The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [26]
Somehow the zoo survived, but just barely. When the Taliban finally fled Kabul in late 2001, after the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-backed invasion, all that remained were a few vultures, owls, wolves, the beaten-down bear, and Marjan, his bones showing through his coat. With his scars and melted face, Marjan became the symbol of all the injuries inflicted on Afghans over decades of war, of all the pain. His picture appeared on the front pages of newspapers worldwide and sparked numerous tributes on the Internet. He was Afghanistan—battered, blind, blurry, but still strong.
Within two months, he fell down dead. The bear followed soon after.
Obviously the international community had to do something. So it threw money at the problem, a reaction it would eventually have to all the crises in the country. All told, Americans donated the bulk of $530,000 raised by top international zoo managers. It was supposed to be more than enough to fix the problems at the Kabul Zoo. It was not. Afghanistan was not just a money pit; it was a money tar pit, a country where money stuck to walls and fingers and never to where it was supposed to stick. And the Chinese didn’t exactly help—a phrase that was to be repeated for years to come in almost every sector of government and aid, as China refused to do much in Afghanistan but profit from natural resources such as the country’s copper mine. Against the wishes of every other country, the Chinese government decided that the world’s worst zoo needed more animals. So it donated two lions, two bears, two pigs, two deer, and one wolf. The pigs, which resembled large Iowa farm pigs more than exotic zoo pigs, soon gave birth to five piglets. Afghanistan did not need pigs, considered dirty in Islam. It was another fine example of the unnecessary aid deemed necessary by somebody not in the country.
By the time I got to the zoo, right before the elections, the Chinese gift had been exposed as the Trojan horse it was. The male Chinese bear had died the year before, after swallowing a plastic bag filled with banana peels and a man’s shoe heel. Four pigs then died from rabies after stray dogs jumped into their pen and bit one. (Luckily the other three pigs were elsewhere at the time. Where? Who knows. They were mysterious pigs.) All the animals had to be vaccinated for rabies. Over the summer, the second Chinese bear broke out of her cage, walked down a zoo path, and hopped into the pigpen, which had a low wall apparently notorious among the animals. Two pigs were there—the other, somewhere else. The bear squeezed both pigs to death. Typically, the Afghans wanted to ascribe some sort of romance to the bear’s actions. They loved stories of star-crossed lovers, largely because many of them were forced to marry their cousins, whom they did not love in that soul-consuming, fatalistic way made popular by both Indian and Hollywood movies.
“She was lovesick and lonely and she missed her mate,” the deputy zoo director told me. “So she broke into the pig cage and tried to hug the two pigs, but she hugged them too hard and they died.”
I nodded and took notes. I tried to poke holes in his logic. “But weren’t they female pigs?”
“Yeah, so what? When you’re lonely, you’ll take love from anywhere, a female bear will take it from a female pig, no problem,” he said.
In Afghanistan, I would learn that this was too often true. The zoo workers surrounded the wayward lovesick female bear with torches and nudged her back to her cage. This was considered progress—earlier, workers