The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [30]
Even my first warlord, Pacha Khan Zadran, was allowed to run for parliament, despite his recent résumé of running an illegal militia and fighting the Americans before being arrested in Pakistan and jailed for a time. The disarmament commission reported that Pacha Khan had not surrendered all the weapons necessary to run for parliament. But still, the election commission allowed him, under the more-the-merrier warlord free-for-all. He won a seat. Like everyone else, he was now respectable, the past forgiven.
I stayed in Kabul for days after the election, the last visiting journalist in town. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to face Chris and what I knew I had to do. Finally an earthquake threw me out of bed, an earthquake that seemed to last for minutes and threatened to shake the Gandamack into powder. I flew back to India. The quake killed more than eighty thousand people, mostly on the Pakistani side of Kashmir. I spent barely a night with my fragile boyfriend before flying off to cover the earthquake. By the time I came back, Chris knew he needed to go home to Chicago. I also knew it—I couldn’t bear the responsibility.
“I think I want to break up,” I said as soon as I walked in the front door.
“I know,” he said.
Later I told him he needed to leave. Soon.
“But I want to stay for a while,” he said. “I want to be here for your birthday.”
“Go home for my birthday.”
I wasn’t trying to be cruel. The best gift he could give me was to get home safe. So I put my ex-boyfriend on a plane, threw away the Post-it notes bearing my name, and tried to forget about the lost files on my computer, which Chris had wiped clean. The next day I ran away again, back to Afghanistan, where life seemed simpler.
CHAPTER 7
MONKEY GONE TO HEAVEN
I left India without telling my bosses. They knew I was going to Afghanistan—they just didn’t know when. Not only that—I flew into Kabul, and then almost immediately took another flight an hour west to Herat. Why? Yes, I had found a story that I knew my bosses would want, but I also flew there because a man had invited me. I had become interested in Jeremy earlier that month, just as my long-term relationship was falling apart. This potential fling, spurred on by a flurry of e-mails, would never last. We were both on the bounce. I had met Jeremy a few times during the past year at various parties. Over the summer, he and his long-term girlfriend had split. Jeremy was only twenty-nine, and he bore a strong resemblance to every man I had ever dated—he was artsy, handsome, and angsty; he played the bass guitar; he wore corduroy; and he liked the band Postal Service. I told him very little about my breakup. He invited me to Herat for a long weekend. Coincidentally, a weekend that included my thirty-fifth birthday.
On that Thursday, a translator I found through Farouq picked me up at the airport. We started reporting a story on the largest parliamentary vote-winner in the province, which was near Iran and much more developed than most of Afghanistan. The top winner was a woman who won primarily because Afghan men thought the mother of six was hot. After interviewing a few men who had tacked up her election poster like some cheesecake pinup, I went to my hotel to wait for Jeremy to call. He was working on a U.S.-funded agriculture project, delivering wheat seeds to farmers in an attempt to discourage poppy cultivation. The opium trade had sprung back to life after an earlier Taliban crackdown, like a dried-out sponge dropped in water. Jeremy’s project was a well-intentioned idea but similar to fighting a hundred-year flood with a sandbag, if the sandbag were given out as a loan and had to be repaid at some point in the future. Jeremy was due back that afternoon from a meeting with farmers in Farah Province. I sat in my room, which was dubbed a “deluxe,” apparently because it had four single beds all crammed together, and waited. After an hour, Jeremy called.