The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [114]
Upon hearing our plans to leave, the mayor asked me to wait. He then ran inside a house and ran out, holding a large white scarf embroidered with pink-and-green flowers. He presented it to me in front of the alleged villagers.
“Because you are our first foreigner,” he said.
I took it. The crowd of alleged villagers clapped. I made a grand speech.
“Thanks so much for this. Your hospitality—threatening to beat us up and set our car on fire, refusing to let us walk around, lying to us consistently, and now this, handing me this scarf so I can cover myself up—it’s truly been amazing. I’m speechless.”
My translator looked at me.
“I really hope none of them speak English,” he said, before sanitizing my speech for the masses. They clapped again. I waved, tossed the scarf in the backseat, and hurtled into the car.
We stopped first at the press club in the neighboring town. A club officer confirmed that the surviving militant was from this Faridkot. A TV journalist who had visited Faridkot earlier said all the villagers said the man was from this Faridkot—off the record.
“But on the record, they refused,” he told us.
While in the press club, my translator’s brother called in hysterics. A police official had just called to tell him that we had been kidnapped. Classic ISI intimidation, designed to scare us into leaving. A friend, another journalist, later called me, saying that he had been told that my translator and I had been beaten up—his glasses and my computer had been broken.
We left. But we also visited the police commander for Okara district and told him about our reception. “I can’t say anything,” he said. A bit later, when the news-agency journalists came to complain about their stolen phones and DVs, the commander made a call.
“Sir,” he said, “your men have snatched the journalists’ DVs and telephones. You can erase the images, but please give them back to the journalists.”
Nothing odd going on, nothing at all.
Wary of the reach of both the ISI and Nawaz Sharif, Samad and I decided to drive all the way to Islamabad that night, dropping off our translator on the side of the road near Lahore.
“I’m leaving town for a while,” he said. “I’ll probably go underground. You won’t be able to reach me.”
This cloak-and-dagger show could strangle the country. One journalist we met was arrested after my story. I later tried to help another journalist, threatened by the ISI after his TV report aired, get out of Pakistan, without success. Even a year later, any journalist who went to this Faridkot would risk arrest or harassment by the agencies, who stalked this corner of nothing like a traffic cop looking for his quota.
My story ran on the front page. The next day was Eid. I opened my front door and saw rivulets of blood running down the street from all the animals gutted to mark the holiday. A man in a tan salwar kameez stained with blood walked down the middle of the street, holding a dripping knife, his eyes glazed. Anywhere else in the world, I would have run away screaming. Here, this was normal. Considering everything happening in the country, all the blood and gore, I barely noticed that the Tribune Company had just filed for bankruptcy. Sacrifice? I was a newspaper reporter working for a bankrupt company in the middle of the war on terror. I was standing in line like a dumb steer in a chute in Montana, and I didn’t even know it.
CHAPTER 24
BAD LIVER AND A BROKEN HEART
The threat of war loomed between Pakistan and India. I had been through this before—back in 2002 and 2003, when the two countries bumped chests the last time around, after the attack on India’s parliament was blamed on Lash militants. Because of our history, I treated this display of force between the two neighbors as what it was—a chest-thumping drama worthy of an Indian movie. Now that both countries had nukes, and now that both countries salivated for U.S. approval, war was unlikely. Still, we all wrote stories about the two nations being on the verge of hitting the button. Everyone pumped it up like a championship football