The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [117]
Later, in the bathroom, I looked at myself under harsh fluorescent lights. My black eyeliner was now smudged. One eye looked like I had been slugged. I had bits of red wine in the corners of my mouth. My tongue was stained purple, the color of cheap boxed wine, as were my teeth. I looked puffy, trashy, and drunk, the opposite of sexy. But I stayed late. My slight crush drove me home, after almost backing into the British embassy. I poured myself out of his car, into my front door, and fell asleep in my dress and boots. I popped awake the next morning at nine.
I needed a new start. It was a new year, after all, and Obama was going to be president. Afghanistan and Pakistan were finally on America’s radar, the biggest story in the world. I focused on work, on cultivating new sources, on winning Ultimate Fight Challenge. I vowed to do embeds, blogs, video, interviews, cartwheels, breaking news, long features, recipes, algebra. If there was going to be some kind of contest over my job, I was going to fight as hard as possible to win. I channeled the theme from Rocky. I would cancel all holidays, write at all hours, say yes to every editor. I wasn’t going to just roll over and play dead. But I was hungover, still lying in bed, and I narrowly avoided strangling myself in competing clichés and resolutions.
Why did I want to stay so much, in a region that was falling apart, as my newspaper was dying? Because despite the missed vacations, despite everything, this still felt more like home than anywhere else. Only in this madness was it possible to feel such purpose. I was paid to watch history. In a small way, I felt that I was part of something much bigger, like I mattered in a way I never did back home. Every dinner conversation felt important; every turn of the screw felt momentous. This was my life. I wanted to know how the story ended. And if I left here, I wanted to leave on my terms because I had decided it was time to leave, not because someone back in Chicago decided to pull the plug.
So I came up with targets, on both sides of the border, stories that would appeal back home, sources who could deliver scoops. I had recently met a man in the Pakistani military. He was on the inside. He knew what was happening with the troop movements against India. He called me in code, as he knew our phones were tapped. It was all very conspiratorial and promising. He called me from an unknown number.
“This is that one person you met,” he said. “Do you know who I am?”
“Oh yes, you. Of course.”
Through cryptic text messages and calls to various numbers, I invited him over to my house late one night. I served him Black Label whiskey—the preferred drink of most Pakistani men. We sat on my couch. He was nervous to tell me anything, and I knew I had to win his trust. He knew both Bhutto and Sharif. He liked Bhutto. He did not like Sharif because of a dalliance Sharif allegedly once pursued. According to this military man, the woman was the third most beautiful in the world.
Here was something I could give, a quid pro quo to get this man to trust me, a potentially damaging fact that was not actually damaging.
“I know Sharif. He must like women. He may have once fancied me, at least a little bit.”
The man struggled to hold his Black Label without laughing. He swallowed with difficulty.
“You? No. Never.”
“I was probably mistaken.”
“I mean, you’re OK,” he said. “But Nawaz Sharif could have any woman he wants. He had the third most beautiful woman in the world. And you come nowhere near that.”
“You could be right,” I acknowledged.
I decided not to risk anything else. After all, I didn’t know whose side he was on. I had learned that much about Pakistan by this point. Someone was always listening, and few things were what they seemed on the surface—except, apparently, for the gift