“They’re going to kill us!” one photographer shouted.
“Drive, just drive!” another screamed.
They were new. I felt strangely calm. I knew Afghanistan’s finest would never shoot. If they did, they’d never hit us. Paula, who had jumped in the passenger side of the car, stretched her foot across to the driver’s side and punched the gas. Once the car hopped forward, the police scattered. We roared down the road.
That was enough excitement for my day. Within minutes of the polls closing, Karzai’s people claimed victory. It was soon clear why. The fraud had been epic, the kind of fraud that would make dead voters in Chicago sit up and applaud. Ultimately as many as one in three votes would be deemed suspect. Karzai’s supporters would bear the most of the blame.
The fallout would smother and choke everything anyone was trying to do here. Karzai would eventually be declared the winner. But if this election was seen as crucial, then it was a crucial failure. Over the following weeks, the UN mission here would fracture. The Obama administration would waver on whether to send more troops to back a corrupt Karzai government and quibble over how best to solve the Afghan morass and nibble at the edges of the more critical threat, Pakistan. Obama’s base would split over his eventual decision to send more troops and support, at least for a little while. There would be more talk of a truce with the Taliban, of a political solution, and more demand for building a functioning government. Then more violence, more spectacular attacks, more demands for Karzai to shape up or else. Or else what? We had no stick. Our carrots were limp after almost eight years of waggling around.
I could see the stories that stretched for years into the future, much like the ones that stretched back years into the past. More bombs, more sudden death, more adrenaline. Never had I felt as alive as in Pakistan and Afghanistan, so close to chaos, so constantly reminded of how precious, temporary, and fragile life was. I had certainly grown here. I knew how to find money in a war zone, how to flatter a warlord, how to cover a suicide bombing, how to jump-start a car using a cord and a metal ladder, how to do the Taliban shuffle between conflict zones. I knew how to be alone. I knew I did not need a man, unless that man was my fixer. But also, I knew I had turned into this almost drowning caricature of a war hack, working, swearing, and drinking my way through life and relationships. My brother now described me as 100 Percent Id, an epitaph I didn’t want. Maybe having these four months of unemployment in Kabul helped me figure it out.
After the running, the bombs, the death, the downward spiral, I had a choice—I could choose life, or I could choose to keep hopping from one tragedy to the next. Like any junkie, I needed to quit. I decided to go home, knowing full well that this decision was a lot tougher than staying in the warm bath of Kabul. I decided to get out while I could, to graduate from Kabul High. At this point, at least, the party was over. The disastrous election of Karzai was last call. The foreign community’s clumsy efforts to save this region so late in the day were like trying to recover from the Afghan rapper DJ Besho deciding to do an impromptu rap show at a Halloween party at 2:30 AM. There was no recovery from that, only the likelihood of some Afghan in his entourage stealing a cell phone on the way out the door.
Tom, my fellow journalist and former housemate at the Fun House, also decided to leave. We planned a going-away party, our last Thursday night throwdown before checking out of the Hotel California. That afternoon, a friend and I drove over to Tom’s house to drop off a dozen cases of illegal and therefore expensive wine and beer. As we unloaded, Tom’s phone rang.
“Oh, hey Farouq,” he said.
I looked at Tom.
“Yes, please come,” Tom said. “Yes, yes, it’s for her as well.”
“Is that my Farouq?” I asked.
Tom nodded. He hung up.
“Why hasn’t he called me?” I said. “Is he mad at me?”
Kabul High. Then my phone started ringing. Farouq.
“Hey you!” I said, extremely enthusiastically.
“How are you?” he asked.
I had figured that he had already left Afghanistan on his scholarship. He had figured that I was upset with him, or that I had fled the country when my job did. But after everything we had been through together, any hurt over money, over macho aggression, over perceived anti-Afghan slights simply fell away.
“You’re coming tonight, right?” I said.
“Of course.”
This was an old-school party, circa 2006. Tom and I decided against having a guest list. We invited our Afghan friends. The garden filled up quickly—predictably, about one-third of the people stumbling around knew neither Tom nor me, various random foreigners who heard about the party from the rumor mill at L’Atmosphère. But Farouq and my Afghan journalist friends showed up, along with various Afghan officials. And I ended up spending most of the party hanging out with the man who had really mattered here more than any other: Farouq. We danced in an oddly shaped hallway, filled with mostly women, a few straight men, a few gay men, and a few tactile British security contractors who were apparently on Ecstasy. Farouq used a scarf as a dancing implement, pulling it behind his neck, pumping his hands in the air. For hours we danced, that is, until Farouq jumped toward me suddenly. His dancing implement had attracted attention.
“Kim!” he whispered. “I think that man is a gay.” He nodded toward an American guy.
“Yep,” I said, slipping into Farouq lingo. “He is a gay.”
We danced a little more. Farouq, the macho Pashtun, then leaned forward again.
“Kim!” he whispered sharply. “The gay just pinched me.”
“OK, let’s get you out of here.”
I walked him outside, and soon he left for home. We always covered each other’s backs. Within weeks, Farouq would be on a plane out of Kabul.
Over the next four days, I said my goodbyes, the painful ones, the easy ones, the ones I had put off for years. I visited my embittered Afghan grandpa, Sabit, the country’s former attorney general and failed presidential candidate, who sat in his almost empty seven-bedroom eyesore, complaining about the election.
“There was so much fraud, so much fraud,” he said, after berating me for disappearing for years. “I tell you, if this was a fair election, I would have won. I was the most popular candidate, everywhere I went, crowds of people, thousands of them, would come on the streets.”
Oh, Sabit, who still had no idea how his popularity had plummeted, who lived in his own Sabit universe. Officially, he won only 5,791 votes, placing nineteenth. Before I left, he asked me whether I knew any foreigners who would rent his house for $5,000 a month.