The Punishment of Virtue (8 page)

I set up my minidisc player and start listening back over the tape I've recorded, banging out notes on my laptop as I go along.

Four hours later it's done. My tea-pouring guard has gone to sleep. I have set up my folding satellite dish on the roof outside. And I have managed it. I have written up the tale young Fayda told me on the road—awkwardly, I grant. But I have at least sketched the unbelievable story of American soldiers egging on a warlord to snatch Kandahar away from President Karzai, who is also guided by American soldiers. I e-mail the script to Washington over the satellite.

And it flops.

I am reporting to a new editor now that I have crossed into Afghanistan—thus is the world carved up in newsrooms. And the new editor doesn't like the bit about the warlord. I dig my heels in. He sends the script up the chain of command to the international editor, a hard-drinking ogre we have all feared and respected and detested at one point or another. The ogre explodes. We have a shouting argument over the satellite phone. “There isn't shit in your story,” he yells. The misunderstanding is this: he was looking for Mullah Omar sightseeing, the kind that filled the pages of the
Washington Post
he had opened that morning: descriptions of the tacky compound Mullah Omar had built with Usama bin Laden's money, descriptions of the horrors he had committed, landmarks made famous by his Al-Qaeda guests. “There will be plenty of time later to get into squabbling among the Afghans,” my editor snaps.

I feel that everybody knows by now how noxious the Taliban were, and further expansion on that theme is superfluous. It is just gratifying Americans' sensibilities. The time for writing the Taliban story was five years back, I think. This is the story that matters now, I am sure of it. Because we are across the watershed. It is terribly important for America to get this right—important not just for Afghanistan and the United States, but for the planet. The world is watching us in Afghanistan. How we perform here after defeating the Taliban will determine where a lot of people come down on the clash of civilizations.

My editor wins, of course, half an hour to airtime. Fayda's testimony and its implications are cut from my report. So I never get to tell the story I already guess is key to what kind of Afghanistan will emerge from U.S. intervention.

I'm doing that now.

DECEMBER 2001

I
T TOOK ME A LONG TIME
to flesh the story out. I had to get to know the cast of characters—get to know them well enough to go to them, one by one, and ask them how it really happened. I did not plan it that way. But eventually, by stunning happenstance, I did come to know them all. Mahmad Anwar remained a friend even after he left his post in the Kandahar police. I took another Achekzai ride across the border more than a year after the fall of the Taliban to visit him at his home in Chaman. I got to know Akrem and Mullah Naqib. My acquaintance with President Karzai and even Governor Shirzai grew personal enough that I could call and set up appointments to talk about these things.

The only main character I was not able to track down was an American: Colonel David Fox of the U.S. Special Forces. All of my Afghan sources assigned him an important role in the events that would ensue.

My first priority on this quest was to confirm that American soldiers really did encourage Shirzai to “take Kandahar by force.” That was easy.

The airport, where President Karzai had ordered Shirzai to hole up, is a crucial piece of real estate. Set among sparsely growing pine trees about a half hour's drive east of town, it is endowed with an abnormally long runway, tribute to its strategic location. The Soviets expanded the U.S.-built facility in the early 1980s so they could land their bombers to punish the countryside or potentially strike into Pakistan. After Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar invited Usama bin Laden to join him in Kandahar in 1996, the hunted Al-Qaeda chief hardened some compounds at the airport for himself and his key followers. Die-hard Al-Qaeda fighters withdrew there in the last days of the Taliban regime, to play out their last stand in Afghanistan.

In early December 2001, U.S. jets started bombing the airport. A withering barrage of ordnance thundered down, cracking runways, plowing up acres of the brick-hard earth, and sending neighboring villagers fleeing to the homes of friends and relatives, or across the border to Pakistan. My sources inside Shirzai's militia—Mahmad Anwar and his Achekzais—regaled me with stories of bitter fighting for control of this airport between Shirzai's men and Al-Qaeda Arabs. But I never could get truck drivers to confirm a ground battle at the time, when I interviewed them on the Pakistani border.

With their dogged Afghan way of going on living no matter what kind of hell was breaking loose around them, these drivers ran their painted vehicles, loaded with leaning towers of pomegranate crates or magenta-stamped sacks of Afghan wheat, past the airport and up the main road to Chaman, Pakistan. I asked them about the airport, and they described new gun emplacements and a large herd of pickups pressing their noses against the gates. But no fighting.

This is the type of counterintuitive evidence it is wise to give credence to. The vaunted ground battle at the airport never took place. It was part of the fiction Gul Agha was concocting—with tacit U.S. approval, I came to understand—to secure his future reputation.

Not till the bombing had sufficiently “softened” this final target did U.S. handlers allow their Afghan protégés anywhere near the airport. Akrem remembered it this way: “On the eve of our assault, the Americans told us, ‘Tomorrow we will go as far as the first tower of the airport.' Some of our friends went farther, and three of them were killed. So we retreated again, to the bridge. The Americans bombed some more, and then they said, ‘You can advance now.'”

When Akrem reached the outskirts of the airport, a vista of carnage opened before him. “Wherever there were Arabs, they were dead. They were sitting with their weapons, dead. Curled up in corners, dead.” Akrem counted just six or seven of the wounded that Gul Agha's fighters finished off. For a couple days, witnesses reported to me at the time, bodies lay by the roadside stiffening, before militiamen and townsfolk gathered them and buried them in what was immediately dubbed the Arab Cemetery, on the north side of Kandahar.

Then came Karzai's satellite call to Shirzai. Akrem, standing right beside the former governor, overheard it. He heard Shirzai shout insults. “I don't take orders from Hamid Karzai. I don't know Hamid Karzai, and I don't know Mullah Naqib. Kandahar is mine.”

Gul Agha Shirzai does not deny his disobedience. I was at last able to confirm it with him during the appointment I made for the purpose, in 2004. “Yes, I spoke with President Karzai on the phone,” he boasted. “I told him, ‘Don't put Mullah Naqib's Alokozais in charge of Kandahar. Don't make that mistake.'”

And so the gloves came off.

“Then Gul Agha started his propaganda,” says Mullah Naqib. “He said I was allied with the Taliban, that I had hidden Arabs and passed them across the Pakistani border, that all Alokozais do this.”

Gul Agha Shirzai, advised by an Americanized Afghan factotum named Khalid Pashtoon, was making strategic use of the media, as I saw him do for years afterward, impressed at the deftness that lurked beneath his loutish exterior. He was adroitly staking out his position on the airwaves of the widely respected British Broadcasting Company.

The terms of Gul Agha's diatribe on the BBC were, according to my friends, “Mullah Naqib is a member of the Taliban; there's no difference between them.” Mahmad Anwar said Shirzai told the Americans the same thing: “He won't help you hunt Taliban; he'll help them against you.”

I did not catch Shirzai's stormy interview verbatim, when as a guest in an Achekzai compound across the border in Chaman, I was pawing the ground to get inside Afghanistan. But I certainly heard about it. It was the talk of all the refugees: how Gul Agha Shirzai had announced he was going be governor of Kandahar, no two ways about it. The reports I was filing to NPR were filled with accounts of a chaotic—tense though not openly violent—struggle for control of the city. President Karzai even threatened to resign if his supporters could not sort things out among themselves.
¹

At this dramatic juncture, the president gave Akrem permission to leave the airport and head for downtown Kandahar, to join up with Mullah Naqib. The groups were reconfiguring along more natural lines.

“Things aren't clear,” Mullah Naqib told Akrem. “Let's wait a few days to see what develops.”

“The next day,” says Mullah Naqib simply, “Gul Agha Shirzai came to the governor's house.”

That is, he “entered the city by force.” This was the race up the jouncing road, guns sticking out every window, that young Fayda described to me as we retraced the route. Mahmad Anwar was the first of my friends to confirm the key detail: the U.S. role in Shirzai's move on Kandahar. “The Americans escorted Shirzai to the governor's palace,” he remembered. “There were six planes circling in the air.”

I suddenly heard an echo resonating: the voice of a refugee. At the time, he had described the Americans handing out new rifles to Shirzai after he reached the city. The man had been present; he had claimed an armful of MREs. He had described the guns with precision. “New ones,” he had said. “The stocks were plastic, not wood.”

When I put the question to Akrem sometime later, he nodded with a curt finality. “When Shirzai entered Kandahar, he entered with the Americans. And no one was fighting the Americans. Mullah Naqib told me, ‘This is not the time for more war. If they push forward, you pull back.' Everyone felt the Americans were backing Gul Agha.”

Mullah Naqib confirms: “I told my men not to fight. And the president ordered: ‘Don't fight against Gul Agha.' I drove out to his camp to ask him.”

And so, outgunned, Mullah Naqib surrendered Kandahar to the invaders from the south, as he had to the Taliban seven years before.

Gul Agha made straight for the governor's palace in the heart of the city. Built by the founding father of Afghanistan itself, Ahmad Shah Durrani, it stands opposite two shrines to the twin emblems of the nation's legitimacy: the mausoleum over the grave of the same founding father and the graceful mosque that houses a holy relic of the Prophet Muhammad. The Palace, as it is known, was a very symbolic place for Gul Agha to be.

Casting about for a headquarters of his own, Mullah Naqib lit on Mullah Omar's former compound—big, gaudy, partially bombed out, nestled in a pinewood on the edge of town.

And thus began a tense face-off between the two men. For some forty-eight hours, the situation remained deadlocked. No one could be said to control Kandahar.

On December 8, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld ruefully told the
Washington Post,
“The Kandahar situation is a bit like a wild west show. It's very untidy.”
²
What he neglected to add is how his own troops had helped orchestrate this show by ushering Gul Agha Shirzai onstage.

1980—2001

T
HERE WAS AN ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE
between the two sides confronting each other inside Kandahar—that's how I saw it, anyway. Gul Agha Shirzai, according to the picture I was getting from every Kandahari I talked to, was a predator—uneducated, irresponsible—who had no legitimacy except force and money. Hamid Karzai, by contrast, represented inspired political leadership for the new Afghanistan. And not just for Afghanistan, I felt. He seemed to be offering his vision to a cynical world—an example for us all: popular participation in a nation's destiny, individual freedoms, and steps toward healthy economic development. Perhaps he was the answer to the malaise I was feeling. Perhaps he was the spark that could jolt our stalled-out democracies back to life.

Hamid Karzai had played a rather discreet role in the preceding bloody decades of Afghan history. When, in 1979, the Soviet Union sent its army to prop up a puppet Communist government in Kabul, Karzai joined the Afghan resistance. He threw in his lot with one of the factions least known for religious extremism. The scion of a noble clan, Karzai took his place not in the field, but in the back office, handling contacts with rival factions and international supporters, and marshaling aid to fighters. He was among the early direct contacts Americans established among Afghan resistants.
¹

The choice to turn to him again in 2001 was well advised. Karzai's humble but elegant manner, his ringing exposition of the reasons for overthrowing the Taliban, set forth in daily radio interviews from his redoubt in the mountains north of Kandahar, had in large part swayed the stubborn Pashtuns to embrace the coming change. The vision Karzai expounded of an Afghanistan ruled by its people through traditional participatory structures, reclaiming its position among the commonwealth of nations, inspired his compatriots and made of him the obvious—and only—candidate for the role of a God-sent visionary who might finally end Afghanistan's twenty-five-year nightmare.

“He's the only one without blood on his hands,” Afghan refugees in Pakistan told me when I asked them about Karzai the day he was designated interim Afghan president. These refugees were still profoundly shaken by the violence they had experienced during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, and also—perhaps more devastatingly—during the civil war that followed it. The memory of those years haunted them. It pervaded their thoughts and words.

The Soviets finally abandoned Afghanistan and, in the winter of 1989, pulled the last of their troops out in a long and limping line across the great Amu Darya River, Afghanistan's northern border with the crumbling Soviet Union. In the wake of the breathtaking Afghan victory, it was the former resistance commanders' claws-bared struggle for power, their barbaric internecine fighting, that bled Afghanistan white and made it ripe for picking by the Taliban.

“They called themselves religious leaders,” refugees told me. “They would swear on the Qur'an. But they weren't Muslims. Dogs wouldn't do what they did.”

In the scramble to fill the vacuum left by the retreating Soviets, the former resistance commanders did not just kill their countrymen and fellow Muslims. They cooked them alive in cargo containers; they hanged them till their limbs started twitching, then let them down to catch their breath and hoisted them into the air again, and cheered when they finally died.

This behavior was not prompted merely by some innate evil lodged in those who perpetrated it. The cause also lies in the wounds to the spirit many of these fighters suffered during the prolonged anti-Soviet war—a war that shattered every notion their traditions had bequeathed to them about how honorable war should be fought. It was a war whose primary victims were civilians, women and revered elders and toddlers whom the humiliated fighters were powerless to protect. Now we have put a name to the psychological anguish these fighters suffered afterwards: we call it post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

Combat veterans afflicted by this psychological aftereffect of the hell they have been through typically remain in “combat mode,” often turning to criminal activity. It is a kind of self-medication. The skills they acquired during wartime find a purpose that way, and the unaccountable rage they experience finds an outlet. Former soldiers caught in this particular trap of PTSD are incapable of achieving what they so desperately desire: a homecoming to peace.
²

But only sophisticated psychological analysis can reveal these underlying explanations of the 1990s
mujahideen
behavior. For ordinary Afghans who had suffered ten years of Soviet violence, to suffer likewise at the hands of their own Afghan champions was a betrayal beyond words. Even a decade later, in 2001, Afghanistan remained profoundly traumatized. And most Afghans did not want these former resistance commanders rehabilitated; they wanted them tried and executed for war crimes.

But gentle, conflict-averse Hamid Karzai was different. Not only was he remarkably cultivated, he seemed uniquely devoid of brutality and arrogance. One shrewd former Communist government minister praised his style to me this way: “When he came, he was in our local dress, with a turban. He would introduce himself to the people, saying: ‘I grew up in your land. I am the son of Abd al-Ahad Khan; I am the son of you.' Because of his dress and his speaking our language, and because he was speaking simply, the people found a place in their hearts for him.”

In another conversation, an ordinary Kandahari—a small-time opium dealer, in fact—described how Karzai's radio broadcasts during the U.S. anti-Taliban bombing campaign had helped him process information he had been taking in for years, but had never fully understood. It was as though, during that earsplitting, terrifying month of November 2001, Karzai provided the Kandaharis with a new and wider context in which to place their recent Taliban experience.

“We saw the Arabs,” the dealer told me, referring to followers of Usama bin Laden. “We saw them even more than the Taliban. Our government was not in the hand of the Taliban as much as it was in the hand of the Arabs. And we were not allowed to be with them in their council meetings. But still we didn't understand.”

They did not understand, this dealer was trying to tell me, that their country had been hijacked, wrenched from the grasp of ordinary Afghans and put to ideological purposes beyond their ken. Lapsing into the sort of poetic exaggeration Middle Eastern languages delight in to convey emphasis, he tried to spell it out: “We didn't know that twelve hundred countries and fifteen hundred countries were interfering in ours. Only now we came to know it. Now we came to know that there were foreigners and terrorists going around. Now we came to know that our country had dark nights.”

Surely the dealer could not have been so naive. After watching neighboring Pakistan expend itself without counting for two decades to achieve control over Afghanistan, after watching Usama bin Laden cruise the town in a heavily guarded motorcade behind darkened windows, surely this streetwise dealer could not have thought the Taliban were wholly home-grown. His explanation was a self-serving whitewash, more than likely.

Still, Karzai offered his touchily proud countrymen that: He offered them a face-saving way out.

Most important, for nearly all the Afghans I interviewed at the time, was Karzai's emphasis on negotiation. “He was telling the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, to hand over power peacefully and not to destroy the country,” the dealer told me. “From that we came to know he is a good person. By negotiations and by the help of the tribal elders and their councils, he came into Kandahar. With the people's consent, that's how he came. He did not enter Kandahar by force.”

During the days of pandemonium that immediately followed the Taliban flight, with the shoot-out over the cars by the almond merchants' warehouses, and the tug-of-war for the injured at the hospital, and looting all over town—humanitarian offices turned inside out, cars stolen, papers strewn, furniture carried off—Karzai's soldiers were praised for their comportment. They acted like public servants, people said, assisting the frightened population, refraining from pillage and theft. They seemed to represent the new Afghanistan the population so fervently desired.

America's other group of proxies, by contrast, Gul Agha Shirzai and his gun-slinging acolytes, embodied precisely the kind of violent chaos Afghans dreaded.

Shirzai was also from a Kandahar family. His father had a reputation across the province as a champion dogfighter. He poured much of his energy into this passion, breeding the barrel-chested fighting dogs local nomads keep, organizing matches, tallying bets. In a country where a man is known by his lineage, by the deeds of his forebears, these were not auspicious roots for Gul Agha Shirzai.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Shirzai's dog-fighting father also joined the resistance, calling up tribal followers and marshaling them into a rebel force. But according to the word spread by many in Kandahar, the Soviets lured him secretly to their side, and he served as a spy for the occupiers while pretending to fight against them.

Such betrayals and counterbetrayals were a feature of that bitter war. Pakistan, which had the most to lose from a Soviet victory, according to the Cold War calculus of the day, and invested heavily in the Afghan resistance, wanted the elder Shirzai assassinated, the story goes. He died of sudden, violent stomach cramps.

Gul Agha Shirzai is a great hairy bear of a man, with legendary rough manners. Stories about his wiping his mouth on his turban, or squatting to pee in the street, abound. Yet these things matter not at all to his constituency. There is a populist charm to him, something refreshing, almost endearing, about his in-your-face directness. And—key attributes—his generosity, his loyalty and kindness to underlings win wistful praise even from the liege men of his opponents.

It was not until 1992, two and a half years after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, that the holdover Communist governor of Kandahar was finally driven out. He was a member of Gul Agha Shirzai's tribe, and to ease the transition, Shirzai was invited to take over the reins of the province in a power-sharing deal with Mullah Naqib and other key leaders. Most Kandaharis remember him as a weak figurehead, presiding over that awful civil war—the goriest, most rapacious, and chaotic period in living memory.

“He was governor in the governor's palace,” says Hayatullah, a happy-go-lucky man with a lion's mane of curly hair, who was a bus driver at the time. “He was governor in the palace, but nowhere else. If you had five men, you were governor on your street corner, and someone else was governor on his street corner. That's how it was.”

This early 1990s “
mujahideen
time” was the incarnation of Afghanistan as
Yaghestan
, a word that has often been used to caricature it. For centuries, courtly Persian monarchs flung this epithet at the rock-strewn land that lay at the far fringes of their empire. The early Muslim conquerors broke their teeth on the place for decades and never really reduced it. By “
yaghestan
,” the Persians meant a land of the rebellious, of the incorrigibly ungovernable.

Reverting to
yaghestan
served again and again as a fallback position for a people who, every once in a while, did grudgingly gather under one banner into something like a nation. But ties of kin and clan always remained strong. A tribe's feeling for its ancestral territory ran deeper than its loyalties to the institutions of national government. So when that empire or national government came under attack, Afghans were quick to dissolve it, and run like water between the fingers of their would-be conquerors.
³

The Soviet Union was only the latest predatory empire to be confounded by this trick. “It took the USSR thirty-one years to seize the machinery of the Afghan state,” writes Michael Barry, in a brilliant analysis of Afghan history called
Le Royaume de l'Insolence
(
The Kingdom of Insolence
). “The Soviets' mistake was to assume that controlling the government and army of Afghanistan was enough to place the whole country in their grasp…. Whereas, the real country slipped away from them byresorting, in a desperate lurch, to the
yaghestan
reflex.”
⁴

The Soviets, like many predecessors, finally acknowledged the task of controlling Afghanistan beyond them and pulled back across its mountains to their windswept steppes. But what they left behind, after ten years of mortal combat, after countless atrocities and reprisals, and repeated decimation of civilians and their livelihoods—with continued funding afterward from the United States, the USSR, Saudi Arabia, and others, and with neighboring countries egging on the various rival factions—was a
yaghestan
in its most extreme form.

All the invisible bonds that weave a country together into a single polity had been dissolved. All the renunciations of personal sovereignty in exchange for the comforts and protections of a joint destiny had been retracted. Anyone claiming the allegiance of a few armed men felt entitled to strike out for himself. Scores of petty commanders fell to preying on their countrymen. This version of
yaghestan
was a metastasized cancer; it had grown beyond the capacity of traditional tribal structures to contain it.

In Kandahar, the bloodletting was less systematic than it was in Kabul. With the 1992 defeat of the rump Communists, only one full-blown military campaign remained: for local resistants to rid the countryside of the forces of one of their chief erstwhile allies, and an ominous one, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar. The most radical Islamic fundamentalist among the resistance leaders, Hikmatyar was a precursor of the Taliban.