After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, these uprooted mujahideen used brutal violence to assert their authority over the territories they controlled—hence the name jang salar, warlord, that Afghans came to use for many of the anti-Soviet mujahideen. Local mujahideen “commanders”—the word in Afghanistan refers to men with guns and bands of their loyal supporters—also set up toll tax checkpoints on roads. Extortion, arbitrary arrests, killings, kidnapping, and rape had become commonplace in many parts of Afghanistan in the early 1990s. Not surprisingly, many Afghans, including Hamid Karzai, initially welcomed the puritan Taliban as they arose in 1994 from the Pashtun-dominated southern and eastern provinces of Afghanistan to subdue by 1996 most of the warlords.
In the fall of 2001 Operation Enduring Freedom brought many of these mujahideen out of exile and retirement. In what President Bush has called one of the biggest “bargains” of all time, CIA and Special Forces officers handed out hundred-dollar bills totaling seventy million dollars to such regional commanders of private militias as Ismael Khan in the west; Abdul Rashid Dostum, General Mohammed Fahim, and Mohammed Ustad Atta in the north; and Hazrat Ali in the east.
Seeing that they were indispensable to the U.S. war on terror, the warlords moved quickly and boldly as the Taliban regime collapsed. In November 2001, soldiers of the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance raced into Kabul as soon as the Taliban abandoned it and occupied important government buildings, despite being told by their American supporters to await an orderly transition. Elsewhere in Afghanistan, the former mujahideen swiftly regained the power and influence that they had previously lost to the Taliban. Ismael Khan declared himself governor of the western province of Herat and began to siphon away custom tolls on imports from Iran that then amounted to nine million dollars every month; he also reinstituted many Taliban-era restrictions on women.
Warlords in such border provinces as Nangrahar, Kandahar, Khost, and Balkh resumed their battles to control the lucrative businesses of poppy cultivation and smuggling; fighting between the militias of Dostum and Atta Mohammed caused scores of civilian deaths in Balkh in 2002 and 2003. They were soon associated with the kinds of human rights abuses—extrajudicial killings, kidnapping, torture, rape, and human trafficking—that had caused the Taliban to be established in the first place. Warlords working with U.S. Special Forces also committed atrocities, the deaths in the northern province of Shebarghan of up to three thousand Taliban prisoners crammed by Dostum in sealed cargo containers.
In December 2001, the so-called Bonn Agreement, an accord signed by militia leaders who fought with the United States against the Taliban, called for the UN to deploy an international security force in Kabul and stipulated that all militias leave the city before the arrival of the UN-mandated forces. But this was never enforced. When Hamid Karzai arrived in Kabul in late 2001 as the U.S.-backed interim president, he had to contend not only with General Fahim of the Northern Alliance and his tens of thousands of militia fighters ensconced in Kabul but also with the newly empowered warlords in the rest of the country.
Hazrat Ali is one of the more flamboyant and, with eighteen thousand armed supporters, most powerful of these warlords. He became briefly famous in late 2001, when U.S. Special Forces hired him to hunt down Osama bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora in the eastern province of Nangrahar. It is no longer clear whether bin Laden was in Tora Bora as American B-52s pulverized the area and commanders dazzled journalists with stories of high-tech terrorist caves inside the mountains. But Hazrat Ali continued to flourish. Backed by General Fahim in the Northern Alliance, and apparently favored by U.S. Special Forces, he threatened his rivals with American aerial strikes and, after forcing out Karzai’s candidate, appointed himself “security chief” of the province of Nangrahar.
Such job titles in Afghanistan are rarely without grim irony. An investigator for the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in Nangrahar sighed before he went on to recite the cases of kidnapping, torture, and rape of women and young boys in which Ali’s men were implicated. Since Tora Bora, Ali had also become one of the powerful men in Afghanistan involved in the drugs trade.
The farmers I met in Nangrahar Province, among the 2.3 million Afghans employed in the drugs industry, described how Ali had encouraged and closely supervised the production and trafficking of opium. His men came to villages in pickup trucks and bought the poppy harvest, which, previously taken to Pakistan for processing, was now turned into heroin in laboratories within Nangrahar itself before being smuggled through Dubai and Pakistan to the streets of London or Paris.
The new freedoms enjoyed by U.S.-backed warlords like Hazrat Ali partly explain why Afghan opium poppy cultivation, abruptly curtailed when the Taliban. enforced a ban in 2000 and 2001, jumped 64 percent between 2003 and 2004 and why Afghanistan last year supplied 87 percent of the world’s heroin. Just as the CIA-sponsored radical Islam once connected Afghanistan to the modern world, so U.S.-backed warlords have initiated Afghanistan into the globalized economy.
When I met Hazrat Ali in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangrahar, near the Khyber Pass, in December 2004, at a compound teeming with Land Cruisers and heavily armed bodyguards, he had just returned from a tour of some poppy-growing districts. His assistant, a young swarthy man with wild eyes, was disappointed to see me. He had expected a white journalist, and he grew suspicious when I spoke to him in Urdu.
Hazrat Ali himself pleaded humility in the way a small-town hoodlum-turned-politician in India might. He was a “very simple man,” he said. Sitting cross-legged on a divan at one end of a long room, bare except for chandeliers, Ali repeatedly slapped the soles of his feet as he detailed his success in eradicating 95 percent of the poppy grown in Nangrahar. He had not received clear enough instructions from Karzai, he said; otherwise he would have stopped poppy cultivation long ago. Now, within three days, there would no poppy plant left in his province.
These claims were not entirely “bullshit,” as a Western diplomat in Kabul later described them. The efforts at eradication were largely successful in Nangrahar. But opium poppy can be stored for a long time, and many farmers in Nangrahar told me that Hazrat Ali was most likely waiting to sell his reserves after shortages caused by crop eradication in Afghanistan had inflated the international prices.
I asked him how farmers whom he had forced to stop growing poppy would find another way of feeding their families. He said he didn’t worry about that. Opium was immoral, banned by the Sharia; it had to be eliminated. As for farmers in his province who complained about American soldiers breaking into their homes, searching for terrorists and poppy, they needed, Ali said, to reform themselves, to stop growing poppy and supporting terrorists.
In his elegant mansion in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, some fifty miles from the Uzbekistan border, the former warlord-turned-governor Atta Mohammed described to me, as a television crew hovered around us, how hard he had worked to eradicate poppy in Balkh Province and how as a man of peace he had asked hundreds of his fighters to voluntarily disarm. Feared locally as an extreme Islamic fundamentalist, and previously seen in dirty camouflage khakis, Mohammed had recently trimmed his long beard and taken to wearing pinstripe suits while meeting foreign visitors in his wood-paneled office.
Balkh TV news that evening showed Mohammed discussing the progress of Afghanistan with a visiting writer from America. On television, Mohammed looked suave, even persuasive. But Miriam, a long-standing American aid worker I had met the previous evening had already told me that Mohammed’s militia had stashed away large amounts of arms. Afghans in Mazar spoke casually of his role in smuggling drugs across the nearby, largely unguarded border with Uzbekistan. In July 2004, Mohammed had locked the Karzai-appointed local police chief in his own home after the latter seized a consignment of opium. British troops stationed in Mazar as part of the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) -run provincial reconstruction team had to supply the besieged police chief with food and water until the standoff ended.
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sp; When I met the military commander of the PRT in December, he had just returned from what he described, with British euphemism, as “a frank talk” with Mohammed. Apparently, there was little else that he and his few dozen troops in an area as large as Scotland could do.
Certainly, Afghanistan’s weak central government is even less equipped to tackle the fact that twenty-eight out of the country’s thirty-two provinces now grow poppy, often with the support and involvement of local officials, such as the chief of police in the remote northern province of Badakshan, who until recently was running the largest heroin factory in Afghanistan in his garden.
Karzai had initially offered cash incentives to poppy farmers in an attempt to make them destroy their crops. But many farmers never saw the money, which was swallowed by corrupt government officials. Others accepted it and continued to cultivate poppy. Karzai later admitted his payments were a mistake.
The availability of high-yield seeds, cold storage facilities, and microcredit may wean Afghan farmers away from what has become their most reliable source of income, poppy, which grows easily, even in areas without adequate water, and which can earn twenty-five times more than the traditional crops of wheat, rice, and cotton. But this will take years, if not decades. And long-term schemes for making Afghan agriculture and horticulture more profitable do not seem as important to the U.S. counternarcotics program in Afghanistan as aggressive, quick fix schemes for poppy eradication, which seem certain to invite resistance. In 2004, the American security company DynCorp trained a four hundred-strong Afghan eradication team in just two weeks, and sent it out to the central province of Wardak, where it destroyed a thousand hectares, but only after fighting off farmers who fired rockets and sowed their fields with land mines.
In November 2004, farmers in Nangrahar reported seeing a plane spraying poppy fields with chemicals. The governor of the province, Din Mohammed, who had to pacify the angry farmers, told me that only the Americans could have sent the plane, but U.S. officials denied all knowledge of it. A European diplomat told me that “very senior” members of the Bush administration had resolved to aerially eradicate poppy in Afghanistan, much to the consternation of Karzai, who feared that farmers would be incited to armed revolt by planes or helicopters destroying their fields.
It seems unfair to target, manually or aerially, hundreds of thousands of small poppy farmers without ensuring that they have alternative means of survival, especially while warlords and corrupt government officials continue to build great fortunes out of the narcotics business.
Many Afghans have asked why the eighteen thousand U.S. troops in the country were unable to arrest the more notorious drug traffickers. When I put this to a Western diplomat, he said that Al Capone was known as a Mafia don for years before there was enough evidence to convict him. He then promised arrests of some big traffickers in early 2005. But no such arrests have happened, and until they do, it will be hard to dismiss Afghans as conspiracy theorists when they claim the United States ignored the extraordinary growth in poppy production over the last three years because it expected the money from drugs, Afghanistan’s only major export, to spare it some of the costs of rebuilding the country’s economy. Such shortcuts, after all, have been taken before in Afghanistan, during the anti-Soviet jihad, when the CIA was complicit in the drugs trade.
Growing evidence that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were funding themselves. through the narcotics trade may have finally alerted the Bush administration to the possibility that as Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN antinarcotics program, wrote in a report in October 2003, “Afghanistan will again turn into a failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and narco-terrorists.” In his more alarming survey published in November 2004, Costa warned that if the drug problem in Afghanistan persists, “the political and military successes of the last three years will be lost.”
But Afghanistan will be unable to avoid this fate as long as the Bush administration considers warlords indispensable to its war on terror and thus undercuts President Karzai’s authority. Much of the country appears to be run largely by these warlords and their private militias, whom Karzai himself described, in a recent interview with The New York Times, as the greatest threat to Afghanistan’s security, even more dangerous than Taliban insurgents, who killed more than nine hundred people in 2004, including reconstruction and aid workers, but are still largely confined to the southern and eastern provinces.
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his former deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, consistently refused to involve U.S. troops in peacekeeping efforts in Afghanistan. More surprisingly, they opposed, until September 2003, expanding the UN-mandated ISAF beyond Kabul, especially in areas where, as the Human Rights Watch report for 2004 puts it, “there are no real governmental structures or activity, only abuse and criminal enterprises by factions.” The eight thousand-strong ISAF, which is under NATO command, will expand across Afghanistan over the next three years. But its presence will still compare poorly with forty thousand NATO soldiers in Bosnia, which is one-tenth the size of Afghanistan. Moreover, the ISAF has no mandate to take on drugs traffickers or even to intervene militarily in factional fighting.
In July 2004, Médicins sans Frontières (MSF), which had remained in Afghanistan through the hard years of the civil war and the Taliban regime, finally withdrew from the country after five of its workers were killed by unknown gunmen. MSF claimed that Afghan officials gave it evidence that warlords in northwest Afghanistan were involved in the killing but did nothing to arrest the suspects. MSF had previously “condemned the distribution of leaflets by the coalition forces in southern Afghanistan in which the population was informed that providing information about the Taliban and al Qaeda was necessary if they wanted the delivery of aid to continue.” It accused the United States of consistently using “humanitarian aid to build support for its military and political ambitions” and thus compromising the neutrality of Western aid agencies in war zones.
In a response published in The Wall Street Journal, the novelist Cheryl Benard, who is married to the U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, advised MSF that “it is a different world out there” and that “humanitarians will have to operate underthe cover of arms—or not at all.” But it is not clear whether the large-scale and expensive military offensives (costing one billion dollars per month) against the Taliban and Al Qaeda are working, especially when compared to intelligence and police operations in Pakistan, where many senior Al Qaeda members have been captured.
Both bin Laden and Mullah Omar are still at large after the highest bounties and most rigorous manhunts in history. This may attest not only to the difficulties of fighting a shadowy enemy in a vast and mountainous territory but also to the strength of tribal and religious loyalties and growing anti-American sentiment in the Pashtun-dominated provinces of Afghanistan and Pakistan. In October 2002, popular resentment of America helped a coalition of radical Islamist parties win elections in the Pakistani provinces bordering Afghanistan, where the Taliban appear to find ready support. More people in southern and eastern Afghanistan are likely to be drawn to radical Islamists as aerial bombings and raids on villages continue and the U.S. military places itself further beyond international law. No one among the thousands of Afghans detained by the U.S. military at mostly unknown locations across Afghanistan since 2001 has been given prisoner of war status. Often released as arbitrarily as they are arrested, they have no access to legal counsel. Mistreatment during interrogation—beatings, sexual humiliation, and sleep deprivation—appears common. Eight Afghans have died in American custody. In 2004, two of these deaths were ruled homicides by U.S. military doctors at Bagram Air Base near Kabul.
In Jalalabad, I met a diplomat from one of Afghanistan’s powerful neighbors. He described in some detail his encounters with American diplomats and military officers whom he termed intellectually limited but very arrogant. He said, “The Afghans in the south and east hate the Americans as much as they hated the Russians. They are too
tired after twenty-five years of war. But give them two more years of Operation Enduring Freedom and they will start another jihad.”
Later that same evening, I was at the governor’s mansion in Jalalabad, formerly a summer palace of the king of Afghanistan, when a delegation of tribal elders arrived. They had walked for much of the day from a remote district; mud covered their slippers and scaly feet. The governor attended to them immediately, after postponing his meeting with me. They sat on a terrace in two long rows, and the scene—long-bearded, turbaned men before their solicitous potentate, against a backdrop of gardens and pavilions—could have been that of a Moghul miniature painting.
The men had come to complain to the governor about heavy-handed American soldiers in their villages. After their leader spoke briefly and somberly, the governor attempted a joke, possibly in order to hide his own inability to influence his American patrons. Afghanistan, he said, had become a petri dish in which foreigners could throw in whatever they liked. Some of the men laughed, revealing toothless gums.
When their laughter subsided, one of the elders began to speak. From where I sat, I couldn’t see his face. I only heard his deep, urgent voice. He spoke about the dishonor caused to Afghan families by American soldiers barging into women’s quarters, about the frustration and rage felt by him and others, and he spoke for a long time, his voice growing in passion until it broke, and I began to believe that the diplomat, whom I’d thought too embittered by his own encounters with powerful and abrasive Americans, may not have exaggerated much.
Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond Page 33
