the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

“My idea is this,” I told the NATO man, leaning on the bar. “You take
the guy and give him the surgery. Then you compare the bullet with
bullets used by NATO. You’d know either way. And you’d get all this
goodwill, regardless of what you nd out, because you took out the
bullet.”
He just looked at me.
“You know, I used to think you were smart,” he said. “But you’re
really just naïve.”
Clearly, for a while at least, I had to put Afghanistan on hold. As a
journalist, I shouldn’t have been oering suggestions to NATO. I
shouldn’t have been taking any of this so personally. I shouldn’t have
been so angry at NATO, or at that Italian journalist, who pumped his
arms in the air when he ew back to Rome, while his xer, Ajmal, sat
with the Taliban, waiting to die.
Pakistan beckoned. I knew one thing about the other side of the
border: I would never, ever fall in love with that country. There, I could
definitely be impartial.