the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

“Farouq, why are you upset?” I would ask. “Why are you raising your
voice?”
“Kim. I’ve told you a million times,” he would reply, loudly. “I’m not
upset. It’s just the way I talk.”
But now, after I had been gone for so long, we were excited to catch
up and report good stories. I had only a week here—I wanted to make
it count, even while juggling work and Dave, who had own into Kabul
after a grueling six-week embed that involved hiking all night through
the snow.
So Farouq and I drove around the city, something we always did
when I had been gone for a while. Kabul was slightly tense. Armed men
patrolled the neighborhood of Shir Pur, that den of corruption and
various crimes against architecture. Predictably, this was all because of
Sabit, my estranged Afghan grandpa and the country’s wayward
attorney general. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord famous for
his love of booze and horses, had sent men to beat up a rival and his
family members. In a bold attempt at law enforcement, Sabit had
ordered police to surround Dostum’s mirrored and pillared monstrosity
in Shir Pur. Dostum, in turn, ran up to the roof of his house and beat his
chest, an Afghan King Kong. The stando lasted for hours, until nally
Sabit was called o. Dostum’s armed henchman now lurked on street
corners. Sabit hid in his oce. This passed for rule of law in
Afghanistan—warlords trumped all. Sabit, the great white-bearded hope
for the Afghan judicial system, had become the symbol of its failure.
I didn’t write about it, didn’t feel like kicking Sabit when he was
down. No, I wanted something joyful, a happy story, a small good thing
in all the gloom.
So Farouq and I made plans to see Afghan Star, a reality show
modeled on American Idol and the most popular show in Afghanistan.
This show, like other programming on the country’s most popular
station, Tolo TV, started by savvy Afghan-Australian siblings, had
angered conservative mullahs and established some kind of pop culture
for Afghanistan’s young people. For the rst time, a girl had made it to
the nal four. And she was a Pashtun from Kandahar, shocking because
Kandahar was a conservative stronghold. Many Pashtun women from
the south weren’t allowed to work, and they denitely weren’t allowed