The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan
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Kim Barker. (2011). The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Kim Barker. 2011. The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Kim Barker, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.

Kim Barker. The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.

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1. • role: Author
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   • bioText:

     Kim Barker was the South Asia bureau chief for The Chicago Tribune from 2004 to 2009, based in New Delhi and Islamabad. Her book about those years, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a dark comedic take on her time in South Asia, was published by Doubleday. The movie version, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, was released in 2016, starring Tina Fey, Martin Freeman, Alfred Molina, Margot Robbie and Billy Bob Thornton. Barker is now a metro reporter at The New York Times, specializing in investigative reporting and narrative writing. Before joining The Times in mid-2014, Ms. Barker was an investigative reporter at ProPublica.
      

   • name: Kim Barker

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2011-03-22T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Taliban Shuffle

fullDescription

A true-life Catch-22 set in the deeply dysfunctional countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan, by one of the region’s longest-serving correspondents.

Kim Barker is not your typical, impassive foreign correspondent—she is candid, self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud funny. At first an awkward newbie in Afghanistan, she grows into a wisecracking, seasoned reporter with grave concerns about our ability to win hearts and minds in the region. In The Taliban Shuffle, Barker offers an insider’s account of the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, chronicling the years after America’s initial routing of the Taliban, when we failed to finish the job.
When Barker arrives in Kabul, foreign aid is at a record low, electricity is a pipe dream, and of the few remaining foreign troops, some aren’t allowed out after dark. Meanwhile, in the vacuum left by the U.S. and NATO, the Taliban is regrouping as the Afghan and Pakistani governments floun­der. Barker watches Afghan police recruits make a travesty of practice drills and observes the disorienting turnover of diplomatic staff. She is pursued romantically by the former prime minister of Pakistan and sees adrenaline-fueled col­leagues disappear into the clutches of the Taliban. And as her love for these hapless countries grows, her hopes for their stability and security fade.
Swift, funny, and wholly original, The Taliban Shuffle unforgettably captures the absurdities and tragedies of life in a war zone.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus
   • content: "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."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: "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."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Minneapolis Star Tribune
   • content: "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."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone
   • content: "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."
5. • premium: False
   • source: P. J. O'Rourke
   • content: "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."
6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.)

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.)

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.)

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A true-life Catch-22 set in the deeply dysfunctional countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan, by one of the region’s longest-serving correspondents.

Kim Barker is not your typical, impassive foreign correspondent—she is candid, self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud funny. At first an awkward newbie in Afghanistan, she grows into a wisecracking, seasoned reporter with grave concerns about our ability to win hearts and minds in the region. In The Taliban Shuffle, Barker offers an insider’s account of the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, chronicling the years after America’s initial routing of the Taliban, when we failed to finish the job.
When Barker arrives in Kabul, foreign aid is at a record low, electricity is a pipe dream, and of the few remaining foreign troops, some aren’t allowed out after dark. Meanwhile, in the vacuum left by the U.S. and NATO, the Taliban is regrouping as the Afghan and...

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