The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Kim Barker
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 030747738X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Now a Major Motion Picture titled Whiskey Tango Foxtrot starring Tina Fey, Margot Robbie, Martin Freeman, Alfred Molina, and Billy Bob Thornton.
When Kim Barker first arrived in Kabul as a journalist in 2002, she barely owned a passport, spoke only English and had little idea how to do the “Taliban Shuffle” between Afghanistan and Pakistan. No matter—her stories about Islamic militants and shaky reconstruction were soon overshadowed by the bigger news in Iraq. But as she delved deeper into Pakistan and Afghanistan, her love for the hapless countries grew, along with her fear for their future stability. In this darkly comic and unsparing memoir, Barker uses her wry, incisive voice to expose the absurdities and tragedies of the “forgotten war,” finding humor and humanity amid the rubble and heartbreak.
I spent the entire day in pajamas, reading newspapers and a novel, watching movies. That evening, an editor called in a panic. “I assume you’re writing a story about the tsunami.” I uttered the words every editor fears. “What tsunami?” And then I was gone again, looking at bodies, flying in an empty plane to Sri Lanka, bouncing between disaster zones, trying to make sense of a natural catastrophe that had wiped away more than 230,000 lives in an instant. So much for the world not blowing up.
problem was the dreaded cancer, always worried about stranger-danger. The peppercorns in cotto salami, and particularly the bluish meat surrounding them, I deemed poisonous and excised with a sharp knife. Halloween candy—a deadly mix of sugar, poison, and razor blades, to be tested first on my brother or our dog. Mushrooms—off-limits, ever since the elephant king in the Babar cartoon died from eating a bad one. Brown pop—it could kill me, even though I had no idea where that thought came from,
called “chief.” At times it seemed like the SUV would be buried in petals or people. Supporters pounded on the windows so insistently that it occasionally felt like a zombie movie. They shook the vehicle. Stickers and posters showed Chaudhry superimposed over crowds of thousands like a political leader, or Chaudhry and the words “My Hero.” Our soundtrack veered between cheering crowds and loudspeakers, blaring a new hit song that repetitively asked army chief Musharraf, “Hey, man, why don’t you
upcoming parliamentary elections—likely because Musharraf still hated him so much—but he would be a major factor in those elections. Sharif was trying to appear like a figure of reconciliation, above all the politics. He publicly cried after Bhutto’s death, and talked about how she had called him for his fifty-eighth birthday, two days before she was killed. I called everyone I knew to try to get an interview. “You only get fifteen minutes with Mian Sahib,” Sharif’s press aide finally told me,
Even though Sharif was not personally running, his appearance would help win votes for anyone in his party. Sharif looked at me, sighed, and shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s a good question. What do you think, Kim?” “I don’t know. I’m not the former prime minister of Pakistan. So what will you do?” “Really, I don’t know. What do you think?” This put me in an awkward position—giving security advice to Nawaz Sharif. “Well, it’s got to be really difficult. You have these elections coming