The Taliban Shuffle (32 page)

My onetime shooting buddy, Sabit, had failed so miserably as attorney general that his name was now a joke. I felt bad for him, even if I was still wary of seeing him. His moral high ground had been gradually eroded, his credibility erased. Warlords had continued to humiliate him publicly. His temper had alienated everyone. Western diplomats had started treating him a bit like a drunk uncle at a holiday party. But even as I pitied him, Sabit also shared the blame for the broken justice system and what it had become—one of the biggest failures of the international community and the government.

Finally Sabit had gone too far, even for Karzai. The previous summer, in a fit of pique, Sabit announced he was running for president. Karzai immediately fired him. The jokes started—a video appeared on TV and on YouTube, allegedly showing Sabit dancing at a party. The video was fuzzy, and Sabit’s face couldn’t be seen, but it was entitled “Afghanistan Attorney General, Dancing Drunk.” The
New York Times
later sealed the deal, reporting that the video showed Sabit dancing giddily, slurring his words, apparently drunk. I didn’t think that the dancing man was Sabit—but as usual in Afghanistan, the truth didn’t matter. His fall was complete. Afghanistan’s Don Quixote, who rode to power tilting at brothels and booze, was finished.

Things deteriorated further. I was going slightly stir-crazy after imposing my own security lockdown due to all the attacks and kidnappings. So right before leaving Afghanistan, I decided to see
old friends, making use of my new driver. On a Friday afternoon, I dropped by a going-away party for a stranger at a security-guy hangout with its own bar. Within half an hour, I wanted out. After extensive instructions, my driver picked up three of us to go to L’Atmosphère. He couldn’t find it. Our conflicting directions probably didn’t help.

“Doesn’t he know where anything is?” a friend asked.

“Apparently not,” I answered.

“How did you find this guy?”

“Farouq.”

“This isn’t safe,” she said. “The situation’s too bad to be just driving around with no idea where we are. I want to talk to Farouq.”

I called Farouq. This was probably not a good idea. This was Friday, Farouq’s day off. In an attempt to show how productive I was, how useful I was, I had been pushing Farouq harder than in years, harder than he was used to working. I listened to my friend tell Farouq how the young man didn’t know enough to be a driver. She was right—but this conversation would have fallout. She was challenging Farouq’s Pashtun-ness and questioning him in a way that was not good. Farouq wanted to talk to the driver, then me. He was icy.

“He is just a boy. He is just learning. And you’re making him work too late at night.”

“If I’m paying $50 a day for a driver, he has to work,” I said. “And it’s only eight o’clock.”

The next week, Farouq told me the driver could not work in the evenings.

“Because of the situation,” Farouq said. “He’s just a boy.”

The attacks in Afghanistan were almost always between seven and ten in the morning, and we had adjusted our schedule accordingly. Only one major attack had been at night.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Nothing ever happens at night.”

“Something might,” Farouq said.

Right before I left Kabul, the driver again couldn’t remember where a restaurant was. Farouq wasn’t in the car.

“I can’t believe this,” I complained. “My company is paying a lot of money for a driver, and you can’t remember where anything is.”

I had assumed I was paying $50 for a driver, and $100 for Farouq. But apparently Farouq and his employee had a different deal. The poor guy, struggling with his English, tried to understand me. He looked at me, and tried to explain himself in a combination of Dari and English.

“No. Not a lot.”

“How much do you make?”

“Five.” He held up his hand and waved his fingers and thumb.

I should have seen it coming. That Farouq, the master operator, would figure out a typical Afghan workaround, a way to get more money out of the
Tribune
in the last days of a regular paycheck. By my calculations, hiring a driver was now netting Farouq $145 a day, as opposed to the $125 he made when we didn’t have a driver. I tried to look at this from Farouq’s point of view. The driver was driving Farouq’s car, and $5 a day was a lot for most Afghans, most of whom made $1 or $2 a day. And it’s not like he drove much. Essentially, he was being paid to car-sit.

I filed the information away, but considering what was happening with our company, considering how Farouq’s job was under threat, I didn’t confront my old friend about something so comparatively small. I figured everything would work out soon. I just didn’t know how.

I
flew to London to meet my brother for Thanksgiving. But just as we stepped out of a cab to meet Sean for dinner, my phone rang. A boss.

“Where are you?” he said.

“London.”

“Damn. That’s right. I’m assuming you know about the Mumbai situation. Any thoughts?”

“What Mumbai situation?”

A situation, as I had learned, was never good.

He sighed. This was the same editor who had years earlier informed me about the tsunami—eleven hours after it hit—because I had taken the day off. He explained something about gunmen storming hotels in Mumbai in a coordinated attack.

“What?”

He told me to check the news and think about getting on a plane. My brother and I walked into a seafood restaurant to meet Sean, the first time I had seen him since our fateful lunch. We hugged, sat down, and ordered a bucket of seafood. I was distracted by Mumbai, and I kept searching the news on my BlackBerry. I knew I should head for the airport. India looked very, very bad. And I could tell who was responsible for it. Someone in Pakistan. Had to be.

But I decided I could wait until after dinner. My brother, a lawyer, asked Sean questions about every second of his kidnapping.

“Is this OK?” I asked Sean.

“It’s fine,” Sean said, and he regaled us with a story told so often it no longer seemed real.

But Sean seemed twitchy and different. He had a ten-o’clock shadow, and he kept leaving the table to smoke outside. He talked about his sons, and how guilty he felt seeing how old his parents looked when he returned from Pakistan. He hadn’t worked much since the kidnapping. He wasn’t sure what he would do in the future. He wanted to be in Mumbai. We finished dinner. My brother and I left.

“Really interesting guy,” my brother said. “I liked him. Pretty damaged, though.”

Indeed, Sean was damaged. I thought about him, and my own life. Since moving overseas, I had seen my brother for only three meals—two dinners and a breakfast. I had missed a family wedding, countless holidays. I had skipped out on helping my mother recover from the death of her husband. I had not been around for my father’s various health problems. Back home, I was the relative no one recognized. And here I was, on my first night of a short visit to my brother, thinking about flying back to Asia. What was I sacrificing everything for? I loved my job, but my job clearly did not love me. The messages from the new overall bosses featured ominous phrases such as “your partner in change” and did not mention foreign coverage. I had never even met the new editor of our newspaper. As the cherry on my sundae of doom, owner Sam Zell had just been interviewed by the editor of
Portfolio
magazine, in which he again complained about my story on the TV show
Afghan Star
. He was like my grandmother with my marital status—he wouldn’t let it go. It’s possible he thought I lived in Chicago.

“The entire focus is on becoming an international correspondent,” he complained. “I mean, I know that because our newspaper
sent somebody to Kabul to cover the ‘Afghan Idol Show.’ Now, I know
Idol
is the No. 1 TV program in the world, but do my readers really want a firsthand report on what this broad looked like who won the ‘Afghan Idol Show’? Is that news?”

So I added up everything—my brother, Sean, Sam Zell, all that death in Mumbai. If I had learned one thing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it was that there would always be another major tragedy. If I had learned another, it was that family was important. I had rarely put any family first, or put anything or anyone first except my job. I had lost relationships over work, friendships over work. It was time to let go.

“So you have to leave, right?” my brother asked. He knew the drill.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

I called my boss.

“So is there anyone else who can go?” I asked. “I’m a little sick.”

He may have known I was exaggerating my slight sinus infection, but he definitely knew how many vacations I had cut short, how tired I was. So he said I could stay in London for a few days.

I still flew back a day early, to Islamabad. Once the horrific siege of Mumbai was finished, killing 171 people over three days, the focus of the story switched to Pakistan, hardly a shock to the world. The one surviving militant had allegedly told Indian authorities that he was from a town called Faridkot. But at least three towns were named Faridkot in the province of Punjab alone. I had no interest in running after a ghost, in driving to town after town. I wanted the right Faridkot. I also needed to go to Lahore, the capital of Punjab, to look into the charity that American and Indian authorities claimed was a front for the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, blamed for the Mumbai attack. This group—“Lash” for short—had been formed with the help of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), the Pakistani spy agency, in the late 1980s, just after the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan. It had originally served as an
unofficial arm of the Pakistan military, doing its dirty work in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir.

After Lash was blamed for attacking India’s parliament in late 2001, Pakistan banned the group and distanced itself—in theory, at least. Like other banned militant groups, leaders were placed under house arrest, but only for a few months. Like other groups, Lash simply changed its name. Most militancy experts and Western diplomats believed that Lash was now publicly operating as the charity Jamaat-ud-Dawa. The same man had started both groups, the groups had shared the same leaders. Even before the siege of Mumbai, the United States had imposed financial sanctions on the founder and listed both groups as terrorist organizations.

Still, despite a public crackdown on Lash, the charity had run relief camps during a major earthquake and during the internal refugee crisis. A few weeks before Mumbai, the charity held two large meetings in Punjab Province, the first since Lash was banned. Almost a million people attended each meeting. The founder talked in vague terms about jihad, a phrase that in Islam usually meant “a personal struggle against temptation” but with these groups was often code for fighting in defense of the religion, which in recent years had included striking first. Some women in attendance were so impressed with the founder’s speeches, they handed over their gold jewelry for the cause.

Now India and the West accused Lash of planning the Mumbai attack. Given the group’s historic ties to the ISI, the group had either gone rogue or someone linked to the agency had known what was happening. I needed to go to Lahore, where the main mosque for Jamaat-ud-Dawa was. And I knew, with plenty of reservations, that I needed to go to Lahore because of Nawaz Sharif. If anyone knew the right Faridkot, he would.

That Friday, Pakistan seemed to have launched its typical crackdown on the charity—in other words, lots of noise, little action. A charity billboard in the heart of Lahore proclaimed: “We can sacrifice
our lives to preserve the holiness of the Prophet.” I sent my translator into the group’s mosque because I wasn’t allowed. There, flanked by three armed guards, the founder of Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Lash preached to about ten thousand men. His bluster was typical Islamic militant stuff—about sacrifice, about Eid al-Adha, the upcoming religious festival where devout Muslims would sacrifice an animal and give part of it to the poor. The holiday honored Ibrahim, or as Jews and Christians knew him, Abraham.

“Sacrifice is not just to slaughter animals in the name of God,” the founder said. “Sacrifice also means leaving your country in the name of God. It means sacrificing your life in the name of God.”

His meaning seemed fairly clear.

Meanwhile, the spokesman for the charity tried to rewrite history. He said the founder was barely involved with Lash—despite founding it—and insisted Lash was now based in India. The spokesman also drew a vague line in the sand, more like a smudge—he said the charity talked about jihad, but did not set up any training camps for jihad. The man who ran the ISI when Lash was founded denied having anything to do with the group. “Such blatant lies,” he told me, adding later that Jamaat-ud-Dawa was “a good lot of people.”

These men seemed convinced of their magical powers, of their ability to wave a wand and erase a reporter’s memory. This obfuscation was not even up to Pakistan’s usual level.

With a heavy heart, I knew I needed to see Nawaz Sharif. I figured I might be able to get something out of him that he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to tell me—as former prime minister, he’d certainly be told what was happening, but because he wasn’t a government official, he wouldn’t necessarily know that he was supposed to keep the information quiet. But this time, I planned to bring my translator along, a male chaperone. Samad drove our team out to Raiwind. I sat in the back of the car, writing up my story about the charity on my computer, trying not to think about what Sharif might try to pull this visit.

Eventually, we walked inside Sharif’s palace. Sharif looked at my translator, then me, clearly confused. He invited us both into his computer room, where we sat on a couch. Sharif sat on a chair, near a desk. When he answered my questions, he stared at my translator. My translator, embarrassed to be there, stared at the ground.

Sharif told me the right Faridkot—the one in Okara district, just a couple of hours from Lahore. He gave me the phone number for the provincial police chief. He told me what Indian and Pakistani authorities had told him about the lone surviving militant. For us, this was big news—a senior Pakistani confirming what the government had publicly denied: The attackers were from Pakistan.