The Taliban Shuffle

by Kim Barker

  I picked up the phone.

  “Is this Kimberly Barker?” the alleged police officer asked.

  “Yes.”

  He identified himself as a cop.

  “Kimberly Barker, you have been a victim of identity theft,” he then said, in a game-show voice that just as easily could have told me I won a million dollars.

  “What?” I said.

  He explained to me that a woman had been arrested with a fake Indiana driver’s license with my name, and with real credit cards and a bank card with my name.

  I opened my purse. My wallet was gone. And I didn’t know where I had lost it because I had been carrying my driver’s license, my current bank card, and the only credit card I used separately. Whoever stole my wallet pocketed no money. The credit cards were all useless, either expired or never activated, and the bank card was old. Yes, I had done a very poor job keeping current plastic.

  “Yeah, that’s me.” I sighed. “But what makes this identity theft? It sounds like regular theft.”

  “The fake license.”

  My identity on the run, I agreed to drive to the police station on Chicago’s South Side and file a report. It was kind of embarrassing. I had covered wars and tragedies overseas, but I had never been robbed. With the ever-ballooning recession, the United States had turned into its own kind of war zone, an economic one.

  At the station the detectives took me upstairs and sat me at a long table spread with papers. They specialized in identity theft. I asked them what had happened. The day before, police had responded to a report of an illegal weapon in a nearby park and questioned people there. This woman had handed over a fake Illinois driver’s license with a fake name but her correct address. The cops then searched the master criminal, pulling up more fake ID cards, and then a fake ID with my name and an assortment of my plastic. She was clearly an idiotic identity thief, arrested for fraud or theft at least eighteen times. After catching her, the police struggled to find me. That was considerably tougher. Some of the credit-card companies had no way to track me. The police called my working credit-card company and my bank, but the number listed for me was an old one.

  “We were starting to think you didn’t exist,” the lead detective said.

  “I can understand that,” I replied.

  But my bank and the police kept trying, eventually waking up my father at 5:30 AM, who instead of telling the police that I was in Chicago and giving them my cell-phone number, said he didn’t know what country I was in but I was definitely a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. And that’s how they found me, my bank and the Chicago police working together.

  “That’s kind of impressive,” I said. “Fast.”

  The police asked me questions. From what I could tell, my wallet was missing for at most twenty hours before the cops recovered my identification.

  “So … can I talk to her?” I asked.

  “No you can’t talk to her,” the lead detective said.

  We talked more. They asked about my job. I pumped up the macho.

  “Yeah, I talk to the Taliban,” I said. “I’ve hung out with them before.”

  After spending almost an hour at the station, I asked my question again.

  “So can I talk to her? Come on.”

  The detectives looked at each other, shrugged.

  “Bring her out of lockup,” the lead detective said. “Get the room ready.”

  I had watched a lot of TV cop shows overseas while on embeds, while flying from one country to another. I figured I could interrogate a perp. The police escorted me into a tiny white room, where my identity thief sat, handcuffed to the wall. She was a squat African American woman squeezed into a white tank top and black shorts. In a way, we looked similar—I wore a long-sleeved white blouse and black pants. She was visibly confused, with a wrinkled forehead and question-mark eyes. This was not protocol. I thought about how I would proceed. Macho. Over the top. Bad cop. Out of control.

  “So I spend years overseas, dealing with assholes like the Taliban, risking my life, then I come home and an asshole like you steals my identity. How did you get my credit cards?”

  She looked at me, mumbled that she didn’t know anything.

  “Oh, you know. You know, bitch.”

  Here, I was channeling a multitude of TV cop shows.

  “Tell me. I can go easy on you, or I can go hard. It’s up to me how this case is prosecuted. If you cooperate, I’ll go easy. If you don’t, you’ll wish you never were born.”

  “Yeah,” interjected one of the officers, who had adopted the role of good cop. “Help yourself.”

  Eventually, I was able to get the name of the man who had allegedly given her my stolen cards, and the time of day she had allegedly got them. Not much, and no idea if it was true, but the experience was good training for a new career.

  I walked out of the room with the two cops. We all started laughing. The lead detective was congratulatory.

  “Man, you’re good,” he said. “You got more out of her in fifteen minutes than we did in six hours.”

  I had still not dropped my fake-cop persona.

  “Well, you know—I kind of do this for a living. We’re all on the same side.”

  Where was I getting this? I left the cop station in time to see the Cubs lose. My thief would eventually be sentenced in a plea bargain, to about thirty minutes in jail.

  But no matter. I soon heard my best news in months, the news I had been waiting for. Sean and Sami had been released after three months in captivity. Sean was spirited out of Pakistan to London, and Sami had crossed back to Afghanistan. After a flurry of e-mails with friends, I managed to get Sean’s new phone number in London—he was trying to lay low. While driving to Springfield to meet people from the Illinois National Guard, about to deploy to Afghanistan, I called Sean and left a message. He called back almost immediately. He sounded manic, jumping from subject to subject like a fly in a roomful of candy, tasting each one briefly before moving to the next.

  “Hey, do you remember the last conversation we had?” he asked.

  “You mean the one when I told you that you were a fucking idiot and were gonna get kidnapped?” I asked. “Yeah, I remember.”

  “I kept thinking about that.”

  But most of our conversation was one-sided, just a monologue from Sean, a run-on sentence.

  “I lost some teeth,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “At one point, I was inside one safe house. I heard BBC on a radio outside, and they were doing a story on Taliban training camps in Pakistan, and Pakistani officials were denying any training camps, but I couldn’t hear the story that well because of all the gunfire from the Taliban training camp outside my door.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Sami almost lost it, at one point he was convinced we were going to be killed, and he just didn’t want to translate anymore, and without him, I had no way to communicate, so I had to tell him to pull it together.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  Altogether, between driving to Springfield and back to Chicago, through various phone calls, I talked to Sean for almost four hours. Or I listened to Sean. Sami and Sean had been kidnapped almost as soon as they met their crucial contact, although they didn’t realize it at first. They had been moved several times—their captors would torture them, by doing things like brandishing guns, even pretending to shoot them in the head with an unloaded weapon. Sean didn’t know if he would ever be released. What got him through, he said, was thinking about his two sons, about what that would do to them, and about getting home. He felt guilt so heavy it threatened to smother him. He rarely felt hope.

  It was unclear who originally took Sean—possibly criminals—but he was eventually traded up to members of the Haqqani network, the worst bad guys in Pakistan. Press accounts said his TV station had paid a total of $300,000 to free Sean and Sami. Sean didn’t want to talk about money. That also made him feel guilty—any money would go to nothing
good and would make all of us targets. I said I’d see him soon in London.

  My nose felt brand new, and it was time to leave. After the long break, I knew that I wanted to keep my job, wanted to stay overseas. Four years into this gig, my whole identity was wrapped up in it. If I wasn’t a foreign correspondent, then who was I? But after almost two weeks in Chicago, hearing the various plans to save the newspaper, I had become a pessimist. Something had to give. With few ads, dropping subscriptions, and no other business model, the newspaper seemed like it was imploding. I worried that I would have to move back to Chicago, find a new job, or make Dave get an actual job, if we could even make us work. Nothing else seemed likely. I calculated the odds. Chicago or Dave getting a job seemed like the most realistic bets. I talked to Dave. He really didn’t want to get an actual job yet.

  “But I’m pretty sure they’re going to get rid of the foreign staff,” I said. “We can’t both freelance. So I may have to move back to Chicago. We may have to move.”

  “I really hope that doesn’t happen,” he said. “I’d miss you.”

  “Wouldn’t you come with me? You can work there.”

  “I don’t want to live in Chicago. I don’t want to run into all your ex-boyfriends all the time.”

  “All my ex-boyfriends? There’s maybe one.”

  “I don’t want to just be a trophy on your arm there, Kim.”

  “A trophy? You’re hardly a trophy.”

  I thought about what he was saying.

  “What about a compromise, D.C. or New York?”

  “I don’t want to live in the U.S. I have no interest.”

  All my doubts clicked into place. Freedom Fries and all, this was still my country. I didn’t want to move back to the States yet, but I didn’t want to rule out the possibility of ever living here again. I had reverted to my fantasy of normalcy, children, the things I was supposed to want, rather than facing the fact that this relationship was doomed. The fights had just gotten worse; objects had been thrown. I would much rather be alone than ever yell again, even if it meant being alone in Pakistan.

  I walked into the Tribune Tower to say goodbye to my bosses and churn through some paperwork before flying home to Islamabad. Within three months, most of the glass offices would be filled with different people. Most of the top editors would quit, including the man who had written my name on an envelope, the editor in chief, and the editor who wouldn’t let me talk to Sam. The motto of the Tribune would change from the hopeful “World’s Greatest Newspaper” to the realistic “The Midwest’s largest reporting team.” That evening, I stepped off the elevator and walked past the inexplicable six-legged statue on my way out the door. I glanced at the nearby quote from Flannery O’Connor. It seemed apt: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” My limbo was becoming my life.

  CHAPTER 20

  WHY CAN’T WE BE FRIENDS?

  I flew back to Pakistan to pick up the pieces. As I trudged out of the Islamabad airport into the summer swelter, Samad spotted me and grabbed my purple suitcase, big enough for him to fit inside. “Hello, boss,” he said, looking down at the pavement. This was a test run, to see if he could handle working for me again. He had disappeared for more than a month after I left for the States, unavailable whenever my office manager called. But he had finally surfaced to explain why he had been acting so strange. He was not an ISI spy. He had been seeing a girl—his fiancée.

  Although he was engaged, Samad was not supposed to talk to his fiancée. This was an arranged marriage. Samad and his fiancée would not be allowed to marry for years, not until his older brother had married, and not until Samad and the girl were considered old enough. This decision had the force of law because the father of the bride, who didn’t trust Samad, was also Samad’s oldest brother. Samad and his future bride were related in a second way—her mother was his cousin. So Samad was his fiancée’s uncle and second cousin. This was hardly unusual in certain circles in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or even India. Such marriages consolidated family ties and family belongings. Only the middle class and the elite picked their own spouses, and not always.

  After Samad got his car, he figured he had the status to merit a wife. But his older brother said no. So Samad and his cousin/niece had eloped. Samad’s older brother had reacted predictably, vowing to kill Samad for insulting his honor and marrying his eighteen-year-old daughter.

  This, also, was typical. Because Samad and his bride had disobeyed their family, both could be killed. So for weeks, Samad and his new bride were on the run, sheltered by friends in Lahore and sympathetic family members. Finally his mother helped broker a truce. Samad and his wife moved back home. And Samad started calling my office manager, begging for his job back.

  I felt I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t want to train a new driver. And I blamed myself for tempting Samad, giving him too much trust and responsibility. He had reacted like any young man to an empty house, a pool table, and free booze—actually, he had reacted better than most. And I had bigger issues to worry about than a missing bottle of Midori liqueur. Dave was moving out. We had broken up, and the split was hardly amicable. Just before flying in from Kabul, he sent me an e-mail, apologizing for the hurt he had caused but saying he had wanted to be honest about his feelings. “I have no doubt you’ll be run off your feet when I come through, as it always was,” he wrote. “Maybe I do need someone who has time to tend for me when I come in.”

  Maybe so. Samad helped him move out, even though it was confusing for him, a bit like subjecting a three-year-old to a divorce. Samad had bought all three of us key chains, each with our first initial. He had been thrilled when I started dating Dave, talking about my wedding and naming our firstborn before our one-month anniversary. Although divorce and single adults over thirty were quite common in my Pakistani circle of friends, in Samad’s family such things were scandalous.

  While packing up, Dave was kind and polite. I wondered if we were making a mistake. But then friends forced me to go out for dinner instead of moping at home, and to go to the UN club for a drink.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s where he always goes.”

  “That’s where everyone in Islamabad goes,” a friend said, reminding me how miserable our options were. “You can’t let him run your life.”

  So we went, hiding in the back garden because Dave had been spotted inside. After a while, my curiosity won out.

  “What was he doing?” I asked.

  “Singing karaoke,” a friend said.

  “What song?”

  “ ‘My Way.’ ”

  Meanwhile, Pakistan started to simmer again. It was August 2008. President Pervez Musharraf, who had managed to hold on to his presidency even as his popularity, power, and army post had been stripped away, finally stepped down. He didn’t really have a choice—his enemies had recruited enough votes in parliament to impeach him. He gave a speech, punctuated with tears. “God protect Pakistan,” he ended it. “God protect you, Pakistan, forever. Long live Pakistan.” And then Musharraf collected his note cards and tried to stand up, with some difficulty. With that, all vestiges of the country’s military rule were finished, at least for now.

  Instead of resolving the political quagmire, his move only sharpened it. Pakistan’s fragile new ruling coalition was falling apart. The coalition had agreed to restore the judges fired by Musharraf within twenty-four hours of him leaving the presidency, but that deadline quickly passed. The tiger of Punjab, Nawaz Sharif, still defending the judiciary, threatened to pull out of the coalition. But Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, did not want to restore the judges. He probably suspected that they would throw out Musharraf’s controversial ordinance granting amnesty to hundreds of politicians for past crimes; Zardari had faced accusations of corruption for misappropriating as much as $1.5 billion. Mr. Ten Percent also had his eye on a new prize he had once claimed that he never wanted—the presidency.

  The militants exploited the government’s many distr
actions. Two suicide bombers killed at least sixty-seven people during a shift change at the Pakistani army’s main weapons factory outside Islamabad. The insurgents also spread their control in the tribal areas, where the government had never held any sway. This time the Pakistani army tried to push back, moving into the Bajaur tribal agency and even bombing homes. As many as 260,000 civilians, or almost half the residents, fled Bajaur. Shoddy relief camps were set up, where children died of diarrhea and families slept on the ground. In some areas the militants did a better job of providing relief than the government. At a meeting with top UN refugee agency officials, Zardari offered his own creative solution to the insurgency in the tribal areas: Build a cement factory, where people could work, and build bulletproof homes, where they could live. He had even drawn up the plans for such houses himself, demanding that his minions hand them over to the UN.

  Capping the chaos, Nawaz Sharif then dropped out of the government. This shocked me—he had repeatedly threatened to end his party’s support for the coalition, but I didn’t think he would, as this chess move would in effect checkmate himself, eliminating any power he had. I called Sharif for the first time in months, and he invited me over to the Punjab House in Islamabad. He had always been unfailingly polite and soft-spoken with me. He seemed old-fashioned, speaking my name as a full sentence and rarely using contractions.

  This time, in a large banquet hall filled with folding chairs and a long table, Sharif told his aides that he would talk to me alone. At the time, I barely noticed. We talked about Zardari, but he spoke carefully and said little of interest, constantly glancing at my tape recorder like it was radioactive. Eventually, he nodded toward it.

  “Can you turn that off?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said, figuring he wanted to tell me something off the record.

  “So. Do you have a friend, Kim?” Sharif asked.

  I was unsure what he meant.

  “I have a lot of friends,” I replied.