Excerpts-

• Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1
  
  WELCOME TO THE TERRORDOME
  
  I had always wanted to meet a warlord. So we parked our van on the side of the beige road and walked up to the beige house, past dozens of skinny young soldiers brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles and wearing mismatched khaki outfits and rope belts hiked high on their waists. Several flaunted kohl eyeliner and tucked yellow flowers behind their ears. Others decorated their rifle butts with stickers of flowers and Indian movie starlets. Male ethnic Pashtuns loved flowers and black eyeliner and anything fluorescent or sparkly, maybe to make up for the beige terrain that stretched forever in Afghanistan, maybe to look pretty.
  
  Outside the front door, my translator Farouq and I took off our shoes before walking inside and sitting cross-legged on the red cushions that lined the walls. The decorations spanned that narrow range between unicorn-loving prepubescent girl and utilitarian disco. Bright, glittery plastic flowers poked out of holes in the white walls. The curtains were riots of color.
  
  We waited. I was slightly nervous about our reception. Once, warlord Pacha Khan Zadran had been a U.S. ally, one of the many Afghan warlords the Americans used to help drive out the Taliban regime for sheltering Osama bin Laden and his minions after the attacks of September 11, 2001. But like a spoiled child, Pacha Khan had rebelled against his benefactors, apparently because no one was paying enough attention to him. First he turned against the fledg-ling Afghan government, then against his American allies. In an epic battle over a mountain pass, the Americans had just killed the warlord’s son. The Pashtun code required revenge, among other things, and now, six days after the battle, here I was, a fairly convenient American, waiting like a present on a pillow in Pacha Khan’s house, hoping to find a story edgy enough to make it into my newspaper—not easy considering it was March 2003, and there were other things going on in the world. But Farouq told me not to worry. He had a plan.
  
  Pacha Khan soon marched into the room. He certainly looked the warlord part, wearing a tan salwar kameez, the region’s ubiquitous traditional long shirt and baggy pants that resembled pajamas, along with a brown vest, a bandolier of bullets, and a gray-and-black turban. The wrinkles on his face appeared to have been carved out with an ice pick. He resembled a chubby Saddam Hussein. We hopped up to greet him. He motioned us to sit down, welcomed us, and then offered us lunch, an orange oil slick of potatoes and meat that was mostly gristle. I had no choice, given how strictly Afghans and especially Pashtuns viewed hospitality. I dug in, using my hands and a piece of bread as utensils.
  
  But just because Pacha Khan fed us, didn’t mean he would agree to an interview. The Pashtun code required him to show us hospitality. It didn’t force him to talk to me. Pacha Khan squinted at my getup—a long brown Afghan dress over black pants, an Indian paisley headscarf, and cat-eye glasses. I kept shifting my position—with a bad left knee, a bad right ankle, and a bad back, sitting on the floor was about as comfortable as therapy.
  
  Farouq tried to sell my case in the Pashto language. The warlord had certain questions.
  
  “Where is she from?” Pacha Khan asked, suspiciously.
  
  “Turkey,” Farouq responded.
  
  “Is she Muslim?”
  
  “Yes.”
  
  “Have her pray for me.”
  
  I smiled dumbly, oblivious to the conversation and Farouq’s lies.
  
  “She can’t,” Farouq said, slightly revising his story....

• 

  November 29, 2010
  Barker, a journalist for ProPublica, offers a candid and darkly comic account of her eight years as an international correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Afghanistan and Pakistan, beginning shortly after September 11. With self-deprecation and a keen eye for the absurd, Barker describes her evolution from a green, fill-in correspondent to an adrenaline junkie who gets hit on by Nawaz Sharif, former Pakistani prime minister, and becomes adept in "how to find money in a war zone, how to flatter a warlord, how to cover a suicide bombing, how to jump-start a car using a cord and a metal ladder." Barker reveals how profoundly the U.S. continues to get Afghanistan wrong—that American personnel in the country live in a bubble, rarely dealing with Afghans, that they trample on local customs by getting routinely and "staggeringly" drunk despite Islam's prohibition of alcohol, and throw offensive costume parties at the Department for International Development (DFID). In equal measure, Barker elucidates the deep political ties between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the U.S.'s role in today's "whiplash between secularism and extremism," and blasts Pakistan's leaders for destroying their nation through endless coups and power jockeying.

• 

  December 1, 2010
  

  A memoir of the five years the writer spent reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

  Before her first trips as a fill-in correspondent in South Asia in 2001, current ProPublica reporter Barker had little overseas experience. But her life changed in the aftermath of 9/11, when she presented herself to the Chicago Tribune as an ideal candidate for reporting work in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unmarried and childless, she was "expendable." By the time Barker became the bureau chief of the Tribune's Delhi office in 2004, she was a confirmed adrenaline junkie, always looking for her next "fix" of riots, bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and natural disasters. Of the half-dozen countries for which she was responsible, only Afghanistan gave her the "high" she craved. With its "jagged blue-and-purple mountains, and bearded men in pickup trucks stocked with guns and hate for the government," the country seemed a hallucinatory version of her native Montana. Equally at home embedded with troops on the front lines or interviewing Taliban warlords and political elites like Hamid Karzai and Benazir Bhutto, Barker witnessed violence, death and governmental corruption on a daily basis. But unexpected absurdities, such as the attempts of an ex-prime minister of Pakistan to offer the writer choices—himself among them—for romantic "friends," offered occasional comic relief. Her work—and a social life in Kabul that resembled a surreal cross "between a fraternity party and the Hotel California"—became a way she could escape from the relationship failures, which she chronicles with the same candor and edgy wit that characterize the rest of her bold, slightly chaotic narrative. Politically astute and clearly influenced by Hunter S. Thompson, Barker provides sharp commentary on the impotence of American foreign policy in South Asia after the victory against the Taliban. "We had no stick," she writes. "Our carrots were limp after almost eight years of waggling around."

  Fierce, funny and unflinchingly honest.
  

  (COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

• 

  February 1, 2011
  War correspondent Barker first started reporting from Afghanistan in 2003, when the war there was lazy and insignificant. She was just learning to navigate Afghan culture, one caught between warring factions, and struggling to get space in her newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. Lulled into complacency, everyone from the U.S. military to the Afghan diplomatic corps to the Pakistani government stumbled as the Taliban regrouped. Very frank and honest, Barker admits a host of mistakes, including gross cultural ignorance that often put her in danger even as she found Afghanistan similar in some ways to Montana, her home state, what with bearded men in pickup trucks stocked with guns and hate for the government. She reports a string of characters: an amorous Pakistani former prime minister, a flashy Afghan American diplomat, an assortment of warlords, drug lords, fundamentalists, politicians, and fellow correspondents struck by wanderlust and plagued by messy personal livesall of them against a backdrop of declining war coverage in declining American newspapers. A personal, insightful look at covering an ambivalent war in a complicated region.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

• 

  December 1, 2010
  

  A memoir of the five years the writer spent reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

  Before her first trips as a fill-in correspondent in South Asia in 2001, current ProPublica reporter Barker had little overseas experience. But her life changed in the aftermath of 9/11, when she presented herself to the Chicago Tribune as an ideal candidate for reporting work in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unmarried and childless, she was "expendable." By the time Barker became the bureau chief of the Tribune's Delhi office in 2004, she was a confirmed adrenaline junkie, always looking for her next "fix" of riots, bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and natural disasters. Of the half-dozen countries for which she was responsible, only Afghanistan gave her the "high" she craved. With its "jagged blue-and-purple mountains, and bearded men in pickup trucks stocked with guns and hate for the government," the country seemed a hallucinatory version of her native Montana. Equally at home embedded with troops on the front lines or interviewing Taliban warlords and political elites like Hamid Karzai and Benazir Bhutto, Barker witnessed violence, death and governmental corruption on a daily basis. But unexpected absurdities, such as the attempts of an ex-prime minister of Pakistan to offer the writer choices--himself among them--for romantic "friends," offered occasional comic relief. Her work--and a social life in Kabul that resembled a surreal cross "between a fraternity party and the Hotel California"--became a way she could escape from the relationship failures, which she chronicles with the same candor and edgy wit that characterize the rest of her bold, slightly chaotic narrative. Politically astute and clearly influenced by Hunter S. Thompson, Barker provides sharp commentary on the impotence of American foreign policy in South Asia after the victory against the Taliban. "We had no stick," she writes. "Our carrots were limp after almost eight years of waggling around."

  Fierce, funny and unflinchingly honest.
  

  (COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

• Kirkus "Politically astute and clearly influenced by Hunter S. Thompson, Barker provides sharp commentary on the impotence of American foreign policy in South Asia... Fierce, funny and unflinchingly honest."
• Publishers Weekly "A candid and darkly comic account of her eight years as an international correspondent for the Chicago Tribune...With self-deprecation and a keen eye for the absurd, Barker describes her evolution from a green, fill-in correspondent to an adrenaline junkie... In equal measure, Barker elucidates the deep political ties between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the U.S.'s role in today's 'whiplash between secularism and extremism,' and blasts Pakistan's leaders for destroying their nation through endless coups and power jockeying."
• The Minneapolis Star Tribune "Kim Barker's memoir about her five years covering Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Chicago Tribune is brave, funny and outrageous....The Taliban Shuffle will pull you in so deep that you'll smell the poppies and quake from the bombs."
• Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone "Read this and try not to hurt yourself laughing. Who knew war could be so funny? The Taliban Shuffle isn't like any other book out there about Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's witty, brilliant, and impossible to put down. Think P. J. O'Rourke meets Paul Theroux. Kim Barker is a gifted storyteller, and her intrepid, sometimes wacky travels through these two strife-torn nations will leave you informed, amused, and--depending on your sense of adventure--wanting to tag along on her next trip."
• P. J. O'Rourke "Kim Barker gives a true and amusing picture of hellholes and the reporters on assignment in them. But she breaks the journo code of silence and reveals a trade secret of the hacks who cover hellholes: The hell of the holes is that they're kind of fun."

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  Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

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