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“Come for kebabs. I promise, I will make time.”

“Fine. One more chance.”

This time, we ate kebabs wrapped in bread in his upstairs room. I tried to pump him for information on Karzai and corruption, but he ignored me. What was I getting out of this relationship, anyway? He saw me as a friend first, and as a journalist not at all. I saw him as a government official first, and as an arm’s-length friend second. We were not remotely on the same field, let alone playing the same game.

“This journalism thing. How long are you going to keep doing it?” he asked me. “You’re a bad friend, always coming in and out of the country. If you weren’t a journalist, you could just stay in Kabul.”

“But that’s my job,” I said.

“I have a better job for you. USAID is giving me a public-relations adviser. It pays $100,000 a year. The job is yours, if you want it.”

So that’s how easy making actual money was here. The salary certainly eclipsed mine, although it was still far less than most of my non-journalist friends earned in Kabul. But I knew I didn’t want to leave journalism. I also didn’t want Sabit as a boss. He may have been the Americans’ unguided missile, but unguided missiles sometimes hit unintended targets. Sabit had offered me such perks before—my own Land Cruiser, a security detail, a driver—and I had always turned him down.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

But I didn’t. Sabit had become slightly possessive, demanding more and more of my time, calling at all hours. When I talked about friends, he got angry. “I don’t want to hear about your other friends,” he said, more than once. Still, I tried to hold on to Sabit. He was the attorney general, after all. I had also lost some of my other Afghan contacts, to moves out of the country, to misunderstandings, to the fact that I could never seem to hold up my side of an Afghan relationship, an all-consuming campaign that felt like a full-time job. I still had Farouq and his family, but then again, I paid Farouq. At times I felt like I was consistently failing Afghans, never calling as much as I should, never reciprocating. In short, I was too American. So I wanted to keep my eccentric Afghan grandpa in my life. I wanted to be invited over to his grungy apartment in an old Soviet complex, which smelled like a mix of kebabs and fuel because Sabit had to keep a small generator inside for when the power was out.

One day, he called me.

“Come to my office. I have something exciting to show you.”

“On deadline, Sabit. I’m too busy.”

“Please. It will only take five minutes.”

I reluctantly agreed. We walked upstairs. He showed me a single bed, which etched itself in my mind slowly, a sad thin little mattress on a metal frame. This was a new and disturbing development. I raised an eyebrow and looked at him.

“I have a small apartment here now. You can stay here if you want, any time.”

I thanked him.

“Looks like a great bed. Wow. Yeah. Nice. I have to go, thanks for showing it to me.”

It occurred to me that I was possibly being stalked by the attorney general of Afghanistan. Another journalist then told me that when she had interviewed Sabit, he had repeatedly talked about me.

“He thinks you love him,” she said.

“What?”

“He seems to think you’re obsessed with him.”

Maybe I was in a romantic relationship with the attorney general of Afghanistan but hadn’t realized it. Despite my desire to hold on to the Afghans in my life, I needed to break up. Sabit called one Thursday morning.

“Come to the office,” he said.

“I can’t. I’m busy.”

“You’re always busy,” he said, instantly angry.

“You know, I don’t think I can do your version of friendship.”

“I can’t do yours,” Sabit replied. And then he hung up.

In the next few years, we would talk only once on the phone, when I called him to make sure he was OK after one of his many stunts, which occasionally and unsurprisingly involved fisticuffs. But I followed his career closely. He soon turned into a media darling, the champion of the underdog, determined to root out corruption. Sabit said he would take on