The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [42]
Also, after two years, I felt I was starting to get the hang of this job, to figure it out. In Afghanistan, I knew when to wear a headscarf, when to shake a man’s hand, when to take off my glasses, when to shut my mouth. More accurately, I knew when to ask Farouq what to do, and to listen to what he said. I was also getting used to the pace, to juggling all the countries and all the work. I knew that a train crash or a religious stampede that killed seventy-five in India wasn’t a story—they happened all the time. I knew that roadside bombs in southern Afghanistan no longer merited a middle-of-the-night house call by Farouq—they were starting to happen all the time. I knew that I couldn’t pursue certain stories found in local newspapers, with headlines such as BABIES MARRY PUPPIES, because I had written too many stories about animals and risked getting a reputation. I was also now exercising regularly, regardless of the country, even just doing Pilates in a hotel room. My hair was cut every couple months; my roots matched my ends. In short, I was shaping up.
I had also started mastering certain tricks, like breathing and biting my lip to hold on to my temper, regardless of what went wrong. I had stopped throwing fits over bad laundry and bad Internet. Well, most of the time. An exception was made for the guys who incinerated my pajama bottoms in an Indonesian hotel room, just because I left them on the bathroom floor. I channeled Sabit as I went off on them.
Back in Kabul after the riots, I opted against staying in the Gandamack or another hotel, potential targets for more violence. Instead, I decided to stay at a friend’s house, figuring that there, I would be safer. Just after my plane landed, Farouq and I met my British journalist friend Sean for lunch at L’Atmosphère, which would sometimes let its strict no-Afghan policy slide. Farouq was slightly uncomfortable, but in the daytime, no one seemed to care. Sean wanted to talk about the Taliban and related insurgent groups. But Sean, who liked conspiracies and intrigue just as much as the Afghans, figured his phone could be tapped or the trees in L’Atmosphère bugged. So he never referred to the insurgents by name. He called them “Tango” instead.
“Sami thinks he’s got a way to meet Tango,” Sean told us. Sami was Sean’s fixer.
“Tango? Seriously? You need a better code word,” I replied.
His documentary the year before about the driving school for Afghan women was the best I had seen about living in the new Afghanistan—and there had been several, primarily shot by Europeans. But this time, Sean wanted to do a documentary on the Taliban. He wanted war. Sean wanted the typical heart of darkness craved by a subspecies of male foreign correspondent, mostly British, all adrenaline junkies, who figured they were wasting time if they weren’t dodging bullets. Clearly, the divorce had gone through. His cause to win back his wife was probably not helped by a magazine spread the previous fall, which featured a picture of him in a Kabul brothel, allegedly soliciting a prostitute for sex. Sean had actually been in the brothel helping a photographer friend get pictures of clients, but since she could not convince any real clients to agree to a picture, she used a photograph she slyly snapped of Sean. Sean’s face had been blurred, but his profile was unmistakable. When one of his sons saw the magazine spread, he said simply: “Daddy.”
Now, shaded by an umbrella in the garden, Sean asked for advice. With few Taliban contacts, I could offer little help. But Farouq had just been with a journalist