“So then shouldn’t the women decide if they want to wear the burka or not?” I countered. “Yet it seems you don’t give them the option.”
“Each finger on your hand is different,” the commander said, smiling. “And it is the same with us. Not every Talib has the same opinion on how women should be. I personally like intelligent, strong women.”
Soon the food appeared: grilled chicken, lamb kabobs, yogurt, rice with raisins, onion rings, potatoes, lentil daal, and greens. It was a feast, too much for four people.
I had been taking notes, but now the sheikh said, “Stop writing. It is time for the important questions now. Let’s talk about life. You know, Sister Souad, I am also looking for a second wife. I’ve heard many good things about German women. I heard they read the wishes off their husband’s lips. I think you are ready for this.”
I immediately thought about the jihadist from Zarqa who had tried to woo me with text messages, or the time I’d unwittingly joked about marrying Shaker al-Abssi’s son-in-law. This time I decided to play dumb. “I can’t speak on their behalf because I’m not really German,” I said in English. “My father is Moroccan and my mother is Turkish. But I think you’ve been reading fairy tales.”
The sheikh listened to the translation. “Well yes, but there are also German women who have a Muslim background,” he said.
“Sheikh, honestly, don’t you think one woman is headache enough?”
“Yes, you’re probably right. One is already headache enough,” he said good-naturedly. “More wives, more headaches. It’s good to have more children, though. Of course I would not take a second wife if my wife didn’t give me the okay. But she would like to have someone else to help with the housework.”
Great, I thought.
The commander, meanwhile, kept piling food onto my plate and his. “I want an intelligent wife,” he continued. “The Prophet Muhammad had strong women, and a strong wife can make a strong leader.”
I’ll admit I was surprised to hear that.
“Let me ask you this,” he continued. “How many people sleep around and are unmarried? Don’t you think we are more honest? We don’t just screw the girl. We marry her. We take care of her. We are not trying to hurt women. Allah frowns upon that. Souad, you should think about this. We have some very strong men in the leadership. They would love to get married to someone like you.”
Again I dodged. My parents would have the last say, I said. It was an excuse that had always worked in the past.
All three men were working through their food, breaking pieces of bread and using them to scoop up the rice and meat. Though the sheikh said it wasn’t as spicy as usual, I felt my tongue start to burn. I drank one glass of water after another, trying to put out the fire, and left most of the food on my plate. It was really delicious, I told them, but I had eaten already. Finally, the sheikh took my plate and finished my dinner. “That is a big honor,” the translator noted.
“I do not eat off everyone’s plate,” the sheikh said. “Today we didn’t invite you as a journalist. We invited you as someone we respect.”
These shifts—from fear to familiarity, from the brink of disaster to a moment of warm acceptance as a human being, not as a potential enemy—were unnerving. After dinner, we stopped at a remote gas station along the highway. A man with a long beard approached on a motorcycle. He was carrying a gun and a bag covered with dark red flowers. For a second, I thought what a funny picture it would be: guns and roses.
The translator gave the bag to the Taliban commander, who handed it to me. “I cannot accept this,” I said, wondering where the man on the motorcycle had come from and how long he had been waiting.
“You have to accept this, unless you want us to kidnap you,” the commander said. Our journalistic code of ethics doesn’t allow us to accept gifts, but there was no way my editor would punish me for taking this one.
“Thank you,” I said, taking the bag from him. “And give my respect to your wife.”
“Remember when you go back to Germany to look for a good candidate for me,” he said with a slight smile.
Once back at the guesthouse in Karachi where I was staying, I called Adnan, who had been waiting frantically to find out if I was safe, and returned the calls of worried friends who hadn’t been able to reach me. Then I went upstairs to my room and opened the bag. In it were perfumed oil and red and green decorative stones. I stared at the bag and tried to understand. I knew it was probably just exhaustion, but the whole evening was already beginning to seem like a dream—a strange, surreal dream. Yet when I awoke the next morning there they were: my gifts from the Taliban.
A month later, after a short break, I returned to Pakistan, this time to Islamabad, the capital. I contacted the Taliban commander, and he again mentioned that he was looking for a second wife. I told him about a dream I’d had of him with two lambs, and that it might mean his wife was pregnant with twins. He laughed and said that she was indeed pregnant, but that she wasn’t having twins.
He asked if I thought the child would be a boy or a girl. I said a boy. He said that if he became a father of twin girls, he would name one after me. We laughed.
When we talked next, a few months later, he told me that his wife had indeed had twins. He sounded tired. “When you were a little baby, did you cry during the night and during the day?”
“I think I was a very nice baby,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
Later, he invited me to meet his wife and children. Proudly, he showed me his cache of U.S. Army boots, sunglasses, field beds, and Special Forces jackets, which he’d bought on the black market in Peshawar. “We are happy because we know that they cannot win the war,” he said, standing amid his booty.
They gave me the baby who cried during the night to hold. She slept peacefully in my arms.
“She is crying all the night,” the commander said. “She wants all the attention. I have named her Souad.”
*
WHENEVER I GOT back to Islamabad after an excursion, I went to Jamal’s office to catch up. One afternoon, after a trip to Quetta, a low-slung city near the Afghan border, I stopped by to say hello. Jamal had visitors, and he invited me to join them. I sat in a corner of the room sipping my tea and listened to one of the three men, who had come from Waziristan, a tribal region in northwestern Pakistan that had been a haven for the Taliban. The man introduced himself as Kareem Khan and said he was a journalist. He spoke Arabic and was cursing the United States. “The only choice one has is jihad against them, and to kill Americans,” he said.