I need a shot of faith and I grasp desperately at those fifteen, twenty days at the end of which Haji Lalai suggested our imprisonment would be over. I pass myself off as someone well acquainted with the mechanisms of kidnappings and negotiations. I ask Haji Lalai his age, a factor that has a considerable bearing on tribal relationships. He says he’s twenty-eight, twenty-nine in June. I congratulate him on his rank, on the fact that he is in charge of military operations in such a vast province; but I add that he is young, very young. I tell him I’m fifty-two and suggest that, in keeping with tradition and rules of good etiquette, I have every right to feel I deserve respect. I expect, above all, a conversation of a different tenor, based on more sophisticated reasoning, on contestations more fitting to a meeting between a man who has hundreds of soldiers under his command, and a journalist whose destiny is in play. I complain, object to the trap that has been laid for me, and ask for news about the much vaunted Taliban leader who we were supposed to interview and who has supposedly been thrown in jail.
