The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [64]
He just looked at me.
“You know, I used to think you were smart,” he said. “But you’re really just naïve.”
Clearly, for a while at least, I had to put Afghanistan on hold. As a journalist, I shouldn’t have been offering suggestions to NATO. I shouldn’t have been taking any of this so personally. I shouldn’t have been so angry at NATO, or at that Italian journalist, who pumped his arms in the air when he flew back to Rome, while his fixer, Ajmal, sat with the Taliban, waiting to die.
Pakistan beckoned. I knew one thing about the other side of the border: I would never, ever fall in love with that country. There, I could definitely be impartial.
PART II WHACK-
A-STAN
CHAPTER 13
UNDER PRESSURE
Thousands of people blocked the road, swallowing the SUV in front of us. They climbed on the roof, pelted rose petals at the windshield, and tried to shake or kiss the hand of the man in sunglasses sitting calmly in the passenger seat. Some touched the car reverently, like a shrine. I knew I couldn’t just watch this from behind a car window. I had to get out and feel the love.
Wearing a black headscarf and a long red Pakistani top over jeans, I waded through the crowd to the vehicle carrying the most popular man in Pakistan. Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry was an unlikely hero, with a tendency to mumble, a prickly ego, and a lazy eye. President Pervez Musharraf, the mustachioed military ruler known for his swashbuckling promises to round up the country’s miscreants, had recently suspended Chaudhry as the country’s chief justice, largely because Musharraf feared that Chaudhry could block his impending attempt to be reelected president while remaining army chief. But Chaudhry had refused to go away quietly, becoming the first top official in Pakistan to object when Musharraf demanded a resignation. Now Chaudhry was a celebrity, the focal point for the fact that most Pakistanis wanted to throttle Musharraf and permanently end military rule. Anywhere Chaudhry set foot in the spring of 2007 quickly turned into a cross between a political rally and a concert.
Standing near the Chaudhry-mobile, I took notes—on the rose petals, the men shouting they would die for Chaudhry, the nearby goat sacrifice. And then someone grabbed my butt, squeezing a chunk of it. I spun around, but all the men, a good head shorter than me, stared ahead blankly. Pakistan, where even the tiny men seemed to have nuclear arms. Sometimes I hated it here.
“Who did that?” I demanded.
Of course, no one answered.
I turned back around and returned to taking notes. But again—someone grabbed my butt. We performed the same ritual, of me turning around, of them pretending neither me nor my butt existed.
“Fuck off,” I announced, but everyone ignored me.
This time when I turned back around, I held my left hand down by my side. I pretended that I was paying attention to all the cheering, sacrificing, and tossing of rose petals. I waited.
Soon someone pinched me. But this time I managed to grab the offending hand. I spun around. The man, who stood about five feet tall and appeared close to fifty, waved his one free hand in front of him, looked up, and pleaded, “No, no, no.”
I punched him in the face.
“Don’t you have sisters, mothers?” I said, looking at the other men.
Sometimes that argument actually worked.
In Afghanistan, this never happened. Men occasionally grazed a hip, or walked too close, or maybe tried a single pinch. But nothing in Afghanistan ever turned into an ass-grabbing free-for-all. In Pakistan, the quality of one’s rear didn’t matter, nor did a woman’s attractiveness. An ass grab was about humiliation and, of course, the feeling of some men in the country that Western women needed sex like oxygen, and that if a Pakistani man just happened to put himself in her path