MARQUETTE – When journalist Kim Barker arrived in Afghanistan in 2002, she realized she forgot all her money, and there were no wire transfers or ATMs in a war zone.

She went to the front desk to speak to the owner of the hotel – complete with bullet holes in the ceiling – and told him her problem.

The owner opened a drawer, pulled out a wad of bills and asked, “How much do you need?”

Barker spent five years as the South Asia bureau chief for The Chicago Tribune between 2004 and 2009, directing coverage of Pakistan, Afghanistan and India.

She spoke Monday evening at Northern Michigan University about her 2011 book, “The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan.” Paramount Pictures has adapted it into a film starring Tina Fey called “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” that opens in theaters March 4.

Barker, now a reporter for Propublica, has 20 years of journalism experience covering a wide variety of subject matter. But before heading to the Middle East, she’d never traveled, she said. So she was surprised when Afghanistan wasn’t as foreign as she expected.

“For me, it was kind of like home because I’m from Montana, and it’s a state that has a lot of mountains and a lot of guys with beards and pickup trucks and guns who don’t like the government, so it was kind of familiar,” Barker joked.

While her anecdotes kept the crowded Great Lakes Rooms in stitches, the grim and immeasurable cost of war remained an underlying thread of her talk, which focused on the lessons she learned and how they could be applied to foreign policy.

She did not discuss the separate war in Iraq, referring to Afghanistan as “the forgotten war.”

Between 2001 and 2014, the “the forgotten war” killed 149,000 people in Afghanistan and Pakistan – including more than 2,300 American troops, Barker said. For context, she added, the total killed is seven times the population of Marquette.

For this, American taxpayers have paid more than $728 billion, she said. Citing the National Priorities Project, Barker put that number in context too. Since 2001, she said, Marquette residents have paid $35 million for this war.

“With all this good news, you can see why I wanted to write a funny book about Afghanistan and Pakistan, because the only alternative was basically crawling into a corner and just sort of curling up in a pool of tears,” she said.

After the tragic events of 9/11, Barker said the Tribune was looking for correspondents to send overseas. Wanting to witness history unfold and test her own limits, Barker walked into the foreign editor’s office with zero foreign experience and introduced herself.

“I said, ‘My name is Kim Barker and I’m a metro reporter. I’m single and I’m childless and therefore I’m expendable, and I’ll go anywhere you want to send me,” Barker said.

Barker would go on to cover the horror stories – suicide bombings and families torn apart – but she was most interested, not in how people died in war, but in how they lived, she said.

“I had the sort of sense from reading about it that Afghans were this very humorless people, you know, downtrodden,” Barker said.

But she found the opposite was true.

“It turns out Afghans have this amazing sense of humor,” Barker said. “I think it was Woody Allen who said, … ‘Comedy is tragedy plus time.’ And for Afghans, that time is about five minutes. They make jokes and I’m like, ‘Too soon, too soon.’ “

The lessons Barker learned – that America has had to learn simultaneously – were do your research, adapt to the local culture, stick with a single strategy and know when to get out.

Not understanding the cultural differences, the motivations of neighboring countries, the rivalries between tribes or the desires of Afghans in their complex historical context – Americans “got a lot of things wrong,” Barker said.

“We fought a 13-year war,” Barker said. “But it’s not like it was one 13-year-old war, it was more like it was 13 one-year wars. We kept shifting the goal posts, we kept shifting the strategies, … basically, throwing up anything against the wall to see what’s going to stick. And as we’re doing all this, security is getting worse and worse.”

Today, the Afghan government – which was essentially set up by the U.S. State Department and suffers from endemic corruption, Barker said – is struggling to fight off both the Taliban and Islamic State militants.

As Barker left, the countries she had grown to love – from her hospitable and resilient friends to the incredible food – started “circling the drain,” she said.

“For anybody who’s been overseas or worked overseas or wants to go overseas, for the future soldiers, diplomats, aid workers, journalists, it’s really hard to change a country, you know. That is very difficult,” Barker said. “But you can change individuals’ lives, and you can let them change yours.”

Barker said she saw positive things too, like little girls going to school for the first time, cities getting electricity, the internet and cell phones taking off – even reality television.

She wrote letters of recommendation to send Afghanistan’s first foreign exchange students to the U.S. in 30 years. Many of them are still in the U.S. today, she said.

“I would do pretty much anything for any Afghan that I met over there,” she said, “Anything to help.”

Barker said what the vast majority of Afghan people really want is what we all want: Peace, security and a future for their children.

“I think that Afghans will go towards whoever makes that possible,” she said. “And they’ve been … fragmented. … I do think people there are tired of fighting.”

Mary Wardell can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 248.