The Punishment of Virtue (42 page)

SEPTEMBER 2003–SEPTEMBER 2004

A
FTER
A
KREM'S REMOVAL
had been announced and everyone was back in Kandahar, his loyal, hotheaded Alokozai tribesmen thronged to him. “This is an outrage,” they would cry, seated in his receiving room. “What should we do?” Akrem would take a breath, then raise a hand to quiet them. “I work for the central government of this country,” he would say. “And this is the central government's decision. We have to respect it.” He told his men to go back to their barracks and their checkpoints, and to give their obedience to the new chief of police.

I was impressed. In his shoes, I could never have come up with that.

Then Akrem returned to Kabul, to await the pleasure of President Karzai.

I made a several trips up to the capital that fall. Qayum was back from the United States, and we were wrangling about our organization, Afghans for Civil Society.

“What about Mazar-i-Sherif for Zabit Akrem,” he put to me, during an early visit. We were sitting in the shade of his verandah, admiring the ripening grapes that dangled from the small arbor.

Mazar-i-Sherif is an absolutely beautiful town, clear across Afghanistan from Kandahar, over the towering Hindu Kush range, part of the central Asian steppe culture beyond it that created the marvel of Samarqand. Mazar-the-Holy is named for its ancient turquoise-tiled mosque sanctuary. During the Taliban war to take over Afghanistan in the late 1990s, Mazar had been the last major holdout. Battles there, in 1997 and 1998, were the very worst of the war. First the Uzbeks, under their charismatic, double-crossing leader, Rashid Dostum, handed the Taliban their most devastating defeat to date: more than six thousand “religious students” were killed, wounded, or captured, including a harvest of seasoned officers and hundreds of Pakistani “advisers.” A year later, the Taliban took their revenge. The killing spree, when they captured cosmopolitan Mazar, went on for two full days. Using local Pashtuns as guides, the Taliban hunted down members of northern ethnic groups for a triple-tap execution: head, heart, and genitals. Prisoners were packed in cargo containers and left out in the desert.
¹
Now, with the tables turned again after the Taliban demise, Mazar was taking it out on local Pashtuns.

Mazar? God, no. It's a death sentence.
I tried to persuade Qayum out of it.

Confabbing in the living room of the house a friend had loaned Akrem, or in Qayum's patch of garden where I could host him in a bit of style, or over the phone when I was in Kandahar, Akrem and I would size up cities. “Farah is way too small,” our chats would go. “What about Herat?” And we would analyze the political situation in Herat. As we went over and over the possibilities, I gradually came to roost on one: Kabul. Zabit Akrem would be the perfect police chief for the Afghan capital. I told Qayum. I told Akrem's boss, Interior Minister Ali Jalali. Jalali laughed at me.

And so we kept configuring. Akrem was doing the same thing with other friends, with his tribal elders in Kandahar, with his family. Always, Mazar wound up on the bottom of the list.

Akrem would speak in these terms, weighing preferences and disadvantages, with me and others close to him. But not with President Karzai when the president summoned him to the Palace. With President Karzai, Akrem played it gruff: “I am a soldier, you are my commander. Where you order me to go, I go.”

Once, he invited me to dinner. It was a gesture, a wordless sign of gratitude for my devotion. And it embarrassed me. I knew he didn't have the money.

In Afghanistan, guests of note are invited to occasions along with their friends and retinues. It would never occur to a host to plan for his honored guest in the singular. Akrem planned for a company. The tiny high command of ACS was in Kabul for a showdown with Qayum. Even Amir, our Iranian-born U.S. coordinator, had flown over from Boston. Akrem looked the four of us up and down, and wondered where the rest of my followers were.

He was greeting us at the steps of the Iranian Restaurant, one of the classiest in town. It is built in the round and furnished inside like a tent, tapestries circling the walls. We had a private room with a table eight feet long, covered in food. It seemed like ostentation until I thought for a moment—and I understood that this was just the loudest way Akrem could think of to say thanks.

I don't remember what we discussed that night. I remember Akrem and Amir locking on to each other, pulling their chairs back into a corner after we were done eating, leaning into each other's conversation. Those two deep men found solace in each other. Each had been a refugee—the fact had conditioned their lives—one fleeing to the other's land, Iran, the other away from it. They spoke in Persian, Amir's Iranian accent sounding oddly effeminate to me, Akrem's voice, still clumsy with Pashtu intonations, hewn out of rock.

Akrem and I had time that autumn to indulge in quiet reflection between our sizing up of cities. “Do you think the war on terror is real?” I asked him one October day as we sat on Qayum's back porch.

“Since the fall of communism,” Akrem answered thoughtfully, “there has been a void of ideas. Islamic fundamentalism is the only competing ideology facing the West now. And competition is useful. The war on terror is real. But maybe the West is loath to win it totally, to totally eradicate extremism.”

Or: “For democracy to work, it has to be implemented by someone who speaks the truth. Now it is implemented by people who say one thing and do another. There has to be a sense of confidence—among villagers, for instance—that they can participate in political decisions. They must feel that what they wish to say about the landlord, about the governor, they can say.” Akrem reached for a metaphor. “If you keep a bird in a cage for twenty years and then open the door and say it's free, it may be free, but it doesn't have the courage of flight. There is no one giving the Afghan people that courage.”

The time stretched on and on, idly, and still no answer from the Palace. Once, I asked how his latest meeting with President Karzai had gone. Akrem paused before answering, as he often did.

“There was no meeting,” he broke the silence. “I haven't seen him. He won't see me.” He looked up, caught my eyes, allowing me to glimpse his embarrassment. “You're the only one I've told this to. I have to lie to my tribesmen when they call me from Kandahar. It's too much shame.”

I was beginning to see where this was going, and I was livid. The decision had been made; they were sending him to Mazar. Why did they have to make him twist in the wind?

As for myself, in the wake of the changes in Kandahar, I was thrashing around in a psychological whirlpool, fighting the disillusionment that was pulling me under. On top of the devastating turn Afghan politics had taken and his role in the results Qayum's smoke-and-mirrors management style was getting the best of me. And he kept trying to nudge our organization, ACS, in directions that seemed distinctly sinister. His latest idea, which he had pitched to me as “opening an office in Washington,” turned out to consist of setting up a service to collect information on the security situation and the ethnic makeup of the army. I was getting ready to resign.

The only thing that might have held me back was a project we had finally hammered out with the National Endowment for Democracy. It was the idea of organizing a council of elders for Kandahar Province: a training laboratory for parliamentary democracy. The way Qayum and I had conceived it, the council would be made up of community leaders from all the districts, nominated by village elders. There would be three committees: security, reconstruction, and government oversight. The original notion had been that the council would be an alternative and a challenge to Governor Shirzai's autocratic rule.

Since we had first come up with the idea and suggested it to NED, however, things had grown a little trickier. First, Shirzai had gotten a jump on us and set up an official provincial council, presided over by Ahmad Wali Karzai. And now Shirzai had been replaced as governor by Yusuf Pashtun—unassailable because of his impeccable English and his engineering degree from the American University in Beirut. I was not at all convinced, under these new circumstances, that our
shura
idea would work. Still, NED was ready to finance it, to the tune of $80,000. I thought about Akrem. From the beginning, I had wanted him to run this thing.

“Forget this nonsense, Comandan Saab,” I begged. “Look at what they're doing to you.”

Poor Comandan Saab, they will break his heart.
I remembered the prediction. It had come true. They were breaking his heart.

“Why are you sticking with them? Leave it,” I urged. “Come and run my
shura.”

He thought about it. He really considered it. But he kept waiting. I didn't understand. There was something about his stubborn loyalty that did not add up. Surely Zabit Akrem, of all people, wasn't naive?

Finally, in late November, Akrem was appointed chief of police of Mazar-i-Sherif. And at last I understood President Karzai's tactic. After three months'wait in mortified expectation, Mazar, which had been rooted so leadenly at the bottom of all our lists, sounded like paradise.

Akrem left his family in a house near Mullah Naqib's in Kandahar, and departed for Mazar.

As threatened, and after an exchange of angry missives with Qayum, I resigned from ACS at the end of January 2004 and wrenched myself out of the compound with the cows. I had decided to let go of the fantasy of direct democracy building in favor of grassroots economic action. Paralyzed at the thought of being in Kandahar on my own, I forced myself to go through the motions, accomplish all the material acts required to set up a new place for myself in a residential neighborhood. I quickly found myself reveling in the freedom, in my new proximity to ordinary people.

Still, Kandahar without Akrem—and, oddly, without my sparring partner, Gul Agha—was a bit hollow. I felt cut off from its doings, even though I was closer to its population in my new setup.

I would talk to Akrem on the phone every couple of weeks, feeling the distance. He was dealing with a whole new cast of characters, a different situation entirely.

“So how
is
it?” I asked him on his first trip back, when I rushed to meet him in a friend's garden. “What's Mazar like?”

“Sarah,” he shook his head with a smile. “It's like here, but ten times more. Here we have the tribes and we have Pakistan. There, it's not just the tribal Pashtuns, but the Pashtuns and the Uzbeks, and the Tajiks and the Hazaras. Even Turkomen! And instead of Pakistan, there's Russia and Iran and China—all of them with a hand in.”

And yet Akrem seemed to be swimming, in the sharks' tank they had dispatched him to. He looked healthy. He was alive again.

One day, I was taking a taxi from Kabul to Kandahar. This was another habit of mine unique among internationals. At last the road was paved, and the six-hour drive wasn't so bad. And the $15 taxi fare sure beat $100 on the UN flight. I did take some precautions: I'd have a Palace driver escort me to the station and send me with a driver he knew. Or at least I'd have someone note down the license plate number of the taxi I was taking, and I'd try to ride with other women. On this occasion, there were two women, with children, and a husband. I sat in front.

A few hours into the ride, the driver and the male passenger had struck up conversation. I heard the word
Mazar,
and then
Khakrezwal,
Akrem's last name. I tuned in. My Pashtu was finally becoming serviceable.

“There's this new chief of police,” the passenger was saying. “Things are really different now. Security is good. We don't have any problems now.”

I butted in: “This Khakrezwal. Who's he to you?” In Pashtu, the question is not quite as rude as it sounds in English. It is a neutral way of finding out what the tribal or blood relationship is between two people.

“He's no one to me,” my fellow passenger replied, a little surprised. “We're just Mazaris, that's all, going to visit my wife's family in Kandahar. Mr. Commander Khakrezwal has made things so much better in our town. That's all I was saying.”

That was pretty good publicity.

It was some weeks later that I got a call from Akrem. The story that was coming across the weak cell phone connection was impossibly garbled. It seemed that he had been besieged—literally besieged, in the military sense—inside his own police headquarters. The local warlord, Ustaz Ata, wanted him out of his hair, and had drummed up a pretext to intimidate him, I found out later. I think Akrem was telling me he couldn't get men out even to bring in food. Aghast, I called Qayum. “For God's sake,
do
something!”

I was pretty upset.

And yet Mazar was a world away for me, a decor with no depth surrounding Akrem when I heard his voice on the telephone, but substantially invisible to me. I never got up there to visit him, and I hardly made the effort to conjure up a picture, to place him in context, during our chats. And so I could not conceive of what he was going through.

“You have no idea,” his young right-hand man told me a year later. “For more than twenty-four hours, looking out our windows at their forces ringed around, we honestly thought we were going to die any minute.”