Inside the Taliban Shuffle
Source: Foreign Policy, 3/2/2011
ASP Fellow Joshua Foust authors a review of Kim Barker’s book The Taliban Shuffle.
By Joshua Foust
In a way, that is the real tragedy Barker explains in Taliban Shuffle, though she’s not nearly that specific. Despite her friendships with well-to-do, educated, English-speaking Kabulis, her one trip to the Arghandab didn’t really teach her much about how Kandahar works. Her brief interview with Pacha Khan didn’t help her understand Gardez’s nasty politics. Living in a mansion in Islamabad only helps you understand so much of what drives Pakistan’s horrifying slow-motion implosion. If nothing else, Barker’s book is a perfect encapsulation of the many flaws of international reporters — their obsessions, neuroses, failures to understand the stories sitting right in front of them — where interviewing captured impoverished Taliban in a prison substitutes for actually understanding what motivates people to plant bombs and fire mortars into a city. Read as a summary of how and why the U.S. got so many things wrong about the war, Taliban Shuffle is just about perfect.
Not many women can say that Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s troubled former prime minister, tried to set her up on a date with a Pakistani man. Kim Barker, the author of The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, can do that one better: she can say Sharif tried to set her up with Asif Ali Zardari, the president of Pakistan.
Barker, appropriately, declined Sharif’s kind invitation; she also had to decline, sometime later, Sharif’s invitation to be his latest mistress. Her surreal book is chock full of such ridiculous experiences, whether the grabby, eve-teasing crowds of Pakistani men in Peshawar or the uncomfortably flirtatious former Afghan attorney general, Abdul Jabar Sabit. Barker, a former Chicago Tribune correspondent now with ProPublica, recounts nearly a decade of soul-wrenching zaniness, perpetrated in equal parts by the Afghans, Pakistanis, and the white people moving amongst them both, with a good sense of humor. This is funny stuff, it’s true. But it’s also very sad.
In chunks of her book, for example, Barker uses Afghans not as vessels to explain and humanize the war but as props to further her own decadence. Even now, as she uses catharsis to cleanse her soul, the tragedy of their lives is given little more than a throwaway line at the end of a chapter or two. That time a British journalist kissed her while she was trying to use the bathroom at a whites-only guesthouse in Kabul? Four pages. Beyond the cliché-ridden prose and a meekly attempted sardonic shake of the head, her book denies Afghans agency, personhood, and choice. She attempts to explain how she fell into deep burnout sometime in 2009; how the weight of all the bad policy finally dragged her down; how the unending corruption of Afghanistan and the casual brutality of Pakistan wore her out. But even her best friends there seem to be little more than ciphers representing the sum total of their respective country’s people.
Then there are the constant clichés. A decade after U.S. troops first assaulted Afghanistan, it is difficult to discuss the war without resorting to clichés. They permeate everything written about the country, whether the people (tribal, venal, obsessed with sex and animals and porn and drugs and politics), the landscape (a “moonscape,” to be more precise, as if America lacks deserts or mountains), or the fighting (bloody, Taliban, IEDs, ambush, airstrike). In a way, writing a book written entirely in cliché makes sense, if seen as a meta-commentary on the slipshod disservice the journalistic community has done the American public in not properly covering the place.
Alas, that is not what Barker has done. In Taliban Shuffle, she recounts all of those journalistic clichés, but she doesn’t seem aware of what they are. She complains bitterly at the “criminal negligence” of Afghanistan by the International Community from 2002 to 2006, but she can barely give more than a fill-in-the-blanks description of what happened right in front of her nose. In a real way, she is repeating and amplifying the journalistic sins that have beset Afghanistan almost as much as the West’s military and political missteps there, but rather than purging her guilt for participating in it, she seems only interested in explaining why her life was so difficult being a senior reporter for a major, though bankrupt, newspaper.
That’s not to complain of Barker’s attempts to humanize herself. Having been a very brief witness to the expat scene in Kabul — a kaleidoscopic bacchanalia of excess and debauchery — the need for catharsis from being a participant for so long is obvious. It is only at the end of her tale, when Pakistan’s frightening power politics has frightened her more than the Taliban’s IEDs ever did, when her unemployment finally prompted her to reconsider her choices and her options, and her own self awareness pokes through the haze of nihilism so many foreign correspondents develop, that Barker seeks solace in reality.
But that’s probably the point anyway. Barker is not writing about Afghanistan, but about the disconnected, decadent, exploitative foreigners who write about Afghanistan. In this, her book is a probing — and uncomfortably hilarious — glimpse inside the universe so many of our foreign correspondents inhabit. It is a universe where Afghanistan is little more than Kabul with occasional field trips elsewhere; where Pakistan is boring Islamabad punctuated by bombs in other cities; where it’s normal to live in hotels and attend fabulous parties at mansions where all the locals speak English and drink wine. For exposing this world for the hollow fraud it is, Barker deserves enormous praise.
One anecdote in particular summarizes so much of what’s gone wrong in the coverage of the war. It is right at the very beginning, when Barker is in Gardez City in 2002. She is about to interview Pacha Khan Zadran, a warlord who probably best symbolizes everything that went wrong with the government’s attempt to integrate the warlords that had choked the country for almost a decade. Installed as the governor of Paktia in 2001, Pacha Khan was then removed when local tribes essentially rebelled against his leadership. During the ensuing clashes, Pacha Khan’s forces shelled Gardez, killing upwards of 50 civilians — and polarized the entire area into pro- and anti-Pachan Khan factions. By September of 2002 the U.S. military — under the command of future ISAF commander Dan McNeill — ended their relationship with Pacha Khan’s forces, creating a power vacuum. Pacha Khan became locked in a deadly rivalry with another tribal elder, Hakim Taniwal, over who gets control and influence of Khost’s politics (Taniwal later mysteriously died in a suicide car bombing; the culprits were never identified). It was a total mess.
Barker walks into this situation and describes Pacha Khan’s murder of civilians as throwing a temper tantrum “apparently because no one was paying enough attention to him.” She imagines herself being at the mercy of his Pashtunwali, as his son had just been killed. She is fascinated by his interior decorator. Barker describes herself as ignorant, and this is true (though almost everyone was at this point in the war). But what’s so troubling is, over the next six years Barker develops a sense of how palace politics work in Kabul, how disconnected the U.S. military is from the streets of Kabul, even of the tragedy of the Taliban’s unanswered campaign to execute all the pro-government elders in Kandahar. But she never seems to develop an understanding of Afghanistan itself, and her time in Pakistan seems limited to covering suicide bombs and flirting with Nawaz Sharif.
These things matter in both countries. No one could deny that. But they are also only a part of the story. Events in Kabul will not dictate the country’s future. Events in the countryside, where people make decisions to support or reject the many different sides to the war — that’s what will dictate Afghanistan’s future. Pakistan’s future, too, is out in the tribal areas, in the endless brown-green hills of Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, and not, ultimately, in Rawalpindi. Barker is not unique in focusing on the easiest parts of either country in her reporting — and in fact, I’d place her near the top of foreign correspondents who’ve covered both. But the system she reported for, the much-hated Sam Zell-ification of her paper the Chicago Tribune only among the most explicitly distasteful, simply never bothered to understand Afghanistan as a place filled with people, rather than a war filled with combat.
