Read Online The Taliban Shuffle by Kim Barker - Free Book Online

for the eighty-cent ticket. Nasir spotted a familiar face in the audience: the
Titanic
-loving taxi driver I had met two years earlier, who at the time said he was treated well at Guantánamo when he was mistakenly picked up and shipped there. Through Farouq, I asked about his life. He shrugged. He droveanother taxi between Khost and Kabul, but he never got his first taxi back. He had gone to the circus twenty times in the past month—Kabul had nothing else to do for fun. But his tone had changed. He talked about an old man who recently had been shot dead in a nighttime raid near Khost by U.S. soldiers.
    “America is no good,” the taxi driver said. “The Americans are no good. They are not treating Afghans right.”
    Not much to say to that. He shifted his attention to the circus. So did we. A girl bent her feet over her back and used them to light a Pine Light cigarette. A man dressed up as a frog and hopped around. A boy did a headstand on a man’s head. A tightrope walker swilled liquid from an Absolut vodka bottle as he stumbled along the low-slung rope. We said goodbye to the taxi driver to interview a man who came to the circus to escape the headache of having two wives. We never saw the taxi driver again.
    But we did drive south to Khost, the eastern town that bordered the tribal areas of Pakistan, to visit the family of the dead man he had mentioned—Shayesta Khan, who had been about seventy-five, a village elder with a long white beard. This was the other side of the war from my embed in Paktika, the side of “collateral damage,” the U.S. military term for unintentional injury caused while pursuing legitimate targets. Increasingly, such damage was becoming a problem throughout southern and eastern Afghanistan, the areas dominated by the ethnic Pashtuns and home to most insurgent activity. Anger about so-called “civilian casualties” and house raids was starting to bubble up there. Outside Kabul, in the places where public opinion mattered most, the mood toward the United States was shifting. It was not just the hostility displayed by Afghans upset at U.S. soldiers bursting into their compounds. It was the new willingness to believe the worst, even the most outrageous claims, without question. No one yet understood that what mattered in Afghanistan was not reality—it was rumor, the stories that raced from village to village.
    The raid on Shayesta Khan’s house was nothing like the compoundvisits I had observed, where the U.S. soldiers drank tea and tried to respect Afghan culture. This was a nighttime, kick-in-the-door, suited-up raid. An informant had allegedly told the U.S. military that bombs were being made in the compound where about sixty members of Shayesta Khan’s family lived. Who the informant was, I could never find out, nor could I find any other evidence that the claims were true.
    In the early morning hours, U.S. soldiers had broken down the compound’s side door, near steps that led to an open area outside Shayesta Khan’s bedroom. Family members said they heard shouting, then gunshots. Everything was a blur, and everyone had a different story. The local Afghan intelligence deputy said Shayesta Khan was shot reaching for a shirt. His sons said their father was shot trying to light a gas lantern. In their initial news release, U.S. military officials said an Afghan man was shot after he ignored a warning from an interpreter and a warning shot. The U.S. officials said the man was in the home of a known bomb-maker and kept moving toward a container on a dresser despite warnings, acting “aggressively” and making “threatening actions.”
    Who knew which version was right? But I learned certain facts—Shayesta Khan was old, and he was partly deaf, and bullet holes and shattered windows indicated that he was shot from outside his window. Afghan officials who had seen the body said Khan was shot several times, on the left side of his head and body. Afghans we met in the province thought