The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [128]
Helicopters rumbled in the distance. I asked if Karzai was coming by helicopter, which would be further evidence of bad security and Karzai’s isolation.
“What do you want?” his campaign spokesman said. “He’s not coming here by helicopter. He’s driving. Come on.”
Ten minutes later, the sound of helicopters grew louder.
“So is he coming by helicopter?” I asked.
“No, he’s coming by road,” the spokesman said.
“But those are helicopters.”
“What do you want, they’re just patrolling.”
The helicopters landed. Karzai strode into the building, waving, shaking hands with the women. He was polished as always—wearing his peaked hat made from the hair of a slain newborn goat, a gray suit jacket over his pressed cream-colored traditional long shirt and pants. He pumped his hands in the air, put his hand over his heart. Women gave speeches, praising Karzai for naming a lone female governor, for letting them work in the ministries.
Karzai spoke for more than half an hour, acknowledging that some people felt he had not done enough in his first term.
“I saw a lot of improvements on my way from the presidential palace to here, beautiful houses and big buildings,” said Karzai, neglecting to mention that many were built by profits from the drug trade and corruption. “If I win the election again, I will ask the Taliban to work hand in hand with their Afghan brothers, so they can help each other to make a peaceful and secure Afghanistan in the future.”
Oh, great. Them again. Now, after making deals to win the support of the country’s most powerful warlords, Karzai wanted to make a deal with the Taliban, who clearly would balk at women being teachers, let alone governors. Regardless, as Karzai finished his speech, the women rushed toward him, handing him pieces of paper, favors they wanted, or shaking his hand and crying. He called me “ma’am,” pushed his way toward the door, and as he did so, a loudspeaker burst into flames, creating a hysterical logjam of headscarves and burqas. Caught in the middle, I shoved the tiny Afghan women to the side like Godzilla, but still, one rammed into my right knee. I limped outside and watched Karzai run toward one of the helicopters and climb inside, to fly the lonely three and a half miles back to the presidential palace.
The signs were growing that it was time to pull out—for me, at least. I went to the Nova beauty salon, where an Afghan beautician sliced open the bottom of my foot with a razor before plucking more than half my eyebrows, leaving me looking permanently frightened, a line of tiny scabs above my right eye. (The eyebrow, sadly, would never grow back quite right.) I opened the refrigerator at the house and found a tenement-sized rat, nonchalantly sitting on the middle shelf and gnawing chorizo. I suffered two bouts of food poisoning in three weeks. I ran into my ex-boyfriend Dave, who got mad when I wouldn’t look at his photographs of his various embeds. I attended my new driver’s brother’s wedding, where an Afghan woman wearing hair extensions, heavy makeup, $70,000 worth of gold, and an occasionally see-through dress featuring tiger and leopard prints looked at me disapprovingly and offered to get me a new hairdo. A friend’s fixer sneaked into our house to steal a Heineken.
The security company Edinburgh International put out an extremely helpful warning of a possible suicide bomber to its clients. “He is described as having a long beard and is wearing a white or green head covering (turban). Potential targets are not known.” I spotted an Afghan bus with a red sticker of a buxom longhaired naked woman lounging in a martini glass. Finally, Abdul Rashid Dostum, the chest-thumping, King Kong–channeling warlord who had gone to Turkey after winning his confrontation with my onetime shooting buddy and Afghan grandpa Abdul Jabar Sabit, returned from Turkey to endorse Karzai,