the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

John Wilson. And always, their mission was to win hearts and minds, to
convince the Afghans that they were there only to help.
We started by walking around a market in Orgun, where stalls sold
everything from pirated DVDs to live chickens. One soldier bought a
teapot for $3. A sta sergeant tried to build rapport with the shop
owner, who wore a pakol, a traditional hat that resembled a pie with
an extra roll of dough on the bottom.
“We’re just trying to collect information about a robbery that
happened less than a week ago,” the sta sergeant told Pakol. “Local
nationals in green uniforms robbed a jingle truck on Highway 141.”
The optimistically named Highway 141 was a one-lane dirt road.
Pakol looked suspicious. “We don’t know. We come here early in the
morning. We leave here late in the evening. We haven’t heard
anything.”
The staff sergeant tried another question.
“IED on the way to Sharana?”
“We don’t know about this,” Pakol said. Then he waited a beat. “If
we see mines or something, we’ll let you know.” He waited another
beat. “But if you want tea, we’ll give you tea.”
With no objections, Pakol blew out dust from a few cups and poured
from a pot boiling on a gas canister. We all sipped green tea.
“Did you come to help us or what?” Pakol asked, after the rst cup
was gone. That was Afghan tea protocol. Always wait for a cup of tea
to ask a serious question. Pakol then ticked o his complaints, the
things he wanted the Americans to fix.
“The dust is really bad,” he said.
“There’s always gonna be something,” the staff sergeant replied.
With that, we left the shop. As we trudged along, everyone stared at
us, making it dicult to shop. I knew why: Here were men in army
uniforms, ak vests, and helmets, twenty-rst-century soldiers carrying
guns, looking like unbeatable futuristic ghting machines, establishing a
perimeter, looking, checking, in the middle of a fteenth-century dusty
souk. I walked in the middle, wearing a headscarf beneath my helmet,
trying to bridge two cultures. I looked at the translator, a nineteen-yearold
kid from Kabul. He had wrapped a scarf around the bottom of his
face like a Wild West bandit and put on sunglasses and a baseball cap.
“What’s up with the outfit?” I asked him.