The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [49]
“What did he say?” I asked.
“Tell you later,” said Farouq, still laughing.
We climbed into the Toyota Corolla and waved goodbye.
“Come on Farouq, tell me, what did he say?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way—it’s Kandahar,” Farouq said. “He said, ‘If you put a turban on that one, she would be a handsome boy.’ ”
In Kandahar, I could only take that one way.
Two and a half years later, almost everyone we met on this trip would be dead. Khakrizwal would be shot outside the home where he served us lunch. Many other Alikozai leaders would be killed or die, including the tribal chief, who suffered a heart attack shortly after being hit by a roadside bomb. A female supercop, one of the only women in Kandahar who defied the Taliban, would be gunned down as she left for work with her son. The lone survivor: Karzai’s brother, the alleged drug trafficker and power broker, who had denied any wrongdoing, saying that the allegations were simply an attempt to discredit his brother. “I am sick and tired of the drug accusation,” Ahmed Wali Karzai told me. “It’s the same old story. It’s to get to the president.” But over the years, the allegations would only gain credibility, with various Western officials talking about them like fact. For whatever reason, almost any Afghan who dared to speak publicly about them would mysteriously end up dead.
We soon drove back to Kabul, accomplishing all but one goal. We failed to meet with the Taliban commander from Helmand. Farouq refused to take me out of Kandahar to meet any Taliban officials in the field because he didn’t trust them. The Helmand commander said he could not drive to Kandahar to meet us because the Americans had launched a new operation, aimed at flushing out the insurgents. Operation Mountain Thrust featured more than ten thousand international and Afghan troops, the largest operation since the fall of the Taliban. With a name like that, I knew I had to get some.
CHAPTER 10
HELL YES
Sure, Operation Mountain Thrust may have sounded like a porno—English-speakers in the country milked it all they could, drawing out the pronunciation into “mount-and-thrust”—but at least it wasn’t Operation Turtle, the even more ridiculously named operation nearby. This mission was seen as crucial, aimed at securing dangerous areas in the south before the United States officially handed them over to various NATO countries, especially since the Taliban was trying to take advantage of that handover. In many cases, the troops were moving into areas they had never before entered, undoubtedly a bit late, almost five years into the war, but who was counting? The war would be won or lost here, in the dangerous and so-far-untamed south. The Canadians had taken over in Kandahar. The British were taking the lead in Helmand, the southern province that bordered Kandahar on the west. The Dutch—the Dutch?—would take Uruzgan, the small province just to the north of Kandahar and east of Helmand. The Romanians would take the lead in Zabul, east of Kandahar and Uruzgan. The United States would shift its primary mission to eastern Afghanistan, but really, it seemed like the Americans hoped to tiptoe out of Afghanistan altogether.
After signing up for another embed, I found myself earmarked for Helmand, ground zero of everything bad in Afghanistan, the heart of both the Taliban and the poppy trade. It hadn’t always been this way. Helmand was once the country’s breadbasket. The United States had spent so much development money here in the 1960s and 1970s that part of Helmand was dubbed “Little America.” But development stalled during the country’s wars, and farmers fell back on the region’s longtime favorite cash crop, a flower that grew well during droughts and earned top dollar, the poppy, the raw material for opium and heroin. While in power,