The Taliban Shuffle (18 page)

Later it seemed as if this Halloween blowout was the last gasp of the kind of freewheeling fraternity-party craziness that had become normal in Kabul. The Fun House would soon break up. The foreigner parties would start to have guest lists for security’s sake—and often, Afghans like Farouq weren’t included on those lists. As the crisis in the country deepened, the Westerners would segregate themselves and retreat into their compounds, building a separate world in Kabul, free of the hassles of Afghanistan, free of Afghans.

M
y eccentric grandpa, the Interior Ministry’s Abdul Jabar Sabit, had gone from media shy to overexposed almost overnight. The Don Quixote of Afghanistan had led police and journalists on a raid of Afghan corner shops, confiscating about three thousand cans of beer and six hundred bottles of wine in one afternoon. He was hardly alone in his morality quest. The country was considering creating a new vice and virtue department, harkening back to the days of the Taliban, when special cops patrolled the streets looking for men with short beards and women with obvious ankles. All the noise had the intended effect. The two stores that had sold booze to foreigners announced that they would no longer stock alcohol—a move that would not end the capital’s booze supply but would make it much more scarce and expensive. Bottles of Jacob’s Creek that sold for under $8 in the U.S. would now fetch at least $40 apiece.

I had kept up an acquaintance with Sabit, but a nervous one. I worried that he would turn on me, like he had turned on his other drivers, and I alternately wondered if he was even more fundamentalist than he outwardly behaved, or if he was possibly a hypocrite.

Sabit now courted the media so incessantly, he seemed to be running for office—and as it turned out, he was. The Brits and the
Americans had been trying to improve the country’s justice system, even though neither group was supposed to be involved. In one of the biggest practical jokes ever played on Afghanistan, Italy had been tapped to reform the courts, despite the country’s lackluster justice record—in only the most recent example, Italy’s prime minister had been accused of bribing judges and tweaking laws to avoid conviction. The Italians’ efforts on judicial reform in Afghanistan so far could only be described as impotent.

Unwilling to sit on the sidelines, the Brits and the Americans now sold Sabit as the answer to government corruption. He was being pushed as the best choice for attorney general, the top lawyer in the land, a crucial job. Somehow the Afghan government needed to convince its citizens that criminals would be held accountable, that corruption would not be tolerated, and that an Afghan justice system was more effective than the Taliban’s Islamic courts. Like civilian casualties, corruption was turning into a major wedge issue. The Taliban may have been strict, but they did promise law and order, and they weren’t for sale. (Most of the time. In Afghanistan, there were always exceptions.)

Sabit was not an entirely new suggestion for attorney general. I had heard about this plan months earlier, from a U.S. embassy official.

“Sabit? Really?” I had asked.

“Sure,” the embassy man had said. “He may be an unguided missile, but he’s our unguided missile.”

And maybe that was true—when Sabit visited Guantánamo Bay, he largely validated what the United States had said about the American detention center there, even as he pushed for some allegedly innocent men to come back home. He had also sounded all the right notes about fighting corruption and following the advice of his benefactors. Yet Sabit faced an interesting paradox. Some people saw him as too conservative, given his morality campaign and past alliance with the fundamentalist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Others saw him as a U.S. patsy.

But Karzai nominated Sabit anyway, which meant that Sabit had to appear before the Afghan parliament and convince members to vote for him. This wasn’t entirely necessary—Karzai largely ignored the body, and would later even choose to keep his foreign minister when the parliament sacked him. But the affirmation would give Sabit legitimacy. He gave a long speech, talking poignantly about corruption and the need to fight it. The parliament overwhelmingly voted for him.

“You should have seen my speech to them,” Sabit told me later. “I won them over. By the end, they all loved me. They were all clapping. Some were crying, they were so impressed.”

Typical Sabit self-aggrandizement, and I believed one-third of it, a good rule of thumb for most Afghan officials. Regardless, the wild-haired Pashtun with the long white beard and tailored suits who had taught me to shoot a Kalashnikov and threatened to kill his neighbor became the country’s attorney general. He called me over to his new office in the fall of 2006. His desk was heaped with bouquets of fluorescent, glittery fake flowers, and I tossed a box of chocolates into the psychedelic garden, which promptly swallowed it. Dozens of men in turbans and various hats sat in his office, which smelled vaguely of feet.

I sat in the office politely. About a hundred more men waited in the lobby and garden. Sabit held court for an hour in Pashto. At a certain point, I walked out and left my regrets with the secretary, who had been fired as Sabit’s driver soon after our shooting expedition.

That became a daily routine—Sabit called me over. I sat in his office, drank a lot of green tea, and ate a few bitter almonds. And then I left, without talking to anyone.

“I’m not coming to see you anymore,” I finally told him. “It’s pointless. You have no time to tell me what’s going on.”

“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 the occupants of Shir Pur, the Kabul neighborhood where all the old warlords and drug lords and influential government officials had been given land by the government. He flew around the country, holding press conferences. Every Afghan I met, when trying to name something positive, mentioned Sabit. He was seen as a bit of hope.

But his first major target—a rival accused of the relatively benign crime of threatening a judge—easily evaded arrest, despite cops surrounding his house. Sabit then accused the Kabul airport police chief of corruption, although the chief was universally considered clean. When I worked on a story about corruption, about all the Afghan officials who had asked for
shirini
(Dari for sweets), a man told me a prosecutor under Sabit had asked for $2,000 to free his nephew. And even when Sabit had legitimate targets, he was often ignored. He arrested corrupt officials in the provinces of Herat, Balkh, and Khost. They were released almost as soon as he left town.

Then Sabit messed up publicly. In the spring of 2007, he picked a fight with Tolo TV, the most powerful TV station in Afghanistan. He charged that the station had misquoted him by saying he had said “system” when he really said “judicial system”—impossible considering that Sabit’s statement had been televised, and ridiculous because the distinction hardly mattered. In a typical jackbooted abuse of power, Sabit sent police to surround the TV station and arrest various employees. At least two Tolo workers were beaten up. For Sabit, that was not a smart move, considering that Tolo had some very influential Western friends, not to mention pushy journalists. Tolo reporters then dug into Sabit’s life, finding out that despite his avowed hatred of corruption, he had somehow secured a nice plot of land behind a hospital in Wazir Akbar Khan, one of Kabul’s most exclusive neighborhoods, through connections to the Kabul city government. Other journalists interviewed brothel and restaurant owners claiming they were asked for kickbacks. Some
said the most significant change under Sabit was an increase in bribe amounts.

Sabit was his own worst enemy. He had earlier given a TV interview where he had called one of the top religious men in the country a “donkey pussy,” a common epithet in Afghanistan. Tolo started playing the clip of Sabit saying “donkey pussy” incessantly—inserting it into the satirical TV show
Danger Bell
. Weeks later, Sabit picked a fight with a Northern Alliance warlord, one described by an Afghan in a 2003 Human Rights Watch report as a “maniac” and “dangerous.” On the way to a spot where Afghans picnicked on Friday afternoons, Sabit jumped out of his car during a traffic jam. He was typically angry and blustery, yelling at people, telling them where to go. The warlord drove up with his family, and the two men somehow got into a fight. Sabit was beaten with rifle butts. Although he wasn’t seriously injured, the attack showed his power, or lack of it. Police were sent out to the Panjshir Valley to arrest the warlord, but his militia quickly sent them home. Everyone said they were sorry and moved on.

Despite our falling out, I didn’t relish Sabit’s humiliation. It implied that Afghanistan was dangerously fragile—not because the Taliban was so strong but because the government was so weak. Karzai just kept bending. When anyone challenged him, he folded. And his handling of various crises indicated that he cared more about the foreigners than the Afghans, which made him even more unpopular.

One such crisis involved Ajmal Naqshbandi, the poet of a translator who had helped me when Farouq got married. He was the Afghan everyone talked about, the example of the lack of justice, of the compromises Karzai made. Since I had worked with him three years earlier, he had grown as a journalist, dangerously so. Ajmal had repeatedly traveled to risky parts of the east, developing sources with insurgents there, and he was crazy enough to meet them face-to-face. I saw Ajmal occasionally when he worked with friends or waved from a passing car. Sometimes we ate at the pizza restaurant and guesthouse run by his family.

But that March, Ajmal had taken an Italian journalist to meet the Taliban in Helmand Province. The two men were immediately kidnapped; their Afghan driver’s throat was slashed in front of them. The Taliban made their ransom demands. After two weeks, in exchange for five high-level Taliban prisoners and possibly money, the Italian journalist was released. Ajmal was also supposed to be freed—but the Taliban kept him, maybe to make the Karzai government look bad. Three weeks later, after several dramatic appeals by Ajmal, his throat was slit.