The Punishment of Virtue (25 page)

The impression of American favoritism was exacerbated by Shirzai's fighters' wardrobe. Both
Nazmi Khass
and the militia at the base had been issued U.S. Army fatigues. U.S. soldiers wearing that uniform are subject to U.S. discipline and supervision. The Afghan fighters were not. And they interpreted the formidable shield afforded by their friendship with the U.S. troops as a blank check.

When idle conversations with Kandaharis veered to the subject of security, as they often did, I would keep count. Every time I heard of an ugly incident—a boy being shot in the leg by a soldier who wanted his bicycle, the driver of a wedding procession being shot because he refused to give a soldier some candy, a house being looted on the pretext that the soldiers were looking for opium—I asked what uniform the perpetrators were wearing. Almost every time, the witness would describe the particolorU.S. camouflage worn by Shirzai's gunmen.

What were Kandaharis to conclude except that Shirzai's men were operating under U.S. command, that they and their actions were part of U.S. policy?

In other words, much of the expenditure in effort and treasure that was aimed at building bridges and gaining friends in Kandahar did the reverse. It built a growing feeling of resentment against the U.S. troops.

Shirzai's gunmen gained a further benefit from their ownership of the airfield's outer perimeter: a chunk of territory that was free from scrutiny. The distance from Gate 1, the outside gate manned by the Afghans, to Gate 2, the inner gate guarded by U.S. troops, was about half a mile. That half mile, ringed all the way around the base, was a no-man's land, protected and peopled by Shirzai's henchmen. For a time, they were taking advantage of this privacy to load marijuana shipments for transport to Pakistan.

The racket, as I understood it, went like this: Among his other contracts, Razziq Shirzai had won the exclusive right to supply the U.S. base with diesel fuel. Tanker trucks would drive up from Pakistan or across from Iran and onto base, empty their contents into great rubber pouches like giant water beds partially sunk into the ground. Then, in at least one case, after an empty tanker had exited the base proper and entered the zone between the perimeters, Shirzai's men loaded it up with dope and sent it back toward Pakistan.

That particular truck was captured by Afghan frontier guards in March 2003. The chief of the border police at the time was one of my Achekzai friends—the commander who had detailed the young bodyguard to me on my first drive into Kandahar. That spring of 2003, I was on my way to Chaman to visit Mahmad Anwar, and I stopped at the border police headquarters for a motorcycle ride into Pakistan. Over the obligatory glass of tea, the commander told me how he had captured a tanker truck full of dope a few days back. He reached into his breast pocket for some papers that the driver had been carrying.

The border police chief unfolded one. What I saw first, inked in green across the top of the slip of paper, was the official letterhead of the Provincial Government of Kandahar. The note was signed Bacha Shirzai, the governor's other brother. It read: “The carrier of this letter is my man; he is doing my business. Please provide him with all necessary assistance.” It amounted to safe conduct through every checkpoint from Kandahar to the Pakistani border and beyond.

The second piece of paper was a cryptic list: some names with numbers next to them, about forty in all: “Ata Jan 7,” for example. “Najibullah4.” (I'm remembering the names. They may not be accurate.) It had to be a kind of cargo invoice, listing each drug trafficker and the weight of the shipment he had placed aboard the tanker truck. A
man,
the common unit of weight in Kandahar, equals appoximately four and a half kilos, or almost ten pounds. “Ata Jan” would have been shipping nearly seventy pounds of pot to Pakistan. A rough addition of the numbers on the list put the tanker's total cargo at around nine hundred kilos, or just short of two thousand pounds.

And the Shirzais, doubtless for a price, were apparently providing a safe place on the U.S. base to load this cargo, and then protection for it on the road to Pakistan.

There was another drug scam on base, involving U.S. soldiers this time. Shirzai's men would run marijuana
into
the base, for use by U.S. soldiers. The pot came with the tanker loads of fuel the Afghans were delivering. In payment, the soldiers would falsify the delivery records, signing in a full tanker of diesel when in fact the load was short.

These transactions were eventually discovered and the U.S. soldiers discreetly punished. But the Shirzais never suffered any consequences.

In both cases, the integrity of the U.S. mission was compromised because U.S. troops either appeared to be or actually were participating in the very drug trade they were theoretically supposed to interdict.

But to my mind, the very worst breach of U.S. security lay with the interpretation and translation services the troops relied upon for all their interactions with the Afghans around them. I can remember only one soldier who spoke Pashtu. Local interpreters were required for the army's every move. And those interpreters were provided, again, by Razziq Shirzai. They did not even receive their pay directly from U.S. personnel, though one Civil Affairs sergeant almost gave herself an ulcer trying to get the procedure changed. But she was ordered to keep giving the money to Razziq, and to let him pay the interpreters. They lived in his compound in the noman's-land. In the Afghan context, this made the interpreters beholden not to the Americans, but to Razziq Shirzai. Whether by inclination or—as was often the case—by force, with physical abuse driving home the facts, the interpreters were Razziq's men, under his orders.

The result was a severely distorted picture of the situation in the Afghan south and nearly unintelligible interactions between Americans and Afghans. The information U.S. forces were receiving was frequently inaccurate or deliberately misrepresented. The messages U.S. officers were trying to communicate to locals were either not getting through at all, or were, time and again, twisted to suit the Shirzais'ends. Complaints and suggestions that some courageous Afghans—like Akrem—might step forward to offer U.S. forces were similarly bent and deformed.

It was on the basis of a picture this flawed that U.S. commanders were reaching their combat and reconstruction decisions in Kandahar. It made me want to weep with frustration.

DECEMBER 2001–FEBRUARY 2003

I
N THE BEGINNING
, given U.S. forces' stated mission in Afghanistan—fighting Al-Qaeda—their lack of communication with the Afghans around them arguably did not matter very much. For at first, there was not much Al-Qaeda to fight. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were gone.

For about six months, there was a period of grace when those who were battling for the future of Afghanistan only had to battle the past's inert wreckage, not its resurrected ghosts. Even Kandahar, which separated from its Taliban affliction with care and some cynicism, was released for a moment. For a time, no alternative to the new U.S.-led experiment stalked. Kandaharis could give themselves up to the promise they perceived in it without a glance over their shoulders.

A trip to the bazaar drew a crowd, unsettling in its immobility, its insatiable, unsmiling stare, but nothing worse. A petulant clot of traffic blocking an unpaved street was just a frustration, not something that required the calculation of risk. I could drive across Kandahar without nervously eyeing the motorcycle that drew alongside me, or thinking to roll up my windows in case of grenades.

When the first signs came, we did not see them as portents, for they were silent—harmless, we thought—and they came not to Afghanistan but to neighboring Pakistan.

It was like some grotesque courtship ritual. Men, dressed in immaculate white or glowering black, their beards carefully frayed to untrimmed wisps at the edges, their heads wrapped in the loopy, outsized turban the Taliban had made their trademark, would appear on their doorsteps and stand for a while. Or they would collect in relaxed groups on street corners in the busy Pashtunabad bazaar, the Afghan neighborhood in Quetta. Like peacocks before a prospective mate, they were on display. Except it was hardly the rare
burka
-clad female whose attention they desired. The show was for their rival; they wished to gauge his reaction.

That rival, in the form of the new Afghan government and the Americans protecting it, did not react. And so the way was open for the next phase.

That was the “night letters” and the threats. A folded slip of paper tucked into a crack in the door of the mosque or passed around by a friend, declaring that the new Afghan government had rejected Islam and combating it was holy war.

This message began to lace the sermons delivered in the white-painted mosques of Quetta, with their quiet, arcaded courtyards, havens from the sooty chaos outside. Soon the imams added the obligation and the threat: anyone collaborating with the apostate government in Afghanistan could be—should be—killed.

A word about courage. Afghans are famous for it. They are legendary spillers of blood. Afghan songs and poetry are full of merciless exhortations to ferocity. Few Westerners recall the Afghans' successful resistance to the Arab invaders who tried to reduce their rocky land thirteen hundred years ago. But the Afghans do, and with pride, despite their fierce conversion later to the Islam those Arabs were carrying. The Afghans' rout of the British army in 1842—that massacre of the Army of the Indus down to one last man who was allowed to live so he could describe the horror of it—has haunted the imaginations of all foreigners who have even thought about spending time in Afghanistan ever since. It doesn't matter if they don't know the historical details of that butchery. The shadow of it haunts them.

Of course, a closer look at the historical details uncovers a good deal of shrewdness mixed in with Afghan courage. Afghan fighters know how to turn terrain, timing, and temporary alliances to advantage so as to reduce the actual spillage of their blood. Those Redcoats in 1842 were shot up in a canyon, with straight rock walls that rise almost to blot out the sky. The Afghans were ranged above, shooting down at the beefy English officers and their cold and homesick Indian troops, thinned out along the road like blood cells in a capillary. The slaughter of those men had more to do with the blind arrogance and incompetence of their generals than the Afghans' profligate courage. Sometimes the fighting of Afghans resembles a kind of stylized theater, a performance designed to bring the probable winner to light so that the terms of his acceptance can be negotiated.

The most egregious recent exception to this rule came during the 1980s Soviet invasion, when Afghans leading mules and carrying bolt-action rifles took on the Red Army. Even that was a guerrilla war, not one marked by pitched battles. The Afghan fighters allied themselves once more with their unfriendly landscape. They renewed their everlasting covenant with the treacherous rocks and the rough footpaths across them, and kept on shooting.

One man who fought the length of this war, Tor, a lanky man, inhabited by a miraculous innocence despite his haunted eyes, can even think back on his time in the mountains with some fondness. He remembers his horse—white, of all the nontactical colors—which would carry him all day, then munch down a handful of cookies dug out of a sack, and be eager to set off again. Tor's eyes glint like a boy's with a bicycle when he talks about that horse.

But it was a real war. And it took an appalling toll in the elements of civilization that were more painstaking for Afghanistan to acquire than other countries: the orchards, the irrigation systems hollowed out of stone and laboriously maintained for generations, and in blood, in innocent blood. The Soviets, shot at from a village, would come back with their invincible helicopter gunships and raze the village, bring down the mud-brick houses on their occupants, splinter the bones of the elders, eviscerate the women never once seen by a stranger's eyes, sow mines among the almonds and apricots so those who longed to tend the trees would be blown up trying. A million Afghans were killed in that decade of war, most of them civilians.

In time, the Afghans, with their rifles and their white horses, and finally with their U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles, won the war. But the victory, miraculous though it was given the odds, unimaginable though it was in its impact on the organization of the whole world, came too late to avert an irreparable loss. The Afghans lost their courage. For, before the Stingers arrived, courage could do nothing against a helicopter flying out of range, whose reinforced belly was immune to bullets anyway. The inequality in firepower between the Soviets and the Afghans was so great as to render courage irrelevant. The Afghans' courage was disempowered, as was their mythical hardiness. I saw the marks from entrance and exit wounds in my Achekzai host-father's lower gut. “But then what are you doing alive?” I exclaimed, eyeing a hand-breadth of scar tissue on his side where the slug blew its way out. “Oh, I just took my shawl and tied myself up in it,” he answered, perhaps with a touch of bravado. Even the courage to do this, even this superhuman ability simply to survive, could not keep a million innocent people from dying. And so the Afghans' courage deserted them.

The meaning of this loss is that it is no longer necessary to kill Afghans to intimidate them. When I was reporting, I was astonished to find my big, strapping, dignified driver repeatedly malingering when I wanted to go someplace the least bit dangerous. I was astonished when my interpreter quit his fantastically well-paying job with me, citing the intolerable risk. The last straw came when I asked our driver to pull over, and I got out of the car to follow a dirt track toward the airport. “They'll shoot you,” said my interpreter. I explained that U.S. Marines don't shoot on sight. “There are mines,” he insisted. I pointed out the fresh tire tracks in the dirt, which showed me where to place my feet.

I was dumbstruck to discover myself more courageous than the fabled Afghans, and effortlessly. I gained a reputation in Kandahar, but it is false. I am not so very brave. Only, I have not been through their trauma. I am not violated and indelibly damaged by it, as Afghans are. Brutality and agonizing death have been visited on them in such unpredictable and unparriable ways that their ability to calculate risk is gone.

And so fear has grown to be a determining factor in Afghan society. Its power to paralyze can be invoked by the wisp of a threat. A “night letter,” instructing families to remove their girls from the infidels' school lest something happen to them, produces results. A look, cast by a neighbor at the man who invites a foreigner to his home to take tea, can abort future invitations. All of the rituals and pantomime of courage remain, like fossils. But in today's Afghanistan the impact of an intimidation campaign cannot be underestimated.

In the autumn of 2002 the verbal intimidation got reinforcement. That was the time of the shelling, constant but apparently random. Not a night would go by without the sound of an explosion, a rocket-propelled grenade, fired from somewhere, at something, maybe. There was rarely much damage, rarely a death. We would talk about it, try to analyze the previous night's damage, wonder who the target might have been, who the perpetrators. Fruitlessly.

And we got used to it.

Then, with the new year, the aim improved. Something would blow up near the office of a humanitarian group, shattering windows. Or a stick of dynamite would be tossed over the walls of a compound when no one was there.

It was Akrem who pointed out these evolving stages to me, who helped me discern beneath the jumble of events the underlying pattern.

That winter, he managed to land a tribesman in one of the terrorist training camps that littered the Pakistani side of the border. The mole brought back the curriculum, a syllabus covering such subjects as demolitions and bomb making, especially with kitchen pressure cookers, or how to plan and execute the assassinations of public figures: how to track their routines, where to wait for them, how to aim. A Pakistani army colonel and two majors were the professors; Akrem gave me their names.

“The Pakistanis train people and give them money,” he said, “and the people plant bombs. Then, if the Afghans and the Americans get angry, the Pakistanis catch a few ‘Talibs,' and tell the real ones to stay quiet for a month or two. This is the Pakistani strategy: they advance by taking two steps forward and four steps back.”

It was the first time Akrem told me this. He would say it again the night before he died.

By February 1, aid workers posted in Kandahar—the ill-omened city even Afghans were afraid to visit—were getting rattled. Several offices decided to suspend or curtail their missions. Security began to dominate the conversation at the weekly coordination meetings.

Of course, security had dominated conversation among Afghans for months.

But between the security concerns of the Afghans and the security concerns of the foreigners there was a gulf. The foreigners were worried about shadowy “former Taliban” and a putative anti-American insurgency. The Afghans were worried about the quite real depredations of the government those Americans had put in power.

For Afghans' fears about what would take place if the warlords returned had been realized. Perhaps not in their goriest excesses, but with enough precision to bring back memories of the “
mujahideen
nights,” the early 1990s chaos that took the place of the retreating Soviets. There were chains on the roads again. Shirzai's militiamen who manned them were taking tolls from taxis. Mama Ubaydullah, in Spin Boldak on the border, according to my Achekzais, was kidnapping the beautiful sons of merchants for ransom and who knew what else. The younger brother of the carpenter who built the studio for our radio station was captured right in Kandahar. He was turned over to soldiers for a theft he did not commit. The soldiers made him cook for them and serve them, and they wanted to make him do other things for them, but could not quite go so far because we were on the case. Nazar Jan's men had a lean-to in my old backyard, the cemetery. Now women could no longer go to visit graves. The private prison was spawning tales, the one maintained by Shirzai's Afghan American factotum, Khalid Pashtoon, now provincial director for foreign affairs. Prisoners were tortured there, it was said, sometimes for money. Everyone had a story. Everyone knew someone who had been hurt. And the fear of it radiated through Kandahar.

Frustration was radiating, too.
This
was the new Afghanistan? people began to wonder.

That winter of 2002, I brought together some of the delegates to the previous June's
Loya Jirga,
or Grand Tribal Council, for a series of focus group discussions. The men and women, from rival tribes and hostile orientations, sitting in one room for the first time in six months, agreed resoundingly on one thing: they had had it with warlords. This is not a word that has been invented in the West. The concept, utterly familiar in Afghanistan, has a name:
topak salaran
, or “gun-rulers.” The delegates agreed that the presence of these men had distorted the June
Loya Jirga
, and their presence in government since then was distorting the nascent Afghan democracy.

The former delegates were not at all impressed by the claims of some notorious warlords to be religious leaders—claims I had heard Westerners acknowledge. “They are using the name of Islam all the time; but their deeds are unholy. To speak out against them is not to speak against Islam,” said one. Or “These people killed thousands of Muslims, and no one even mentioned it. We could have arrested them and put them in jail where they belong. But they were members of the
Loya Jirga,
so now we can't.”
¹

This was the delegates' main complaint about the meeting that had affixed a seal on Hamid Karzai's interim presidency of Afghanistan. They felt it had proved, in part, counterproductive. Most of the delegates had been dispatched to Kabul with a clear mandate: bring an end to warlordism and establish law and order, or
qanun
. “We don't want schools or a hospital,” one delegate quoted his constituents' instructions. “We want security.” But instead of curbing the warlords, instead of expelling them once and for all from Afghan politics, the Karzai administration was augmenting their power. That was how the delegates felt. “Before, the
topak salaran
had hundreds of followers,” said one, while the others in his group nodded. “Now they have thousands. Their position has been legitimized. Before, their hearts were shaking; now they are strong.”