The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [43]
After we finished eating, Sean asked if I would be the point of contact when he went to meet the Taliban in Helmand, in case he disappeared.
“Sure,” I said.
“It’s unlikely anyone would ever call you,” he said.
“Fine.”
The confluence of events suddenly seemed ominous. Afghans were growing angrier at the foreigners and the government. The Taliban was spreading its influence in the south. And the Americans were turning over command of the south to NATO, which was made up of some countries far less committed to war than the United States. I knew I had to get serious.
“I want to meet the Taliban,” I told Farouq as we left Sean. “Can we?”
“Maybe,” he replied. “There are safe ways to do it.”
Farouq was growing increasingly concerned about safety. His wife was about to give birth to their second child. He still liked to travel, but he also didn’t want to risk anything. I wondered if he would be willing to make the trip we had made three years earlier to visit Pacha Khan. I wondered if he had lost his edge. Three main fixers were known for meeting the Taliban, and Farouq wasn’t one of them. Those were Sami, a man named Tahir, and Ajmal Naqshbandi, my fixer when Farouq had gotten married, who was evolving from shy poet to danger boy.
The United States certainly didn’t help convince Farouq that any risk was worth it. One night, Farouq drove down the road with a full SUV—his wife, daughter, two sisters-in-law, and mother-in-law. Near the Ministry of Interior, he saw a line of headlights moving toward him. When he drew closer, he heard a bang near his windshield. He yanked the steering wheel over, braking hard on the side of the road. Then he heard another bang, and another bang. Only then, he realized the line of headlights was a U.S. military convoy. The U.S. soldiers shined heavy lights toward Farouq and started yelling at him. So Farouq turned off his lights and held his breath, silently scared, unwilling to let his family know just how frightened he was. Farouq told me the soldiers laughed at him.
“I think some of the soldiers knew that I was scared, but still they threw more tube lights on me and pushed me more to the side of the street,” he said. “American soldiers are scared from leaves, from trees, rocks, and everything in Afghanistan.”
I figured I knew what the bangs could be—when a car failed to stop, soldiers sometimes fired warning shots.
But regardless of his feelings, Farouq started planning a trip down south, as I dove into another serious issue. Hamid Karzai was once the sartorially blessed favorite of the West, but no longer. He had proved to be whiny and conflicted, a combination of Woody Allen, Chicken Little, and Jimmy Carter. Ever since Zal had left the year before, Karzai had lost direction, like the victim of a breakup. The new U.S. ambassador seemed adamant about returning normalcy to the relationship—despite the fact that Afghanistan was anything but normal. Karzai had turned into a weather-vane leader, tilting toward whoever saw him last, increasingly paranoid and suspicious, squeezed between the foreigners and the Afghans.
Even calling Karzai the “mayor of Kabul,” as many did, was too generous. When he gave the foreigners an ultimatum to remove concrete security barriers in the city, the foreigners ignored him. When Karzai complained about civilian casualties, nothing changed.
Karzai also was blamed for losing control of his brothers. One brother was a parliament member who rarely showed up. Another was publicly linked to the drug trade in southern Afghanistan, even though he denied it. Another was becoming one of the most influential businessmen in Afghanistan, allowed to privatize government companies such as Afghanistan’s only cement factory with impunity, allegedly because of his connections to the president and