LISETTE 2015
It didn’t begin with the bombings. By which I mean, Kabul was no longer Kabul well before then. There used to be thousands of us Westerners, mostly military and contractors, but also aid workers, missionaries, adventurers, diplomats, and journalists like myself, trying to make our mark or our fortune in the “good war,” Afghanistan, as opposed to the “dumb war,” Iraq. The money we brought kept things kicking in our Kabul, the Westerner’s Kabul, the city within the city that was unaffordable or just plain off-limits to ordinary Afghans. People called it the Kabubble, and the Kabubble meant imported steaks at Boccaccio, bootleg Heinekens on Flower Street, and rooftop parties overlooking the lights that crawl up the sides of the mountains around the city at night. It meant a place you could let your hair down, drink alcohol, and tell strangers the lies you told yourself about why you were there, what you were doing, and what a difference you were making.
By 2015, those days were long gone. Troop levels down from a peak of over a hundred thousand to less than ten thousand, and for all the cheerleading for a military exit I’ve heard from self-righteous European aid workers and twenty-two-year-old journalists seeking to “give voice to the Afghan people,” I couldn’t help noticing that as the American military left, those folks’ numbers thinned out, too. You didn’t see as many correspondents, or NGO administrators, or even heavily armed white dudes in cargo pants on Street 15 those days. “The tide has turned,” Obama had told us in 2012. Indeed.
Then, early morning, early August, the sound of an explosion. We hear the boom in the office, the window frames rattle, and Aasif, one of my Afghan colleagues, looks at me and says, hopefully, “Maybe the military blowing up a weapons cache?” It’s eight thirty, I haven’t had my coffee yet, and neither of us is eager to run out to a bomb site and try to count dead and injured.
We both run up the stairs to the roof. Just a few years prior, there would have been a gaggle of photographers and cameramen already there, filming black smoke, placing bets on what got hit. To the extent that people cared at all, they cared then. In 2015, there’s a lot less interest in random explosions in Kabul. The offices are depleted, and when we get to the roof it’s just Omar, languidly snapping photographs and sucking on the tiniest nub of a cigarette. I’m not sure of Omar’s exact age—he was a young boy during 9/11, so he’s probably barely in his twenties, but he affects a hard-bitten cynicism. “Big, maybe even big big,” he says. “But early for too much people traffic, so I guess”—he surveys the scene with an expert eye—“ten dead.” This is how Omar talks when sober. Drunk, I have seen him cry about these things, and speak idealistically about the work he does bringing his country’s suffering to the world’s attention. It tends to make everyone around him embarrassed.
After calling his relatives and confirming that everyone’s all right, Aasif says he’ll head down to the site. Since I figure Bob’ll want me to write the snap, I go downstairs, call the military press office. They confirm there’s been no controlled det, but they can’t confirm an explosion, so I write, “Explosion sounds in Afghan capital. Plume of smoke seen rising.” I read it over once, twice, press send.
Not a lot of information, but two minutes later, while I’m working on my second paragraph for the urgent, Bob swings by from the back office with a cup of coffee and says, “You beat the AP by two seconds.” He places the coffee in front of me, my reward.
I take a sip, finish off the last paragraph, it’s clocking in at 125 words, and send it. Four minutes from start to finish. Good enough.
Now the work begins. Aasif’s already heading to the scene—he’s got a motorcycle, which means he’s way better at getting through Kabul traffic than those of us relying on taxis or the agency car. Bob tasks me to write, Denise to work the phones. Denise is twenty-three, and plain looking, but she’s so much younger than I am that even when we’re together, and even though I know I cut a striking figure when I want to and she ties a head scarf like a homeless bag lady, she turns heads. She’s catnip to a certain kind of guy, the kind of guy who’s not quite sure his time in Afghanistan has proved his manhood, and besides, is secretly terrified of death and needs to work that anxiety out by fucking the young. “Terror sex,” that’s what my friend Cynthia calls it, and both of us are a little uneasy that terror sex doesn’t hold as much appeal for us as it used to. “I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar,” we’ll say, quoting Frank O’Hara. But we’re not that alive anymore, and not even really sure we want to be. After all, we hold the Denises of the world, and our younger selves, and the men who fuck them, in contempt.
“Can we say this is rare?” Denise asks, a little tentative.
“When was the last one?” Bob’s style of instruction is Socratic.
“Three weeks,” I say.
“Does that count as rare?” says Bob.
“For a war zone?” says Denise.
“Kabul’s not a war zone,” I say. “Last bombing killed five people . . .”
“How many dead would it take to make Kabul unsafe?” says Bob.
“Point of comparison. Is Kabul’s murder rate worse than New Orleans?” says Denise.
“Is New Orleans safe?”
Aasif calls in, the bomb went off near the Interior Ministry, or possibly beside the Interior Ministry, the police aren’t letting him in but he’s convinced a storekeeper to let him onto his roof, he’s got Omar taking shots of the damage, hopefully he’ll get something artful, something beautiful enough to get picked up and extend the reach of the violence, make some dent on the public mind. The great democratic public relies on the intrepid veracity of the free press to cut past the political rhetoric with hard-hitting fact so they can make informed decisions. Which, fourteen years into this war, hasn’t happened yet, but hey, maybe could someday.
Denise gets a contact at the local hospital to confirm seven dead, but we don’t know who the dead are, and that matters. If they’re Afghan forces, ISAF will spin this as a good news story. Afghans stepping up and courageously defending their country, protecting it from greater harm. If the bomb went off somewhere inside the Interior Ministry, though, that will make the Kabul administration seem weak, hopelessly compromised. If it’s a civilian target, well, it’ll be another data point in the shift the Taliban has taken to kill innocent Afghans. The Afghan government will issue a statement vaguely laying the blame on Pakistan. The U.S. military will say it shows the Taliban’s increasing desperation, whatever that means.
Bob turns his computer and shows me a Twitter conversation between @ISAFmedia and the Taliban. “The outcome is inevitable. Question is how much longer will terrorists put innocent Afghans in harm’s way?” reads the ISAF tweet. And a self-appointed Taliban spokesman tweeting back: “U hve bn puttng thm n ‘harm’s way’ da pst 10 yrs. Razd whole vilgs. Dnt talk bout ‘harm’s way.’”
“Worthless,” I say.
I look at my watch. I’ll want to get to the site before the police have cleaned everything up, in time to get some “color”: a newly orphaned child wailing and looking around helplessly for her parents, the green pickup truck used to bring the wounded to the hospital, the shattered glass and ruined fruit stalls, businesses, livelihoods, lives. Omar’s photos will help . . . not just the ones we’ll use, but Omar’s always good at taking a few purely documentary shots so we can run down mundane details that don’t do much in a photo but pop in a story, like the elderly Pashtun man in the last bombing, who with blood running down his arms held his coat over the corpse of a woman to protect her modesty. The key is finding a detail that might make someone, some reader looking over the morning paper, drinking coffee, eating a hard-boiled egg, about to rush to work, to make that person stop, and care. It’s difficult, in part because these days I find it hard to get those details to even make me care. When I first came here, I was full of rage at the indifference most people back home showed to the deaths of Afghans. All these human beings, suffering, dying, and fighting with unbelievable courage to live in this brutal country, courage that can inspire you for at least a few years. It’s a feeling I doubt I’ll ever get back. These days the thought will sometimes run through my head as I lie in bed, trying to sleep: I am broken, I am broken, and I do not know how I will ever fix this hole I’ve carved into my soul.
And then I hear the much larger sound of the second bomb.