The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (32 page)

Other smugglers preferred the highways, and paid different tolls. I met a small businessman in Kandahar who hired metalworkers to carve hiding spots into the bodies and engine compartments of cars and trucks. His shipments moved unnoticed among the other vehicles on the roads; in case of trouble, each of his vehicles contained three unarmed men carrying wads of cash hidden on their bodies. His transporters did not usually need to pay bribes, however, because he took the precaution of keeping district police chiefs and checkpoint commanders on regular salaries. Even if they were caught, it was only a matter of paying extra to get his men and shipments out of custody. This so-called “government route” along the highways may not have been systematic in the years before 2005; the small businessman relied on personal connections and individual payoffs at checkpoints. He could name the police, army and militia commanders who controlled various places on the road where his vehicles might face inspection, and maintained strong relationships with them. The international community tended to shrug off this kind of low-level corruption, figuring that without such perks the Afghan security forces might have little incentive to accept jobs in the dangerous south.

As the insurgency grew, and Taliban grabbed more territory, it would have been logical to assume that the insurgents’ share of the drug trade should have grown to reflect their increased power. But the insurgents appeared to face tough competition from mafias
within the Afghan government, which became better organized as the years passed. It’s unclear how much the international community understood about the threads of corruption that ran through all echelons of public and private life. It’s possible that the Western allies, despite their informants and monitoring technology, never did find conclusive evidence that their Afghan partners ran drug networks. I met officials from the US Drug Enforcement Administration who seemed genuinely frustrated by their lack of solid information. They could not claim ignorance about the overall trend, however. A British narcotics expert illustrated the situation with a PowerPoint slideshow he gave to US intelligence experts. He showed them a drawing of weigh scales; one side represented the Taliban share of the market, the other indicated the government side. He clicked forward, and a stack of cartoon bills cascaded down to show the insurgents’ windfall from protecting drug dealers. Then he clicked again, and a much bigger stack landed on the scales. The government’s take far outweighed the Taliban’s operation, he said. It was a blunt way of making his point, but the British expert felt a need to emphasize the message, particularly to the Americans; the US government was paying some Afghan strongmen for help with clandestine operations, after all, and the same characters were frequently the worst offenders in the drug trade. Nobody in the audience looked surprised as the British expert described the situation. A prominent US analyst, at the back of the auditorium, nodded and rolled his eyes.

Several months later, I sat down with a senior Afghan police official who had worked on counter-narcotics, and asked him whether that British expert was correct: Were figures in the Afghan government eating up the drug market?

“I saw the Toyota Land Cruisers coming out of the desert, the smugglers,” I told him. “This is one way of moving drugs across the desert, in the open areas that belong to the Taliban. Another way is along the highways, the roads that belong to the government.… Which way is bigger?”

The officer looked at me like I was an idiot.

“The government routes are much stronger and protected,” he said.

But in every other way, government influence in Afghanistan was waning. District leaders did not venture out to their rural offices, preferring to hide in major cities. Local officials pleaded for helicopter rescues to get them out of the Taliban-infested countryside. Security companies added dozens of extra men to protect convoys running through insurgent territory. How could the government mafias be strengthening their grip on the drug routes?

I may never know the answer, but one part of the equation seemed to be the way the government’s anti-drug police attacked rivals and protected friends. The Ministry of Counter Narcotics lacked armed men, but a branch of the Interior Ministry known as the Counter Narcotics Police of Afghanistan (CNPA) had a presence throughout the country and commanded about three thousand officers. Its men had better equipment and training than regular police. Their leader, General Mohammed Daud Daud, a deputy minister of interior with responsibility for the CNPA, was considered the country’s most powerful anti-drug czar. He was also widely believed to rank among the biggest players in the narcotics industry, as persistent rumours claimed that he used his position and his clout as a former militia commander to further his own interests. He vehemently denied any role in drug trafficking—“Your information is completely defective and deficient, and shameful for the prestige of journalism,” he told my translator—and I never did put together what you might consider legal evidence of wrongdoing. But in the final months of my assignment in Afghanistan I started to assemble some fascinating information about General Daud, as one example of the way drugs reached their fingers into government. Asking questions about the general seemed safer than investigating other government figures, because his status as a northerner made him less dangerous to me in the south. I was also lucky enough to find the kind of paper trail
that rarely surfaces in Afghanistan: letters that appeared to directly link General Daud with a drug dealer.

The letters were discovered by CNPA officers on June 19, 2005, during what must have been a really confusing narcotics bust. The takedown went smoothly at first, as the anti-drug team set an ambush on a road east of Kabul for a notorious dealer named Sayyed Jan. He refused to stop, and officers raked the tires of his new Lexus with gunfire. He tried to run away with two bodyguards, but the team captured them and found heroin in his vehicle. Accounts varied about the quantity of drugs; General Daud himself claimed it was 230 kilograms, but other counter-narcotics sources said it was somewhat less. (A British official joked, “Maybe some fell off the lorry.”) More perplexingly for the CNPA team, the drug dealer was carrying letters of protection from their own boss. A letter from General Daud to a southern governor, dated three months earlier, introduced the drug dealer in respectful terms and urged the provincial leader to help him with unspecified duties. Two other letters show that the governor and local police chief obeyed the CNPA boss, writing their own guarantees of safe passage for the dealer. Reading those letters must have felt uncomfortable for the CNPA men, as they realized they had caught somebody with powerful connections.

It would have been convenient for General Daud to claim that the drug dealer had been operating as a double agent, secretly working on anti-narcotics operations—that could have explained why the anti-drug czar scrawled his signature on behalf of somebody caught with millions of dollars’ worth of heroin. But the general did not offer that defence when a court convicted Mr. Jan. (He later escaped, under mysterious circumstances.) Nor did the general give any legitimate reason for helping Mr. Jan. When my translator confronted him, he touted his record of accomplishments and denied taking money from Mr. Jan—or any other drug dealer. I did not believe him. One of the trafficker’s relatives sat down with me and explained how the payoffs worked, with bribes of $50,000 to $100,000 required for each major
shipment. The most expensive payment, an additional $50,000 per shipment, went to the man Mr. Jan referred to using a Pashto word that sounds like
masher
, meaning
boss
. During my conversation with Mr. Jan’s relative on a chilly day in November, he huddled deeper into his woolen shawl when I asked him to name the boss. “Who was his boss?” he said, looking at me seriously through the smoke of his cigarette. “His boss was the chief of CNPA.”

Drug profits made government jobs worth serious money. Mr. Jan’s relative estimated that officers would need to pay at least $200,000 per year for the privilege of holding some CNPA postings. A former provincial police chief told me the same thing, confirming that bribes worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars changed hands before authorities in Kabul appointed people to key postings. It seemed that among the government officials who controlled the gateways of the south, few cared about collecting a salary from Kabul. The money flowed in the opposite direction, as employees rented their positions and hoped to extract enough bribe money to make the investment pay off.

I showed my notes on drug corruption to an experienced United Nations official in Kabul. He told me not to mistake the government mafias for a seamless conspiracy, suggesting that the networks within the regime functioned more like interlinked, overlapping, competing factions. The United Nations estimated that the number of farm hectares devoted to opium cultivation during the first decade of the Karzai regime was, on average, more than double the number of hectares used for opium during the Taliban regime. For the sake of argument, I suggested that a cold-blooded observer might not see the corruption as entirely bad because it funnelled money into the impoverished government and created incentives for the regime to win territory. On an individual level, I suggested, couldn’t the drugs serve as a motivator for Afghan police officers to assume dangerous posts that might otherwise get abandoned? My source from the United Nations didn’t take this well. He responded:
“You’re assuming it’s a two-way relationship between the drug dealers and the government, but it’s more like a triangle. It includes the Taliban.” He explained that roughly two hundred light weapons were smuggled into Afghanistan every day during the peak of the recent fighting season. The insurgents used ammunition in industrial quantities, littering tonnes of bullets on the battlefields with their “spray-and-pray” marksmanship. Taliban were usually portrayed in the media as rugged frontiersmen, hauling guns and bullets through snowy mountain passes, but in reality the shipment routes were more efficient: just like the drug dealers, weapons smugglers took advantage of the roads paved by the international donors. The United Nations official quoted a statistic that nearly made me choke: about 50 to 70 per cent of the insurgents’ weapons arrived by road, with help from corrupt figures in the Afghan government itself. (An intelligence source later confirmed this number, saying the percentages were even higher for ammunition.) The United Nations officials sketched out one drug route that took raw opium from Kandahar to a processing lab in the eastern provinces, then north to the border with Tajikistan. The same network of crooked officials, using the same trucks, smuggled guns back down the same roads for the insurgents in the south. A Kalashnikov rifle purchased for $100 or $150 in Tajikistan would be sold for $400 in Kandahar, a profit margin that made guns almost as lucrative as drugs. The fact that the rifles might be used to kill foreign soldiers—or even the corrupt Afghan official who sold them—did nothing to stem the trade.

My article about drug corruption appeared in early 2009, using the phrase “toxic triangle” to summarize the three-way relationship between the traffickers, insurgents and government figures. Within days of publication it became clear that I should stay away from the country for awhile. General Daud visited Kandahar soon afterward and seemed suspiciously curious about my whereabouts, as well as the identity of my translators, but fortunately he failed to discover their names. By then I had already departed. A US military intelligence
analyst sent a message saying that Afghanistan “isn’t healthy for you to come back to for at least a good, long while.… I don’t want to be attending a funeral.” I had expected that kind of backlash, in fact. My editors had approved a temporary leave from my job at the newspaper, so I would not need to go back to Afghanistan that year. I had already said goodbye to my local friends, who organized a farewell picnic at the last minute, throwing down a few woven mats in a parking lot near the airport. It had been a strange celebration, sitting cross-legged under a lone tree with barren branches, a little beyond the barbed-wire perimeter. Soldiers in a nearby watchtower paced back and forth as we enjoyed a final meal together. I promised to return someday.

Stray dogs at Tarnak Farms

I stayed away from Afghanistan for two years, wary of the threat from General Daud. He probably forgot about me—just one of many annoying foreigners—but I’ll never know whether he nursed a grudge: a bomb killed him in May 2011. His supporters wailed in the streets, and analysts lamented his death as a sign of instability. This was accurate; General Daud had been a dangerous man, especially for critics like me, but he ranked among the biggest of the pro-government figures who enforced a sort of order. The assassination was an indication of things going badly, of cracks in whatever structure existed in Kabul. His death allowed me back into the country, however, and I quickly made arrangements for a trip to Kandahar. I wanted to see old friends, and get a sense of how things had changed. News reports suggested that a radical transformation was underway: the United States had tripled the overall troop strength in southern Afghanistan. The surge of reinforcements was matched by a surge of violence, with insurgent attacks doubling in the province over two years. When I closed my eyes and imagined the war-ravaged place I had known, it was hard to picture Kandahar with dramatically more bombings, ambushes and assassinations. The city I left behind was a place where conversations often ended with a bang, as people rushed outside to gawk at smoke rising from the latest explosion. Now what?
Smoke from several bombings hanging over the rooftops at any given time?