The Taliban Shuffle

by Kim Barker

“No. Do you have a friend?”

  I figured it out.

  “You mean a boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked at Sharif. I had two options—lie, or tell the truth. And because I wanted to see where this line of questioning was going, I told the truth.

  “I had a boyfriend. We recently broke up.” I nodded my head stupidly, as if to punctuate this thought.

  “Why?” Sharif asked. “Was he too boring for you? Not fun enough?”

  “Um. No. It just didn’t work out.”

  “Oh. I cannot believe you do not have a friend,” Sharif countered.

  “No. Nope. I don’t. I did.”

  “Do you want me to find one for you?” Sharif asked.

  To recap: The militants were gaining strength along the border with Afghanistan and staging increasingly bold attacks in the country’s cities. The famed Khyber Pass, linking Pakistan and Afghanistan, was now too dangerous to drive. The country appeared as unmoored and directionless as a headless chicken. And here was Sharif, offering to find me a friend. Thank God the leaders of Pakistan had their priorities straight.

  “Sure. Why not?” I said.

  The thought of being fixed up on a date by the former prime minister of Pakistan, one of the most powerful men in the country and, at certain points, the world, proved irresistible. It had true train-wreck potential.

  “What qualities are you looking for in a friend?” he asked.

  “Tall. Funny. Smart.”

  I envisioned a blind date at a restaurant in Lahore over kebabs and watermelon juice with one of Sharif’s sidekicks, some man with a mustache, Sharif lurking in the background as chaperone.

  “Hmmm. Tall may be tough. You are very tall, and most Pakistanis are not.” Sharif stood, walked past the banquet table toward the windows, and looked out over the capital. He pondered, before turning back toward me.

  “What do you mean by smart?” he asked.

  “You know. Smart. Quick. Clever.”

  “Oh, clever.” He nodded, thought for a second. “But you do not want cunning. You definitely do not want a cunning friend.”

  He looked out the window. It seemed to me that he was thinking of Bhutto’s widower, Zardari, his onetime ally and now rival, a man universally considered cunning at business who many felt had outsmarted Sharif in their recent political tango.

  “No. Who wants cunning?”

  “Anything else?” he asked. “What about his appearance?”

  “I don’t really care. Not fat. Athletic.”

  We shook hands, and I left. In all my strange interviews with Sharif, that definitely was the strangest.

  Pakistan’s spies soon seemed to kick up their interest in me, maybe because I had written a few controversial stories, maybe because of Sharif. Sitting in my living room, I complained to several friends about a man named Qazi, a former army colonel who worked as part of intelligence over foreigners.

  “Qazi,” I said. “That guy. He always calls me and asks me what I’m doing.”

  My friend’s phone started ringing. He looked at the screen, then at us.

  “It’s Qazi,” he said. “I’m not answering it.”

  Then my phone started ringing. Qazi. I felt I had no choice.

  “Hey, Qazi.”

  “Hello, Kim, how are you, how is everything, your house?”

  “Fine. I’m kind of busy.” I rolled my eyes, looked at my friends.

  “So did you like Taxila?”

  “What?” A friend had recently driven me through Taxila, a town near Islamabad where I had bought a plaster-of-paris disco ball and a five-foot-tall mirrored plaster-of-paris flower vase. But how could Qazi know this?

  “Did you like the shopping there?”

  My tone grew sharp. “How do you know I was there?”

  He started laughing. “Oh, you’d be surprised what I know. I have eyes everywhere.”

  “OK, then. I gotta go.” I hung up.

  That was creepy, but I didn’t have time to think about it. Zardari was soon elected president, ending his quest for the power that he had repeatedly claimed not to want. As one of his first official moves as president, Zardari would travel to New York and call vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin “gorgeous” and threaten to hug her. Pakistan: Spreading love and good feelings, around the world.

  It would soon be Ramadan, the fasting month that made working in an Islamic country almost unbearable, so I decided to leave for a short reporting trip to India. But I still didn’t have my annual Pakistani visa, despite applying more than a month earlier. My current visa was about to expire. I was stuck. Two days after Zardari’s election, a man rang my doorbell in the late afternoon. He said he was from the Interior Ministry and was following up on my visa application, but he was probably a spook. He had a slight brown beard and light gray eyes, and was wearing a button-up plaid shirt and gray pants. He looked gray—how appropriate. He called me “lady,” and not in a nice way.

  “Lady, give me your CV,” he insisted.

  I didn’t have a curriculum vitae or a résumé.

  “What’s your name?” I countered.

  “Lady, give me your CV. CV,” he repeated.

  “What’s your name—are you ISI?” I asked.

  “Interior Ministry. Lady, CV,” he demanded.

  “Give me your card.”

  He ignored me.

  “I don’t have a CV.”

  “Lady, you have to have a CV.”

  It was like a Jerry Lewis skit.

  “Calling me lady like that—it’s rude,” I said.

  But he was right—I should have a CV. I should have been looking for a job, now that he mentioned it, but instead I was stuck, hoping desperately to hold on to this one. He was growing upset, standing on my front porch. I knew I needed to handle this, or he’d just keep coming back, so I invited him inside my house, and then inside my office. That’s what he wanted—to check out me and my surroundings. Many Pakistanis believed American journalists were actually American spies—a suspicion only bolstered by past claims of American spies to be working as journalists. My spook stared at the difficult-to-obtain maps of the tribal areas pinned to the walls, the map of Afghanistan, and then walked over to my computer.

  “Lady, what is Chicago Tribunal?” he asked.

  “It’s the Tribune. It’s a newspaper. Didn’t they tell you anything?”

  “I’ve never heard of it. Lady, I’ve never heard of you.”

  He told me he started his job the previous March, but he would not give me his name or his card or his title.

  “Why you not have a CV? Why not?” he asked, growing angry.

  I needed to somehow turn this around, and now, this guy was very suspicious.

  “I can write a CV and deliver it to you tomorrow morning.”

  “No,” he said. “I will interview you, and do it that way.”

  He sat down and pulled out a notebook. He asked where I worked, my dates of employment, where I graduated college, where I was born.

  “Montana,” I said.

  He squinted. “Lady, I’ve never heard of it.” Then he thought for a second. “Montana bikes. I’ve heard of them.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What’s your ancestry?”

  This time I squinted. “Why?”

  “Not for work,” he said. “Because I’m curious.”

  But it was for work. He wanted to know if I was Jewish. They always wanted to know if we were Jewish.

  “I bet you’re German,” he said.

  “German Irish,” I said.

  “Religion?” he asked.

  “Catholic,” I claimed.

  We were getting along now. I apologized for my rudeness. He apologized for calling me lady. Then he demanded to see my most recent story and my website. He immediately became suspicious again.

  “That picture doesn’t look like you,” he said, looking at my mug shot online. “She looks a lot younger. She looks a lo
t nicer.”

  “Well, it’s from a few years ago.”

  The man finally stood up.

  “Don’t go anywhere for ten days,” he said, as he walked out my front door.

  I worried I would never get my visa.

  But I stayed busy. Zardari was sworn in as president the day after my spook visit. At a press conference with Afghan president Hamid Karzai at the president’s house in Islamabad, both men pledged to cooperate against militants but didn’t say how. I sat in the back row, near the exit, as the event featured absolutely no security, no metal detectors, no bag searches, even though the list of people who wanted to kill either man was surely the size of a New York phonebook. I sent a text message to a colleague outside, letting her know the reason if anything should explode. Afterward, we were escorted out through the kitchen. I stole a Diet Coke.

  The next night, Samad drove some friends and me to a dinner inside the diplomatic enclave. My phone beeped with a text message from a number with a British international code.

  “Hello, Kim, I arrived London yesterday. Congratulations on AZ becoming the new president, how is he doing and how have the people taken it? I am working on the project we discussed and will have the result soon. Best wishes and warm regards.”

  I had no idea who sent the message. My brother? Sean? No, this sender clearly knew me from Pakistan. And what was the project? What had I discussed? I read the text message to my friends, and we pondered the sender. Then, finally, I remembered reading that Nawaz Sharif had flown to London so that his sick wife could have some tests.

  “Is this Nawaz?” I replied.

  “You are correct,” he responded.

  The project. That was funny. Everyone in the car, even the man from the U.S. embassy, agreed that I needed to see this through. And I thought—well, we all did—how hilarious it would be if Sharif actually found an option that worked.

  CHAPTER 21

  LONDON CALLING

  After finally being promised a visa that would allow me to return to Pakistan, I flew to India to write some stories. Nawaz Sharif asked for my number there. He needed to talk about something important, outside Pakistan. One early evening, he called from London. Sharif wondered whether I would be back in Pakistan before Eid al-Fitr, the Islamic holiday at the end of Ramadan. Maybe, I told him. He planned to go to Pakistan for a day, and then to Saudi Arabia for four days.

  “I am working on the project,” he said.

  “Day and night, I’m sure,” I replied.

  Sharif said the real reason he was calling was to warn me that the phones were tapped in Pakistan.

  “Be very careful,” he said. “Your phones are tapped. My phones are tapped. Do you know a man named Rehman Malik? He is giving the orders to do this, maybe at the behest of Mr. Zardari.”

  Everyone knew Rehman Malik, a slightly menacing figure who was the acting interior minister of Pakistan. He was known for making random word associations in press conferences and being unable to utter a coherent sentence. He also had slightly purple hair.

  “Is this new?” I asked. “Hasn’t it always been this way?”

  “Well, yes. But it has gotten worse in the past two or three months.”

  So true. He had a solution—he would buy me a new phone. And give me a new number, but a number so precious that I could only give it to my very close friends, who had to get new phones and numbers as well.

  Very tempting, but I told him no. He was, after all, the former prime minister of Pakistan. I couldn’t accept any gifts from him.

  “Sounds complicated. It’s not necessary. And you can’t buy me a phone.”

  He said I needed to be careful. We ended our conversation, and he promised to work on the project.

  “Don’t be—what is it you say? Don’t be naughty,” he said before hanging up.

  Naughty? Who said that? The conversation was slightly worrying. I thought of Sharif as a Punjabi matchmaker determined to find me a man, not as anyone who talked naughty to me.

  While watching TV in the Indian coastal town of Mangalore—a misnomer if there ever was one—I found out the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad had been blown up and fifty-four people had been killed. I saw the flames and the destruction and a friend from CNN climbing over the rubble and explaining how bad this was. Normally I would have been upset that I was out of position for such an attack. But this time I was just numb and, in fact, happy I wasn’t there. I had lived at the Marriott for weeks at a time, and even when I lived elsewhere, I had visited several times a week. Like the Serena, the Marriott was an oasis for expatriates and Pakistanis. I had joined the gym there, ate at the Thai and Japanese restaurants, and drank high tea with sources. The bombers exploded their truck at the worst time possible—in the evening, just as the guards sat down to break their daily Ramadan fast with an evening meal. The attack was one of the worst ever in Islamabad and marked a whole new level of sophistication for militants attacking inside Pakistan, a whole new level of cruelty. I had known some of the dead—the front-desk greeters, the people who worked at the metal detector.

  I stayed in India longer than I should have. Samad picked me up at the airport.

  “Do you want to drive by Marriott?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I really don’t.”

  Pakistan increasingly depressed me. I had once hoped that the lawyers could actually change the country and that Pakistanis would finally get the government they deserved. Instead, they got a secondhand trashy veneer of democracy. The political machinations were yet another example of how the country’s priorities were completely upside down. Finally Pakistan had a civilian government, a rarity. But instead of focusing on the real problems in the country—the bad economy, the war, the Pakistani Taliban—the civilian leaders bickered with one another. The military and spy agencies seemed unwilling to abandon the reins of Pakistan and fixated on India rather than homegrown militants. And the rare offensives the military ever announced here showed that the country was only willing to take on a certain kind of militant—the ones attacking inside Pakistan, and never the ones training and planning strikes against international troops and civilian targets in neighboring Afghanistan.

  The United States was also to blame, losing massive popularity in Pakistan by supporting Musharraf until almost the end and failing to adequately push nonmilitary aid. America was seen as hypocritical, championing democracy in countries like Iraq or Afghanistan, but not in Pakistan. And the U.S. drone attacks in the tribal areas had provoked a backlash in much of the country. Many Pakistanis blamed the militants’ growing power on the country’s promise to help America, not on the establishment’s decision to play a double game with the militants. Of course, some Pakistanis blamed the militants on rival India, talking of eight—or was it eighty?—Indian consulates in Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan, all fomenting rebellion.

  In short: None of this was Pakistan’s fault. The country had a reluctance to look inside, much like a chain-smoker refusing to accept responsibility for lung cancer while blaming it on a nearby factory. That view was dangerous. If Pakistanis didn’t see this war as their war, as a fight for the nation’s survival, then more and more bombs would explode, and the country would continue its downward spiral. If Pakistan didn’t own this war, the militants would keep spreading, recruiting through money, refugee camps, intimidation, religion, tradition, and help from invisible friends. The militants had already set up shop throughout much of the tribal areas, where the government had no influence, and the army had only small sticks and little staying power.

  I planned a trip to Afghanistan, where the politics were much less murky, where the suicide bombers were much less effective, to write about alleged negotiations with the Taliban.

  That’s why I had to see Nawaz Sharif again. Emissaries from the Afghan government and former Taliban bigwigs had flown to Saudi Arabia for the feasts that marked the end of Ramadan. But they had another goal. Afghan officials had been hoping that the influential Saudi royal family
would moderate negotiations between their battered government and the resurgent militants. Sharif, in Saudi Arabia at the time, was rumored to have been at those meetings. That made sense. He was close to the Saudi king. He had supported the Afghan Taliban, when the regime was in power.

  I called Sharif and told him why I wanted to see him.

  “Most welcome, Kim,” he said. “Anytime.”

  We arranged for a lunch on a Saturday in October—I was due to fly to Kabul two days later. Samad and I decided to drive the five hours from Islamabad to Raiwind instead of flying. Samad showed up on time, but I overslept, having been up late the night before. I hopped out of bed and rifled through my Islamic clothes for something suitable because I liked to dress conservatively when interviewing Pakistani politicians. I yanked out a red knee-length top from India that had dancing couples embroidered on it. Potentially ridiculous, but the nicest clean one I had. We left Islamabad.

  “You’re gonna have to hurry, Samad,” I said. “Possible?”

  “Kim, possible,” he said. It always cracked me up when I got him to say that.

  We made good time south, but got lost at some point on the narrow roads to Raiwind. Sharif sent out an escort vehicle with flashing lights to meet us. We breezed through security—we actually didn’t even slow down—and I forced Samad to stop in the middle of the long driveway leading up to Sharif’s palace. I had forgotten to comb my hair or put on any makeup. I turned the rearview mirror toward me, smoothed down my messy hair with my hands, and put on some lipstick. Twenty seconds. “Good enough,” I pronounced my effort, and flipped the mirror back to Samad.

  We reached the imposing driveway. Sharif actually waited in front of his massive front doors for me, wearing a blue suit, slightly snug around his waist. He clasped his hands in front of his belt. It was clear that our meeting was important. Sharif was surrounded by several lackeys, who all smiled tight-lipped before looking down at the ground. I jumped out of the car, sweaty after the ride, panicked because I was late. I shook Nawaz’s hand—he had soft fingers, manicured nails, baby-like skin that had probably never seen a callous.

  “Hello, Kim,” he said.