The Taliban Shuffle': Kim Barker's unforgettable memoir of journalism in Afghanistan
Kim Barker's "The Taliban Shuffle" is a memoir of her seven years covering the war in Afghanistan. Barker will discuss her book Thursday April 28 at Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Co.
By
Tyrone Beason
Special to The Seattle Times
Author appearance Kim Barker
The author of "The Taliban Shuffle" will discuss her book at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave., Seattle; free (206-624-6600 or
www.elliottbaybook.com).
In her fascinating new behind-the-scenes memoir, "The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan" (Doubleday, 302 pp., $25.95), the Chicago Tribune's ex-South Asia bureau chief and former Seattle Times reporter Kim Barker uses her experiences as a foreign correspondent to show that the U.S.-led campaign to bring stability to a region that has known only conflict is a fool's errand at best.
Barker's memoir is not intended as a diatribe against the effort in Afghanistan, a country she fell in love with in the seven years she reported from Kabul and other locations in and outside the country. But one can't help but connect the dots as Barker meets unrepentant warlords, watches resentful locals throw rocks at a military helicopter she's riding in, investigates Pakistan's role in the turmoil across the border and constructs a colorful expat life in Kabul that's increasingly detached from the unraveling Afghan society around her.
The Bush administration dropped the ball in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 by leaving a skeleton crew of U.S. military personnel to secure the peace and prevent the defeated regime from returning.
"The foreigners cheated on Afghanistan," Barker writes early on. "They went to war in Iraq."
The news media also failed Afghanistan.
At first, Barker is sent as a fill-in correspondent, her job essentially "to baby-sit a war that nobody cared about."
She can hardly get a story in her own newspaper.
The adrenaline rush of working in a war zone is too nice a high to walk away from, though. Barker puts relationships with men, friends and her family on the back burner while sprinting from story to story in a region where a rigged election, protest or, more ominously, bombing, always begs for attention.
Work takes a heavy emotional toll. But the irrepressibly spunky Barker soldiers on.
In a perverse way, covering conflict allows Barker to escape her problems. It becomes an all-consuming job, and after a while she can't imagine herself outside of this smoke-and-mirrors world. Her Afghan fixer and translator Farouq, for example, emerges as the most important person in her life.
The most memorable scenes in "The Taliban Shuffle" involve Barker's close encounters with an eccentric cast of Afghan and Pakistani leaders who, for better or worse, America comes to rely on as the situation in Afghanistan worsens.
It's hard to beat the nonsensical utterances of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who at one point tells Barker he'd like to communicate with the Taliban, but can't find their address.
[HI]Most unforgettable, though, is former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whose estate resembles Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch. Barker's hilarious accounts of their weird friendship and his attempt to find a romantic "friend" for her are, by themselves, enough to make this book worth rea[/HI]ding.
All this private foolishness from the region's leaders contrasts vividly with the more serious accounts of government incompetence, attacks and assassinations, rising civilian casualties and a U.S. strategy that remains muddled under the Obama administration, in Barker's view.
While Barker dances "The Taliban Shuffle," a reference to the crazy life she lives overseas, the financial collapse of her paper's parent company threatens to end her own wild psychological trip. (Barker is now a reporter for the public- interest journalism organization ProPublica).
Barker's memoir is what you'd hear if the reporter never turned off the voice recorder between interviews brilliant firsthand outtakes that wind up telling us more about the Afghan debacle than any foreign-policy briefing.