the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

mine. My translator tried to protect my back. I stood in a basketball
stance, an immovable force. But not for long. A Pakistani journalist
from Aaj TV pushed past me, elbowed me in the ribs, and shoved me
to the side. I pushed back.
“You don’t see me standing here?” I said.
He shrugged. “Women should not be here anyway. This is a man’s
job.”
The crowd swayed back and forth, and I tried to keep my balance. A
man grabbed my butt, a message to my st, and before my brain knew
it, I managed to punch him in the face. Not professional, not at all, but
still somewhat gratifying.
That was the chaos just before Nawaz Sharif and his brother walked
out of the airport, with me worried about my rear, my position, the
barbed wire, a mob, and a potential bomb. Supporters lifted the Sharifs
onto their shoulders and spun them around in circles because they had
no room to walk. Nawaz Sharif looked shell-shocked. He somehow
clambered onto a rickety wooden table next to a taxi stand. The
contrast with Bhutto was obvious—she was smooth, a master
performer, charisma personied, always in control. Sharif seemed more
like a baffled everyman, nondescript and beige.
The crush of men waved their arms in the air and shouted that they
loved Sharif. He spoke into a microphone, but it was broken and no
one could hear anything he said. Speech over, Sharif climbed down
from the counter and slipped into a bulletproof black Mercedes,
courtesy of his good friend, King Abdullah, who had also shipped Sharif
back to Pakistan in a Saudi royal plane.
Now, six weeks later, it was January 2008. Bhutto was dead and
Sharif was the only living senior politician in Pakistan. He had been
banned from running in the 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 gure of
reconciliation, above all the politics. He publicly cried after Bhutto’s
death, and talked about how she had called him for his fty-eighth
birthday, two days before she was killed. I called everyone I knew to
try to get an interview.
“You only get fteen minutes with Mian Sahib,” Sharif’s press aide
nally told me, referring to Sharif by his honorary title. “Maybe twenty