sharif with King Abdullah and slain former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Finally I was summoned.