Entry 3:
So much for Islamabad as Casablanca. With the Taliban fleeing Kabul and rumors flying that the Afghan border controls will crumble right along with the militia, everyone's suddenly paranoid that sooner or later they'll be the only one who still comes to Rick's. The sight of an empty room at the hotel restaurant positively petrifies: Where have the other reporters gone? Do they know something I don't? Among colleagues, there's talk of getting up four-by-fours, buying pirated Pakistani Johnny Cash CDs, and heading for the border. Road trip!
It's a strange feeling to have come all this way and to watch the regime unravel via CNN. It was an even stranger feeling today, as I watched an Afghan leader I'd once interviewed walk across the Marriott Lobby. Last time we talked, he spoke grandly about his conditions for what the country must be like after the Taliban. This time, he stood in the middle of the restaurant and watched the pictures of Kabul on television. For the short term, I'm set to get about as close to his motherland as he is: I'm still in
Tomorrow I'm going to watch a bunch of mujahideen veteran types put their heads together and plan for what comes next. I'm not expecting a great deal. While the war was moving slowly, when Americans were veritably begging for some kind of revolt from the Pashtuns based in Pakistan, my conversations—while sitting at fancy restaurant tables, while gnawing meat off femur-sized bones on floor mats, while sipping green tea in stuffy exile offices—were all equally undecipherable. No one was for anything; no one was entirely against anyone. Everyone could really fix everything, if only the Americans would give them some money and some help. Now that the Northern Alliance is setting the timetable, I can only imagine it'll be more confused.
Islamabad is impossibly beautiful these days. Highs in the 70s, cool nights, no rain. The sky is an unbroken blue, and the green hills that ring the town positively shine. It all adds to the air of unreality that this planned city projects at this wildly unplanned time. Locals joke that Islamabad—with its wide streets and nice houses and absence of noise and confusion and, you know, Pakistanis—is a 15-minute drive from
Some people focus their attention even further afield. I'm writing, as I usually do, from a cyber cafe. And, as usual, I'm one of the few people in here who's not looking at pornography. Though TV stations censor kisses out of Western movies and prohibition is the rule, the city has a veritable glut of these Internet stores, which all have the look of peep-show arcades. Every computer to a booth, every monitor facing the wall. The carrels even have closing doors. The place oozes porniness. Around me, the men all murmur Web addresses to one another and giggle.
For this, we built a high-tech communications system to make the world smaller. How long before all of this wonder comes to Kabul? A room full of folks hanging barely onto the urban upper-middle class, using their education to figure out new ways to look at naked women. As everyone contemplates a post-Taliban
My cell phone keeps ringing with news and rumors from colleagues and sources. And thanks to that I've learned I'm not the only porn-free surfer in here. "Excuse me," a guy says, leaning into my carrel. "Are you a journalist?" I tell him I am. "I am from Heart," he says. "What have you heard?" Maybe Islamabad's not so far away, after all.
