A FEW YEARS AFTER the financial crisis, America’s jobs, it seemed, were in Kabul. I knew a lot of journalists and photographers in Istanbul who worked there regularly, and they would return with terrifying stories of night raids and Taliban ambushes and rides in Black Hawk helicopters, at the end of the day collapsing into bed, caked in dirt. But it seemed journalism was not the only reason to go to Kabul. At the time, an unemployed American friend in Istanbul could not get any government jobs in D.C., but in any case, he said, “all the good jobs,” those for a hundred thousand dollars a year or more, were in Kabul. For a lot of those jobs, you had to have a master’s degree, at least; even in their desperation for applicants the American government maintains high standards for positions with inexplicable purposes: “program officer,” “regional governance specialist,” “communication and reporting officer.” A recent Harvard graduate I met in Istanbul was furious that she wasn’t qualified to work in Kabul—so many of her friends were there, and she had even studied Dari, and “wouldn’t it just be interesting to go?”
My boyfriend at the time, a journalist, first brought up the possibility of my visiting Kabul at my parents’ dinner table: “Suzy’s really gotta come to Kabul,” he said in a way that sounded like, “You really gotta get out to Des Moines some time.” The table had fallen silent, that being the first time my parents reconsidered how much they thought they liked my new boyfriend. “Are you insane?” I said to him with my eyes, my hands frozen on either side of my plate, but he was chewing his steak and rhapsodizing about how beautiful we’d all find Afghanistan. Foreigners fall in love with Afghanistan like they would a young girl.
My family, by then, had come to accept my life in Istanbul. They even visited several times, shocked by how beautiful and modern and gentle the country was. Not only was I safe there but, post–financial crisis, there were fewer opportunities for me at home. My parents were pragmatists, little different from the Americans Googling for high salaries in Kandahar. Americans were trying to figure out how to either take advantage of or survive in this new world.
At that time, suicide bombers struck Kabul once a month, but my journalist friends said it was safe, compared to Helmand. Foreign correspondents had well-honed ways of deflecting fear. At night they still filled up Kabul’s one Italian restaurant or Thai place, marveled over how they got that kind of fish in Afghanistan. I wanted to see this parallel world that had been created in the semipeaceful headquarters of our nine-year war. “But remember, it’s not really like an occupation,” I was told. The military had recently announced, in the eerily professional and nonsensical jargon with which it announces important battles, that they would invade Kandahar soon, and “reverse the momentum and gain time and space for the Afghan capacity.” To protest this incursion in their “political and spiritual center,” the Taliban began firing rockets; journalists in Istanbul put in their requests for a seat on the bus.
Many reporters and photographers chose to live in Istanbul, but rarely covered Turkey, mainly because American newspapers couldn’t make much sense out of its Islamic-democracy-secularist-autocracy mishmash, and also because, at the time anyway, there were no wars in Turkey. Some reporters would come to Istanbul from places like Basra or Karachi and gush anew at the wonders of Atatürk, still the main reason in their minds that this “Muslim country” was so stable, that it didn’t have suicide bombers, that women in spaghetti straps danced on tables by the Bosphorus. Istanbul was the relief, but also the exception, which might have had the unintended consequence of reminding them the Muslim world was hopeless, and that only the West could save it.
Machismo almost necessarily amplified the latent savior complex, if not a secret thrill for violence, in so many of us. Yet despite war correspondents’ reputation for superficiality and adrenaline addiction, the ones I knew were idealists, so much more so than the self-centered New York writers I had known. I was surprised at first to hear the sincerity in the correspondents’ voices, the concern for the fate of other countries. They had a necessary belief in the importance of journalism, not only because it was among the ways they could justify why they imperiled their bodies. These Americans had a purpose for living I had not yet glimpsed in my generation, and I suspected that the snide remarks often made about war journalists—that they were self-important—likely came from a place of profound envy and longing to do something for the greater good of the world. But what power did journalists have? How often did we hurt the very people we claimed to represent with our own muddled vision of the world, of America, of ourselves?
In retrospect, the dissolution of the Arab world also meant the dissolution of a certain kind of foreign journalism. Before it, the West had set up their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with elaborate infrastructures. In Afghanistan they had an easy blueprint to follow; the Americans had a muscle memory of the occupations in Germany and Japan, and a convenient amnesia of the German and Japanese people’s total devastation and easy capitulation to them. America was not the same country in 2001 as it was in 1945, but Americans thought it was, so frozen was their conception of reality in those myth-production years. The contemporary occupations would instead become temporary containment strategies for chaos, market economies for occupation, a dream factory of empire. Later, a foreign friend observed harshly that perhaps ISIS went after journalists because during the war on terror, journalists had become associated with that vast infrastructure of the American military. The country’s imperial soul had hardened into a vulnerable exoskeleton, all of us visible to anyone who wanted to attack it. In those years, I, too, participated in my first and only American occupation, in Kabul.