The Punishment of Virtue (29 page)

Into this swashbuckling atmosphere was born, somewhere around 835, to a coppersmith in a village off the Zaranj-to-Bost road, Ya'qub ibn Layth. It was he who would finally defeat the zunbil for the Muslims and bring Islam to Zabulistan.

True to local custom, stories pin the start of Ya'qub ibn Layth's career to a highway robbery. A great caravan, in one version, is approaching Zaranj from Iraq; its representatives send ahead to the governor for an escort through Khariji-infested country. Ya'qub and his band of
ayyars
find out; they hide in a tower and ambush the escort on its way to meet the caravan. Helping themselves to arms and horses, the brigands ride ahead to fall upon the caravan—whooping the Khariji war cry to confuse their victims.

Like Ahmad Shah Durrani nine hundred years later, if on a smaller scale, Ya'qub thus demonstrated to his companions that they had something to gain by riding with him.

Ya'qub and his followers joined another band of
ayyar
s, and together they fought and faked their way to Zaranj, the provincial capital, which they captured and then quarreled over. In 861, Ya'qub ibn Layth had won out and was recognized by the people of Zaranj as their commander. But he still had to defeat his former
ayyar
chief, who had fallen back on Bost.

This he did in 864. The battle took place in Kandahar, where Ya'qub's
ayyar
opponent had joined forces with the zunbil of Zabulistan. The zunbil was killed in the fray, unhorsed, it is said, by Ya'qub himself.

The full annexation of the region and its conversion to Islam took many more years—Ya'qub waged another major campaign against Zabulistan in 870, and Kandahar proved especially hard for the Muslim invaders to reduce. But the determination of Ya'qub, a truly local Muslim ruler, who was schooled in the tricks of banditry and who enjoyed the support of the turbulent frontier folk from whom he sprang, would gradually break down the independence of Zabulistan.
³⁴

Like the poetic folk heroes Rustam and Garshasp, Ya'qub ibn Layth never forgot to send back a share of plunder to the liege lord of all Muslims, the commander of the faithful, the caliph of Baghdad. According to the chronicles, the capital was agog at the four-armed copper idol of a female deity, girt with two silver belts set with jewels, which arrived from near Kabul.
³⁵

But, again like Rustam and Garshasp, Ya'qub's submission to Baghdad was only token. At last he turned his armies westward, and pushed his conquests well into the lands of his nominal overlord. In 876, he was advancing on the capital, Baghdad.

For fifty years, Ya'qub's family, called the Saffarids,
³⁶
ruled much of the Muslim empire. Their domain, bordered by Kandahar and Kabul in the east, reached westward across most of Iran. Then the tables were turned, and Ya'qub ibn Layth's successors were pushed back to their native Zaranj, where the Saffarids carried on as local rulers for almost a century.

The Saffarid conquests are seen as one of the first real breaches in the territorial integrity of the Muslim empire. After the turn of the tenth century, no one could ever again claim to unite the disparate Muslim communities under a single government. And so in a sense, the eastern
yaghestan
—including the Kandahar region—remained unfettered even after its conversion to Islam.

Ya'qub ibn Layth was a local boy, and he spoke Persian. One evening, after a victory at Herat, he is said to have cut short the poet who was singing his praises in Arabic. “Why must I listen to this stuff I can't understand,” a local historian quotes him saying, more or less.
³⁷
His chancellor hastily improvised some lines in Persian, borrowing an Arabic meter to distinguish them from the minstrels'ditties that were all that existed in Persian at the time.

This man became the court poet. He sang Ya'qub's exploits in his invented Persian meter, helping spark a literary revolution. It was his work that led the way to the
Shahnama
and the
Book of Garshasp
, which celebrated the exploits of those other east-frontier local boys, Jamshid and Garshasp and Rustam.

WINTER 2002–EARLY SPRING 2003

T
HE SWASHBUCKLING, FRONTIER
atmosphere of those ancient days never really left Kandahar. It is still present now. There is always a sense of unchecked power, a feeling that violence might strike, and with impunity. The feeling lurks beneath the surface; my usual tack was to vigorously ignore it, and get on with the day-to-day. Sometimes that was not entirely possible.

One chill morning we were bringing in a blackened metal barrel, belatedly blowing the dust off it and attaching a length of jointed pipe to make it into a woodstove. It would soon be truly cold on our plateau, after the insufferable heat. And not a radiator in sight. I would pile a wool blanket on top of a U.S. Army-issue sleeping bag—goodies handed out to anti-Taliban proxies during the war—and still I slept fully clothed.

As we were tugging on the pipe, trying to wedge it into the hole cut for the purpose high on one of the walls, and then sealing the joint with a strip of cloth dipped in gypsum, one of Ahmad Wali Karzai's men arrived with a message asking me to see him. This was rare.

We still ate Ahmad Wali's food at Afghans for Civil Society—a priceless donation. We would send someone around to the tiny outdoor kitchen where two or three cooks wielding washtub-sized pots prepared meals for a hundred over wood-fire embers. Our man would line up with the others and bring back the stewed lamb and potatoes and rice in steel bowls—and when we were lucky, some okra.

In this way we were included in Ahmad Wali's retinue. I would stop by a few times a week to eat at the house, sitting in the carpeted hall downstairs, or to join the audience upstairs watching Ahmad Wali play pool at night—one of his few releases from the incessant demands of his undefined job. If I had left it a little too long, he would crack one of his dry, deadpan jokes about my absence, hardly looking my way as I walked in. A further sign of belonging.

But he rarely called for me unless it was something urgent.

He met me upstairs, by the pool table. “Don't worry about this,” he reassured me, pointing at one of the stuffed chairs. He sat down opposite. “It's not what it seems. I think I know what it is.

“The CIA wants to see you,” Ahmad Wali said. They had, he told me, some information about a threat against my life.

I later found out the exact terms.

Someone in provincial government was keeping tabs on a terrorist cell through an informant. The group answered to that radical Soviet-era faction leader Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, Pakistan's protégé before the Taliban. This cell was preparing an attack, right now. Its target: “a CIA agent masquerading as a journalist” named Sarah. The terrorists disposed of details accurate down to the make and color of my car. Considerately, the informant's handler had passed this information on to the CIA.

Ahmad Wali hardly let me digest this before interrupting with his hypotheses. He did not think the threat was real. And the explanation he hastened to add sounded right. He suspected Governor Gul Agha Shirzai's unscrupulous factotum Khalid Pashtoon, the one with the private prison. Pashtoon had excellent relations with the CIA. Ahmad Wali guessed Pashtoon had provided the “tip” himself, in hopes of scaring me out of the province.

I agreed with Ahmad Wali. It was pretty transparent, in fact.

Still, I brought the matter up with Akrem in one of our early meetings. He dismissed the possibility with a toss of his head. The faction leader Gulbuddin Hikmatyar had no presence in Kandahar Province as far as he knew. A few people in Helmand maybe, but nothing active in Kandahar.

The next morning I drove out to see the CIA at Mullah Omar's former compound in the pinewoods. The irony apparently lost on them, the American spooks had set themselves up in the headquarters of the vanquished Taliban; so instead of creating a visible contrast with the previous regime, they invited comparison.

There had been some work to fix the place up after the U.S. bombing, but the wedding-cake mosque was still there, and that clumsy landscape mural on one of the walls. The intelligence agents had failed to inform the Afghans on the gate that I was coming, so it took a while to get in. I had not even been supplied with the name of the person who had summoned me, so it was a hard job persuading the careful Afghans.

Hostility was palpable as I entered the CIA quarters, weaving my way through a forest of exercise bikes to get there. A heavy-set agent in shorts, sweating on one of them, frowned down at me as I walked past. Two of his colleagues found a small room sufficiently barren of secrets to allow me inside, and alerted me to the threat, in fulfillment of what they informed me was their duty.

I suggested Ahmad Wali's analysis. They waved it away, then hastily rectified: “Of course, we can't rule anything out. But we don't have any reason to think the governor's people would do that. No.”

The CIA agents were not even going to pursue the possibility, out of idle curiosity. Nor did they ever exchange words with me again.

To my embarrassment, this episode got blown out of proportion. The U.S. State Department representative at the Kandahar airport, a great guy if a bit eccentric with his head tilted back beneath a felt fedora, contacted U.S. troops all the way to Urozgan Province when he could not reach me on the phone—a common enough occurrence in infrastructure-starved Kandahar. Then he called Qayum Karzai's wife in Baltimore, who called my mother. The absolutely last thing I wanted to happen. It took a day or two to climb back out of that one.

But I was not frightened. I was closer to angry. I was sure that Ahmad Wali was right. It had to be the governor.

From the start, I had suspected warlordism was going to be the most serious problem facing the new Afghanistan. Our run-in with Governor Shirzai over the stone to rebuild Akokolacha hamlet had confirmed the premonition. Shirzai had proven to be just what Kandaharis had feared: arbitrary, predatory, brutal, if charismatic. The fact that Afghans for Civil Society had a mandate from Qayum to address matters of policy meant that we would be speaking out about warlordism as a policy issue, both in the United States and in Afghanistan.

But that sort of discussion was abstract at first, an intellectual debate. As time went on and to my intense surprise, nothing at all was done to curb Shirzai and other governors like him, and I had to witness the Kandaharis—people I knew—suffering yet again at their hands, the issue became a boiling frustration.

Now, suddenly, it had become personal.

Shared and rising disbelief at President Karzai's blindness to the threat these regional warlords represented became staple fare during my frequent chats with Akrem. We just could not understand Karzai's unwillingness to recognize and confront the problem.

One evening some weeks after the threat against me, I was sitting in his receiving room. Prayer beads of light-green Khakrez stone looped around his wrist, flipping them idly as he talked, Akrem was reclining against the carpet-laid cushions when he began to muse:

“President Karzai should be paying more attention down here.”

I waited.

“I don't see why he isn't collecting the customs directly instead of leaving it to the governor's people. He should define his officials' responsibilities more clearly. That would solve a lot of the problems here—if he explained to the governor exactly what his powers and duties are and what my powers and duties are. And he should send a representative to supervise the work of the provincial administrative departments. The education department, for example. Teachers should be talking about the central government in school, not just ‘Gul Agha, Gul Agha, Gul Agha.' Really, Mr. Karzai should have more
contact
. He should be meeting with groups of elders.” Akrem used the slang word
whitebeards.
“He should be mobilizing them. He should send for them and sit with them in Kabul, listen to what they have to say. And then he should give them some little gift, a turban or something. They will be overjoyed. And they will support him.”

I smiled. This was the kind of political strategizing that always seemed just a little incongruous juxtaposed with Akrem's police uniform and his bulky build. Once I asked him: “Do you talk to the president this way?”

“No,” he shook his head. “With the president I talk like a soldier.”

I don't know if this was true. If so, it was unfortunate.

In any case, and as usual, I agreed. It was over a year now since President Karzai had taken power, swept up to Kabul on an exuberant tide of hope, armed with an unequivocal mandate to fill his government with constructive, educated people, and to root out the predatory strongmen. The Afghan central government, personified by Karzai, was the population's only defense against the local warlords. It was supposed to contain these cancerous tumors, which the United States had injected back into the Afghan body politic. Kandaharis expected Karzai to act as their champion. They wanted him to provide
qanun.

But instead of protecting the people from the warlords, curbing them, or removing them from office, Karzai seemed to be waltzing with them, an endless number up in Kabul. He was becoming a distant figurehead incapable or unwilling to weigh in on the level that counted for ordinary people.

Several times that year I had passed word to President Karzai in this vein by way of an odd channel his brothers opened up between us: letters I wrote at their urging, which they handed to the president. I emphasized how important it was for President Karzai to keep in touch with his people, especially his base in the south. He enjoyed a tremendous popular mandate, but few institutions of power. Mixing with the people, leading from their ranks, he could work miracles. But cut off from them, he was just another scrabbling jockey in the Kabul power struggle. In just about these terms, I told him as much.

After the assassination attempt against him in the summer of 2002, Karzai's U.S.-furnished security had become draconian. The bodyguards with their lethal accoutrements hardly let him out of the palace. So, if President Karzai could not go to the provinces, why not, as Akrem was suggesting, take the provinces to him?

Akrem, naturally, had something specific in mind. He had been meeting with some tribal elders himself.

They were Ghiljais—that branch of the Pashtun ethnic group that had been expelled from Kandahar in 1738 by Nadir Shah and his Abdali mercenaries. Now the Ghiljais were a minority in the province. And because many of them had joined the Taliban—Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar was a Ghiljai—that had served as an excuse to exclude them altogether from the post-Taliban distribution of power.

I agreed to meet the Ghiljais. They had set up a tribal council with a president—a compact, intelligent man, silver-gray turban neatly tied, white beard trimmed to a tasteful point. He had a couple of deputies: a greasy-haired, ingratiating former Communist import-export merchant, and Mullah Omar's landlord at the roadside village where he used to lead prayers. Each one strove for exclusive and private access to me. God knows what I thought I was getting into.

We convened a meeting. At first the elders came off sounding like a disgruntled voting bloc after an electoral defeat. “The good people aren't getting government jobs,” was their primary complaint.

Meaning you, right?

I listened further.

“The people in power took their positions by force, and by force they placed their friends everywhere.”

That was sounding different.

“And reconstruction, it was supposed to be for everyone, but the money's being stolen.”

I asked if the gentlemen thought these last two points were connected.

“Of course they are! That's the whole problem. The powerful people gave their friends all the seats, like the education department or urban development, and then those officials put the reconstruction money in their pockets. They share it among themselves. And no one else gets any.”

I remembered the fate of my very first project, a campaign to link U.S. schools with newly opened schools in Kandahar, with American students collecting money and sending letters and pictures to their struggling Afghan counterparts. Some $1,200 dollars that students at my own elementary school had raised with great energy and excitement were pocketed by the principal of their Kandahar sister school, along with $600 of my own, which I unthinkingly left in my purse in his office. With a little investigation afterwards, we discovered that the principal split the money with one of his teachers and the two top education department officials, in a well-oiled routine. This larceny was minor compared to the wholesale theft of food supplies donated by the World Food Program and a Pakistani-based organization called Islamic Relief. None of the guilty education department officials, cronies of Governor Shirzai, was ever disciplined. These discoveries put me off working with Kandahar schools. Though ACS continued to do so, my heart was never again really in the program.

I broke off these recollections with a volley of queries to the Ghiljais. Their answers coming thick and fast, we reached the subject of warlordism: “The militiamen should be disarmed and put to work.” The elders were emphatic.

This position, too, echoed what other Kandaharis had been telling me for some time. As a representative sample of views in Kandahar, I found the Ghiljais' concerns perfectly worthy of attention.