The Punishment of Virtue (37 page)

“Thank you so much, Bill,” I answered him, from my perch on the back steps where cell phone reception was good, and I could watch the cows at tether and the antics of Wooly the Sheep. “But I think I'm OK. The letter never did get to Razziq Shirzai. An alert lieutenant kept that from happening.”

“Oh, I see,” Bill said. “All right…”

I assured him I was on my way up to Kabul before long anyway, and not to worry.

“Listen, Sarah,” Bill pursued. “Would you mind if I passed your letter along to General McNeill, the” Dan Mc-Neill, Bill thought, ought to hear what had happened on the base, and maybe the whole flap could provide an opening to transmit some of my views. For, mirroring the great divide between the two bureaucracies in Washington, a chasm had opened up between U.S. civilian and military leadership in Afghanistan. Bill accorded McNeill a pinch of praise to reassure me. He'd talked to him a few times, he said, and McNeill did not seem “too unreasonable.”

For me, the sentence—and the tone in which it was uttered—served as an abrupt initiation into the devastating rift between the Defense Department and the State Department in their supposedly joint conduct of U.S. foreign policy—far more telling than what was filtering out to me from media coverage back in the States. Bill Taylor was equivalent to the highest-ranking U.S. official in Afghanistan. And he had only spoken to the general in command of U.S. troops “a few times”? Bill's tone of voice was just as eloquent as his words. It assumed a kind of comradeship between us—fellow humans, the implication was—as we contemplated the specimen of some other species. State Department civilians found McNeill almost impossible to work with. They said he ran his show in Afghanistan as though they did not exist.

For my part, I could not have wished for a higher-value target, short of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself. I said, by all means, send the letter to General McNeill.

A few days passed and I got another call from Bill. “General McNeill wants to see you.” I later found out how it had gone, McNeill's response to my letter, a rant: “What does she think, we believe Shirzai? We trust the guy? A guy who's got a used-car salesman with a bad toupee for a sidekick? Does she think we trust
any
of them? But what's the alternative? And what about her, in with the Karzais? I can think of one of them who's making a whole pile of money out of our presence in Kandahar…” And on and on in this vein till the very end, when he suddenly asked: “When can I see her?”

I took the next plane to Kabul.

We met at the embassy, attended by a note taker named Tim. On his lapel, General McNeill wore a stickpin from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. That was his silent handshake across the divide, his signal that we belong to the same species after all.

I have never been especially adept at the unspoken; I always insist on spelling things ponderously out. So I reached for the much more unwieldy tool of words. “General,” I ventured, “before I say anything else, I want you to understand that I am with you. I consider myself to be on your team. I'm not allergic to men in uniform. If I sound harsh, it's a harshness that comes from disappointment, not knee-jerk opposition. Almost the way I'd be harsh with my own family.”

McNeill seemed to take this in.

I was burning to know if what the Special Forces officer told me out at Kandahar Airfield represented the position of the U.S. Army. McNeill, with a hint of a grimace, remarked that he had been having “some trouble” with that Special Forces team, and would be glad to see the back of them. From his response, it seemed clear that the SF soldier was speaking substantially for himself regarding the myriad virutes of Gul Agha Shirzai.

A bit reassured, I pounced on what seemed to be the most immediate fire to put out: Helmand.

“Governor Shir Mahmad did not order the assassination of those two troopers,” I told McNeill, “there's just no way.” General McNeill confirmed that he had aborted the Special Forces plan. He had ordered SF not to move on the governor, he told me, a spark of self-satisfaction in his voice.

Picking up on the tone, I suddenly glimpsed another divide between Americans, this one within the U.S. military itself. General McNeill was supreme commander of Coalition troops in Afghanistan. And yet Special Forces, the outfit that was conducting the greatest proportion of combat operations, did not answer directly to him. Special Forces, cohabiting with regular army troops on the U.S. bases at Baghram and Kandahar, roaming about bearded and grubby in the Afghan countryside, had its own separate chain of command, and answered to its own chief in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

So. Here's another factor thwarting the coordination of U.S. policy in Afghanistan.
I sighed. Though General McNeill did not say so explicitly, he made it plain that he shared my frustration.

The subject of Gul Agha Shirzai was, of course, the elephant splashing water on its back in the middle of our conversation. McNeill was clear. “We are here to support President Karzai. Shirzai is President Karzai's governor, and so long as he is President Karzai's governor, we will support him.” I launched into my argument that intermediate steps existed between removing Shirzai and writing him a blank check.

I pointed out, for example, that Kandahar has legitimate security forces: the army and the police. These forces had legal status under the 1964 constitution, which was supposed to be governing Afghanistan until a new one was written. In Kandahar, President Karzai deliberately took these legitimate security forces out of Shirzai's hands and placed them under someone else's command. Shirzai, by setting up his own private militias that now compete with these forces, was actually engaged in an act of rebellion. Collaborating so closely with his illegal militias, the U.S. military was not working
for
the central government, but
against
it. “Those militias should be disarmed,” I said.

I had had this conversation with military intelligence officers in Kandahar, and they had vehemently agreed. They had even worked up an operational plan for doing the job, which fell under the disarmament and demobilization mandate of the international community. But I could tell from General McNeill's expression that no such vigorous action was in the cards.

On the other hand, past the party line, he did display undisguised distaste for the caliber of most Afghan government officials. An opinion he let slip late in our discussion indicated—so starkly as to give me a jolt—that he included the Karzais with the rest.

The conversation went on, for a long time. I offered McNeill several openings to wrap it up politely, but he did not, circling instead from policy to personal antecedents and back around to policy. Finally he told me he wanted me to see his commander in Kandahar, a Colonel John Camp-bell. “A very competent youngster,” McNeill styled him, a man he said he himself would be proud to serve under, very smart. “Don't get me wrong,” he hastened to add, “he's a warrior. But he is intelligent. A good conversationalist.”

Army style, McNeill made it happen. Within days of my return to Kandahar, I had an appointment to see the base commander. I was bringing my Ghiljai elders out for a meet-and-greet with a Civil Affairs captain, so we decided to make a day of it.

Colonel Campbell proved to be every bit of what McNeill had promised. At first, our conversation was a little more awkward than the channel that had miraculously opened with the general. Maybe the fact that I had been forced on Campbell from on high put his back up. Maybe he was embarrassed that the Letter to Washington snafu had happened on his watch. He had read it, of course, so he knew where I was coming from.

We quickly abandoned territory-marking preliminaries, however, in favor of a remarkable frankness. Campbell, his hair shaved to the length and consistency of peach fuzz, his arched eyebrows expressing most of his reactions, was listening. His questions were direct. In reply, I was more detailed about the ways in which the exclusive U.S. relationship with Shirzai and his gang undermined the central government and undermined what the colonel was trying to accomplish in southern Afghanistan.

Campbell absorbed my points. And he turned and quietly asked the Civil Affairs captain sitting in on the meeting: “How did we let this happen?”

He turned back to me. “Tell me three things I can do, right now, to make things better.” I found five on the tip of my tongue. The first was to open up a direct channel with Akrem.

“Provide training for the Kandahar police force,” I said. Akrem had been begging for this kind of help for months. I had spent time with him, drawing up an organization chart of his department, listing the most-needed skills. “My men are fighters,” he would say; “they don't know how to conduct criminal investigations—they don't know how to direct traffic, for that matter. They need to be trained in the ways of a civilian institution of law and order.”

Here was an irony. Long before I had met Akrem, back in the first months of 2002, before I had even returned to Afghanistan to live, I had entertained a fantasy. I wanted to get U.S. cops to train their Kandahari counterparts. I wanted to make a symbol out of it. I thought: what if we get the New York City Police Department, the NYPD, to adopt the Kandahar police department. What if those heroic New York City cops came to the very place where the 9/11 attack was planned, and waded in and helped forge their counterparts into the police force of a new, democratic Afghanistan. What a phenomenal way to build a bridge out of the rubble of September 11. But the enormity of it daunted me. I did not know anyone in New York municipal government. I did not know whom to approach. Besides, in the postwar division of labor, the United States had been assigned the Afghan National Army to nurture, and Germany was put in charge of the police. A full year later, nothing had happened. Desperate, Akrem had set up a training facility himself, till he ran out of money. By now, with still no Germans in sight, there seemed to be no reason why the U.S. Army should not step into the void.

Idea number two for Colonel Campbell was for him to break his exclusive bonds with Governor Shirzai's private militia. Diversify, I told him. Work with other Afghan units. Even if, as seemed to be the case, constructive, reliable commanders were scarce in the regular forces, the United States would be less vulnerable to manipulation.

I told him to stop systematically turning low-level suspected insurgents over to Gul Agha's forces, since that gave them an incentive to point the Americans toward their personal opponents, calling them Taliban. I told the colonel to start meeting with tribal elders, for they were the leaders respected by the community. Finally, I advised him to work to target reconstruction contracts so as to benefit a cross section of the population.

When I was done, Colonel Campbell leaned back and looked at me, levelly. “We make mistakes,” he said. “But I think you will see that we also have a procedure for trying to catch and correct them.”

It was a fair point. What civilian NGO has postoperation assessment built into its mode of functioning? Of course, the military did not always get it right. Defensiveness in the glare of the media's occasionally harsh light, or impunity in its absence, left grave faults to grow, fester, and metastasize. The treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq is an egregious case in point. Still, the procedure does exist and compared not so badly to the ways of self-righteous humanitarians, myself included, who use the angelic nature of their self-sacrifice to cover everything from excessive salaries to an utter lack of accountability, as they mount the steps, measured off in one-year assignments, of their careers in the burgeoning aid industry.

Colonel Campbell was as good as his word. He told the Civil Affairs captain, a Niagara Falls police officer in civilian life, to get together with Akrem and see about designing a training program. The captain did so, though nothing ever came of it; he was more interested in the intelligence-gathering opportunities the relationship offered. Campbell asked me to draw up a chart depicting the main tribes in the region. To my dumbfounded amazement, there was no such information available to the U.S. army in Kandahar—almost a year and a half after its arrival there.

Hearing that I had arranged for a group of elders to come onto the base that very day, Colonel Campbell suggested that maybe he should stop by. He did so, at perhaps the most surreally awkward moment of a meeting that had kicked off a bit awkwardly anyway. The Civil Affairs captain had arrayed Formica tables with foldout metal legs in a U around a makeshift conference room—partitioned off in plywood from the main terminal building, which, despite some blackened spots left over from the anti–Al-Qaeda bombing, housed most of the army's offices. It was lunchtime, and in deference to the notion that Afghans might eat at lunchtime, the captain had placed cardboard trays of raisins and blueberry muffins and stacks of packaged PowerBars at intervals around the tables. Fifteen venerable Ghiljai elders considered this unhabitual arrangement, and gamely found places upon folding metal chairs arranged around the tables.

The captain had made the effort to avoid Shirzai's interpreters, bringing a middle-aged Afghan American instead, who proved to be both not too bright and a native of eastern Afghanistan, so the elders' broad Kandahar accent was a trial for him.

The captain's attempt at a fulsome greeting completed, and the response of the group's president underway, an odd noise began emanating from one of my favorite elders, Tukhi, with his wide, solemn eyes and enormous beard. It was a kind of moaning sound, punctuated by ragged breaths. Then he collapsed.