The Punishment of Virtue (9 page)

In the obsessive Cold War context of the day, the likely consequences of his radicalism were ignored by the foreign countries that supported him: Pakistan and the United States. Indeed, the extremist religious ideology he professed was seen as a spur to resistants whom it might inspire to take up arms against the atheistic Communists.

The United States had not overlooked the potential impact of the Afghan war in its global contest with the Soviets, a contest that had preoccupied it for more than thirty years. Like Latin America, Afghanistan was seen as a key battleground where the overextended Soviet empire could be bled. From at least 1980, the U.S. Congress was allocating ever-increasing funds to the Afghan rebels. Over the course of a decade, Washington had poured an average of more than a quarter of a billion dollars a year into the Afghan resistance, in perhaps the biggest covert operation in U.S. history. Obsessed by the threat of communism and blind to other dangers, American officials waxed enthusiastic about the potency of religious fervor as an antidote to Communist ideology.
⁵

But it was Afghanistan's neighbor, Pakistan, that really drove the policy. In those times, the implications of a direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union were beyond contemplation. So Washington could not be seen to support the Afghan resistance directly. Instead, in a fiction all parties chose to wink at, the United States channeled its support for the Afghan rebels through Pakistan. Thus Pakistan, via its intelligence agency, the ISI, was able to decide how and to whom all that U.S. money would be distributed.

Pakistani officials harnessed Islamist ideology to further their regional agenda. The U.S. funds were lavished on religious extremists. Hikmatyar alone got more than half the manna.
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Although Hikmatyar's faction was the richest, however, it did not enjoy the widest support among the Afghan population. Afghans were seduced neither by its ideology nor its money. Once alerted to Hikmatyar's designs on their city in 1992, Kandahari forces under the command of Mullah Naqib and Zabit Akrem quickly drove the fundamentalists out.

This campaign was the last organized fighting in the Kandahar region. But the place was infested with petty commanders and their men, action addicted and armed to the teeth. Conditioned by a decade of war, in which trauma and mutual betrayal had pulverized any sense of right and wrong, these shattered men rushed to fill the power vacuum left by the fighting factions in Kabul and the weak, dull-witted Gul Agha Shirzai in Kandahar. They went back to plying a time-honored local trade: highway robbery.

Kandahar's most valuable natural resource, after all, was its road, the obligatory route for trade, travel, and expansionist adventure between Iran or Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. For centuries, Kandaharis had been farmers and herders, true enough, cultivating almonds and pomegranates, drying perfumed grapes into exquisite raisins, stacking stalks of cumin against their compound walls, sending their children out with flocks of sheep and goats. But arable land is scarce on the moonscape around their oasis. Kandaharis' noblest callings had always been connected with their road. They were raiders, swooping down on India more than half a dozen times in the reign of a single king, the one who is now revered as the father of the Afghan nation. They were traders, dominating the lucrative commerce in horses, for example, between Central Asia and British India. They were tollbooth operators and protection racketeers. And beating their own occasional attempts at a system, they were accomplished smugglers.

During much of the decade-long war against the Soviets, Kandaharis had been deprived of their road. The resistants had blown its bridges and sowed it with mines to keep the Soviets from possessing it. In turn, the Soviets had planted antipersonnel charges to thwart resupply of the rebels. Once a river, channeling a constant tide of human traffic, this ancient road became a wasteland. The only way to get from Quetta to Kandahar was by tracing a wide loop part way around the city, crossing the Kabul highway to the north and east, then hugging the chain of hills that leads southwest toward Kandahar. Lumbering transport trucks painted with designs in a riot of colors and caparisoned with jingling ornaments struggled and swayed along this route, sometimes bogging down for days in the rainy spring. Tiny village crossroads became bustling bazaars as the traffic of five provinces jostled through.

As soon as the Communists were defeated in 1992, that road became the top priority of demining agencies. “The very first day the main road to Kandahar was reopened, I drove it,” recalls one Abdullah, an engineer who was working under a UN Development Program contract in Quetta, Pakistan, at the time. It was early 1992. Deminers working furiously from both ends of the road had managed to pry open a narrow channel—three yards wide, marked off on each side by a wobbling line of stones painted red.

The river in Arghandab had flooded, and the UN wanted to dispatch a team to take stock. “It was late, after lunch,” Abdullah remembers, “but my supervisors asked me if I could go straight away.” By 8:30
P
.
M
., the team had made the drive from Quetta up the switchbacking road to the border, stopping when they got there to pick up one of Mullah Naqib's fighters for protection inside Afghanistan.

Then they entered the gauntlet, easing their white truck inside the double row of red stones. “There were no cars, at all. Then, after maybe half an hour, we saw two headlights, coming toward us.” Nose to nose, the two vehicles came to a stop. “We were like this!” Abdullah raises his hands and lets them tremble in a remembered palsy of fear. “I am too scared of mines.” He told his driver to pull the truck carefully to one side, right up onto the red stones. “We stopped there; we didn't move.” The other car inched past.

After that, the only vehicles the team saw were tractors, chugging toward Pakistan in blissful disregard for the mortal danger under their tires. “They were carrying planes. New ones! The jets they used for fighting.” Head tilted and arms akimbo, Abdullah mimics the broken planes, lying like wounded birds on the tractor beds. “They broke them in parts,” he says. The dismembered Communist government MiGs were being carted to Pakistan for sale as scrap metal.

Once open in that spring of 1992, Kandahar's road soon regained its status as a main artery linking Iran and Central Asia to Pakistan. And with the Soviets gone, it didn't take long for the underemployed, overarmed former resistance fighters to set to extracting profit from all the traffic. “There were a hundred hundred chains between Kandahar and the border,” recalls Abdullah. These “chains” were in fact dirty ropes strung across the road, with a tent or mud-brick guardhouse on one side, manned by somebody's fighters. Ammunition belts slung across their torsos, waving Kalashnikovs they did not hesitate to use, the gunmen shook down every car, truck, or bus that passed by. “Every fifty yards, hundred yards, there was a chain. You had to give them money.” If the fighters were displeased with the take, or if they were just bored or having a bad day, they might drag a passenger out of a vehicle and shoot him, or her. Or rape him first, then shoot him.
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Any Kandahari will tell you stories of the nerveracking trial that road became during the “
mujahideen
nights,” as that era is styled. Bacha, a typical traveler, is a tall, weatherbeaten fruit grower from the walled gardens of Mullah Naqib's Arghandab. With a partner he used to run great truckloads of pomegranates and grapes to the Pakistani border. “At every chain we had to give them a crate,” he says. “Except at that mountain with the smooth round rocks near Spin Boldak. Hikmatyar's fighters were there. They wanted twenty or thirty crates each time we passed. One time my partner got out of the truck. ‘I can understand you need two crates, three, four crates for eating,' he told the soldiers. ‘But twenty?'”

The gunmen went for him, slamming into him with their rifle butts, again and again. After that, Bacha and his partner would heft down the crates, silently.

Bus driver Hayatullah had his toe shot off by one such gang of gunmen. They absconded with his bus and all the money everyone aboard was carrying. Hayatullah thanks God his sunny disposition kept the gunmen calm and every one of his passengers alive.

The worst offenders were the two most populous tribes in the region, the Popalzais, nominally loyal to Hamid Karzai's father, and Mullah Naqib's Alokozais. Both elders were quick to admit that they had lost all control of their men. “The sons of dogs,” the elder Karzai used to grumble. “What are they doing?” Mullah Naqib laments: “I couldn't discipline them. If I told them to stop, they'd just join another faction. Even now they're no good.”

When Kandaharis count back over the chains that made a nightmare of the simplest trip in that period, they don't remember too many belonging to the governor, Gul Agha Shirzai. But he does not earn much credit for this absence on the roads. It was not from lack of wanting to be there, but because his small tribe did not have the clout. Shirzai's term as governor is cited with revulsion as the heyday of the thugs. And he, like the rest of them, was run out of Kandahar when the Taliban swept into town in 1994.

This is the one deed for which the black-turbaned militiamen are to this day remembered with gratitude in Kandahar. They rid the countryside of the vultures that were picking the very marrow from its shattered bones.

And when, against the backdrop of U.S. bombing in October 2001, Gul Agha Shirzai cobbled together an anti-Taliban proxy force, he called a lot of these very same vultures up out of retirement.

My friends the Achekzais, who had held countless chains on the road to Pakistan, are still infamous for their smuggling, irreligion, foul language, love of money, and expert thievery. “Among the Achekzais, it was considered an honor to be skillful enough to steal a neighbor's sheep,” laughs tribal elder Mahmud Khan, who lives across the border in Pakistan. “If someone managed it, the owner would salute the deed with a reward.”
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Gul Agha Shirzai did not waste much love on these shysters, who had once kidnapped him for ransom, but since the Achekzais control the border, he was obliged to invite them along to guarantee his force safe passage into Afghanistan.

A commander from the Karzais' Popalzai tribe was with Shirzai, as Karzai's eyes and ears. During the “
mujahideen
nights,” this man's comrades manned chains from the eastern gate to the city out to the airport fifteen miles away. Kandaharis remember how the fighters used to shake down former Communist soldiers at their headquarters near the gate. “You know how they would kill them?” one witness says. “One would take their hands and the other would take their feet, and they would throw them up against the ceiling, and let them fall down to the ground. ‘Where are your weapons?'the gunmen would shout. ‘Where is your money?' These weren't leaders, or Communist Party members who might deserve revenge. They were simple soldiers. The gunmen were working them over for money, nothing else.”

With such people poised to take charge again when the Taliban were defeated, it is no wonder many Kandaharis viewed the coming change with some trepidation.

“Now will be the era of the robbers,” a young auto mechanic told me in late November 2001, after tribesmen had looted a warehouse for refugees just inside Afghanistan, in the last days of the U.S. bombing. I asked if he didn't trust the tribal elders to maintain order after the Taliban departed.

“No, I don't.” He was emphatic. “They held power before, and they plundered the people and did bad things to them.”

Other shopkeepers and small businessmen told of reverting to the defensive measures they had learned during the mujahideen nights: sleeping in different places each night, bringing all their wares home at the end of the day, and shuttering their empty stalls.

One further emblem of the post-Taliban free-for-all that these refugees so accurately foretold has burned itself into my memory. The scene took place in mid-December 2001, a few days after the Taliban ouster, after I had arrived in Kandahar. I had gone to the hospital because those fourteen wounded Al-Qaeda fighters, left behind when the others fled, were barricaded in there, cradling grenades against their stomachs. Some were reciting holy verses to the others, hands spread before them to symbolize an open book, bobbing back and forth in their intensity. It was hard to get near the Arabs, and, waiting, I looked in on another ward. I found it full of children, limbs ripped off in accidents with mines and unexploded ordnance. While I stood in the doorway, a new little patient was wheeled in, blood gushing from his upper arm where a chunk of flesh was missing. I felt my head go light. Suffering children do it to me every time. Fighting nausea, I asked the father what had happened. He told me his boy had seen a couple of soldiers smoking. The month-long Ramadan fast was not yet over. Smoking, along with eating or drinking, was still prohibited from dawn till dusk. “Why are you breaking your fast?” the boy had asked. In reply, one of the gunmen had idly leveled his Kalashnikov and fired, almost blowing off the child's arm.

That soldier was a member of Gul Agha Shirzai's forces.

And yet, this very Shirzai—symbol of the arbitrary, bloody madness the populace feared—was the one U.S. advisers had urged on to attack Kandahar and snatch it from Hamid Karzai, the battle-shy mediator.

DECEMBER 2001

O
NCE IN POSSESSION
of the governor's palace, Gul Agha Shirzai dug in. His thick-tongued voice blanketing the airwaves, he transformed the precious radios everyone crowded around into his personal mouthpiece. Kandahar was his, Shirzai declared; no one, by God, would budge him.

In a culture where polite formulations, even if hypocritical, are the strict norm, Shirzai's public and explicit defiance of both President Karzai and Mullah Naqib was a verbal slash on the cheek.

Yet no one took up the challenge.

The invincible but oddly lamblike Mullah Naqib was at a bit of a loss. He turned to Karzai, the man he had followed thus far. Allergic to bloodshed, Karzai commanded peace. “The president told me: ‘Don't fight against Shirzai.' And I kept telling my men, ‘Don't fight; the time for war is finished.'”

At checkpoints all over town, Shirzai's men moved in on the fighters Mullah Naqib had posted, flinging blows and curses. The shaggy-haired bus driver Hayatullah witnessed the scene at the crossroad marking the center of the old bazaar. “They fought them,” Hayatullah says, smacking the place on his own back where neck meets shoulder, to illustrate the blow from a gunstock. “Shirzai's men said: ‘We battled Al-Qaeda at the airport; where were you? Get out of here.'” I meet Hayatullah's eye, knowing now how little fighting Shirzai's men actually did. The Alokozais, Hayatullah confirms, did not respond. “Mullah Naqib told them not to.”

The man to whom it fell to enforce this command—to restrain his Alokozai tribesmen—was Zabit Akrem. With his usual crisp analysis, unalloyed by emotion, he looked back on the moment: “I think Mullah Naqib's decision was a good one,” he judged.

The fundamental problem, in Akrem's view, was the credulity of the U.S. officers on the scene. “The Americans were such amateurs,” he said. “They were honest to the point of simplemindedness. Anyone Shirzai or his interpreter told them was a Talib, they would take it on faith—and act on the accusation.”

By this time, Shirzai's propaganda campaign was in full swing. It was quickly obvious to Akrem that his tribal elder Mullah Naqib was irrevocably tarred in the Americans' eyes as a Taliban sympathizer. Taking on Shirzai, under those circumstances, would have meant taking on the Americans. And the Americans, as the sheer sound and fury of their bombing campaign were meant to demonstrate, could not be taken on.

So Gul Agha Shirzai, unopposed, made himself at home in the governor's mansion, the palace built by the Afghan founding father, the symbol of Afghanistan's identity as a nation; and Mullah Naqib settled on the remaining emblem of power: the gaudy compound that reclusive, one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar had just abandoned.

The place looked like a circus tent after an earthquake. Its private mosque and living quarters were adorned with wedding-cake curlicues. A clumsily painted landscape scene covered a main wall. Behind it, U.S. bombing had reduced an entire segment of the building to ragged chunks of rubble. Mullah Naqib and Akrem arrayed their Alokozais around the jagged holes, and were shortly joined by President Karzai and his retinue.

Then began the congratulatory visits that are a feature of Pashtun culture. For three solid days during major holidays, Pashtuns go about to pay their respects: to their families and tribal elders, to their employers, to their colleagues. It is a kind of ritual renewal of bonds: of family, of fealty, of friendship. I have seen graybeards of the noble Popalzai tribe stoop to kiss the hand of President Karzai's younger brother Ahmad Wali, and the whole household follow suit—even the young servants who live in an intimate egalitarianism with him the rest of the year. Mullah Naqib's receiving room never empties, as Arghandab villagers descend on Kandahar to join the communal prayer at the cathedral mosque, making the obligatory trip to their elder's compound on their way home.

December 8 and 9, 2001, it was as if the whole of Kandahar filed through Mullah Muhammad Omar's house to pledge allegiance to the new
ra'is,
or “headman.” With the elegance that is a family trait, lightened by a whimsical turn, Hamid Karzai accepted the devotion generously, touching the necks of the conscripted Taliban boy soldiers as they bent to kiss his hand, then paying them $5 worth of back wages and sending them home to the rocks of Ma'ruf District, or Arghestan, or Urozgan Province, where they would resume their efforts to scratch out a livelihood from the unforgiving land.

When the flood of well-wishers had subsided a little, Karzai told Mullah Naqib they would go to see Gul Agha Shirzai, and sort out the governorship. The way Akrem remembered it, Gul Agha sent an invitation, and the president accepted.

Culturally, this was a telling gesture for Karzai to make. In Afghanistan, it is the subordinate who makes the effort to travel to the seat of his superior. The superior plays the role of host, receiving guests and providing for them, or else summoning liege men into his presence. For the president-designate of the country to bestir himself to visit a boorish underling—an underling who had just disobeyed a direct command—was a reversal of protocol that could only have signaled to Gul Agha Shirzai the degree of de facto power he possessed.
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Just recalling this meeting made Mullah Naqib boil with indignation when I asked him about it. He said Shirzai was there, and his ever-present Afghan-American “interpreter,” named Khalid Pashtoon, along with the U.S. Special Forces colonel David Fox, some CIA agents, Karzai, and himself.

I was sitting in a cool room of Mullah Naqib's home in Kandahar for this conversation, one of those vaulted cellar rooms sunk underground for protection against the heat. I was leaning against the wall opposite the old fighter, taking notes. Mullah Naqib had lifted off his turban; it was lying upside down next to him, for air.

“Khalid Pashtoon was barking like a mad dog,” Mullah Naqib said. “He said I was hiding Al-Qaeda fighters. He said there were sixty of them in my own house. ‘What?' I told him. ‘What are they, ants?' You know, ants?” He held up thumb and finger a hair apart. “Where would I even put sixty of them? Then Pashtoon said other Alokozais were hiding Al-Qaeda fighters. I answered ‘Oh yeah? Where? Show me some! By God, if you find a single Al-Qaeda in Arghandab, you can cut off my head.' It was lies, all of it lies.”

Gul Agha Shirzai again conceded this version of events when I put it to him later. He was a minister by then. We were meeting in his office in Kabul, with at least half a dozen officials seated on ornate chairs around us. “I said that if Mullah Naqib had a government position in Kandahar, the old tribal warfare would break out again, just like during the
mujahideen
nights.” I pressed him about the rest, about calling Mullah Naqib a Talib. Minister Shirzai smiled. “Yes, Khalid Pashtoon said that. He said Mullah Naqib
brought
the Taliban to Kandahar. He said he gave them three hundred thousand dollars and nine cars and thirteen hundred guns.” The Americans, according to Shirzai, hardly intervened in the discussion.

They hardly had to. They were all sitting on his side of the table.

This is the sort of body language that speaks louder to Afghans than words. The American attitude was clear to Karzai. “They were supporting him,” he told me, his tone final. That, for Karzai, was decisive.

I knew something like this had transpired when—on December 10, 2001, the day after this private meeting took place—my translator ran up to me, exclaiming he had heard on the radio that the standoff was over. Mullah Naqib had declined the governorship, pleading old age.

Old age. That's the cover story.
I presumed a blackmail inked in Afghan blood. I assumed Shirzai had threatened to take up arms to keep the governorship, and that conflict-averse Karzai had given in.

In fact, as is so often the case in Afghanistan, the details of the threat were not even spelled out. They were implicit in Shirzai's “entering the city by force.” That bit of U.S.-backed body language communicated the threat with perfect clarity. And mediation—
Pashtun Wali
style—played itself out the way it usually does. He who credibly threatened violence got what he wanted. The more reasonable parties, Karzai and Mullah Naqib, were induced to renounce their claim. For if they did not, conflict was likely to erupt. Thus can a certain style of dispute resolution contribute to the phenomenon of warlordism.

This scenario followed logically from the circumstances and the personalities of those involved. Still, I wondered how Hamid Karzai had actually reacted to the insolent power play. How had he behaved during that decisive meeting? Had he stood up for his ally, Mullah Naqib? Had he mediated?

The answer was neither.

“The president didn't say anything,” Mullah Naqib told me. “He just translated for the Americans.”
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According to Akrem, “Mullah Naqib was the only one who could have brought a peaceful end to the Taliban in Kandahar. He told the president, ‘Gul Agha may say I'm a Talib, but you've been in touch with me all this time. Why don't you speak up in my favor?'

“The President answered: ‘It seems the Americans aren't listening to me. They're listening to Gul Agha. Wait a while.'

“But Mullah Naqib was outraged. ‘Gul Agha is a liar!' he cried out. ‘He's spreading rumors!' And he made the president translate.”

Such passivity on Karzai's part stunned me. And yet, by the time I heard it described, I knew the reason for it.

The story goes as follows.

“It was summertime,” says Mullah Naqib. “A little later than this.” He waves a hand at the garden he's just been tending: a riot of magenta nasturtiums, yellow and orange marigolds. He has laid down the small sickle he was using to break up clods and has come to sit beside me on a mat under an arbor. Soon the grapevines will put out their leaves and make the place a heaven of respite from Kandahar's murderous sun.

The year he is talking about is 1994, at the height of the chaos that engulfed Afghanistan following the withdrawal of Soviet troops. Kandahar was splayed on a rack operated by the warlords. Gul Agha Shirzai was governor; Mullah Naqib commanded the army; the Karzais' Popalzai tribe manned half a dozen chains on the east side of town; the Achekzais' chains started a little farther out, at the airport. On the road leading northwestward toward Herat, Popalzai chains alternated every few yards with those of yet another tribe. Mullah Naqib's Alokozai fighters, he is the first to admit, were doing their share of “bad, bad things.” The sinews of tortured Kandahar were just about parting.

Mullah Naqib continues: “Hamid Karzai came from Quetta here to Kandahar. I was in my office at army headquarters. He came to see me there. Those days, the Taliban had already started working. Their leaders were coming into town, talking to people, telling them: ‘We don't want power; we don't want government positions. We just want to clear the chains off the roads.'”

Mullah Naqib says he was impressed by the modesty of the demands put forward by these men, many of whom he knew. At the meeting, he says, Karzai echoed their arguments. “Mr. Karzai told me: ‘These religious students only want to take the chains down. They won't get involved in the government. You should help them.'”

“Hamid Karzai said the country was torn to pieces, and the Taliban will bring some unity.” This is Akrem's account. “He said ‘They will bring the king back, and the Americans are supporting this.'”

Mullah Naqib was at a loss for a better solution. “I said to Mr. Karzai, ‘Sure I'll help them!'”

President Karzai remembers the episode differently. When he and I talked about it in September 2004, Karzai said it was Mullah Naqib who called him, asking him to come visit him in Kandahar. Mullah Naqib's message, President Karzai told me, was that Kandahar was going to ruin because of infighting among the former mujahideen. It was impossible to rein them in, Karzai remembered Mullah Naqib's lament, because if you tried to discipline an unruly commander, he would just join another faction.

“‘You have buddies at the checkpoint by the airport,'” Karzai recalled Mullah Naqib's words. “‘Tell them to come see me. Let's do this. Let's help the Taliban.'”

I started. “
He
convinced
you
?”

“He called me,” Karzai confirmed. “He proposed it.”

It is possible. And yet, knowing the men involved, having gained a feel for their personalities, having spoken with their friends and family members, and having considered external evidence, I do not believe it. Mullah Naqib is a military tactician, not a political strategist. He is not a sophisticated political thinker. To me, it is just not plausible that he would have shown the type of initiative needed to forge these alliances. Karzai, by contrast, is a political dance master. Moreover, his version does not explain the strategy sessions with Taliban leaders that more than one witness has described him holding throughout that spring in his Quetta home. Nor does it account for a visit he made to the U.S. embassy in Pakistan in 1994 to discuss American support for the movement.
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I believe, with full knowledge I may be wrong, that it was Karzai who persuaded Mullah Naqib to help the Taliban take Kandahar.
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