Descent Into Chaos (41 page)

Early on I bluntly asked Fahim whether he wanted to be the leader of an armed faction of one ethnic group or the head of a new national army and respected by all Afghans. I said he had the choice and on that choice would rest the well-being of the country. He looked at his aide in a moment of shock, then gathered his thoughts and gave a bland answer, saying he was not against “strengthening the central government, exercising greater control through demobilization and arms collections, and building the new ANA.” I realized then that neither Afghans nor U.S. commanders had confronted him with reality. His conciliatory tone had convinced some U.S. commanders that he was reform-minded when, in fact, he would resist reform of the Defense Ministry and demobilizing his own troops for as long as possible, thereby delaying everything the UN was trying to do.
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Fahim was also at the center of acute jealousies and rivalries within the Panjsheri camp. A major bone of contention was the cash, bank accounts, and precious stones their dead leader Ahmad Shah Masud had held. Masud had personally handled the finances of the resistance, and had received donations from foreign countries and earnings from the sale of precious stones. He had even had control of emerald and lapis lazuli mines in NA areas. A close relation of Masud’s would trade the stones in the Gulf and Europe, yielding Masud an income of up to $60 million in a good year. Fahim now reportedly controlled these mines. Millions of dollars were at stake, much of it secretly banked in Dubai and other Arab Gulf states. Some of the funds were held by Masud’s family members; others by Fahim and Engineer Arif, his intelligence chief. The latter insisted that the Masud family hand over money they held because Fahim was now their leader. Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former president, also insisted that he receive his share.

There were other sources of income. After Kabul fell, the Panjsheris who controlled the city got ahold of six containers of newly printed Afghani banknotes that by chance had just arrived from the printing press in Russia. When Karzai took office in December the government was bankrupt, but they refused to hand over any money. Since 1992, Afghani banknotes had been printed in Russia. Seven trillion Afghanis—the equivalent of $175 million—were printed between 1996 and 2001.
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A dire situation ensued, in which a small group of warlords alone held more money than the entire Afghan government. This situation prompted the United States to ask the IMF to create a new currency as quickly as possible.

Another major source of funds for the NA warlords was the drug trade. NA commanders taxed all opium routed for export through Central Asia by traffickers. After the war ended, poppy production exploded in the northeastern province of Badakhshan—to the advantage of the NA warlords. With all the power, money, and other stakes Fahim held, it had become imperative for the UN to speed up reform of the Defense Ministry, but U.S. support was only halfhearted. The UN was demanding that the three thousand officers in the ministry be reduced to three hundred, while eighty of the top posts should be filled with non-Panjsheris. Brahimi blamed the slow pace of reform and disarmament on “insufficient cooperation from key partners,” which meant the Americans and Karzai.
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Only after Khalilzad arrived as U.S. ambassador to Kabul did the Americans fully support the reforms and put pressure on Fahim. On September 21, 2003, just one day before Karzai left for a trip to Washington, Fahim agreed to appoint twenty-two officers from all ethnic groups to senior posts in the Defense Ministry.

The UN was also determined to push ahead with disarming the warlord militias. The lack of security created by the militias had led to public despondency, further undermining the weak authority of Karzai. The UN program called Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration, or DDR, eventually disarmed sixty-two thousand men, but not before the UN battled a lack of support from the Americans, Karzai, and others. Among Afghans, it was the most popular move carried out by the UN, although thousands of armed men remained. DDR had become an essential part of peacemaking and nation building around the world. “Demobilizing combatants is the single most important factor determining the success of peace operations,” said a UN report.
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The report noted that DDR was always the most underfunded operation in building peace.

The United States put up major obstacles, refusing to fund or support DDR or allow U.S. troops to help the UN carry out disarmament, which was both dangerous and risky. The CIA refused to divulge which of the militias were still on its payroll. Brahimi told the Americans that it was just as important to create a new army as it was to demobilize old militias, but U.S. officials declined to see the linkage. With the invasion of Iraq around the corner, Washington’s emphatic instructions to its commanders was not to get involved in “green on green” conflict. European governments were furious and frustrated at the American attitude, as were many junior U.S. officers in the field, who quietly helped the UN disarm the warlords.
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Washington’s refusal to support DDR in Afghanistan was another factor, along with the much bigger issue of the unilateral invasion of Iraq, which created the gulf between the United States and Europe.

The DDR plan was finalized at the security conference in Tokyo in February 2003, when Japan pledged to meet half the $160 million cost.
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Sultan Aziz, an Afghan-born development expert at the UN Development Program, led the team that drew up the DDR plan, which was called Afghanistan’s New Beginnings Programme. Every disbanded militiaman who handed in his weapon would receive two hundred dollars in cash, a food package, and agricultural implements if he wanted to return to his village or a temporary job and retraining in a new skill. Fahim had drawn up a plan where nobody would actually be sacked but militiamen would simply be moved to the ANA. The UN and the reformist ministers in the Afghan cabinet, led by Ashraf Ghani, refused to accept the plan, which led to an intense debate with Fahim. Finally, the Japanese made it clear they would not provide funding for DDR until Fahim scrapped his plan. DDR finally began in October 2003—four months late—with a test run in Kunduz, where one thousand men were disarmed.
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Simultaneously, the UN, with the help of ISAF, began to collect heavy weapons from the warlords and place them in central locations in preparation for the elections.

More than any other issue, DDR had divided the cabinet between reformists and the reactionary warlords who knew well enough that disarmament would spell the end of their military power. In May 2003 an anonymous paper written by a senior aide to Karzai circulated in the White House. (The author asked then and now that his name not be disclosed.)
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The paper openly accused Fahim of subverting the Bonn Agreement and the government in order to retain power. It gave a detailed assessment of his sources of income, which amounted to nearly $1 billion a year. U.S. officials told me that the paper had shocked Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, because the writer was too well known and liked by the Americans to ignore.

The reformist ministers now prevailed upon Karzai to take a stand against the warlords and Fahim. Karzai told Rumsfeld that he needed to sack Ismael Khan as governor of Herat, as Khan continued to refuse to hand over all customs revenues to the treasury. Rumsfeld replied that this was not the moment to make such a move, because of U.S. preoccupations with Iraq. The reformists in the cabinet told Karzai that if he got tough with the warlords, the Americans would have no choice but to respect his wishes and support him. If he asked their permission beforehand, the United States would never be willing to take any risks.

By the summer of 2004, the UN had succeeded in collecting all heavy weapons and completed the DDR of sixty-two thousand soldiers, but not before Fahim was removed from office, the warlords sacked from their military posts, and the Americans persuaded to stop financing them. DDR became one of the most decisive programs in the postwar period because it forced all the major players, from the Americans to the warlords, to come down on one side of the fence. For the UN it had been controversial and risky, but it had successfully forced the pace of reform. If the Americans had backed the UN program from the start, law and order would have improved much earlier and perhaps the Taliban resurgence could have been avoided. When the Taliban did reappear, their major slogan was that they would restore law and order. In June 2005 the UN launched the Disbandment of Illegal Armed Groups, or DIAG, which aimed to disband the hundreds of smaller groups of armed men who had not been affected by DDR.

The disputes over security were unsettled when the UN and the Afghan government embarked on the most ambitious part of the Bonn Agreement to date—framing a new constitution. In 2002, Vice President Nematullah Shahrani, an Uzbek from the north, had been appointed to head the nine-member commission that prepared an initial draft for a new constitution. The draft was then debated within the larger thirty-five-member Constitutional Commission that Karzai had appointed in April 2003.
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The Constitutional Commission members toured the country to seek people’s opinion on the draft. “On our tours people give the most importance to discussing how an Islamic system can be democratic,” Shahrani told me. “The second important issue was whether Afghanistan should be a republic, a monarchy or a parliamentary democracy, and the third was the debate between federalism and centralism.”
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Shahrani had been educated at Kabul University, Egypt’s Al-Azhar Islamic University, and George Washington University in Washington, where he had studied corporate law. He epitomized what Afghanistan’s Islam was like thirty years ago, conservative but not extremist, moderate but not overly modern. “Our constitution will be like a mirror,” Shahrani assured me. “One side reflects the wishes of the Afghan people, the other side the world and the best laws of other countries. We want to relate Afghanistan to the world,” he said. Three foreign experts—Guy Carcassonne, a French legal expert who had helped draft the 1964 Afghan constitution; Yash Pal Ghai, a Kenyan legal expert; and Barnett Rubin—helped the commission in the drafting process. The draft constitution was finally unveiled on November 3, 2003—two months later than the deadline—and the public was asked to comment again.

Indirect elections were held for a 500-member Constitutional Loya Jirga (CLJ), which would debate and approve the new constitution. The delegates, including 64 women—2 from each province—were elected by the 17,286 district representatives chosen during the 2002 Loya Jirga. Fifty of its members were appointed by Karzai. Ultimately there were 103 women in the CLJ, the highest percentage of women in any legislative chamber in the Muslim world.

This was to be Afghanistan’s sixth constitution since the first constitution was promulgated by King Amanullah in 1923.
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The new draft copied much from the 1964 constitution drawn up Zahir Shah, which envisaged a multiparty parliamentary system. “We took the very decent constitution of 1964 and just took out the king,” is how Brahimi described it to me. The new draft constitution declared the country the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and stated that no law repugnant to Islam would be adopted, although it steered well clear of imposing Sharia, or Islamic law. It envisaged a strong centralized state with a powerful president backed by a vice president. The president would be elected for a five-year term and would appoint the cabinet, judges, and senior military officers. The demands of NA leaders who wanted to have a powerful prime minister as well were rejected because of fears that two centers of power would be dangerous and unsettling, although this was to become a major issue during the CLJ.

The draft called for a two-house legislature—the lower Wolesi Jirga, or House of People, and the upper Meshrano Jirga, or House of Elders. Members of the lower house would be elected to a five-year term and would include at least one female delegate from each province. The president would have the power to appoint one third of the members of the upper house, of which 50 percent would have to be women. The Wolesi Jirga would have the power to impeach the president. The draft struck an important balance between the demands of the international community and Afghan tradition and religion. Thus the draft included the right of freedom of worship, stating there would be no discrimination on the basis of gender or ethnicity, and ratified all the major international human rights conventions.

Several groups opposed the draft, including monarchists wanting more powers for Zahir Shah, jihadi leaders who demanded Sharia law, and warlords who wanted a less centralized system, with greater authority given to the provinces. General Dostum’s Junbish Party went as far as to suggest a new United Republic of Afghanistan, divided into multi-province states, each with its own government and budget. Dostum was particularly concerned about losing his autonomy in the north.

After being delayed for three months and then delayed three times in the second week of December, the CLJ finally opened on December 14, 2003, as the security situation worsened. Three security perimeters involving some eight thousand ISAF and ANA surrounded the enormous white tent housing the delegates in Kabul. In the past few weeks the Taliban had stepped up assassinations and kidnappings of foreign aid workers, contractors, and Coalition soldiers. Two Indian and three Turkish engineers were kidnapped by the Taliban in the week preceding the CLJ. On December 2, the U.S. military had launched Operation Avalanche, an offensive in seven southern and eastern provinces, in order to keep the Taliban under pressure. The worsening security situation had been highlighted by Kofi Annan as he spoke of “the risk of failure in Afghanistan” for the first time. He told the UN Security Council on December 8 that “unchecked criminality, outbreaks of factional fighting and activities surrounding the illegal narcotic trade have all had a negative impact. The international community must decide whether to increase its level of involvement in Afghanistan or risk failure.”
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A great deal was at stake as the CLJ delegates began to deliberate.