The Company We Keep (38 page)

Pakistan continues to struggle. The Marriott, where we often ate dinner and sometimes went just to escape the heat, was destroyed by a truck bomb on September 20, 2008. The Pearl Continental, where we stayed in Peshawar, was destroyed by another truck bomb, on June 11, 2009. Bob’s ISI contact, Colonel Imam, was kidnapped by militants in March 2010.

BOB

T
wo days before we leave Pakistan, I ask our Pashtun fixer why we can’t find Osama bin Ladin. It’s simple, he says, you never bothered to look for the chicken feathers. He smiles at my confusion and clears it up for me: the Arabs in al Qaeda eat chicken, while their hosts, the Pashtuns, who live in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, eat mutton. It was a matter, then, of wandering around these mountains looking for chicken feathers outside houses. “In a week you would have found bin Ladin,” he said.

The BBC reported in 1999 that “after a long chase” Sheikh Hamad bin Jasim bin Hamad Al Thani was arrested and brought back home to stand trial for attempting to overthrow his cousin in 1996. The question was whether the court would impose the death penalty.

As it turned out, the sheikh was spared execution and even eventually released. At the end of the day, his cousin the emir had the good sense not to shed the blood of one of his own. It’s not the way to hold together a family.

I read somewhere that with family the problems start when you never ask the questions you need to, and they never give you the answers they want to. No doubt, there’s a certain amount of truth in that. But I think it’s a lot more basic: we’re just plain dense when it comes to living. And it’s all the more ironic for someone like me, who thinks he’s so smart dealing with the big questions, like the rise and fall of empires.

Nothing I did in my years in the CIA added or subtracted from the mess out there. But what I do know is that while I was trying to make sense of that mess, there was a mess brewing at home. Very likely I could have done something about it had I stayed put. But what I can tell you for certain now is this: I won’t let it happen again.