Taliban (28 page)

The sparkle, though, was on the surface. The better shop sites near the entrance were occupied, but deeper inside a good third of the retail space had yet to be let. It was Thursday lunchtime, a peak shopping period, yet there were few customers around. There was also a shabbiness to this aspiring temple of consumerism that would have jarred in the Gulf. Bare electric wires protruded here and there, and the plasterwork showed signs of premature decay. It was in the end an Afghan approximation of prosperity, not the real thing. The goods on display – hi-fi equipment, the latest mobile phones, glitzy jewellery, gleaming household appliances – were beyond the means of perhaps 95 per cent of the people of Afghanistan.

Judging by facial shapes and the clean-shaven chins on display, the shoppers here were almost all Tajiks. I suspected that many of them enjoyed the inflated salaries paid by international organizations: members of that small army of interpreters, drivers and junior administrators without whom the foreigners could not operate. Working for ISAF or the UN was punishable by death in some parts of the country, but here it was a status symbol. I spotted more than one man strolling ahead of his wife and children with an ISAF identity card ostentatiously displayed in a transparent pouch on one arm.

It seemed to me that many Tajiks had grown fat on the war – and a visit to my friend Saman one afternoon did nothing to alter that impression. Saman was the epitome of a Panjshiri Tajik:
clever, resourceful and tough. As a younger man he had fought for Massoud, including in the bitter battles for control of Kabul in the early 1990s. The last time I had seen him was in 2002 when he accompanied me on a trip to the north of the country. He was flat broke then, a demobbed soldier wondering how on earth he was going to support his family in the unusual period of peace that followed the toppling of the Taliban. His mujahideen contacts and classic Tajik features made for the smoothest of passages through the checkpoints of the Tajik-dominated areas. He was a charming, good-humoured man, as well as very street-savvy. He paid close attention to every conversation, compulsively chewing a toothpick with his head cocked to one side like a bird, sorting and filing away whatever information he thought might be turned to use in the future.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that in the intervening eight years he had become so exceedingly rich that he only went out with a bodyguard these days, for fear of kidnappers. It was foreign aid that had made his fortune. In 2002, just after I’d last seen him, Saman had gone into the concrete business. He was inspired in this choice by a friend who had set up an NGO specializing in reconstruction work. The whole country needed rebuilding, the Americans were desperate for local partners to help them do it, and the friend was naturally rolling in dollars. Saman simply copied him. He began by sitting quietly in his friend’s office, watching and learning and chewing his toothpicks until he felt confident enough to register his own construction NGO. This exercise took precisely a fortnight; he won his first foreign contract a week later.

I went to see him in his new headquarters. He came out to greet me from behind a sleek black Sony laptop, which was placed in the centre of an immense desk made of polished Chinese mahogany.
He was the same smiling Saman, although clean-shaven now and decidedly paunchier than before. He had abandoned his shalwar qamiz and Chitrali cap for some Western-looking jeans and a natty black jacket. There was a fat turquoise ring on his finger, and he was smoking ‘Zest’ mentholated cigarettes. Business, he confessed, had never been better. He was making so much money that he had even taken a second wife. He was employing over three hundred people on ten different construction projects, the largest of which involved building a new blast wall around a United Nations accommodation compound out on the Jalalabad road to the east of the city.

A year or two previously he had converted his NGO into a regular tax-paying business – the Paryan Road and Building Construction Co., named after his home village in the Panjshir – because it ticked the box marked ‘economic development’ for the Americans, who preferred things that way. Apart from that, the business and his core clientele had hardly changed. He had no shame about milking the dollar-cow so brazenly. ‘It’s good money. Anyone can do it. In fact, why don’t you? You are a foreigner, you speak English. It would be so easy for you!’

He had recently returned from Washington – ‘a very nice city’ – where he had attended a US–Afghan ‘match-making conference’, organized by the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industries. This mostly involved offering his services to dozens of officials in the US military. In the conference literature which he showed me, the wording of his company profile – if not the atrocious English in which it was written – was designed to make everybody feel good about helping him prosper.

‘Propagation of heart-rending circumstances exits [sic] in all Afghanistan, because they have survived decades of war, internal and external displacement,’ it read. ‘In fact Afghanistan has
endured swollen intimidation and divested away from the global world facilitation . . . Afghanistan exigencies are beyond the availed preservation, thereby and adhered and insistent concentration is the sole way to hoist Afghanistan from the current scary situation.’

The theory was sound enough: American investment supporting a legitimate Afghan business while creating local jobs and mending the nation’s ruined infrastructure. The trouble was that, according to Saman, eight out of the ten construction contracts he was engaged on were for foreign, not Afghan, infrastructure: principally defence reinforcement and road-access work for Nato bases. The UN compound blast-wall project was entirely representative of what he did.

This was hardly a model for a lasting economic recovery. Saman’s company was really no more than a parasite on the back of the mighty Nato war machine. Any benefit to Afghans was short term at best, and not even Saman thought the boom would last.

‘We’ve got another year of this, two at the most, and then it will finish,’ he said.

The Americans, he was convinced, would leave that soon: hadn’t President Obama said as much when he announced the troop surge in 2009? And when that happened he was sure the Taliban would come back into power.

‘Nothing will stop them now. In fact they are already here, aren’t they? Didn’t you hear that bomb the other day?’

The prospect of the Taliban’s return didn’t seem to bother him.

‘They will be a different Taliban this time, like a domesticated cat compared to a tiger,’ he said; and if things got really bad he could always retreat to the Panjshir, a region the Taliban had failed to penetrate even in their tiger days. He only smiled and shrugged when I asked him what he might do there, although I was sure he
would find something, and survive. Panjshiris like him always did.

The Tajik grip on Karzai and the West was strong. It wasn’t just Tajik dominance of the army that threatened to upset the country’s ethnic equilibrium, for they also controlled the NDS, the National Directorate of Security; and the baleful influence of Marshal Fahim was still to be seen in both. The NDS was headed by yet another Panjshiri, Amrullah Saleh.

‘We continue to allow the key organizations to be dominated by people from a single ethnic minority,’ one senior diplomat remarked; ‘in fact, by people from a single valley controlled by that minority. Why? We say we are here to support democracy, but we have effectively taken sides in a 35-year-old civil war.’

The NDS was the successor to the KHAD (
Khadamat-e Etela’at-e Dawlati
or state information agency), which occupies a special place in Afghan demonology. A client organization of the KGB, its first director was Mohammed Najibullah, who later became President and was murdered by the Taliban in 1996. Najibullah dealt with the regime’s enemies with terrible cruelty. Arbitrary arrest, torture, show trials and executions were all routine. There were eight KHAD detention centres in Kabul alone; some 27,000 political prisoners were said to have been murdered at the most infamous of these, the prison at Pul-i-Charkhi just east of the city. In December 2006, ISAF discovered a mass grave in its grounds that was thought to contain the bodies of some 2,000 victims of the Soviet era. To this day the American military, with scant appreciation for Pul-i-Charkhi’s grim symbolism, use it as a transfer jail for prisoners released from Guantanamo.

The NDS was supposed to be different from the KHAD. Its operations were theoretically circumscribed by the new Constitution that it was intended to uphold, but in practice it operated with a
good deal of autonomy, just as the KHAD had done – and there were worrying signs that its methods were getting harsher. The human-rights abuses they were suspected of committing during night raids were only a part of this story. Many Afghans complained that although the organization’s title had changed, its personnel had not – and nor had their communist mindset. This naturally made them wonder what the point of fighting the jihad had been. The very suggestion that the KHAD was returning under a new, American-backed guise was enough to give anyone the jitters.

Even Karzai’s new Minister of Interior, Mohamed Hanif Atmar, had once worked for the KHAD; he lost a leg defending Jalalabad against the mujahideen in 1988. Atmar was perhaps typical of the new breed of politician embraced by the Americans. In the late 1990s he studied information technology and post-war reconstruction at the University of York, reinventing himself as a smooth-talking, English-speaking technocrat. His reformist agenda was so plausible that in March 2009 it was suggested in Washington that he should be installed as Prime Minister as a means of bypassing the wayward Karzai.
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It made many Afghans wonder: what kind of state was it that the West was really building in Afghanistan?

Soviet-style bureaucracy was inarguably creeping back. It was noticeable in petty things, such as the new requirement for all foreigners to register with the local police – or even in the official from the Ministry of Agriculture who tried to levy a
25 export tax on my tourist carpet when I later left the country through Kabul airport. But the growing totalitarianism of the NDS represented something more serious. They seemed intent on trying to control the way the war against the Taliban was reported; and they were
increasingly heavy-handed with anyone, even foreigners, who went off message. In the wake of the Safi Landmark hotel bombing, for instance, the foreign press corps – whose television crews had covered much of the NDS response to the attack live on location – were told by officials from the Orwellian-sounding Department 33 (Media) that in future they would not be permitted to do so, ‘in the interests of security’. This was in apparent contravention of the Constitution, which solemnly upheld the freedom of the press. A week later, when the independent research organization ICOS began interviewing refugees from the fighting in Marjah, the NDS threatened to arrest the organization’s head, the Canadian QC Norine Macdonald. The official line was that there were no refugees from Marjah: only smiling citizens grateful to be ‘liberated’ from the Taliban menace.

‘Shaping the narrative’ was a legitimate counter-insurgency tactic much practised by the Americans, but there was a big difference between shaping the narrative and suppressing it. Qais Azimi, a local employee of the English-language arm of al-Jazeera television, had a far scarier run-in with the NDS in January 2009, when he went to investigate reports that the Taliban had emerged in the northern province of Kunduz.

‘I didn’t believe the reports at first,’ he recalled. ‘There weren’t supposed to be any Taliban in Kunduz back then, but I thought I’d check it out anyway. When I got there I met a mullah, Abdul Salaam, who took me on a drive around the province that lasted two hours, with about a hundred Taliban on motorbikes as an escort. I filmed the whole lot.’

Back in Kabul he presented his scoop to his boss at al-Jazeera, David Chater, who ran his footage the same evening. The following afternoon, he was summoned to the offices of the NDS: ‘And
don’t bring a camera,’ they told him. At which point, Azimi knew he was in trouble.

To begin with, an NDS officer accused him of faking the footage, and then that he had been duped by the Taliban.

‘I realized that they really didn’t know there were Taliban in Kunduz. It turned out that the local NDS man did know, but was so afraid of losing his job if headquarters found out that he hadn’t told them. He got fired later.’

The NDS men grew increasingly upset and aggressive. After two hours of questioning, Azimi was handcuffed, blindfolded with goggles and a hood, and made to stand in a ditch at the bottom of the garden in the NDS compound.

‘I said my prayers. There were three guys around me. One of them cocked a gun next to my head. I heard one of them say, “Let’s do it tomorrow.” I was convinced I was going to die.’

He was then taken to a dark, wet basement room containing a bottle of dirty drinking water and a battered Koran, annotated with the messages of former inmates proclaiming their innocence. He was shackled to a chair, and the interrogations began again. In the course of seventy-two hours, he was questioned by no fewer than thirty-two people.