the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

this to be the best embed possible. But I wasn’t thrilled. It sounded
scary, much scarier than Paktika.
In late June, after days of waiting on the sweltering Kandahar tarmac,
I boarded a Chinook helicopter bound for Helmand. I buckled up,
along with several soldiers and a new U.S. military translator, an
Afghan American who had grown up on the East Coast. He looked
uncomfortable in his fatigues, like he was afraid he might wrinkle
them.
“What will you be doing?” I asked the man, who had the highest
clearance possible because he was an American citizen.
“Working with the special forces, I guess.” He slumped in his seat a
bit at the idea.
“Wow.” I looked at him closer. He didn’t look Pashtun. “Are you
Pashtun?”
“Uzbek.”
“And you grew up in the U.S.?”
He nodded.
“You speak Pashto?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. Enough to get by.”
This was not encouraging. His Pashto could have been perfect, but
the Afghans in Helmand would not trust an Uzbek or his translation.
They would see his very existence as an insult to Pashtuns and an
indication of how little the Americans understood. Uzbeks were from
the north, known for oppressing the Pashtun minority there. This
translator would also be unaware of all the tribal rivalries, of the
granular ins and outs that made up every community in Afghanistan,
each a universe of petty historic squabbles and alliances that mattered.
Besides, speaking enough Pashto to get by was by no means enough
Pashto. This was not the rst time, nor would it be the last, that I met
an Afghan translator who had been dropped into the wrong area.
The helicopter drowned out any hope of more conversation. Our pair
of Chinooks took o, ying low over rolling hills. Every time the
Chinooks ew the two-hour distance between Kandahar and Helmand,
they took a dierent route over dierent hills, to avoid possible
insurgents. The copilot handed me a headset so I could listen to the
banter up front.
“Look. Even the girls are throwing rocks at us,” the pilot said,