Kim Barker - The Taliban Shuffle - Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Mainly I hung out. I talked to the soldiers in my engineering platoon, including Crowley, a North Carolina native who blew apart any soldier stereotype I had. He had earned an anthropology degree, started graduate school in England before running out of money, and joined the army to be able to afford to go back. He was bright and, at twenty-eight, older than the other soldiers. He was cute, with slightly exaggerated ears and a big smile. Like other soldiers here, he complained to me about the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan, about the amorphous process of winning hearts and minds and meeting villagers instead of fighting bad guys. He handed out candy to kids, yanked off his helmet to wiggle his ears, won a game of “bloody knuckles” with an Afghan boy, played “Dixie” on his harmonica, and accidentally tossed a pen into a pile of cow manure when he was trying to give it to a kid. (The kids, predictably, dove into the manure, fighting over the pen.) Crowley was funny.

“Iraq is like a war,” Crowley told me. “This is like a summer camp.”

And later, he was more serious. “The army doesn’t put a lot of effort into us here,” Crowley said. “It seems like the military as a whole doesn’t care about the welfare of soldiers in Afghanistan. Here, we get a lot more complacent. I don’t ever chamber a round in my rifle anymore. Because I know nothing’s gonna happen.”

How complacent were these troops? They told us we didn’t need to wear our body armor and helmets on patrol, that they weren’t necessary. Everyone complained about how Afghanistan was a “forgotten war.” They even got generic letters about Iraq from troop-supporting strangers back in the United States.

On patrol, I spent time near Crowley because he was so open and easy. Sometimes he talked about his fiancée and his ex-wife. He was leaving the base in a few days for vacation and was getting married in a week. It was an experience I would repeatedly have, where male soldiers, many starved for female company or for a new ear to listen, would tell me things that they shouldn’t necessarily have revealed. Divorce, infidelity, loneliness—they would tell me their secrets and watch me take notes. In return, I would give them nothing—no information about my personal life, my past loves, my own flaws. One soldier in Crowley’s platoon, always an outcast, always teased for not holding his weapon correctly, sat down with the photographer and me in the mess hall one afternoon and spilled out how he never should have joined the army.

“I’m just not the world’s best soldier,” the young man said. “If there’s a way to mess something up, I manage to find it.”

It created a dilemma. I knew that the soldiers might suffer for their indiscretions. But at the same time, some of their indiscretions would be the most powerful stories. With Crowley’s fellow soldier, the one who wasn’t cut out for the army, I chose not to quote him. It was a judgment call. I didn’t want to be responsible for anything bad that might happen.

Being on an embed created other problems, such as being dependent on the very people you wrote about, and naturally wanting them to like you, and wanting the military not to blackball you. The soldiers took care of us. They sent a translator to the market to buy sunglasses and sweaters for us. They were American like me. They reminded me of Montana. They yelled at Afghan men who tried to take my picture with their cell phones. “What would you do if we tried to take a picture of your women?” one soldier said to a smiling Afghan, who snapped the picture anyway.

Regardless of any of this, I wrote the story that was right in front of me—the “forgotten war,” the bored soldiers, feeling left out of the Iraq action, and Crowley, unlocked and unloaded. He left for vacation, to get married, the same day the photographer and I flew back to Bagram Airfield.

The story got a lot of reaction. I realized how carefully everyone read anything about the troops. Through an unspoken agreement, I was expected to leave out the boredom and the fact that Crowley repeatedly was not locked and loaded. I told my critics that I just wrote what I saw. I moved on.

I had no idea what would happen.

In Kabul that spring of 2005, the lack of war was as obvious as the bikinis at the pool of L’Atmosphère, the restaurant of wicker chairs, glass-topped tables, and absurdly priced wine that had become the equivalent of the sitcom Cheers in the Afghan capital. How quiet was it? It was so quiet that an award-winning war correspondent would spend the summer filming a documentary about a Kabul school for female drivers. It was so quiet that the photographer and I rode around in a government bus in Kabul where workers yanked beggars off the street, effectively kidnapping them for a day, holding them in a school and feeding them some gruel before releasing them, a catch-and-release program for the poor. (By now we knew the regular beggars and their acts. The boy with flippers for arms. The girl who wore her blind brother’s suit jacket and led him around by his one good arm. Egg Boy, an entrepreneur who sobbed daily next to broken eggs at various intersections, raking in egg money from concerned foreigners.)

It was so quiet that I went to a brothel for fun, so quiet that I knew I should probably fly home to India to spend time with Chris, so quiet that I decided it was a better idea to hang out in the quiet. It was also so quiet that the U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, left Afghanistan for Iraq, his job done in Kabul, a job transfer that would only later seem significant, when the U.S. embassy finally got ambassadors who acted like ambassadors. In a blue tie, dark blue suit, and white shirt, Zal was predictably somber at his last press conference, telling the room that the country was in the fourth kilometer of a ten-kilometer journey. He also said he was not “a potted plant” and was available to help if Afghanistan ever wanted it.

“My time has come to say farewell,” he told the standing-room-only crowd. “I will never forget Afghanistan, and I will return.”

His show was Oscar-worthy, and I feared he was about to burst into a version of “Don’t Cry for Me, Afghanistan.” A few Afghan journalists actually seemed close to tears. Their deference toward Zal bordered on worship.

And then, with a wave and a smile that could have powered a small Afghan village, the Viceroy was gone. I didn’t know it at the time, but that would be the last large press conference I would ever attend, or be invited to, at the U.S. embassy, because in the future the embassy would stop holding free-for-all events, stop opening its doors so wide. And Zal would be the last U.S. ambassador who talked to Karzai that often.

Because Kabul was so quiet, our team—Farouq, Nasir, the photographer, and me—went to the most decrepit circus on the planet, the Pak-Asia Circus, making its first grand tour from Pakistan. It featured a ripped tent, a tightrope that sagged dangerously close to the ground, and so much more. The big top here was more of a sad raggedy small top. The knife thrower accidentally hit his beautiful female assistant in the thigh, drawing blood, but here in Afghanistan, such minor bloodshed qualified as slapstick comedy. The circus was usually packed, mainly with government workers, even the army, who didn’t have to pay for the eighty-cent ticket. Nasir spotted a familiar face in the audience: the Titanic -loving taxi driver I had met two years earlier, who at the time said he was treated well at Guantánamo when he was mistakenly picked up and shipped there. Through Farouq, I asked about his life. He shrugged. He drove another taxi between Khost and Kabul, but he never got his first taxi back. He had gone to the circus twenty times in the past month—Kabul had nothing else to do for fun. But his tone had changed. He talked about an old man who recently had been shot dead in a nighttime raid near Khost by U.S. soldiers.