The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [103]
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