The Punishment of Virtue (39 page)

As for me, aware of what had really been in the works, I knew what a climbdown this result was.

The first thing I wanted to do when I arrived back in Kabul was to find out what had gone wrong. I made the rounds. The U.S. embassy, President Karzai's chief of staff, and Interior Minister Jalali were my chief sources.

Their stories, of course, diverged. “They ganged up on us,” complained Jalali of the Americans. “They told us everything short of ‘Don't do it,' spelled out in capital letters.”

Karzai's chief of staff described U.S. civilian and military brass, several of whom had flown in from Washington, virtually lining up outside President Karzai's office to deliver messages like: “Have you thought through all the implications of this?” “Our troops are tied up in Iraq now.” “This just isn't the time.”

Faced with such explicit reservations, there was no way the Afghans could go ahead, the chief of staff told me.

At the U.S. embassy, I got a slightly different picture. Zalmai Khalilzad, Washington's special envoy and later U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, had asked President Karzai to detail his plans. “There's checkers,” Khalilzad had reportedly told Karzai, “and there's chess. When you play chess, you calculate your moves, two or three in advance.” The Americans, it seemed, had suggested some scenarios that might transpire if the warlords were fired. And they had asked Afghan officials to think about them: “What if…? Orif…? Orif…?” And the Afghans' response had been a little vague.

With nothing specific to counter Khalilzad's contingencies, the Afghans appeared to be presuming U.S. troops would bail them out if things went wrong. They seemed to be taking American help for granted. This was just the kind of attitude that would give a General McNeill indigestion.

The embassy told me the Afghans had pondered these discussions and had come back “spooked,” saying: “Maybe it's not such a great idea after all.” I suspected something closer to petulant deflation on the Afghans'part, a perhaps slightly relieved resignation together with an aggrieved sense that their suspicions had been right all along: the Americans were not going to back them up.

I brought the U.S. descriptions of poor Afghan planning to President Karzai's chief of staff. He shrugged. “He doesn't think that way. The president doesn't do detailed contingency planning. He just knows when something is going to work.”

It was the tuning fork. He probably did “just know” the move would work, with his finely honed intuition. But I was beyond irritated. Let him
pretend
to plan, I fumed to myself, enough to calm down the Americans anyway. I mean, gee. Hadn't we described exactly how to do it in our eight-point plan? Had he forgotten to read it or something?

As for the Americans, if their protestations of support for Karzai were in good faith, I wondered why they didn't offer to
help
with the planning process? Why didn't they put their chess-playing experience at his disposal, once it was clear that he really did want to rid his country of the warlords?

Both sides, I concluded, had blinked.

The Afghan proposal had been to fire half a dozen warlords: along with Gul Agha Shirzai, Isma'il Khan in Herat—perhaps the mightiest of all and backed openly by Iran—the double-crossing Uzbek general Abd ar-Rashid Dostum, who had the very worst record from the “
mujahideen
nights” and was currently duking it out in beautiful Mazar-i-Sherif with another thug called Ustaz Ata, and a couple more for good measure. In fairness, I could imagine the cautious Americans breaking out in a cold sweat at the prospect of such a hecatomb.

“Well, what about just Governor Shirzai?” I asked at the embassy. The answer came back that this would have been acceptable to Washington. “We were ready to do that. He was easy.” It was the Afghans, it seemed, who were playing for broke.

I went back to my friends in the Afghan government to get this confirmed. “That's right,” one of them conceded, “we couldn't have fired only Gul Agha. Pakistan would have been against it.” I almost passed out.
Pakistan?
Who's Pakistan? What does Pakistan have to do with this?

It was the beginning of my slow realization that Pakistan might have quite a lot to do with such matters. For whatever reason—fear, painful realism, or complicity—the very summit of Afghan government was relinquishing a good deal of sovereignty to its neighbor to the south. To this day, I have not fully worked out why.

For his part, Interior Minister Jalali proudly declared that he himself had argued against removing only Shirzai. “He hardly matters,” Jalali told me. “And it didn't seem fair, really, since it was Shirzai who stood up at the governors' meeting and said he would turn over his customs money to Kabul. It didn't seem right to punish him.”
And you believed him?
I saw that Shirzai's teddy bear routine was working on Jalali—the Afghan who had spent so much time in America that he had forgotten the wiles of his own people.

Then I remembered that someone at the embassy had used the exact same word to describe Shirzai's relationship with President Karzai. Karzai, it seemed, felt a kind of fondness for the Kandahar governor. He was like a teddy bear that President Karzai would be lonely without.

What a long way we had come since December 2001, when Karzai had worked shrewdly to contain Shirzai's power in Kandahar after the Americans had imposed him as governor.

As though all of these discoveries were not demoralizing enough, Interior Minister Jalali landed one more blow. “I'm going to fire your friend,” he declared.

“What?”

“Zabit Akrem, the police chief. I'm going to dismiss him this week.”

“What?” I gasped again. “You're kidding me, aren't you? Why?”

“He's cor-
rupt,”
said Jalali, practically rolling the “r.”

It was simply beyond my fathoming anything anymore. Here was the one Afghan official who seemed
not
to be corrupt. The one bent on doing his job. I suspected Akrem wasn't perfect: his wife was cloistered, and I had heard something about a house he was building in Kandahar, suspiciously large. Sometimes I hid my own enthusiasm for him because in Afghanistan, they were all rotten, weren't they? It was naïve to think well of anyone, right? And yet Akrem had never disappointed me. On the contrary.

I began begging. “Please, Ali, don't do that. I am telling you, he is the president's most loyal supporter in Kandahar. He's a good official. If you do it, not only will you have left Gul Agha in place, you'll have rewarded him. You'll have infinitely strengthened him. You can't fire Zabit Akrem and leave Gul Agha. And besides if you do it, the Alokozais will be furious; you'll lose the whole tribe.”

I felt like one of those petitioners, kissing my eyes in entreaty.

As a kindness to me, Jalali put it, he would stay execution till he went down to Kandahar in a few days and took stock of the situation himself. I slumped back on his couch, exhausted. I felt as though I had been hauling on the arm of a man with a gun—hauling his arm upward, to keep him from shooting his own foot.

It was time to go home to Kandahar.

SUMMER 2003

I
N
K
ANDAHAR
,
THE
first order of business seemed fairly clear: I had to have a face-to-face with Governor Gul Agha Shirzai.

I had been receiving fresh reports about how incensed he was. He really did complain to President Karzai about me. The president's younger brother Ahmad Wali, who had witnessed the scene at the Palace, had driven over to our compound in my absence and regaled my staff with the story.

Shirzai had actually threatened to quit if I remained in Kandahar. Interior Minister Jalali filled in the details for me later; he had been there too: “That
nar-shizai!”
Shirzai had fulminated to President Karzai—using a gutter term that means something like “mannish woman.” “So long as she's in my province, I can't work! I want to resign!”

“Nar-shizai!
Jalali cackled.
“Nar-shizai!”
He was in stitches.

Well, shoot, I thought. Why didn't the president go ahead and let Shirzai resign? That would have solved several problems.

But it seemed President Karzai was not amused. Everyone knew I was connected with the Karzai family. What was I doing giving all those interviews in the United States? People would think I was speaking for him, that my pronouncements were his indirect way of passing a message—that he had put me up to it. That was a fair enough critique. Not that it would shut me up any.

The governor was not home, so I pushed on to pay my respects to Ahmad Wali Karzai. He was pumping away on an exercise bike. One can't exactly go out for a jog in Kandahar, especially if one is the president's brother.

“No, Sarah. Don't go over there,” Ahmad Wali gasped. “He's really mad.” He said Shirzai had told the president that I was handing out money to get people to oppose his governorship. Typical Gul Agha Shirzai, I thought, declaiming wide-eyed the biggest whopper that came to his mind.
He
was the one who went around distributing handfuls of cash out of his black Land Cruiser. The old fellow who took care of Mullah Omar's cow in our back yard had got lucky the previous week: Shirzai had handed him the equivalent of a hundred dollars.

I left Ahmad Wali to his exercise and went, of course, back to the governor's residence. The soldiers in their U.S. fatigues shoved us roughly back from the gate. The governor's motorcade was about to come out.

Standing my ground as the black cars emerged, I raised a finger in a signal to stop. And I'll be darned: they did.

While an aide fumbled for some money to hand a beggar woman (he fished a blue bill out of his pocket, the locally colossal sum of $10), Gul Agha barreled out of his seat like an angry bear. “…do you think you're doing?!” He was in the middle of a sentence when he hit the ground. “Are you doing aid work or politics? Why are you going around—”

“We need to talk,” I interrupted. “But not here.” There was some kind of delegation from the finance ministry in the car with him, politely refraining from gawking. “Let's meet tomorrow. What time can I come?”

And so we made a date for the next morning at nine o'clock.

I had Engineer Abdullah with me to translate. In the opposite corner, it was just Governor Shirzai and his venom-filled factotum Khalid Pashtoon. The animosity I had long sensed between the two of them crackled in the air, blue-white, as if from a pair of short-circuiting wires. Pashtoon, the nominal subordinate, snapped at his boss two or three times in a tone of such manifest contempt I would have shown him the door right away, had he been my flunky. I wondered what he had on Shirzai for the governor to keep him around.

But I had never seen Shirzai so firm with him. For once, the governor insisted on running the meeting himself, chewing Pashtoon out like a private when he got out of line. It was great fun to watch.

Governor Shirzai had a whole list of questions for me, beginning with the one about my job description. Was I doing humanitarian work in Kandahar, or politics? Well, that was a good one. I asked it myself just about every day.

The governor continued. What had he ever done to me anyway? Was all this a personal vendetta of mine?

That was the cue for the one line I had rehearsed before coming in, the thing I had wanted to explain when I set up the appointment.

“This is nothing personal,” I answered. “What I am opposed to is a system, a certain way of governing. I'm not against you as a man. It's just your bad luck, Mr. Governor. If I lived in Herat, I'd be saying all the same things about Isma'il Khan.”

Khalid Pashtoon had made notes of practically every word I had uttered in the United States, and he kept himself busy consulting them. Every few minutes he would lob one, like a hand grenade. I had said Shirzai worked for Pakistan and the United States at the same time, he quoted, looking up to see what kind of damage that one would do.

The governor reared back with a bellow: he was the man in all of Afghanistan who worked hardest against Pakistan. “Since my father's time! The Americans called my father the Lion of Afghanistan! And now the Pakistanis are trying to kill me!”

“Is that so,” I replied. “Then why does the ISI run the one Internet café in town, which your friend here Khalid Pashtoon recently inaugurated?”

At first Governor Shirzai pretended not to know about the café-cum-listening-post. When I pushed him, he claimed it wasn't really important. “And besides,” he added, pausing to contradict his point with a most enlightening proverb:

“If you can't twist their arm, kiss their hand.”

It was an Afghan version of If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. And it confirmed what I had known for months: Shirzai was working for Pakistan.

“What a shame, Mr. Governor,” I parried back, “that someone of your valiant reputation—the son of the Lion of Afghanistan himself—should have to kiss
anyone's
hand.”

Shirzai's memory of his exchange about me with President Karzai diverged characteristically from the other accounts I had heard. In the governor's fantasy, it was Karzai who had offered to expel me from Kandahar, and the big-hearted governor had stayed his hand. “No, no,” he described himself urging the president generously, “it's OK; leave her.”

He could not resist just one subtle threat. The way I was going on, Shirzai warned me, some people might get upset, and then there was no telling what they might do; there was no controlling them.

Ah, I thought. We're going to play hardball? And I pulled out the pitch that Abdullah had counseled me to absolutely use. “I'm not working for the Americans,” I repeated, “but when General McNeill or Colonel Campbell asks me what's going on in Kandahar, I can't tell him a lie. I have to describe things exactly as I see them.”

“Name-drop,” Abdullah had said. “Name-drop as much as you can, and watch him wilt.”

It worked like a charm. Suddenly Gul Agha turned teddy bear. “Why did you have to write that I blow my nose in my turban?” he wondered, truly hurt. I assured him I had written no such thing. I was only quoted in that
Washington Post
article. I had not authored it.

“Well,” Governor Shirzai cheered up and said, “listen, you've been here a long time. You're not a foreigner anymore. You're a member of the family now.” The change in tone was breathtaking. “If you have any problems with anything I'm doing, come here and talk to me about it. I don't even mind if you write more articles, that's OK; just come to me first.”

And then Shirzai came out with his second local proverb, the import of which stayed with me for weeks. “Kill me,” the governor said. “But don't put me out in the sun.”

Better dead than exposed. It was a notion that cut to the core of the worst cultural clash I confronted in this land I had adopted: its utterly incomprehensible relationship with the truth. Words were not all that important, it seemed, since people lied so systematically. And yet words were terribly important, since they outlasted deeds; so the battles that counted were about getting the last word. I could not make it compute. To me words were precious and weighty—but only in their power to communicate the truth. For the truth, once communicated, was a potent force for good. So I thought.

The governor repeated his kind invitation. “Any time, day or night,” he effused, “if you have something to say to me, you come here. If I'm asleep, slap me on the ass and wake me up.”

“Thank you, Mr. Governor,” I managed. “Thank you so much.”

This encounter ushered in about three weeks of truce. A delegation from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) came to visit from Washington. We needed to talk about an idea Qayum and I had dreamed up for founding a provincewide council of elders—NED might just fund it—and they were checking on a project they had already sponsored: the conversion of our weekly women's discussion group into a more focused examination of the proposed new Afghan constitution. While they were there, the NED folks said, they wanted to meet the governor.

I called him up. “What kind of friend are you?” my erstwhile dueling partner demanded. “I've been sick with a cold for three days and you didn't even come to visit!” So I mixed some echinacea in with a jar of honey and brought it along as a gift.

Shirzai was resolved to make the most of this unexpected U.S. visit. He invited us to join a breakfast he was giving. We took our places at a table groaning with platters—kebabs alongside breakfast pastry. The other chairs around the table groaned with some of the city's top dignitaries: the chief judge, the public prosecutor, and Police Chief Zabit Akrem, among others. In this public setting, Akrem and I played our tacitly agreed charade, pretending polite acquaintance, no more.

I gave the governor-bear his honey, and lapsed into the kind of impudent informality that certain people bring out in me. Shirzai was explaining to the NED people what a democratic fellow he was. Anyone could say anything they wanted in his province. I think I audibly choked back a laugh. “Good,” I said. “I've got an article coming out soon.” He did not bite.

The brunch was pure enjoyment. It was NED's meeting; I was just along for the ride.

In light of our suddenly friendly truce, I actually decided to make a concession to Governor Shirzai. I was writing an op-ed for the
New York Times,
about warlordism, of course. I decided that this time there was no need to mention Gul Agha by name. It would, it seemed to me, be unnecessarily provocative, and it would not add much substance to what I was trying to say.

I searched my conscience. Was I, too, falling for the teddy bear act?

The op-ed appeared on July 1: “Afghanistan's Future, Lost in the Shuffle.” I hammered out my now-familiar refrain: U.S. policy could not succeed in Afghanistan if U.S. officials kept hedging their bets. I did spare the governor, referring to him only as “the local warlord.”

“Why are the Americans helping President Karzai and helping his enemies, the warlords, too?” I quoted puzzled Kandaharis, and concluded: “The United States should back any future decision to remove the war-lord governors.”
¹

Governor Shirzai was not taken in by the omission of his name in this article. He knew exactly who was meant. His riposte came shortly afterward, in the guise of a phone call from the political affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy, Kurt Amend.

“You have to come to Kabul,” he said. “Immediately. There is a really serious threat out against you. I think your life is in danger.” I could feel his urgency. It was me by name, Kurt was saying, and the details about the vehicle I drove and my recent activities were really scary.

This was sounding familiar. “Let me check around a little. I'll call you right back.”

I punched the number of a friend in the “intelligence community.” Not a civilian, a military man. He said he'd ask a few questions. Within half an hour he confirmed my suspicion: there was no “threat matrix” at the moment against any known group or individual in Kandahar. And it so happened, I had found out in the meantime, that Governor Shirzai and Khalid Pashtoon were in Kabul. Beyond any doubt, one of them had gone to the CIA station, and that was how the “threat” had been relayed to the embassy.

When, later, I saw the wording of the thing, I found it almost comical. It referred explicitly to the previous threat, petulantly complaining that it had had no effect on me at all. I had not lowered my profile one little bit and was still engaging in dangerous behavior, like meeting with moderate mullahs.

The shared inspiration of the two reports was pretty evident.

I called Kurt and told him not to worry.

And I wasn't worried. Much. But I did feel I had to respond. I felt that in the Afghan cultural context, so bold a challenge demanded a riposte; otherwise I would be seen as weak and easy prey. So I asked that friend in the intelligence community: “Next time you see the governor, would you mind letting him know that the U.S. military would be pretty displeased if anything should happen to me?”

“I'd enjoy that very much.”

I asked Bill Taylor at the embassy to pass on the same message. I did not have to ask Governor Shirzai's boss, Interior Minister Jalali. He did it of his own accord, in public, at a luncheon in Kandahar for his British counterpart, Jack Straw. Minister Jalali called me over to where he stood with Shirzai, leaning against a wall in private conversation.