Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar Read online

  I told him I’d heard he’d intervened to stop me from interviewing the prisoner. “That’s a lie,” he said.

  “I heard it from reliable sources,” I said.

  “You want to know something?” he said, coming out from behind his desk and moving toward me. “If it were up to me, I wouldn’t let you inside that prison.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I don’t want to humanize these people. And that’s exactly what you’d do.”

  “So you did block my request!”

  “And everybody knows you staged your own kidnapping to get yourself some attention.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  And with that, he shoved me out of his office and slammed the door.

  It has been nearly seven years now since anyone has confronted me with the incontrovertible proof of my pro-Palestinian bias—the meal comment. The last time was when I participated in a panel discussion at Princeton University during reunions in June 2004. I was there to discuss matters I thought were important—the future of peace in the Middle East, how to prevent yet more generations of Israelis and Palestinians distrusting and even hating each other—but a member of the panel came to the meeting with my lunch on his mind. “If you remember,” he said, after I’d finished a spiel criticizing Israel’s policy of targeted assassinations, which often ended up killing many civilians along with militants, “this is the journalist who praised his captors for the lunch they served him after taking him hostage in Gaza.” My eyes rolled and I tried to answer him with a measured tone and more politeness than I had shown the Israeli press director.

  In March 2011 I returned to Israel and the Palestinian territories, visiting the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, historic Hebron, and other notorious clash points. The region was significantly calmer than the roiling mess I’d left behind in 2004, but it didn’t take me very long to see how little, really, had changed. Once again I found myself whipsawed between Arabs and Jews, between settlers and (former) militants, between conflicting historical narratives. And once again I realized that in this charged environment, even the most innocent gestures can bring one grief. Desperate for a bite to eat outside the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron—a holy site to which Muslims and Jews have shared access—I was faced with a choice: patronize the Jewish pizza shop favored by a settler acquaintance, or the falafel stand run by a friend of my Palestinian guide. I hesitated, I waffed, I looked them both in the eye. In the end, I decided to go hungry.

  THE PRICE OF ORANGES

  ~ PAKISTAN ~

  JASON BURKE

  NOT MUCH HAPPENED IN ISLAMABAD IN 1998. NOT MUCH HAPPENED in Pakistan, in fact—or at least not much that troubled editors, viewers, readers, or policy makers in Europe or the United States. The country had slid inexorably away from international attention since the end of the war fought by the mujahideen against Soviet troops in neighboring Afghanistan almost a decade before. Most media organizations covered Pakistan from India. It was not a big story. The rediscovery of Pakistan and Afghanistan would come, with breathless haste, on September 12, 2001.

  Just behind my apartment in Islamabad that year was a plot of land covered in mimosa trees, wild cannabis, and scrub. It was a graveyard, and though no one tended it or came to grieve at the dozen or so mounds of earth that lay among the rubbish under the trees, no one built on it either—though the potential for profitable development of such a prime piece of urban real estate was high. To one side of the graveyard was the substantial embassy of North Korea, to whom, it was whispered, Pakistan sold blueprints for nuclear bombs. These rumors were later proved to be at least partially true. Watching the embassy were two plainclothes intelligence agents, who usually sat on the pavement in the shade below a eucalyptus tree and read popular local-language newspapers. I knew them quite well after a while, and they smiled sheepishly when we greeted each other.

  On the other side of the graveyard was the home of Benazir Bhutto. Those watching the Koreans could thus watch the former head of state, too. Out of power since her second government had been dismissed by the president on the prompting of the military two years before, Bhutto was fighting a series of graft allegations in the courts, and the intelligence services naturally wanted to know whom she was meeting. A few weeks after my arrival in Islamabad I was one of those giving their name to the bored policemen outside Zardari House—her home was then named after her controversial husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who had been in prison on corruption charges for several years.

  I had received an invitation from Bhutto to come and “take tea.” She was talking to her lawyers when I arrived, and for the first half-hour of our interview she went over what she claimed were the flaws in the case against her. She said she was a victim of a political conspiracy. This was at least partially true.

  Since the death of military dictator Zia-ul-Haq in 1987, Pakistan had had four democratically elected governments. Two had been Bhutto’s. Two had been those of her rival, Nawaz Sharif, scion of a Punjabi industrialist and leader of the Pakistan Muslim League. Sharif had been removed from power himself after a disastrous period from 1990 to 1993, but not before imprisoning Bhutto’s husband. Back in power in 1996, Sharif had relaunched his investigations against his archrival. The allegations against Bhutto were serious, involving tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks, ownership of mansions in Britain, jewelry bought and held in Swiss banks. Bhutto’s father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, charismatic and cynical in equal measure, had founded his Pakistan People’s Party, which his daughter had inherited, on a mix of populist socialist and nationalist rhetoric and with the slogan roti, kapre, makan (food, clothes, and shelter). If the PML was the party of the Punjab, Pakistan’s wealthiest province, and of rich businessmen or shopkeepers, then the PPP was supposed to be the party of the poor, especially the rural poor. The allegations of looting her country’s exchequer, even if most were directed at her husband, hurt politically, if not personally.

  Bhutto, forty-five years old, was wearing a blue shalwar kameez and her trademark white dupatta or scarf. Pearls the size of marbles dangled from gold clasps at her ears, and she wore a ring the size of a small matchbox on her finger on which I counted at least seventy-two individual diamonds in twelve rows. As she spoke she delicately nibbled cubes of burfi, sweetmeats popular throughout South Asia. Burfi is made from condensed milk cooked with sugar until it forms a solid cube of flaky paste. It is often mixed with rose water, cardamom, coconut, mango, pistachios, or cashew nuts, sometimes even cheese, all of which take the edge off the otherwise tongue-curling sweetness. Cut into mouthful-size blocks and saved for special occasions, burfi is decorated with flakes of silver foil and takes on a festive air.

  It became very clear, very quickly, that Bhutto—despite the prospect of arrest and incarceration within days—was keener to gossip about the world at large than to talk about her own predicament. Conversation leaped from the almost surreally mundane to the enormously weighty with bewildering speed. One moment we were discussing the future of democracy in Pakistan or American policy in the Middle East, the next we were discussing new theories about the addictive properties of sugar or the latest trend in interior design or how her cat, Biscuit, had just had kittens. Bhutto wanted to know what I thought about the leopard skin that lay on the black tiles of her hall floor and the stuffed leopard that reared above it, and while we considered the golden stars painted on her ceiling she asked how long I thought Tony Blair was likely to remain in power in Britain.

  We discussed books. Bhutto, whose taste for slushy romances was well known, said she had recently turned to “fun” biographies. Her favorite was a historical novel she had just finished about the life of Madame de Pompadour, the powerful mistress of Louis XV. And as tea stretched to dinner and we moved to the dining room, conversation broadened further. A servant brought out plates of barbecued chicken, kebabs, and stir-fried beef and bowls of dal (curried lentils), rice, and noodles. Bhutto picked at the heaped food in front of her, nervous, sh
e admitted, of putting on weight.

  She spoke about her time as a young woman at Oxford University, about the mass rallies that characterized her early political career in Pakistan as she campaigned for the restoration of democracy under the rule of Zia-ul-Haq, thereby fulfilling a promise made to her father in his prison cell hours before he had been hanged in 1979, the year the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. She spoke of the gifts she had been given during her two stints as prime minister. From Baroness Thatcher, whom she said she greatly admired and liked, she had received a blue-rimmed china soup bowl. Other world leaders had abandoned her after she had been forced out of power, but Thatcher had stayed in touch, she said. As far as Bhutto was concerned, the idea that Monica Lewinsky had seduced Bill Clinton was far-fetched. “He must have given her, you know, a look. . . . He’s a Leo, you know, and so is my husband. Men like that . . . well. . . .” The sentence remained unfinished. She nibbled burfi, choosing carefully from a plate of the multicolored matchbox-size sweets, long fingers hesitating between those with almonds embedded in them and those with pistachios.

  As I was leaving she asked me if I would like to go down to Naudero, her country home six hundred miles to the south and the seat of the Bhutto dynasty, for the commemoration of her father’s “martyrdom.” She had just had a new guesthouse completed, her children would be there, and it would be “just wonderful” if I could make it. In the garden of her home, her staff were singing prayers, interwoven with chants in the Sufi Muslim tradition, a call for God’s help for the coming court appearances and for the trials and tribulations to come.

  As the sun went down, the bright colors of the trees and the dust and the wheat became flat. Everything turned to tan and gray and rust. The small low villages, often just an uneven group of mud-walled houses clustered below a few palms, became diffcult to pick out against the pale earth around them. Everywhere there were reservoirs and canals and streams. Buffaloes stood up to their necks in the water below thick clouds of mosquitoes, eyes white in the gathering darkness. On fallow fields there were small groups of herdsmen and Gypsy families camped behind piled bracken fences, cooking in small battered metal pots over furze fires, their livestock tethered nearby.

  It was evening and my first sight of the interior of Sind. The province had been a desert until the British built a vast system of irrigation canals in the early part of the twentieth century. The surface of the land is now divided into small plots of crops—mainly rice, some wheat. There is a lot of fallow or waste ground—often a result of the irrigation raising the water table. As the water evaporates through the soil, it leaves mineral deposits behind. The soil becomes too salty to cultivate and reverts to dust and scrub. As a result the patchwork of fields is uneven, broken by long stretches of salt. As dusk came, the salt patches reflected what was left of the light. We passed a herd of camels trudging sedately along the side of the road. We drove on.

  Eventually we arrived at a small rural town, fluorescent lights swinging above the tea shops and cheap restaurants bright and green after the darkness of the desert around. This was Naudero, the Bhutto family seat.

  Centuries of Western visitors have written of the fabulous hospitality of their Asiatic hosts. Two elements are often missing from their accounts. The first is that feeding followers and visitors was for centuries an essential element of the redistribution of resources on which the quasi-feudal system existing across much of South Asia or the Middle East depended. The second is that hospitality is also an excellent means of control. Guests eat and sleep where they are told. Equally, those they meet can be carefully selected, what they see is restricted. In the most delicate and delightful of fashions, the guest is placed under the authority of the host.

  To celebrate the anniversary of her father’s death, Bhutto had gathered her faithful retainers. Sitting at the head of the dining room table in Naudero like a sixteenth-century English monarch surrounded by her lords temporal and spiritual, she listened attentively as the senior barons of her party described the political situation in their domains. They sat in order of seniority. Opposite her, at the far end of the table, was Shabbir Ahmed Khan Chandio, the second most senior man of a tribe, numbering over a million people, almost all of whom would vote as he told them to. His family owned land the size of an average-size American state along the border with the vast neighboring province of Baluchistan. To his right was Makhtoum Shahabuddin Makhtoum, who had been finance minister in Bhutto’s second administration. His land was so extensive that he claimed genuinely to be unaware of its exact size. Like Bhutto, he was also to be worshipped by several hundred thousand people as a spiritual leader, a saint, a pir. When Makhtoum spoke about “my villages” or “my people,” the use of the possessive pronoun was entirely appropriate.

  The dining room was the inner sanctum. Outside the house was a paved courtyard and a small zoo with antelope, deer, and a giant turkey. Beside the small, wonderfully carved, natural wood door to the main house was a large shaded area decorated with giant paintings of Bhutto and her father. This veranda was covered with plastic chairs and acted as Bhutto’s waiting room.

  When she was in Naudero Bhutto held audiences for her followers. They lasted entire afternoons. Outside her front door several hundred locals—mainly men but some women—milled around the courtyard hoping to be summoned to see her. The women wore burkas, the all-covering cloak with a mesh aperture to see through made famous by the Taliban in Afghanistan but worn across much of the region long before the hard-line Islamic movement came to power in Kabul in 1996. Every so often a dozen or so supplicants would be shown in to the front room of the house, and Bhutto would listen to their problems and promise solutions. To one side, a servant kept a tray with a plate of Quality Street British supermarket chocolates and a box of burfi on it. Every ten minutes or so, Bhutto would take one, hesitating as ever as she chose. As the afternoon wore on, the rate at which the tray was brought to the small dais on which Bhutto sat accelerated.

  The weekend climaxed in the rally to commemorate the death of Bhutto’s father. For days local PPP organizers had been working to gather a big crowd. The buses and trucks had been trawling the surrounding villagers picking up Bhutto supporters and paying others and bringing all of them to the huge shrine that their leader was building as a dynastic tomb close to Larkana. It was unfinished—work having stopped when she was last ejected from government—but it was vast.

  A podium had been set up a few hundred yards from the shrine and on it, in front of a crowd of ten or fifteen thousand, was gathered almost the entire political leadership of the PPP. In their starched white shalwars and designer shades it was diffcult to imagine that they had anything in common with the masses sweltering in the sun in front of them.

  Bhutto was, as is customary in South Asia, an hour or two late. Her speech was unexceptional, a lengthy shrill diatribe against the government and an effusive eulogy to her father. The crowd was large but not very large, and she failed to excite them very much. Her mind appeared to be on other things.

  A few weeks later three judges, including the son of one of those who had sentenced her father to death, found her guilty of accepting bribes. Bhutto called on her supporters to fight the “fascist regime.” Only in Naudero was there any response. Elsewhere there were a few sit-down protests and the odd demonstration. But there were no mass gatherings, no outbreaks of mass violence, no nationwide campaigns of civil disobedience. Bhutto slipped quietly out of the country and into exile.

  Bhutto’s exile was to last eight years. It is ironic in retrospect that she was thus to watch the return of her homeland to a major role on the international stage from the stalls. The attacks of 9/11 should have helped Bhutto in many ways. She was after all the archetype of a sort of moderate Muslim leader—Oxford-educated, a woman, adept at convincing and charming Western interlocutors (especially men). Yet in President Pervez Musharraf, the army chief who had taken power in 1999 in a bloodless and relatively popular coup, she came up against a new and favor
ed American ally and apparent friend of President George Bush. Bhutto, despite a formidable, well-funded, and effective lobbying effort in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, found herself marginalized. She was unable either to return to Pakistan, where new laws banned her from prime ministerial office, or to establish an international role. She spent much of her time in Dubai, where her children were at school, and visited London regularly. Every time we spoke her frustration, though carefully concealed, was evident. Many politicians have returned from periods of internal or external exile stronger and more effective than when they left. Not Bhutto, however. Pakistan changed radically in the eight years that she was away, and not in ways that made any eventual return easier.

  Five main trends were working against Bhutto. The first was that, given a choice between apparent stability under Musharraf, who also projected a moderate, pro-Western image and was good at charming his interlocutors, and Bhutto, the choice for America was clear. Yes, she was moderate, relatively secular, and pro-Western. But she was also willful, unpredictable, and very unpopular with Pakistan’s security establishment. Until Musharraf began to be seen as more of a liability than an asset, from about 2007, no one was prepared to take the risk of backing Bhutto.

  Second, there were genuine doubts over Bhutto’s ability to control the rising tide of militancy in Pakistan if she did make a return to power. Although the real deterioration came after 2006, within even a year of 9/11, violence was soaring. As a frequent visitor to Pakistan throughout this period, I watched the growing toll of the bombings and shootings with pain and concern. The ground I could safely cover within the country became more and more restricted. Everything that had made Pakistan not just passionately interesting intellectually but a genuinely enjoyable place to be disappeared. There were many people whom I could no longer visit. The fabulous, often savagely beautiful landscapes that I had driven, ridden, trekked, even skied through would now have to wait for a better, happier time. One gastronomic pleasure after another dropped away, too. One of the constant delights of Pakistan had been the food. Once I had sampled astonishing chicken cooked with oranges at a graduation ceremony at a madrassa (religious school) deep in tribal territory close to the Afghan border. Such a meal was soon unthinkable. By 2008 grilled trout fished from mountain streams in the Swat Valley, 150 miles from Islamabad, was off the menu too, with fishing in remote areas rash to say the least and Swat itself partially under the control of newly formed Pakistani Taliban groups. Soon even eating out in the frontier city of Peshawar, where once I had shared mixed mutton curries cooked in iron pans over coals with local journalists in the main bazaar, was too risky. So too were the platters of Kabul-style pilau rice with meat, raisins, and carrots in the vast smugglers market on the road to the famous Khyber Pass. The aftermath of 9/11 in the restive zones along the frontier had seen a globalized radical Islamic identity fuse with a local tribal and ethnic particularism to form a potent and combustible combination. Bhutto did not seem to be the best candidate to counter it.