The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  Following someone’s directions, we reach quite a stately building, set off from the main road by a broad dirt midden, planted with trees. It has a round tower marking one corner, with a dome on top. In front of the narrow door stands a line of cars idling, like the others that seem to have the streets to themselves this day: two newly minted Toyota SUVs, plastic still covering their immaculate interiors, and behind them, three pickup trucks packed with rowdy fighters. The men in the second truck wear the distinctive, loopy black turbans the Taliban made famous. Before I have a chance to wonder what I have blundered into, Mahmad Anwar bursts out of the front SUV: “Sarah!” The first syllable is long, SAH, the r the slightest kiss of the tongue behind the front teeth. Mahmad Anwar grips my hand, claps my shoulder, and bundles me into his SUV, right next to him. I do not have a chance to decide. My staff finds room in one of the pickups.

  Mahmad Anwar was the follower of a particularly brutal and treacherous 1980s gun lord, whose wild-eyed marijuana-smoking devotees are to this day known for their lack of restraint. Yet he, too, strikes an unlikely figure as a cutthroat. Apart from a great scar that plows a furrow down the length of one forearm, much about him exudes a wide-eyed sweetness. He boasts shamelessly, in pure Achekzai style, elaborating on his enemies’ fear of him. But there is something boyish about these tall tales. His voice cracks, especially when he laughs, as though he has laryngitis. And he is endlessly tender with his friends, no matter who they are or what their station.

  We have hardly made it a half mile down one of Kandahar’s dirt streets when he slams to a stop, leaps out of the Land Cruiser, and rushes to en-fold a stick of a man in his arms. It is a tattered, impoverished Hindu, selling fried food from a cart. The two were friends long ago and lost sight of each other. The friendship is dearer to Mahmad Anwar than any lapse in dignity the gesture may carry. That is Mahmad Anwar.

  Our convoy’s trucks bristle with Kalashnikovs, a machine gun or two pointed out the back of each, and rocket launchers taped, according to the local fashion, upright to the backs of the cabs like menacing flag poles. Our fighters—fierce looking in their Taliban-style turbans, ammo belts crisscrossed under their shawls—are piled in every which way.

  We may not look like it, but we are the police. In fact, we’re working for Zabit Akrem. But I did not know that; I did not know who Akrem was yet. Our mission, I learn, is to start establishing some order. In the chaotic few days since the Taliban collapse, aid offices were ransacked and taken over by militia toughs. We are going to clear them out of their newly acquired aeries. First stop, the Kandahar Red Crescent office. The riffraff there refuses to budge. It takes Mahmad Anwar long minutes of discussion, Pashtun style, to “reason” their leader into leaving.

  Next, we make for a former den of Al-Qaeda fighters to pick up gear they left behind. I swarm with the men up narrow steps, crowd into one cell-like room, then a second, then watch as the fighters divvy up the Al-Qaeda stuff. Within five minutes, half a dozen have exchanged their traditional Kandahari garb of loose trousers and a long blousy tunic for dappled United Arab Emirates desert fatigues, struggling into the tight pants. I watch blankets and other useful accoutrements disappear, while ammo boxes and a couple each of Kalashnikovs, rocket launchers, and old-fashioned pie-plate machine guns are hauled downstairs and turned over to Mahmad Anwar. I even confess to taking a trophy, the wooden stock of an Al-Qaeda gun, for my brother Lincoln in Los Angeles. It never got to him.

  The sun is closing in on the horizon now. We have to hurry. This is Ramadan; we’ve all been fasting since dawn. We have to rush to be in our places, ready to attack our food the instant we hear the first notes of the hungrily awaited call to sunset prayer.

  We make for the house of one of Mahmad Anwar’s relatives. I remember a narrow passageway, and going down some steps to the guest room, where visiting males are received. The floor is covered in rich rugs from Herat and Mazar-i-Sherif. The furnishings are familiar to me from years I spent in the Peace Corps in Morocco: carpets on the floor, mattresses around the edges of the room for seating, and not much else. You settle down cross-legged, in a rough circle. On a plastic mat spread over the rugs, communal dishes are placed within reach of everyone, along with great sheets of homemade bread, two feet long. There is chicken in a kind of caramelized onion sauce, and lamb in something else delicious. Salad consists of slices of long, mild radishes, bunches of mint and coriander, and some scallions. I remember a white-headed uncle of Mahmad Anwar talking endlessly, God knows about what. No one else could slip a word in. The uncle is an elder; he has to be respected.

  After dinner, Mahmad Anwar gives me my own room upstairs in a neighbor’s house, with a guard whose job seems to be to serve me tea and make the occasional round outside on the roof. I look at my watch, one of those double-dial jobs I bought from the duty-free shop on British Airways. It is just about 7:00 P.M. Kandahar time—10:30 in the morning in Washington, the lower dial informs me. I have less than five hours to do it: to turn the kaleidoscopic hours I have just lived through into a four-and-a-half-minute radio report for All Things Considered. And somehow I have to convey the biggest piece of news: that the chaos I experienced that afternoon in Kandahar was due to U.S. policy. American soldiers escorted the gunslingers into town.

  I set up my minidisc player and start listening back over the tape I’ve recorded, banging out notes on my laptop as I go along.

  Four hours later it’s done. My tea-pouring guard has gone to sleep. I have set up my folding satellite dish on the roof outside. And I have managed it. I have written up the tale young Fayda told me on the road—awkwardly, I grant. But I have at least sketched the unbelievable story of American soldiers egging on a warlord to snatch Kandahar away from President Karzai, who is also guided by American soldiers. I e-mail the script to Washington over the satellite.

  And it flops.

  I am reporting to a new editor now that I have crossed into Afghanistan—thus is the world carved up in newsrooms. And the new editor doesn’t like the bit about the warlord. I dig my heels in. He sends the script up the chain of command to the international editor, a hard-drinking ogre we have all feared and respected and detested at one point or another. The ogre explodes. We have a shouting argument over the satellite phone. “There isn’t shit in your story,” he yells. The misunderstanding is this: he was looking for Mullah Omar sightseeing, the kind that filled the pages of the Washington Post he had opened that morning: descriptions of the tacky compound Mullah Omar had built with Usama bin Laden’s money, descriptions of the horrors he had committed, landmarks made famous by his Al-Qaeda guests. “There will be plenty of time later to get into squabbling among the Afghans,” my editor snaps.

  I feel that everybody knows by now how noxious the Taliban were, and further expansion on that theme is superfluous. It is just gratifying Americans’ sensibilities. The time for writing the Taliban story was five years back, I think. This is the story that matters now, I am sure of it. Because we are across the watershed. It is terribly important for America to get this right—important not just for Afghanistan and the United States, but for the planet. The world is watching us in Afghanistan. How we perform here after defeating the Taliban will determine where a lot of people come down on the clash of civilizations.

  My editor wins, of course, half an hour to airtime. Fayda’s testimony and its implications are cut from my report. So I never get to tell the story I already guess is key to what kind of Afghanistan will emerge from U.S. intervention.

  I’m doing that now.

  CHAPTER 7

  TAKING THE CITY BY FORCE

  DECEMBER 2001

  IT TOOK ME A LONG TIME to flesh the story out. I had to get to know the cast of characters—get to know them well enough to go to them, one by one, and ask them how it really happened. I did not plan it that way. But eventually, by stunning happenstance, I did come to know them all. Mahmad Anwar remained a friend even after he left his post in the Kandahar police. I took another Achekzai ride
across the border more than a year after the fall of the Taliban to visit him at his home in Chaman. I got to know Akrem and Mullah Naqib. My acquaintance with President Karzai and even Governor Shirzai grew personal enough that I could call and set up appointments to talk about these things.

  The only main character I was not able to track down was an American: Colonel David Fox of the U.S. Special Forces. All of my Afghan sources assigned him an important role in the events that would ensue.

  My first priority on this quest was to confirm that American soldiers really did encourage Shirzai to “take Kandahar by force.” That was easy.

  The airport, where President Karzai had ordered Shirzai to hole up, is a crucial piece of real estate. Set among sparsely growing pine trees about a half hour’s drive east of town, it is endowed with an abnormally long runway, tribute to its strategic location. The Soviets expanded the U.S.-built facility in the early 1980s so they could land their bombers to punish the countryside or potentially strike into Pakistan. After Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar invited Usama bin Laden to join him in Kandahar in 1996, the hunted Al-Qaeda chief hardened some compounds at the airport for himself and his key followers. Die-hard Al-Qaeda fighters withdrew there in the last days of the Taliban regime, to play out their last stand in Afghanistan.

  In early December 2001, U.S. jets started bombing the airport. A withering barrage of ordnance thundered down, cracking runways, plowing up acres of the brick-hard earth, and sending neighboring villagers fleeing to the homes of friends and relatives, or across the border to Pakistan. My sources inside Shirzai’s militia—Mahmad Anwar and his Achekzais—regaled me with stories of bitter fighting for control of this airport between Shirzai’s men and Al-Qaeda Arabs. But I never could get truck drivers to confirm a ground battle at the time, when I interviewed them on the Pakistani border.

  With their dogged Afghan way of going on living no matter what kind of hell was breaking loose around them, these drivers ran their painted vehicles, loaded with leaning towers of pomegranate crates or magenta-stamped sacks of Afghan wheat, past the airport and up the main road to Chaman, Pakistan. I asked them about the airport, and they described new gun emplacements and a large herd of pickups pressing their noses against the gates. But no fighting.

  This is the type of counterintuitive evidence it is wise to give credence to. The vaunted ground battle at the airport never took place. It was part of the fiction Gul Agha was concocting—with tacit U.S. approval, I came to understand—to secure his future reputation.

  Not till the bombing had sufficiently “softened” this final target did U.S. handlers allow their Afghan protégés anywhere near the airport. Akrem remembered it this way: “On the eve of our assault, the Americans told us, ‘Tomorrow we will go as far as the first tower of the airport.’ Some of our friends went farther, and three of them were killed. So we retreated again, to the bridge. The Americans bombed some more, and then they said, ‘You can advance now.’”

  When Akrem reached the outskirts of the airport, a vista of carnage opened before him. “Wherever there were Arabs, they were dead. They were sitting with their weapons, dead. Curled up in corners, dead.” Akrem counted just six or seven of the wounded that Gul Agha’s fighters finished off. For a couple days, witnesses reported to me at the time, bodies lay by the roadside stiffening, before militiamen and townsfolk gathered them and buried them in what was immediately dubbed the Arab Cemetery, on the north side of Kandahar.

  Then came Karzai’s satellite call to Shirzai. Akrem, standing right beside the former governor, overheard it. He heard Shirzai shout insults. “I don’t take orders from Hamid Karzai. I don’t know Hamid Karzai, and I don’t know Mullah Naqib. Kandahar is mine.”

  Gul Agha Shirzai does not deny his disobedience. I was at last able to confirm it with him during the appointment I made for the purpose, in 2004. “Yes, I spoke with President Karzai on the phone,” he boasted. “I told him, ‘Don’t put Mullah Naqib’s Alokozais in charge of Kandahar. Don’t make that mistake.’”

  And so the gloves came off.

  “Then Gul Agha started his propaganda,” says Mullah Naqib. “He said I was allied with the Taliban, that I had hidden Arabs and passed them across the Pakistani border, that all Alokozais do this.”

  Gul Agha Shirzai, advised by an Americanized Afghan factotum named Khalid Pashtoon, was making strategic use of the media, as I saw him do for years afterward, impressed at the deftness that lurked beneath his loutish exterior. He was adroitly staking out his position on the airwaves of the widely respected British Broadcasting Company.

  The terms of Gul Agha’s diatribe on the BBC were, according to my friends, “Mullah Naqib is a member of the Taliban; there’s no difference between them.” Mahmad Anwar said Shirzai told the Americans the same thing: “He won’t help you hunt Taliban; he’ll help them against you.”

  I did not catch Shirzai’s stormy interview verbatim, when as a guest in an Achekzai compound across the border in Chaman, I was pawing the ground to get inside Afghanistan. But I certainly heard about it. It was the talk of all the refugees: how Gul Agha Shirzai had announced he was going be governor of Kandahar, no two ways about it. The reports I was filing to NPR were filled with accounts of a chaotic—tense though not openly violent—struggle for control of the city. President Karzai even threatened to resign if his supporters could not sort things out among themselves.1

  At this dramatic juncture, the president gave Akrem permission to leave the airport and head for downtown Kandahar, to join up with Mullah Naqib. The groups were reconfiguring along more natural lines.

  “Things aren’t clear,” Mullah Naqib told Akrem. “Let’s wait a few days to see what develops.”

  “The next day,” says Mullah Naqib simply, “Gul Agha Shirzai came to the governor’s house.”

  That is, he “entered the city by force.” This was the race up the jouncing road, guns sticking out every window, that young Fayda described to me as we retraced the route. Mahmad Anwar was the first of my friends to confirm the key detail: the U.S. role in Shirzai’s move on Kandahar. “The Americans escorted Shirzai to the governor’s palace,” he remembered. “There were six planes circling in the air.”

  I suddenly heard an echo resonating: the voice of a refugee. At the time, he had described the Americans handing out new rifles to Shirzai after he reached the city. The man had been present; he had claimed an armful of MREs. He had described the guns with precision. “New ones,” he had said. “The stocks were plastic, not wood.”

  When I put the question to Akrem sometime later, he nodded with a curt finality. “When Shirzai entered Kandahar, he entered with the Americans. And no one was fighting the Americans. Mullah Naqib told me, ‘This is not the time for more war. If they push forward, you pull back.’ Everyone felt the Americans were backing Gul Agha.”

  Mullah Naqib confirms: “I told my men not to fight. And the president ordered: ‘Don’t fight against Gul Agha.’ I drove out to his camp to ask him.”

  And so, outgunned, Mullah Naqib surrendered Kandahar to the invaders from the south, as he had to the Taliban seven years before.

  Gul Agha made straight for the governor’s palace in the heart of the city. Built by the founding father of Afghanistan itself, Ahmad Shah Durrani, it stands opposite two shrines to the twin emblems of the nation’s legitimacy: the mausoleum over the grave of the same founding father and the graceful mosque that houses a holy relic of the Prophet Muhammad. The Palace, as it is known, was a very symbolic place for Gul Agha to be.

  Casting about for a headquarters of his own, Mullah Naqib lit on Mullah Omar’s former compound—big, gaudy, partially bombed out, nestled in a pinewood on the edge of town.

  And thus began a tense face-off between the two men. For some forty-eight hours, the situation remained deadlocked. No one could be said to control Kandahar.

  On December 8, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld ruefully told the Washington Post, “The Kandahar situation is a bit like a wild west show.
It’s very untidy.”2 What he neglected to add is how his own troops had helped orchestrate this show by ushering Gul Agha Shirzai onstage.

  CHAPTER 8

  A CHOICE OF ALLIES

  1980—2001

  THERE WAS AN ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE between the two sides confronting each other inside Kandahar—that’s how I saw it, anyway. Gul Agha Shirzai, according to the picture I was getting from every Kandahari I talked to, was a predator—uneducated, irresponsible—who had no legitimacy except force and money. Hamid Karzai, by contrast, represented inspired political leadership for the new Afghanistan. And not just for Afghanistan, I felt. He seemed to be offering his vision to a cynical world—an example for us all: popular participation in a nation’s destiny, individual freedoms, and steps toward healthy economic development. Perhaps he was the answer to the malaise I was feeling. Perhaps he was the spark that could jolt our stalled-out democracies back to life.

  Hamid Karzai had played a rather discreet role in the preceding bloody decades of Afghan history. When, in 1979, the Soviet Union sent its army to prop up a puppet Communist government in Kabul, Karzai joined the Afghan resistance. He threw in his lot with one of the factions least known for religious extremism. The scion of a noble clan, Karzai took his place not in the field, but in the back office, handling contacts with rival factions and international supporters, and marshaling aid to fighters. He was among the early direct contacts Americans established among Afghan resistants.1

  The choice to turn to him again in 2001 was well advised. Karzai’s humble but elegant manner, his ringing exposition of the reasons for overthrowing the Taliban, set forth in daily radio interviews from his redoubt in the mountains north of Kandahar, had in large part swayed the stubborn Pashtuns to embrace the coming change. The vision Karzai expounded of an Afghanistan ruled by its people through traditional participatory structures, reclaiming its position among the commonwealth of nations, inspired his compatriots and made of him the obvious—and only—candidate for the role of a God-sent visionary who might finally end Afghanistan’s twenty-five-year nightmare.