the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

promised to work on the project.
“Don’t be—what is it you say? Don’t be naughty,” he said before
hanging up.
Naughty? Who said that? The conversation was slightly worrying. I
thought of Sharif as a Punjabi matchmaker determined to nd me a
man, not as anyone who talked naughty to me.
While watching TV in the Indian coastal town of Mangalore—a
misnomer if there ever was one—I found out the Marriott Hotel in
Islamabad had been blown up and fty-four people had been killed. I
saw the ames and the destruction and a friend from CNN climbing
over the rubble and explaining how bad this was. Normally I would
have been upset that I was out of position for such an attack. But this
time I was just numb and, in fact, happy I wasn’t there. I had lived at
the Marriott for weeks at a time, and even when I lived elsewhere, I
had visited several times a week. Like the Serena, the Marriott was an
oasis for expatriates and Pakistanis. I had joined the gym there, ate at
the Thai and Japanese restaurants, and drank high tea with sources. The
bombers exploded their truck at the worst time possible—in the
evening, just as the guards sat down to break their daily Ramadan fast
with an evening meal. The attack was one of the worst ever in
Islamabad and marked a whole new level of sophistication for militants
attacking inside Pakistan, a whole new level of cruelty. I had known
some of the dead—the front-desk greeters, the people who worked at
the metal detector.
I stayed in India longer than I should have. Samad picked me up at
the airport.
“Do you want to drive by Marriott?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I really don’t.”
Pakistan increasingly depressed me. I had once hoped that the
lawyers could actually change the country and that Pakistanis would
nally get the government they deserved. Instead, they got a
secondhand trashy veneer of democracy. The political machinations
were yet another example of how the country’s priorities were
completely upside down. Finally Pakistan had a civilian government, a
rarity. But instead of focusing on the real problems in the country—the
bad economy, the war, the Pakistani Taliban—the civilian leaders