The Punishment of Virtue (20 page)

“But I promised the villagers I would rebuild their houses exactly as they stood before,” I improvised. “And they had stone foundations. I need stone.”

Still the governor refused. Eventually I did wrest a promise from him to send a delegation from his office out with us the next day to find another source of stone. We set the meeting for 8:00
A.M
.

Rising to leave—and having learned a little bit about how it's done by then—I piled on a further dollop of public bonhomie.

“Mr. Governor, it goes without saying how relieved I am that nothing serious happened to you last week…”

Flattered, Shirzai offered me a look at his scar. So suddenly I found myself digging around in Governor Gul Agha Shirzai's hair and exclaiming at the white line traced across his scalp.

The next morning the soldiers at the governor's gate were less jovial. Again they refused to admit us. I insisted that we had seen the governor yesterday—

“That was yesterday,” one of them snapped.

—and that we had an appointment this morning, and they were making us late.

It took us fully half an hour to bully our way inside. The chief of staff who had been present at our meeting was sitting behind his formica desk, and he showed no sign of remembering our 8:00
A.M
. appointment. He feigned to ignore me, turning his attention to a staff member or the telephone, then standing up and folding a briefcase shut in preparation for leaving.

I did it with a smile, making a joke of it. But, as he rounded his desk to exit the room, I actually stood in front of him, barring his route to the door. “I'm not letting you go till we settle this issue of the stone,” I said. Again the official tried to look the other way, or say something important to someone else. But there was nothing for it. Short of a physical confrontation, there was no way out of the room. Sizing the situation up, he gave in and led us down the hall to another official, the chief administrative officer.

The door to this man's office, too, was choked with petitioners, Showing rather more courtesy than we had encountered so far, he picked up the phone and called the provincial director of Mines and Industry. After a brief conversation, the administrator penned a note, which we pocketed, then set off to visit Mines and Industry.

That directorate was located across town, up a narrow flight of stairs in the arcade of buildings that line the main road near Mahmad Anwar's headquarters, affording dignity to the approach into town. We climbed the steps to a small dark room and sat down on some chairs against the wall, across from half a dozen graybeards. I made our case yet again. Leaning forward. Pleading. We are trying to rebuild a village. Winter is coming and the people need their houses. Can you please tell us where we can get some stone? The director of Mines and Industry, dressed in the uniform of the new Afghanistan—Western clothes, his white beard neatly trimmed—told us he would have to see the site before making a decision.

“
Zu
,” I said. “Let's go.”

Astonishingly, he agreed. I led the little troop back down the narrow stairs. We climbed into our trucks and headed out the main road toward Akokolacha. Just short of the line of hills that breaks the road, we could see three or four tractors crawling across the desert to our right, small in the distance, but clearly hauling loads of stone. Mines and Industry signaled for us to stop.

“They are breaking the law,” he said as we alighted. He flagged a tractor down when it drew near.

“Where is this stone from?”

The driver jutted his chin at the hills.

“How did you get it?”

Silence.

“Soldiers weren't on the road?”

“They wanted money.”

Mines and Industry admonished the man not to bribe the soldiers anymore, then turned to me. “If we let one person take stone, soon everyone will. The law is the law. We need this stone for our stone crusher.”

Our stone crusher?

The line of hills swept back for several miles. I flung my arm out. “All of this?” I asked, playing it up. “You need all of this stone for your stone crusher?”

The official shrugged and climbed back into his car.

Not above a little deception by this point, I had told him that we had in fact obtained Governor Shirzai's approval to get stone from our friend the quarryman. It was a lie, but I was learning. At the gas station lean-to, the official duly instructed the quarryman to give us the stone.

“But he's not the problem,” I interrupted. “He
wants
to sell us stone. It's Razziq Shirzai and the workers at the quarry.” So we drove back up the sandy track, official in tow, and distributed our ACS business card. “If a tractor driver shows you this card,” the official instructed, “you can give him stone.”

Razziq Shirzai did not give up entirely without a fight. “I don't know any director of Mines and Industry,” he stormed when he caught our tractor loading up the next day. “I know Gul Agha Shirzai. If they don't have an order with the governor's signature on it, they can't have any stone.”

But it was bluster. He backed down; we got our stone. And Hajji Baba, the infuriatingly hilariously crotchety old geezer at Akokolacha, who had complained about our work every step of the way, got his house. He even liked it. Before the arrival of the first rains in six years, all of the bombed houses at Akokolacha and the village mosque had been replaced. So the story wound its tortuous way to a happy ending.

On our side, that is.

The quarryman landed in jail for a couple of weeks. Governor Shirzai in person, on a trip to Pakistan, halted his convoy at the quarryman's gas station and ordered his soldiers to take him away. Fortunately, an Amnesty International delegation was passing through at the time, asking a lot of uncomfortable questions about the treatment of prisoners in private jails. We put the quarryman on their list. He was all but pampered, but it easily could have been worse.

The Amnesty team came by for supper at our compound. Over tea, as we relaxed against the cushions on the floor, I asked them to give it to me straight: objectively, just how bad was the situation in this heart of darkness?

“Actually,” countered their willowy team leader, “conditions in Kandahar are surprisingly good.” Her team was having a most productive visit. “In other towns,” she explained, “we haven't been able to find out anything. It's like a wall of silence. But the police chief here has been really helpful. He's amazing. He threw open the doors of his department. He told us quite honestly, ‘I've got a problem. My men are fighters, not police officers.' He knows he's got human rights abuses, and he asked us for help. I've never seen the like in Afghanistan.” She was talking about Akrem.

I took this in, dubiously, not yet willing to put aside my mistrust of the man.

The Akokolacha saga had the effect of confirming for me the value of our maverick style at ACS: our determination to be involved in policy and practice both. It was always a difficult course to try to explain to people, when they asked, predictably, “What do you do?” That simple question never had a satisfactorily simple answer, and I always heaved a sigh before plunging in. And yet Akokolacha seemed to prove the virtue of our approach. As deep as my misgivings about warlord government had been from the moment I had arrived in Kandahar, I never would have understood what it felt like to be subjected to it, I never would have been able to describe it cogently had it not been
my
tractor that was held up at gunpoint. By the same token, it was impossible for me to live through such events and then shut up about them in the name of maintaining a “positive working relationship” with the provincial authorities in order to win their permission to help the people.

That was the style of most of the other nongovernmental organizations and international agencies: a see-no-evil stance.

A few international actors, like USAID, did take the Afghan political framework into account, though they usually made what was in my view a well-meaning, but crucial, mistake. They thought in institutional terms. Their mission, as some of them understood it, was to cultivate, encourage, and foster the fledgling Afghan government. And for most of them, that meant shoring up its “institutions”: its ministries, its courts, its provincial administrations.

Western political culture prompts us to think this way. Over the past three or four centuries, we in the West have designed and laboriously erected institutions as our bulwark against tyranny. And we have come to revere them, for they have indeed protected us. Westerners, to a degree unique in history, invest their loyalty in institutions, regardless of the individuals who happen to be staffing them at a particular time. The willingness, in 2000, of Americans to obey the ruling of a split Supreme Court in the most closely contested presidential election in their history is a striking example.

Western officials on the ground in Afghanistan were acting instinctively within this conceptual framework. “We're here to support the government,” I heard again and again. “And Gul Agha Shirzai is the governor. So we've got to support him.”

But Afghanistan is not there yet. In Afghanistan, loyalties and allegiances are to individuals. That is the system within which Governor Shirzai was operating, and to which he translated this international support. He applied all of the well-meaning Western aid—lavished on him in his role as a representative of the Afghan government—to the purpose of building up a
personal
power base. And this was a project that could only conflict with truly nationwide governing institutions for Afghanistan. It was to advance this personal aim, which remained largely invisible to Western eyes, that Gul Agha Shirzai diverted much of the plunder he extracted from his own province, and much of the subsidy he extracted from international representatives. In other words, their contributions were working in opposition to their stated aim.

Whenever I raised these issues with U.S. officials, they countered with a valid objection: What was the alternative? It was not up to them to decide who should hold office in Afghanistan. President Karzai had appointed Shirzai.

There were a number of answers to this argument. One was that it was disingenuous. Washington had played a very active role in the choice of Afghan officials, not the least of whom President Karzai himself. In the case of Shirzai, President Karzai had not in fact appointed him, as I knew perfectly well by then. He had appointed Mullah Naqib. It was the United States that, backing Shirzai with a cohort of Special Forces officers and everything such a show of force implied in an Afghan context, had forced him upon the president.

Setting aside these questions of fact, there was another point I tried to make to U.S. and UN officials. There was a difference, I maintained, between “working with” Gul Agha Shirzai and writing him a blank check. Kandaharis—as they told me during innumerable conversations, both casually and in a study setting—longed for three benefits from the U.S. presence in their town: security, reconstruction, and perhaps most of all, government accountability.

They had had plenty of experience with the abusive, predatory nature of their local strongmen (and even of their technically educated compatriots: the “engineers” who had maneuvered themselves into management positions at all the so-called local NGOs, and were helping themselves to a disproportionate share of foreign subsidy). These people had been artificially strengthened by lavish payments during the Soviet and
mujahideen
times. They had grown, like cancerous tumors, out of control. And now, with the Taliban gone, they were back in power again. Vulnerable Kandaharis were looking to the foreigners for protection against them. They saw us, on the whole, as more scrupulous, fair-minded, and hardworking than their fellow-Afghans.

And we, I believe, could have afforded a measure of that protection. American officials could have held Gul Agha Shirzai up to some kind of standard. They could have made their ongoing financial and moral backing of him contingent on better governance. They could have noticed that he was funneling the vast bulk of their aid to his family and tribesmen. They could have taken steps to spread the wealth. They could have disarmed his private militias. They could have sought out other community leaders and listened to their views.

In other words, even if obliged to work with Gul Agha Shirzai, they could have used their considerable leverage to force him to improve.

Akokolacha, which had brought so much of this into focus for me, became an object lesson. I wrote about it.
²
I used it as an example in talks to U.S. audiences and in radio interviews. I told visiting journalists the story, and they wrote about it.
³
(On one such occasion, the poor old quarryman wound up in jail again.)

Thus did Akokolacha launch what began to look every bit like a personal feud between the governor of Kandahar Province and me. In fact, there was nothing personal about it. My table manners are hardly faultless either. It was Gul Agha's system I objected to, the kind of governance he represented—the kind of Afghanistan that would result if his way prevailed.

NOVEMBER 2002

M
Y FEUD WITH
the governor led to one utterly unexpected consequence: friendship with the man I had studiously kept clear of, Police Chief Zabit Akrem. He was feuding with the governor too, and for the same reasons.

One day in late 2002, our weekly women's meeting was drawing to its garrulous close, women gathering their bags and draping their
burqas
like capes from their foreheads—they would leave them open in front so they could keep talking while they made their way downstairs, then flip them down over their faces when they got outside. This was a gathering we hosted at ACS of about a dozen women, several rather prominent, several unknown. One or two were illiterate, in fact, part of our effort to make sure the vast majority of Kandahar women were somehow represented. Our conversations those days were a little unfocused: we would talk about priorities for women in Kandahar, or about setting up an office for the female delegates to the
Loya Jirga
, the grand tribal council that had met in Kabul the previous June.

That afternoon, as I was waiting to walk the women downstairs, Mami Jan came up to me. Loud, big-hearted, melodramatic Mami Jan, was one of the
Loya Jirga
delegates, and administered a medical clinic for women.

“
Comandan Saab
wants to see you,” she said, casually.

“
Comandan Saab?
” It means “Mr. Commander.” I thought I knew who she was talking about.

“Zabit Akrem,” she confirmed.

Nothing had happened to change my opinion of the man since that second nasty meeting in his office eight months before about my living in the house in the graveyard. Still, other westerners, like the Amnesty International team, were unanimous in their praise of him, something I did point out when people asked me.

His roundabout approach was enough to intrigue me: he could have sent a soldier with a summons, and I would have been obliged to appear before him. That he did not—that he chose a mutual friend as a go-between instead, and a female one at that—was obviously meant to signal a reduction in hostilities. I had no hesitation about going to see what he wanted.

Police headquarters featured a press of people hardly second to the one on hand at the governor's palace. So we arranged for him to come by my house that evening after dinner.

I remember scurrying to prepare dishes of nuts and raisins to serve with tea. I even persuaded a neighbor to contribute two plates of shucked pomegranate seeds, mounded and glistening like rubies. On that occasion and the countless times Akrem and I got together afterward, I felt keenly self-conscious about my awkward hosting skills. The size of him, both physically and in his rank and local stature, always made the space I occupied seem inadequate. I did not have a retinue, or a late-model SUV with an armed driver, or any of the other marks of power that do, in the end, matter in Kandahar. He wielded these things with grace—not because he coveted them inordinately for their own sake, but because he knew the value of their symbolism.

At that first meeting, I could see him taking stock of our spare compound and wondering if he had made the right move. I was always more comfortable at his house, on a private street behind police headquarters. We would sit in his snug receiving room, on floor cushions covered with tasteful but unostentatious rugs. A curly-haired bodyguard would appear unbidden with a dish of grapes or cans of soda on glass saucers lined with paper napkins. A new little daughter called Asma would clamber all over him when he allowed her in, tweaking his beard with bright-eyed, fearless devotion, till at last he would shoo her out of the room. And still, I cringed more than once when my incorrigible informality, the directness that I can't keep from tipping into impertinence, grated against the decorum of his flawless manners.

I seated him in a corner of our receiving room, furnished Afghan style with a rug on the floor and velvet-covered mattresses around the walls with matching cushions for backrests. In a niche I had placed two beautiful old brass water pipes that I had picked up for the equivalent of a couple of dollars on that street by the ancient mud-plaster mosque, where rags-and-bones men set out used goods on squares of dirty cloth.

As we talked, it slowly dawned on me that Akrem was scared. Physically afraid.

He was telling me a story that was having the strangest effect on me. It was utterly incredible, and yet it was confirming a lot of things I had begun to suspect.

An informant of his, someone who worked on Governor Shirzai's staff, had been reporting back about weapons deliveries—guns and equipment coming from Pakistan and unloaded directly at the governor's residence. On one occasion, Akrem said, a car had arrived with pistols and sophisticated walkie-talkies and some sort of motion detectors. “Where's the good stuff?” Governor Shirzai had demand, as he looked over the hardware.

“The car with the radar is following right behind us,” the driver had answered, according to Akrem's mole.

Some of these arms, it seemed, were being transshipped out of Kandahar to a nearby battleground. Six days ago, Akrem continued, his mole had observed several vehicles setting out from the governor's residence, Kalashnikovs hidden under a mess of plastic water bottles. The convoy, said Akrem, was headed for Shindand, a town halfway up that seamed cement road that leads out of Kandahar, past the turnoff to Khakrez, and on northwestward to Herat.

Shindand was a hot spot, for it marked the dividing line between the Pashtuns to the south and the Persian-speaking Tajiks to the north. Herat, that former center of Persian culture that had become the stronghold of the Abdali Pashtuns just before the birth of Afghanistan, was back in the Persian orbit. It was ruled by a powerful Persian-speaking Tajik warlord named Isma'il Khan. He had been huffing and puffing against the southern Pashtuns since the anti-Taliban war a year before. While the Kandahar elders were negotiating the Taliban surrender in November of 2001, Isma'il Khan was stamping his foot with impatience, vowing he would take Kandahar by force. That would have really sparked civil war. The whole Afghan south would have risen up against him. As it was, several nasty firefights had broken out recently between Isma'il Khan and a Pashtun commander at Shindand who was defying him.

This, Akrem was telling me, was precisely the kind of ethnic conflict the Pakistani government was trying to foment, using Governor Gul Agha Shirzai as a stalking horse. The Pakistanis wanted to set Gul Agha up as the champion of downtrodden Pashtuns in Herat, and get him to lead a military expedition there in order to keep Afghanistan volatile and unstable—America's
yaghestan
.

“Oh,” I twigged. “So all those declarations of Gul Agha's on the radio recently, about human rights abuses against Pashtuns in Herat…?”

“Exactly,” Akrem answered.

Then just yesterday, Akrem's mole had come to him with another story. At 9:00
P
.
M
. the night before, the man had been in the governor's office. Two Pakistani army officers were there, berating the governor. “You're too slow. What's the problem?” Shirzai was not working quickly enough to ignite the hostilities with Herat, the Pakistanis charged. According to the mole, the governor had put the blame on two big problems he was confronting. One was Kabul. President Karzai would not have any patience for ethnic strife in the new Afghanistan. The other was Zabit Akrem. “He's blocking things on this end,” the governor complained. “Every time I call a security meeting and propose some action, he speaks up against me. He's keeping me from rallying commanders to the anti-Herat cause.”

“Zabit Akrem is making problems for you?” the Pakistani officers retorted. “Then make problems for him. Kill him.”

So
this
explained the occasional clashes on the streets of Kandahar between Akrem's police and Shirzai's private thugs, I thought. There had been that shoot-out right in front of the old mud-plaster mosque, in the middle of the bazaar. Was a rocket launcher fired? I tried to remember. In any case, someone had been killed, I was sure of that.

From the way Akrem was talking, it was clear that he took this threat from Pakistan very seriously indeed.

I leaned forward. Did he mind if I took some notes? I flipped open the orange cover of one of the pocket-sized pads I had used for reporting. Did he have the sense that Pakistani intelligence agents were planted here? Akrem reeled off half a dozen: Seyyid Karim Agha, who used to be at army headquarters; right now he was in Islamabad. Ayyub Palawan, on the border, and Hajji Niyamat Nurzai. The list went on. We talked about the militia commander's hosting a U.S. Special Forces group in Helmand Province to the west of us. He was a loyalist of the fundamentalist resistance leader who had preceded the Taliban as Pakistan's protégé. The fundamentalist faction was back in business these days, and by working with one of its members, the Special Forces troopers might as well have staked their tent right inside the lion's den. I asked Akrem about the private prison supposedly run by Governor Shirzai's hatchet man, Khalid Pashtoon. It was behind the old governor's palace, Akrem confirmed. He named the two men in charge. If I wanted, he could get me together with some people who had been held there. He told me about a Pakistani-infiltrated gang of fighters posted on the U.S. airbase; they were working as American proxies by day and shelling the American positions by night. We discussed the attempted assassination of President Karzai that summer. Akrem shook his head at the lack of a serious investigation. He told me how the key witness had died while in the custody of Gul Agha's men at the U.S. airfield.

The picture he painted for me of the streets of Kandahar left me agape. With U.S. dollars, Governor Shirzai had constituted his own private militia. And—better armed and better paid—that militia was competing with Akrem's police force. He started naming checkpoints around town that Shirzai's “Special Force” had taken over. And I realized that Akrem's men, the legitimate police of Kandahar province, had been pushed back into a little corner of the city. The police patrolled just a few streets, commanded two or three of the precinct houses. Everywhere else were Shirzai's thugs.

I looked up, reconsidering this embattled man.

We talked deep into the night, while Akrem's bodyguards waited hours for him, leaning on his shiny forest green Land Cruiser, fraternizing with my staff. Akrem's answers to my volley of questions were considered, astute, constructive. It was a tone that never wavered through two and a half years of conversations.

We fell into a loose routine. We would rarely let more than a week go by without an exchange of phone calls or a visit. Something would come up that I wanted his take on, or he would have a piece of information to pass along. Or I would simply notice I hadn't heard from
Comandan Saab
in a while, and I would call him up to see how he was doing.

Zabit Akrem proved to be the most sophisticated political thinker I encountered in Afghanistan. The fact seemed somehow incongruous, beside the rough-hewn nature of the man.