The Punishment of Virtue (30 page)

So I began organizing a trip to the capital for “my” elders—as I had started to call them. While I was at it, I thought, why not get them an appointment with the U.S. ambassador? I began meeting with their council, leading what could be termed advocacy-training sessions.

They gathered each week in a large rectangular room off a verandah brightened by a row of windows. I remember clouds of flies lighting on the neon-colored hard candies a boy served with tea. It must have been during the first warm days of March.

The first thing I pushed the elders to do was get to the point. “President Karzai is overwhelmed with petty requests,” I told them. “People who want him to settle their boundary disputes or get their confiscated truck released.” And it is true. To an amazing degree, Karzai's role as president of Afghanistan remained that of a tribal
khan
called upon to adjudicate the most trivial of matters.

“Don't make it look as though you are going to him for jobs,” I said, though it was the Ghiljais' not-so-disguised objective. “You are bringing him questions of national policy, and you should phrase it that way.”

It remained to help the Ghiljais distill what they wanted to say down to the essential. Pashtuns tend to circle their subject.

I took to leading the sessions I attended, shattering protocol by turning directly to the men around the circle and calling on them like students. In a pause, I looked around at the grizzled heads bent toward me, the elders raising their fingers to speak: Tukhi, with his broad beard and saucer-round eyes; wild-haired Gul Mahmad Kuchawal, hands on his gnarled cane, who claimed to represent the region's nomads; young Tukhala Khan, who had probably never spoken up in front of his seniors before.

There it was, another surreal scene: an American female presiding at an Afghan council of elders.

The points the Ghilzais made were precise, intelligent, and grew more and more daring as our sessions went on. For example, the elders thought it was impossible for the gun-lords to be brought to heel without concerted international intervention; they were too entrenched by now. The international community, read the United States, owed this service to Afghanistan.

“The foreigners are the ones who sold guns to these people, who gave them guns, who worked with the gun in Afghanistan. Now they call us warlords. They should help us get rid of these people.”

I, too, was surprised at the lack of attention in Afghanistan to DDR, as it is called: disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. Somehow, the theory seemed to be, the “free market”—in this poverty-stricken land—would absorb the gunmen if they could just be taught a skill. Like the elders, I thought disarming the warlords was going to take more work than that. I thought a more concerted program would be needed, perhaps converting the former gunmen into a kind of Afghan Civilian Conservation Corps, putting them to work on the roads and other major infrastructure projects. That way they would retain an esprit de corps, discipline, and the uniforms and badges that often give young men a sense of pride and identity. Later, arms long laid down and new skills learned, they could be reintroduced into civilian society.

The Ghiljais did not spare President Karzai in their assessment of ward-lordism. “Karzai made the
topak salaran
,” one grizzle-headed man ventured bravely, several sessions in. “Isma'il Khan, Gul Agha Shirzai—didn't Karzai bring them back?”

“You should tell him that. Don't be shy. Be tough on him.”

I was sure that Karzai was just as impatient as we were to rid Afghanistan of these thugs. But for some reason, he was afraid to do it. Maybe he did not know he had the power. Maybe he just needed some clear evidence of local support. That's how I reasoned. It never dawned on me that President Karzai might be playing us all. That perhaps, despite his high talk, he no longer had the least intention of crossing the warlords.

I helped the elders distinguish which of their concerns to address to President Karzai and which to the U.S. ambassador. There is always a latent sense in Afghanistan, despite the country's fierce independence, that “the foreigners” control everything. So the Ghiljais drew up two petitions for my review, one addressed to Karzai, one to U.S. ambassador Robert Finn.

Next came the matter of logistics. And suddenly that Afghan fragility resurfaced. I had risked the drive to Kabul half a dozen times by then. But these men were old. Most had not set foot outside Kandahar in years. They were frightened.

We set about weaving safety nets. The council president got a handheld satellite telephone; we arranged for him to call in along the way. I organized backup from the president's office for when the group arrived in Kabul.

They set off. Calls came in from the prearranged places at more or less the right times—I was not really keeping track, but to my elders it was important. They were proud of their achievement, and they needed encouragement. I cheered them on.

Then, at the Kabul gates, their fears were realized. Northern Alliance fighters looked askance at their dust-daubed cars unencumbered by license plates, at their Pashtun turbans and beards, and listened with revulsion to their soft, southern consonants. The Ghiljais were barred entrance to the city.

While the old men quietly pulled their cars to the side of the road to wait, I jumped on my cell phone, trying to break through to
anyone
at the president's office. Eventually an envoy was sent, and the Ghiljais were escorted into the capital.

It was a meaningful foul-up. What it signaled to the Ghiljais was that this central government of theirs, this central government that was supposed to be protecting them, was not even accessible without the intercession of a foreign woman. What it signaled to them was that Kabul, the capital of their country, did not belong to them. It did not belong to the Afghan people. It belonged to a clutch of warlords from the Northern Alliance.

The presidential guesthouse was the venue for the next crisis. It was not ready. There was no electricity or water. Food had not been prepared.

This lapse was simply unforgivable. I had been planning this visit for weeks. The aim was to improve mutual esteem between President Karzai and a tribal bloc that could anchor support for him in the south. Instead, the elders had been snubbed, in precisely the domain where an Afghan leader's power is traditionally put on display: his hospitality.

I could not believe the Palace had let this happen.

A high-ranking official was at last dispatched. Escorting the Ghiljais to a hotel where they were fed and settled, he saved the day. My elders called me and reported their satisfaction.

In the end, the visit was a great success. President Karzai's chief of staff e-mailed his thanks. The elders, he wrote, were of “much higher quality” than most of the president's callers. They spent nearly two hours at the U.S. embassy. And then, of course, they found their feet. They discovered some other Ghiljais, and they communed. Ministers sent for them. Their visits were covered on TV. My elders stayed in Kabul for two full weeks.

During that time I drove up to the capital myself, to engage in the most intense period of collaboration ever with my boss, Qayum Karzai.

Qayum had proved to be an extraordinary inspiration. He could make me literally catch my breath at his penetrating expositions of what was wrong with Afghanistan and why. Much of my thinking about the warlords was rooted in his analyses. Ever vulnerable to sheer brilliance, I was repeatedly swept away.

By now, though, I had painfully learned that Qayum's patience for the details of making anything happen lagged far behind his appetite for abstract analysis. He seemed blissfully unconscious of what it took. Some other characteristics had begun to unsettle me as well. There was a secretiveness about him, a cultivated ambiguity, and an excessive disorganization, which was belied by his laser-tuned powers of observation, and his allergy to saying anything of substance on the telephone. Something about him made me uncomfortable. But then that genius of his would sweep me off my feet again. It was very disconcerting.

Qayum lived in a modest house in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood of Kabul. It was an NGO Row. Everyone's headquarters was in Wazir Akbar Khan; you could walk from Oxfam to the Red Cross to Germany's GTZ to the U.S. embassy. Newly minted SUVs, emblazoned with logos or shielding their occupants behind smoked-glass windows, clogged the streets, dominating pedestrians from their tall wheels. The occasional fruit-and-sundries stall, the battered white-and-yellow local taxis, the limbless veterans begging from wheelchairs were dwarfed.

Qayum's house had a small patch of garden in front. A sitting room with heavy wooden furniture adjoined the dining room, with a curtain between. Upstairs were three bedrooms occupied by the president's chief of staff and that man's young nephew who also worked at the palace, and an older Karzai cousin of some sort, who would turn on his radio while the television was going, prayed for hours, and thought nothing of camping out indefinitely with Qayum and eating his food. In this way did the place remain Afghan, despite the Western-style furniture. My unannounced arrivals always entailed a shift in occupancy: someone ended up on the living room floor. But I was always greeted, no questions asked, with a tall thermos of tea and a dish of nuts and raisins set out on one of the black marble-topped coffee tables. Once, when Ahmad Wali was in town, his retinue of four stayed with us. They slept in their shawls under the stairs, next to the woodstove that had been installed for the winter. Somehow, there was always room. Qayum would pad around quietly like a long-limbed cat that noticed everything, his glasses perched on the polished dome of his forehead.

Those February days, I established my computer and printer on the end of the dining room table. Qayum's first priority was to produce a mission statement and an organization chart for a putative upcoming presidential campaign. Such a thing was called for in the blueprint for building Afghan political institutions that had been hammered out in Bonn, Germany, just before the fall of the Taliban. But as yet no date for the election had been set, nor had it even been decided whether other offices would be up for a vote at the same time. The assumption was that the presidency at least would be in play and that Karzai would run, though he had not announced any intention to do so and was certainly not busying himself launching a campaign.

Nevertheless, we had at an organization chart. The result of our labor was structured and efficient looking—perfectly alien to the Afghan context, not to mention to Qayum's own impenetrably ambiguous style. Qayum was fantasizing. If his brother did not want to campaign actively for the presidency, as, for whatever reason, he apparently did not, there was no way we were going to force him.

The next effort edged closer to what I thought was the urgent priority. We developed a long-term—and hopelessly elaborate—strategy for eroding the power of the warlords. It would take years.

Then it was my turn. “Let's help the president out,” I said over morning tea, flavored with cardamom. “Let's give him a plan for firing the warlords.”

I had raised the warlord issue repeatedly with expatriates over the past six months—U.S. diplomats and army officers, journalists and humanitarian workers—when I met them at Qayum's house or the U.S. base or the embassy, or when they came to visit me, which was happening more and more frequently. Being one of the few U.S. civilians living in Kandahar proper, and one with a surprising range of Afghan contacts, a person who was willing to voice her opinions to boot, I was becoming something of a tourist attraction. My interlocutors, spooked at the thought of an Afghan conflagration or wanting to advertise their sympathy with President Karzai, had been telling me: “But how can Karzai take on the warlords? He's got no army.”

I thought the question was disingenuous, a pretext for inaction. I didn't think the president needed an army. Neither did the Karzai brothers. We thought the governors were paper tigers, lacking popular support. Without the overt U.S. backing that kept them
rampant
, they would mew plaintively and crawl away. We were sure of it. Our tuning forks were unequivocal.

But there was a chicken-and-egg problem. Americans and Afghans each seemed to be waiting for the other to make the first move. American officials would repeat that as long as President Karzai gave these men his confidence, there was nothing the United States could do.

But we're the ones who brought the warlords back and rammed them down his throat!

Never mind. I let that piece of recent history go. Instead, I tried to explain how Afghans read body language, not words. “As long as we are visibly supporting these warlords with money, uniforms, and guns, that's the message President Karzai is going to read, not our verbal assurances of support against them.”

Then I would shuttle back to the Afghans and explain that President Karzai really had to be decisive about this. He had to take clear and visible action. Then the Americans would follow his lead.

It felt like hauling on chains, trying to get two wild horses to nuzzle each other.

But as I told Qayum that morning over tea, we needed to get out of the realm of speculation. If we could just come up with a concrete proposal for how, practically, to eject the warlords, maybe we could break the deadlock. President Karzai, I said, needed a road map, something he could take to the Americans to demonstrate that he was serious.