Free Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (The Taliban Shuffle MTI) by Kim Barker Page B

it donated two lions, two bears, two pigs, two deer, and one wolf. The pigs, which resembled large Iowa farm pigs more than exotic zoo pigs, soon gave birth to five piglets. Afghanistan did not need pigs, considered dirty in Islam. It was another fine example of the unnecessary aid deemed necessary by somebody not in the country.
    By the time I got to the zoo, right before the elections, the Chinese gift had been exposed as the Trojan horse it was. The male Chinese bear had died the year before, after swallowing a plastic bag filled with banana peels and a man’s shoe heel. Four pigs then died from rabies after stray dogs jumped into their pen and bit one. (Luckily the other three pigs were elsewhere at the time. Where? Who knows. They were mysterious pigs.) All the animals had to be vaccinated for rabies. Over the summer, the second Chinese bear broke out of her cage, walked down a zoo path, and hopped into the pigpen, which had a low wall apparently notorious among the animals. Two pigs were there—the other, somewhere else. The bear squeezed both pigs to death. Typically, the Afghans wanted to ascribe some sort of romance to the bear’s actions. They loved stories of star-crossed lovers, largely because many of them were forced to marry their cousins, whom they did not love in that soul-consuming, fatalistic way made popular by both Indian and Hollywood movies.
    “She was lovesick and lonely and she missed her mate,” the deputy zoo director told me. “So she broke into the pig cage and tried to hug the two pigs, but she hugged them too hard and they died.”
    I nodded and took notes. I tried to poke holes in his logic. “But weren’t they female pigs?”
    “Yeah, so what? When you’re lonely, you’ll take love from anywhere,a female bear will take it from a female pig, no problem,” he said.
    In Afghanistan, I would learn that this was too often true. The zoo workers surrounded the wayward lovesick female bear with torches and nudged her back to her cage. This was considered progress—earlier, workers would have just shot her. Facing reality, China announced it would stop donating animals to the Kabul Zoo until living conditions improved, while, of course, doing nothing to improve those conditions. The one surviving pig would be made famous years later by the international swine flu outbreak. Fearing what it might harbor, Afghans would isolate the country’s only known domestic pig, which already must have felt isolated enough because everyone thought it was unclean.
    By the time Farouq came back to work, the election campaign was in full swing. Covering the election was a little like writing about the zoo—lots of scars, lots of confusion, lots of mysterious pigs. This election was the final step in the transition to full sovereignty outlined in the 2001 Bonn Agreement, the road map for creating an Afghan government that had been hashed out by prominent Afghans—including most major warlords—in Germany during the fall of the Taliban. Many of the country’s top warlords were running for parliament, including some who always made the “best of” lists drawn up by various human-rights groups that no one ever listened to, warlords accused of pounding nails into people’s heads, of pouring boiling oil over a body after cutting off a head, which Afghans swore would make a headless body dance.
    For years, the international community and the Afghans had been toying with what to do about the warlords and past war crimes, pushing the issue around like a large piece of gristle. The UN, the Afghan government, and its backers had theoretically disarmed the illegal militias and defanged the warlords, but no one had been held accountable for anything. This election, in effect, would erase the board of all previous atrocities and eliminate any possibility ofholding any of the warlords responsible for their crimes. Then again, maybe it was already too late. The capricious warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, known for