The Taliban Shuffle (29 page)

I walked into the Tribune Tower to say goodbye to my bosses and churn through some paperwork before flying home to Islamabad. Within three months, most of the glass offices would be filled with different people. Most of the top editors would quit, including the man who had written my name on an envelope, the editor in chief, and the editor who wouldn’t let me talk to Sam. The motto of the
Tribune
would change from the hopeful “World’s Greatest Newspaper” to the realistic “The Midwest’s largest reporting team.” That evening, I stepped off the elevator and walked past the inexplicable six-legged statue on my way out the door. I glanced at the nearby quote from Flannery O’Connor. It seemed apt: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” My limbo was becoming my life.

I
flew back to Pakistan to pick up the pieces. As I trudged out of the Islamabad airport into the summer swelter, Samad spotted me and grabbed my purple suitcase, big enough for him to fit inside. “Hello, boss,” he said, looking down at the pavement. This was a test run, to see if he could handle working for me again. He had disappeared for more than a month after I left for the States, unavailable whenever my office manager called. But he had finally surfaced to explain why he had been acting so strange. He was not an ISI spy. He had been seeing a girl—his fiancée.

Although he was engaged, Samad was not supposed to talk to his fiancée. This was an arranged marriage. Samad and his fiancée would not be allowed to marry for years, not until his older brother had married, and not until Samad and the girl were considered old enough. This decision had the force of law because the father of the bride, who didn’t trust Samad, was also Samad’s oldest brother. Samad and his future bride were related in a second way—her mother was his cousin. So Samad was his fiancée’s uncle and second cousin. This was hardly unusual in certain circles in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or even India. Such marriages consolidated family ties and family belongings. Only the middle class and the elite picked their own spouses, and not always.

After Samad got his car, he figured he had the status to merit a wife. But his older brother said no. So Samad and his cousin/niece had eloped. Samad’s older brother had reacted predictably, vowing to kill Samad for insulting his honor and marrying his eighteen-year-old daughter.

This, also, was typical. Because Samad and his bride had disobeyed their family, both could be killed. So for weeks, Samad and his new bride were on the run, sheltered by friends in Lahore and sympathetic family members. Finally his mother helped broker a truce. Samad and his wife moved back home. And Samad started calling my office manager, begging for his job back.

I felt I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t want to train a new driver. And I blamed myself for tempting Samad, giving him too much trust and responsibility. He had reacted like any young man to an empty house, a pool table, and free booze—actually, he had reacted better than most. And I had bigger issues to worry about than a missing bottle of Midori liqueur. Dave was moving out. We had broken up, and the split was hardly amicable. Just before flying in from Kabul, he sent me an e-mail, apologizing for the hurt he had caused but saying he had wanted to be honest about his feelings. “I have no doubt you’ll be run off your feet when I come through, as it always was,” he wrote. “Maybe I do need someone who has time to tend for me when I come in.”

Maybe so. Samad helped him move out, even though it was confusing for him, a bit like subjecting a three-year-old to a divorce. Samad had bought all three of us key chains, each with our first initial. He had been thrilled when I started dating Dave, talking about my wedding and naming our firstborn before our one-month anniversary. Although divorce and single adults over thirty were quite common in my Pakistani circle of friends, in Samad’s family such things were scandalous.

While packing up, Dave was kind and polite. I wondered if we were making a mistake. But then friends forced me to go out for
dinner instead of moping at home, and to go to the UN club for a drink.

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s where he always goes.”

“That’s where everyone in Islamabad goes,” a friend said, reminding me how miserable our options were. “You can’t let him run your life.”

So we went, hiding in the back garden because Dave had been spotted inside. After a while, my curiosity won out.

“What was he doing?” I asked.

“Singing karaoke,” a friend said.

“What song?”

“ ‘My Way.’ ”

Meanwhile, Pakistan started to simmer again. It was August 2008. President Pervez Musharraf, who had managed to hold on to his presidency even as his popularity, power, and army post had been stripped away, finally stepped down. He didn’t really have a choice—his enemies had recruited enough votes in parliament to impeach him. He gave a speech, punctuated with tears. “God protect Pakistan,” he ended it. “God protect you, Pakistan, forever. Long live Pakistan.” And then Musharraf collected his note cards and tried to stand up, with some difficulty. With that, all vestiges of the country’s military rule were finished, at least for now.

Instead of resolving the political quagmire, his move only sharpened it. Pakistan’s fragile new ruling coalition was falling apart. The coalition had agreed to restore the judges fired by Musharraf within twenty-four hours of him leaving the presidency, but that deadline quickly passed. The tiger of Punjab, Nawaz Sharif, still defending the judiciary, threatened to pull out of the coalition. But Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, did not want to restore the judges. He probably suspected that they would throw out Musharraf’s controversial ordinance granting amnesty to hundreds of politicians for past crimes; Zardari had faced accusations of corruption for misappropriating as much as $1.5 billion. Mr. Ten Percent also had his
eye on a new prize he had once claimed that he never wanted—the presidency.

The militants exploited the government’s many distractions. Two suicide bombers killed at least sixty-seven people during a shift change at the Pakistani army’s main weapons factory outside Islamabad. The insurgents also spread their control in the tribal areas, where the government had never held any sway. This time the Pakistani army tried to push back, moving into the Bajaur tribal agency and even bombing homes. As many as 260,000 civilians, or almost half the residents, fled Bajaur. Shoddy relief camps were set up, where children died of diarrhea and families slept on the ground. In some areas the militants did a better job of providing relief than the government. At a meeting with top UN refugee agency officials, Zardari offered his own creative solution to the insurgency in the tribal areas: Build a cement factory, where people could work, and build bulletproof homes, where they could live. He had even drawn up the plans for such houses himself, demanding that his minions hand them over to the UN.

Capping the chaos, Nawaz Sharif then dropped out of the government. This shocked me—he had repeatedly threatened to end his party’s support for the coalition, but I didn’t think he would, as this chess move would in effect checkmate himself, eliminating any power he had. I called Sharif for the first time in months, and he invited me over to the Punjab House in Islamabad. He had always been unfailingly polite and soft-spoken with me. He seemed old-fashioned, speaking my name as a full sentence and rarely using contractions.

This time, in a large banquet hall filled with folding chairs and a long table, Sharif told his aides that he would talk to me alone. At the time, I barely noticed. We talked about Zardari, but he spoke carefully and said little of interest, constantly glancing at my tape recorder like it was radioactive. Eventually, he nodded toward it.

“Can you turn that off?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, figuring he wanted to tell me something off the record.

“So. Do you have a friend, Kim?” Sharif asked.

I was unsure what he meant.

“I have a lot of friends,” I replied.

“No. Do you have a friend?”

I figured it out.

“You mean a boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

I looked at Sharif. I had two options—lie, or tell the truth. And because I wanted to see where this line of questioning was going, I told the truth.

“I had a boyfriend. We recently broke up.” I nodded my head stupidly, as if to punctuate this thought.

“Why?” Sharif asked. “Was he too boring for you? Not fun enough?”

“Um. No. It just didn’t work out.”

“Oh. I cannot believe you do not have a friend,” Sharif countered.

“No. Nope. I don’t. I did.”

“Do you want me to find one for you?” Sharif asked.

To recap: The militants were gaining strength along the border with Afghanistan and staging increasingly bold attacks in the country’s cities. The famed Khyber Pass, linking Pakistan and Afghanistan, was now too dangerous to drive. The country appeared as unmoored and directionless as a headless chicken. And here was Sharif, offering to find me a friend. Thank God the leaders of Pakistan had their priorities straight.

“Sure. Why not?” I said.

The thought of being fixed up on a date by the former prime minister of Pakistan, one of the most powerful men in the country and, at certain points, the world, proved irresistible. It had true train-wreck potential.

“What qualities are you looking for in a friend?” he asked.

“Tall. Funny. Smart.”

I envisioned a blind date at a restaurant in Lahore over kebabs and watermelon juice with one of Sharif’s sidekicks, some man with a mustache, Sharif lurking in the background as chaperone.

“Hmmm. Tall may be tough. You are very tall, and most Pakistanis are not.” Sharif stood, walked past the banquet table toward the windows, and looked out over the capital. He pondered, before turning back toward me.

“What do you mean by smart?” he asked.

“You know. Smart. Quick. Clever.”

“Oh, clever.” He nodded, thought for a second. “But you do not want cunning. You definitely do not want a cunning friend.”

He looked out the window. It seemed to me that he was thinking of Bhutto’s widower, Zardari, his onetime ally and now rival, a man universally considered cunning at business who many felt had outsmarted Sharif in their recent political tango.

“No. Who wants cunning?”

“Anything else?” he asked. “What about his appearance?”

“I don’t really care. Not fat. Athletic.”

We shook hands, and I left. In all my strange interviews with Sharif, that definitely was the strangest.

Pakistan’s spies soon seemed to kick up their interest in me, maybe because I had written a few controversial stories, maybe because of Sharif. Sitting in my living room, I complained to several friends about a man named Qazi, a former army colonel who worked as part of intelligence over foreigners.

“Qazi,” I said. “That guy. He always calls me and asks me what I’m doing.”

My friend’s phone started ringing. He looked at the screen, then at us.

“It’s Qazi,” he said. “I’m not answering it.”

Then my phone started ringing. Qazi. I felt I had no choice.

“Hey, Qazi.”

“Hello, Kim, how are you, how is everything, your house?”

“Fine. I’m kind of busy.” I rolled my eyes, looked at my friends.

“So did you like Taxila?”

“What?” A friend had recently driven me through Taxila, a town near Islamabad where I had bought a plaster-of-paris disco ball and a five-foot-tall mirrored plaster-of-paris flower vase. But how could Qazi know this?

“Did you like the shopping there?”

My tone grew sharp. “How do you know I was there?”

He started laughing. “Oh, you’d be surprised what I know. I have eyes everywhere.”

“OK, then. I gotta go.” I hung up.

That was creepy, but I didn’t have time to think about it. Zardari was soon elected president, ending his quest for the power that he had repeatedly claimed not to want. As one of his first official moves as president, Zardari would travel to New York and call vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin “gorgeous” and threaten to hug her. Pakistan: Spreading love and good feelings, around the world.

It would soon be Ramadan, the fasting month that made working in an Islamic country almost unbearable, so I decided to leave for a short reporting trip to India. But I still didn’t have my annual Pakistani visa, despite applying more than a month earlier. My current visa was about to expire. I was stuck. Two days after Zardari’s election, a man rang my doorbell in the late afternoon. He said he was from the Interior Ministry and was following up on my visa application, but he was probably a spook. He had a slight brown beard and light gray eyes, and was wearing a button-up plaid shirt and gray pants. He looked gray—how appropriate. He called me “lady,” and not in a nice way.

“Lady, give me your CV,” he insisted.

I didn’t have a curriculum vitae or a résumé.

“What’s your name?” I countered.

“Lady, give me your CV. CV,” he repeated.

“What’s your name—are you ISI?” I asked.

“Interior Ministry. Lady, CV,” he demanded.

“Give me your card.”

He ignored me.

“I don’t have a CV.”

“Lady, you have to have a CV.”

It was like a Jerry Lewis skit.

“Calling me lady like that—it’s rude,” I said.

But he was right—I should have a CV. I should have been looking for a job, now that he mentioned it, but instead I was stuck, hoping desperately to hold on to this one. He was growing upset, standing on my front porch. I knew I needed to handle this, or he’d just keep coming back, so I invited him inside my house, and then inside my office. That’s what he wanted—to check out me and my surroundings. Many Pakistanis believed American journalists were actually American spies—a suspicion only bolstered by past claims of American spies to be working as journalists. My spook stared at the difficult-to-obtain maps of the tribal areas pinned to the walls, the map of Afghanistan, and then walked over to my computer.

“Lady, what is
Chicago Tribunal
?” he asked.

“It’s the
Tribune
. It’s a newspaper. Didn’t they tell you anything?”