The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  Ya’qub ibn Layth was a local boy, and he spoke Persian. One evening, after a victory at Herat, he is said to have cut short the poet who was singing his praises in Arabic. “Why must I listen to this stuff I can’t understand,” a local historian quotes him saying, more or less.37 His chancellor hastily improvised some lines in Persian, borrowing an Arabic meter to distinguish them from the minstrels’ditties that were all that existed in Persian at the time.

  This man became the court poet. He sang Ya’qub’s exploits in his invented Persian meter, helping spark a literary revolution. It was his work that led the way to the Shahnama and the Book of Garshasp, which celebrated the exploits of those other east-frontier local boys, Jamshid and Garshasp and Rustam.

  CHAPTER 20

  HOW TO FIRE A WARLORD

  WINTER 2002–EARLY SPRING 2003

  THE SWASHBUCKLING, FRONTIER atmosphere of those ancient days never really left Kandahar. It is still present now. There is always a sense of unchecked power, a feeling that violence might strike, and with impunity. The feeling lurks beneath the surface; my usual tack was to vigorously ignore it, and get on with the day-to-day. Sometimes that was not entirely possible.

  One chill morning we were bringing in a blackened metal barrel, belatedly blowing the dust off it and attaching a length of jointed pipe to make it into a woodstove. It would soon be truly cold on our plateau, after the insufferable heat. And not a radiator in sight. I would pile a wool blanket on top of a U.S. Army-issue sleeping bag—goodies handed out to anti-Taliban proxies during the war—and still I slept fully clothed.

  As we were tugging on the pipe, trying to wedge it into the hole cut for the purpose high on one of the walls, and then sealing the joint with a strip of cloth dipped in gypsum, one of Ahmad Wali Karzai’s men arrived with a message asking me to see him. This was rare.

  We still ate Ahmad Wali’s food at Afghans for Civil Society—a priceless donation. We would send someone around to the tiny outdoor kitchen where two or three cooks wielding washtub-sized pots prepared meals for a hundred over wood-fire embers. Our man would line up with the others and bring back the stewed lamb and potatoes and rice in steel bowls—and when we were lucky, some okra.

  In this way we were included in Ahmad Wali’s retinue. I would stop by a few times a week to eat at the house, sitting in the carpeted hall downstairs, or to join the audience upstairs watching Ahmad Wali play pool at night—one of his few releases from the incessant demands of his undefined job. If I had left it a little too long, he would crack one of his dry, deadpan jokes about my absence, hardly looking my way as I walked in. A further sign of belonging.

  But he rarely called for me unless it was something urgent.

  He met me upstairs, by the pool table. “Don’t worry about this,” he reassured me, pointing at one of the stuffed chairs. He sat down opposite. “It’s not what it seems. I think I know what it is.

  “The CIA wants to see you,” Ahmad Wali said. They had, he told me, some information about a threat against my life.

  I later found out the exact terms.

  Someone in provincial government was keeping tabs on a terrorist cell through an informant. The group answered to that radical Soviet-era faction leader Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, Pakistan’s protégé before the Taliban. This cell was preparing an attack, right now. Its target: “a CIA agent masquerading as a journalist” named Sarah. The terrorists disposed of details accurate down to the make and color of my car. Considerately, the informant’s handler had passed this information on to the CIA.

  Ahmad Wali hardly let me digest this before interrupting with his hypotheses. He did not think the threat was real. And the explanation he hastened to add sounded right. He suspected Governor Gul Agha Shirzai’s unscrupulous factotum Khalid Pashtoon, the one with the private prison. Pashtoon had excellent relations with the CIA. Ahmad Wali guessed Pashtoon had provided the “tip” himself, in hopes of scaring me out of the province.

  I agreed with Ahmad Wali. It was pretty transparent, in fact.

  Still, I brought the matter up with Akrem in one of our early meetings. He dismissed the possibility with a toss of his head. The faction leader Gulbuddin Hikmatyar had no presence in Kandahar Province as far as he knew. A few people in Helmand maybe, but nothing active in Kandahar.

  The next morning I drove out to see the CIA at Mullah Omar’s former compound in the pinewoods. The irony apparently lost on them, the American spooks had set themselves up in the headquarters of the vanquished Taliban; so instead of creating a visible contrast with the previous regime, they invited comparison.

  There had been some work to fix the place up after the U.S. bombing, but the wedding-cake mosque was still there, and that clumsy landscape mural on one of the walls. The intelligence agents had failed to inform the Afghans on the gate that I was coming, so it took a while to get in. I had not even been supplied with the name of the person who had summoned me, so it was a hard job persuading the careful Afghans.

  Hostility was palpable as I entered the CIA quarters, weaving my way through a forest of exercise bikes to get there. A heavy-set agent in shorts, sweating on one of them, frowned down at me as I walked past. Two of his colleagues found a small room sufficiently barren of secrets to allow me inside, and alerted me to the threat, in fulfillment of what they informed me was their duty.

  I suggested Ahmad Wali’s analysis. They waved it away, then hastily rectified: “Of course, we can’t rule anything out. But we don’t have any reason to think the governor’s people would do that. No.”

  The CIA agents were not even going to pursue the possibility, out of idle curiosity. Nor did they ever exchange words with me again.

  To my embarrassment, this episode got blown out of proportion. The U.S. State Department representative at the Kandahar airport, a great guy if a bit eccentric with his head tilted back beneath a felt fedora, contacted U.S. troops all the way to Urozgan Province when he could not reach me on the phone—a common enough occurrence in infrastructure-starved Kandahar. Then he called Qayum Karzai’s wife in Baltimore, who called my mother. The absolutely last thing I wanted to happen. It took a day or two to climb back out of that one.

  But I was not frightened. I was closer to angry. I was sure that Ahmad Wali was right. It had to be the governor.

  From the start, I had suspected warlordism was going to be the most serious problem facing the new Afghanistan. Our run-in with Governor Shirzai over the stone to rebuild Akokolacha hamlet had confirmed the premonition. Shirzai had proven to be just what Kandaharis had feared: arbitrary, predatory, brutal, if charismatic. The fact that Afghans for Civil Society had a mandate from Qayum to address matters of policy meant that we would be speaking out about warlordism as a policy issue, both in the United States and in Afghanistan.

  But that sort of discussion was abstract at first, an intellectual debate. As time went on and to my intense surprise, nothing at all was done to curb Shirzai and other governors like him, and I had to witness the Kandaharis—people I knew—suffering yet again at their hands, the issue became a boiling frustration.

  Now, suddenly, it had become personal.

  Shared and rising disbelief at President Karzai’s blindness to the threat these regional warlords represented became staple fare during my frequent chats with Akrem. We just could not understand Karzai’s unwillingness to recognize and confront the problem.

  One evening some weeks after the threat against me, I was sitting in his receiving room. Prayer beads of light-green Khakrez stone looped around his wrist, flipping them idly as he talked, Akrem was reclining against the carpet-laid cushions when he began to muse:

  “President Karzai should be paying more attention down here.”

  I waited.

  “I don’t see why he isn’t collecting the customs directly instead of leaving it to the governor’s people. He should define his officials’ responsibilities more clearly. That would solve a lot of the problems here—if he explained to the governor exactly what his powers
and duties are and what my powers and duties are. And he should send a representative to supervise the work of the provincial administrative departments. The education department, for example. Teachers should be talking about the central government in school, not just ‘Gul Agha, Gul Agha, Gul Agha.’ Really, Mr. Karzai should have more contact. He should be meeting with groups of elders.” Akrem used the slang word whitebeards. “He should be mobilizing them. He should send for them and sit with them in Kabul, listen to what they have to say. And then he should give them some little gift, a turban or something. They will be overjoyed. And they will support him.”

  I smiled. This was the kind of political strategizing that always seemed just a little incongruous juxtaposed with Akrem’s police uniform and his bulky build. Once I asked him: “Do you talk to the president this way?”

  “No,” he shook his head. “With the president I talk like a soldier.”

  I don’t know if this was true. If so, it was unfortunate.

  In any case, and as usual, I agreed. It was over a year now since President Karzai had taken power, swept up to Kabul on an exuberant tide of hope, armed with an unequivocal mandate to fill his government with constructive, educated people, and to root out the predatory strongmen. The Afghan central government, personified by Karzai, was the population’s only defense against the local warlords. It was supposed to contain these cancerous tumors, which the United States had injected back into the Afghan body politic. Kandaharis expected Karzai to act as their champion. They wanted him to provide qanun.

  But instead of protecting the people from the warlords, curbing them, or removing them from office, Karzai seemed to be waltzing with them, an endless number up in Kabul. He was becoming a distant figurehead incapable or unwilling to weigh in on the level that counted for ordinary people.

  Several times that year I had passed word to President Karzai in this vein by way of an odd channel his brothers opened up between us: letters I wrote at their urging, which they handed to the president. I emphasized how important it was for President Karzai to keep in touch with his people, especially his base in the south. He enjoyed a tremendous popular mandate, but few institutions of power. Mixing with the people, leading from their ranks, he could work miracles. But cut off from them, he was just another scrabbling jockey in the Kabul power struggle. In just about these terms, I told him as much.

  After the assassination attempt against him in the summer of 2002, Karzai’s U.S.-furnished security had become draconian. The bodyguards with their lethal accoutrements hardly let him out of the palace. So, if President Karzai could not go to the provinces, why not, as Akrem was suggesting, take the provinces to him?

  Akrem, naturally, had something specific in mind. He had been meeting with some tribal elders himself.

  They were Ghiljais—that branch of the Pashtun ethnic group that had been expelled from Kandahar in 1738 by Nadir Shah and his Abdali mercenaries. Now the Ghiljais were a minority in the province. And because many of them had joined the Taliban—Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar was a Ghiljai—that had served as an excuse to exclude them altogether from the post-Taliban distribution of power.

  I agreed to meet the Ghiljais. They had set up a tribal council with a president—a compact, intelligent man, silver-gray turban neatly tied, white beard trimmed to a tasteful point. He had a couple of deputies: a greasy-haired, ingratiating former Communist import-export merchant, and Mullah Omar’s landlord at the roadside village where he used to lead prayers. Each one strove for exclusive and private access to me. God knows what I thought I was getting into.

  We convened a meeting. At first the elders came off sounding like a disgruntled voting bloc after an electoral defeat. “The good people aren’t getting government jobs,” was their primary complaint.

  Meaning you, right?

  I listened further.

  “The people in power took their positions by force, and by force they placed their friends everywhere.”

  That was sounding different.

  “And reconstruction, it was supposed to be for everyone, but the money’s being stolen.”

  I asked if the gentlemen thought these last two points were connected.

  “Of course they are! That’s the whole problem. The powerful people gave their friends all the seats, like the education department or urban development, and then those officials put the reconstruction money in their pockets. They share it among themselves. And no one else gets any.”

  I remembered the fate of my very first project, a campaign to link U.S. schools with newly opened schools in Kandahar, with American students collecting money and sending letters and pictures to their struggling Afghan counterparts. Some $1,200 dollars that students at my own elementary school had raised with great energy and excitement were pocketed by the principal of their Kandahar sister school, along with $600 of my own, which I unthinkingly left in my purse in his office. With a little investigation afterwards, we discovered that the principal split the money with one of his teachers and the two top education department officials, in a well-oiled routine. This larceny was minor compared to the wholesale theft of food supplies donated by the World Food Program and a Pakistani-based organization called Islamic Relief. None of the guilty education department officials, cronies of Governor Shirzai, was ever disciplined. These discoveries put me off working with Kandahar schools. Though ACS continued to do so, my heart was never again really in the program.

  I broke off these recollections with a volley of queries to the Ghiljais. Their answers coming thick and fast, we reached the subject of warlordism: “The militiamen should be disarmed and put to work.” The elders were emphatic.

  This position, too, echoed what other Kandaharis had been telling me for some time. As a representative sample of views in Kandahar, I found the Ghiljais’ concerns perfectly worthy of attention.

  So I began organizing a trip to the capital for “my” elders—as I had started to call them. While I was at it, I thought, why not get them an appointment with the U.S. ambassador? I began meeting with their council, leading what could be termed advocacy-training sessions.

  They gathered each week in a large rectangular room off a verandah brightened by a row of windows. I remember clouds of flies lighting on the neon-colored hard candies a boy served with tea. It must have been during the first warm days of March.

  The first thing I pushed the elders to do was get to the point. “President Karzai is overwhelmed with petty requests,” I told them. “People who want him to settle their boundary disputes or get their confiscated truck released.” And it is true. To an amazing degree, Karzai’s role as president of Afghanistan remained that of a tribal khan called upon to adjudicate the most trivial of matters.

  “Don’t make it look as though you are going to him for jobs,” I said, though it was the Ghiljais’ not-so-disguised objective. “You are bringing him questions of national policy, and you should phrase it that way.”

  It remained to help the Ghiljais distill what they wanted to say down to the essential. Pashtuns tend to circle their subject.

  I took to leading the sessions I attended, shattering protocol by turning directly to the men around the circle and calling on them like students. In a pause, I looked around at the grizzled heads bent toward me, the elders raising their fingers to speak: Tukhi, with his broad beard and saucer-round eyes; wild-haired Gul Mahmad Kuchawal, hands on his gnarled cane, who claimed to represent the region’s nomads; young Tukhala Khan, who had probably never spoken up in front of his seniors before.

  There it was, another surreal scene: an American female presiding at an Afghan council of elders.

  The points the Ghilzais made were precise, intelligent, and grew more and more daring as our sessions went on. For example, the elders thought it was impossible for the gun-lords to be brought to heel without concerted international intervention; they were too entrenched by now. The international community, read the United States, owed this service to Afghanistan.

 
“The foreigners are the ones who sold guns to these people, who gave them guns, who worked with the gun in Afghanistan. Now they call us warlords. They should help us get rid of these people.”

  I, too, was surprised at the lack of attention in Afghanistan to DDR, as it is called: disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. Somehow, the theory seemed to be, the “free market”—in this poverty-stricken land—would absorb the gunmen if they could just be taught a skill. Like the elders, I thought disarming the warlords was going to take more work than that. I thought a more concerted program would be needed, perhaps converting the former gunmen into a kind of Afghan Civilian Conservation Corps, putting them to work on the roads and other major infrastructure projects. That way they would retain an esprit de corps, discipline, and the uniforms and badges that often give young men a sense of pride and identity. Later, arms long laid down and new skills learned, they could be reintroduced into civilian society.

  The Ghiljais did not spare President Karzai in their assessment of ward-lordism. “Karzai made the topak salaran,” one grizzle-headed man ventured bravely, several sessions in. “Isma’il Khan, Gul Agha Shirzai—didn’t Karzai bring them back?”

  “You should tell him that. Don’t be shy. Be tough on him.”

  I was sure that Karzai was just as impatient as we were to rid Afghanistan of these thugs. But for some reason, he was afraid to do it. Maybe he did not know he had the power. Maybe he just needed some clear evidence of local support. That’s how I reasoned. It never dawned on me that President Karzai might be playing us all. That perhaps, despite his high talk, he no longer had the least intention of crossing the warlords.

  I helped the elders distinguish which of their concerns to address to President Karzai and which to the U.S. ambassador. There is always a latent sense in Afghanistan, despite the country’s fierce independence, that “the foreigners” control everything. So the Ghiljais drew up two petitions for my review, one addressed to Karzai, one to U.S. ambassador Robert Finn.