The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [21]
It was so quiet that I went to a brothel for fun, so quiet that I knew I should probably fly home to India to spend time with Chris, so quiet that I decided it was a better idea to hang out in the quiet. It was also so quiet that the U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, left Afghanistan for Iraq, his job done in Kabul, a job transfer that would only later seem significant, when the U.S. embassy finally got ambassadors who acted like ambassadors. In a blue tie, dark blue suit, and white shirt, Zal was predictably somber at his last press conference, telling the room that the country was in the fourth kilometer of a ten-kilometer journey. He also said he was not “a potted plant” and was available to help if Afghanistan ever wanted it.
“My time has come to say farewell,” he told the standing-room-only crowd. “I will never forget Afghanistan, and I will return.”
His show was Oscar-worthy, and I feared he was about to burst into a version of “Don’t Cry for Me, Afghanistan.” A few Afghan journalists actually seemed close to tears. Their deference toward Zal bordered on worship.
And then, with a wave and a smile that could have powered a small Afghan village, the Viceroy was gone. I didn’t know it at the time, but that would be the last large press conference I would ever attend, or be invited to, at the U.S. embassy, because in the future the embassy would stop holding free-for-all events, stop opening its doors so wide. And Zal would be the last U.S. ambassador who talked to Karzai that often.
Because Kabul was so quiet, our team—Farouq, Nasir, the photographer, and me—went to the most decrepit circus on the planet, the Pak-Asia Circus, making its first grand tour from Pakistan. It featured a ripped tent, a tightrope that sagged dangerously close to the ground, and so much more. The big top here was more of a sad raggedy small top. The knife thrower accidentally hit his beautiful female assistant in the thigh, drawing blood, but here in Afghanistan, such minor bloodshed qualified as slapstick comedy. The circus was usually packed, mainly with government workers, even the army, who didn’t have to pay for the eighty-cent ticket. Nasir spotted a familiar face in the audience: the Titanic-loving taxi driver I had met two years earlier, who at the time said he was treated well at Guantánamo when he was mistakenly picked up and shipped there. Through Farouq, I asked about his life. He shrugged. He drove another taxi between Khost and Kabul, but he never got his first taxi back. He had gone to the circus twenty times in the past month—Kabul had nothing else to do for fun. But his tone had changed. He talked about an old man who recently had been shot dead in a nighttime raid near Khost by U.S. soldiers.
“America is no good,” the taxi driver said. “The Americans are no good. They are not treating Afghans right.”
Not much to say to that. He shifted his attention to the circus. So did we. A girl bent her feet over her back and used them to light a Pine Light cigarette. A man dressed up as a frog and hopped around. A boy did a headstand on a man’s head. A tightrope walker swilled liquid from an Absolut vodka bottle as he stumbled along the low-slung rope. We said goodbye to the taxi driver to interview a man who came to the circus to escape the headache of having two wives. We never saw the taxi driver again.
But we did drive south to Khost, the