The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [41]
CHAPTER 9
LET’S GET RADICAL
Years later, whenever anyone asked when the good war became not such a good war, my answer was easy. On May 29, 2006, when a U.S. military truck suffered mechanical failure and plowed into rush-hour traffic in Kabul, killing three Afghans. Peaceful demonstrations quickly turned into antiforeigner riots. Soldiers fired into the crowd. Afghans ransacked buildings with English-language signs, from relief groups to a pizza restaurant. They even set fire to a building they thought was the Escalades brothel, although the brothel was next door. They shouted, “Death to Karzai,” and that regional catchphrase, “Death to America,” and ran from street to street, asking guards if foreigners lived inside. They almost threw a light-skinned girl into a fire, until she shouted in Dari and they realized she was Afghan. Karzai’s political rivals from the Northern Alliance were blamed for stoking the violence, the worst since the Taliban’s fall. At least seventeen Afghans were killed in the rioting; despite considerable efforts, no foreigners died. Karzai demonstrated his usual leadership skills, waiting until the riots had almost run their course to broadcast a televised message, urging calm. But even after calm was restored, Afghans stayed angry.
It wasn’t necessarily the booze and brothels. It was the growing gap in the country between the haves and have-nots, the corruption, the warlords now in parliament, the drug lords doubling as government officials, the general attitude of the foreigners from aid workers to the international troops, and the fact that no one ever seemed to be held accountable for anything. Even if the level of foreign aid had been low compared to other “post-conflict” countries, billions of dollars had still poured in. Dozens of new gleaming wedding halls and shopping centers dotted the Kabul landscape. Warlords, drug lords, and influential officials had been handed government land for a cut rate in the neighborhood of Shir Pur, where they built gaudy mansions that looked like grade-school decoupage projects gone horribly wrong, gooey confections of pillars, mirrors, colored tiles, and green windows. But construction started only after bulldozers pushed out the poor people who had lived there before, along with their mud huts. Shir Pur, which meant “child of lions,” was now referred to as Shir Choor, which meant “looted by lions.” The style of architecture was called “narcotecture”; the hulking monstrosities were described as “poppy palaces.”
Yet for an average Afghan, life still consisted of a mud hut, an outhouse, and a couple of hours of electricity a day. Renting a decent concrete house in Kabul now cost at least $1,500 a month. Afghan teachers and police officers made between $60 and $125 a month. The only changes most Afghans had seen in Kabul had been negative ones—higher rents and food costs, higher bribes, greater hassles. Traffic jams were regularly caused by convoys of Land Cruisers with dark windows and no license plates, by U.S. soldiers screaming out orders and pointing their guns, by concrete barriers set up by foreign aid groups and companies worried about suicide bombs.
Later, I would see these riots as a major breaking point in Afghanistan, the time when we first saw just how angry some Afghans were, just how ripe the country was for a Taliban comeback, just how leaderless Afghanistan really was. Later, I would see May 2006 as the beginning of the downward spiral.
But now, I just saw the riots as worrying.
I flew to Kabul. My life had turned into this—a bomb, a riot, an earthquake, and then I hopped on a plane. Although I was theoretically the bureau chief in Delhi, my responsibilities included at least six countries, depending on which powder keg was exploding. So my three-bedroom apartment was essentially