The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [25]
CHAPTER 6
MARCH OF THE PIGS
Crouched on the dirty pavement, the fortune-teller studied my palm, shook his head, and started talking.
“What’s he saying?” I asked.
Dr. Ali, working with me because Farouq was busy with family obligations, shot me a look, somewhere between a smirk and sympathy.
“He says you will have a miserable life. Nothing will ever go right for you. You will always be unhappy. Do you want to hear more?”
“No,” I said. “I get it.”
I should have known this would be my fortune at the Kabul Zoo. Bored with all the obvious stories before the parliamentary elections in September 2005, I had made a bold move. I had gone to the zoo, planning to use it as an interesting way to tell the history of modern Afghanistan. My hook was Marjan the lion, donated by Germany in 1978, just as a coup by a Marxist party and Soviet sympathizers in the military sparked rumors of a Soviet invasion. Back then, in the zoo’s heyday, more than seven hundred animals lived there.
The next year, the Soviets indeed invaded, and Afghanistan became the major chip in the poker game between the Soviets and the West. The CIA, the Saudis, and Pakistani intelligence eventually decided to support the seven major Afghan jihadi parties, sending money and weapons, using Islam as a rallying tool. And by the end of the 1980s, the Soviets left, followed shortly by American pledges of help. The zoo languished.
An uncertain pall fell over the capital. The pro-Soviet government remained nominally in charge, but soon lost control of the countryside. The jihadi parties pushed toward Kabul, finally capturing the city in 1992. Their fragile warlord coalition held for only a short time. Warlords then took positions outside the city, shelling it while trying to kill and intimidate their rivals’ supporters. The Kabul Zoo was not immune—walls were knocked down or scarred with bullets. The zoo museum and the restaurant were rocketed.
Fighters from various factions, hungry for meat, soon realized the zoo had a ready supply. They kebabed the crane and the flamingo, roasting them over an open flame as zoo workers watched. They killed the two tigers for their pelts. One day a few fighters wanted to see how many bullets it took to kill an elephant. The answer: forty. Others stole the wooden fences from the zebra enclosure to feed fires. Animals died of starvation, of disease.
The bedlam inside the zoo mirrored what was happening in the city. Ask Afghans when the worst period of time was in Kabul, and they’ll never mention the Soviets or the Taliban. They’ll talk about this time, the civil war, when chaos and crazy ruled. They’ll talk about the warlords.
One afternoon at the zoo, a Pashtun fighter inexplicably jumped into the cage of Marjan, who promptly bit off the man’s arm. The man later died. The next day, the man’s brother went to the zoo for revenge. He threw a grenade into the lion cage, which sent shrapnel into Marjan’s muzzle, destroying one eye and almost blinding him in the other. The lion’s face was frozen in an expression somewhere between grief and a Halloween mask, with eyes that appeared to have melted into his nose.
Even then, the indignities were not over.
The Taliban, a Pakistan-supported movement of ethnic Pashtun students from Islamic schools called madrassas, had seized control of much of the south. Spreading fear and the sick kind of security that only fear can deliver, the Taliban marched north and east, finally arriving in Kabul in 1996. The warlords fled. Taliban leaders then declared that Afghans must live by their version