by Sarah Chayes
“Since the fall of communism,” Akrem answered thoughtfully, “there has been a void of ideas. Islamic fundamentalism is the only competing ideology facing the West now. And competition is useful. The war on terror is real. But maybe the West is loath to win it totally, to totally eradicate extremism.”
Or: “For democracy to work, it has to be implemented by someone who speaks the truth. Now it is implemented by people who say one thing and do another. There has to be a sense of confidence—among villagers, for instance—that they can participate in political decisions. They must feel that what they wish to say about the landlord, about the governor, they can say.” Akrem reached for a metaphor. “If you keep a bird in a cage for twenty years and then open the door and say it’s free, it may be free, but it doesn’t have the courage of flight. There is no one giving the Afghan people that courage.”
The time stretched on and on, idly, and still no answer from the Palace. Once, I asked how his latest meeting with President Karzai had gone. Akrem paused before answering, as he often did.
“There was no meeting,” he broke the silence. “I haven’t seen him. He won’t see me.” He looked up, caught my eyes, allowing me to glimpse his embarrassment. “You’re the only one I’ve told this to. I have to lie to my tribesmen when they call me from Kandahar. It’s too much shame.”
I was beginning to see where this was going, and I was livid. The decision had been made; they were sending him to Mazar. Why did they have to make him twist in the wind?
As for myself, in the wake of the changes in Kandahar, I was thrashing around in a psychological whirlpool, fighting the disillusionment that was pulling me under. On top of the devastating turn Afghan politics had taken and his role in the results Qayum’s smoke-and-mirrors management style was getting the best of me. And he kept trying to nudge our organization, ACS, in directions that seemed distinctly sinister. His latest idea, which he had pitched to me as “opening an office in Washington,” turned out to consist of setting up a service to collect information on the security situation and the ethnic makeup of the army. I was getting ready to resign.
The only thing that might have held me back was a project we had finally hammered out with the National Endowment for Democracy. It was the idea of organizing a council of elders for Kandahar Province: a training laboratory for parliamentary democracy. The way Qayum and I had conceived it, the council would be made up of community leaders from all the districts, nominated by village elders. There would be three committees: security, reconstruction, and government oversight. The original notion had been that the council would be an alternative and a challenge to Governor Shirzai’s autocratic rule.
Since we had first come up with the idea and suggested it to NED, however, things had grown a little trickier. First, Shirzai had gotten a jump on us and set up an official provincial council, presided over by Ahmad Wali Karzai. And now Shirzai had been replaced as governor by Yusuf Pashtun—unassailable because of his impeccable English and his engineering degree from the American University in Beirut. I was not at all convinced, under these new circumstances, that our shura idea would work. Still, NED was ready to finance it, to the tune of $80,000. I thought about Akrem. From the beginning, I had wanted him to run this thing.
“Forget this nonsense, Comandan Saab,” I begged. “Look at what they’re doing to you.”
Poor Comandan Saab, they will break his heart. I remembered the prediction. It had come true. They were breaking his heart.
“Why are you sticking with them? Leave it,” I urged. “Come and run my shura.”
He thought about it. He really considered it. But he kept waiting. I didn’t understand. There was something about his stubborn loyalty that did not add up. Surely Zabit Akrem, of all people, wasn’t naive?
Finally, in late November, Akrem was appointed chief of police of Mazar-i-Sherif. And at last I understood President Karzai’s tactic. After three months’wait in mortified expectation, Mazar, which had been rooted so leadenly at the bottom of all our lists, sounded like paradise.
Akrem left his family in a house near Mullah Naqib’s in Kandahar, and departed for Mazar.
As threatened, and after an exchange of angry missives with Qayum, I resigned from ACS at the end of January 2004 and wrenched myself out of the compound with the cows. I had decided to let go of the fantasy of direct democracy building in favor of grassroots economic action. Paralyzed at the thought of being in Kandahar on my own, I forced myself to go through the motions, accomplish all the material acts required to set up a new place for myself in a residential neighborhood. I quickly found myself reveling in the freedom, in my new proximity to ordinary people.
Still, Kandahar without Akrem—and, oddly, without my sparring partner, Gul Agha—was a bit hollow. I felt cut off from its doings, even though I was closer to its population in my new setup.
I would talk to Akrem on the phone every couple of weeks, feeling the distance. He was dealing with a whole new cast of characters, a different situation entirely.
“So how is it?” I asked him on his first trip back, when I rushed to meet him in a friend’s garden. “What’s Mazar like?”
“Sarah,” he shook his head with a smile. “It’s like here, but ten times more. Here we have the tribes and we have Pakistan. There, it’s not just the tribal Pashtuns, but the Pashtuns and the Uzbeks, and the Tajiks and the Hazaras. Even Turkomen! And instead of Pakistan, there’s Russia and Iran and China—all of them with a hand in.”
And yet Akrem seemed to be swimming, in the sharks’ tank they had dispatched him to. He looked healthy. He was alive again.
One day, I was taking a taxi from Kabul to Kandahar. This was another habit of mine unique among internationals. At last the road was paved, and the six-hour drive wasn’t so bad. And the $15 taxi fare sure beat $100 on the UN flight. I did take some precautions: I’d have a Palace driver escort me to the station and send me with a driver he knew. Or at least I’d have someone note down the license plate number of the taxi I was taking, and I’d try to ride with other women. On this occasion, there were two women, with children, and a husband. I sat in front.
A few hours into the ride, the driver and the male passenger had struck up conversation. I heard the word Mazar, and then Khakrezwal, Akrem’s last name. I tuned in. My Pashtu was finally becoming serviceable.
“There’s this new chief of police,” the passenger was saying. “Things are really different now. Security is good. We don’t have any problems now.”
I butted in: “This Khakrezwal. Who’s he to you?” In Pashtu, the question is not quite as rude as it sounds in English. It is a neutral way of finding out what the tribal or blood relationship is between two people.
“He’s no one to me,” my fellow passenger replied, a little surprised. “We’re just Mazaris, that’s all, going to visit my wife’s family in Kandahar. Mr. Commander Khakrezwal has made things so much better in our town. That’s all I was saying.”
That was pretty good publicity.
It was some weeks later that I got a call from Akrem. The story that was coming across the weak cell phone connection was impossibly garbled. It seemed that he had been besieged—literally besieged, in the military sense—inside his own police headquarters. The local warlord, Ustaz Ata, wanted him out of his hair, and had drummed up a pretext to intimidate him, I found out later. I think Akrem was telling me he couldn’t get men out even to bring in food. Aghast, I called Qayum. “For God’s sake, do something!”
I was pretty upset.
And yet Mazar was a world away for me, a decor with no depth surrounding Akrem when I heard his voice on the telephone, but substantially invisible to me. I never got up there to visit him, and I hardly made the effort to conjure up a picture, to place him in context, during our chats. And so I could not conceive of what he was going through.
“You have no idea,” his young right-hand man told me a year later. “For more than twenty-four hours, looking out our windows at their forces ringed
around, we honestly thought we were going to die any minute.”
I called a friend at the New York Times, asking for the number of another friend, the Washington Post correspondent—and, while I was at it, sketching the story. It was emblematic of what was going on with the Afghan central government, I said. Here was its own man, the central government’s representative in Mazar, besieged by some local strongman. And no one, not President Karzai, nor the interior minister, nor anyone else in Kabul was lifting a finger.
The New York Times article came out two days later.
I was calling Akrem every day. “Do you still not have any food?”
“No, we’re OK, we’ve got food now, thank you. We’ve come to an agreement about provisioning.”
Things seemed to be inching toward normalization. I relaxed a little.
But more than a week later, when I was sure the whole episode was long over, I found out he was still in there, hemmed in by that warlord’s militia. I got in my red truck and stormed over to the old warhorse Mullah Naqib’s compound. It was early morning; he was still drinking his tea.
“Let’s get five hundred Alokozais together, and go up there!” I was only half joking. “The government isn’t doing anything, let’s us go. We have to. We can’t just leave him there!”
Mullah Naqib launched into a patient argument. “Civil war isn’t a good thing. We shouldn’t fight.”
“Let’s call him,” I said, and punched the number into my cell phone. And the two of us jollied Akrem for a little while with my plan to invade Mazar.
He must have repeated the story half a dozen times afterward in my hearing, only embellishing it a little bit. “…and she said, ‘I’ll bring two hundred American soldiers, you bring two hundred Alokozais, and let’s go to Mazar!’”
At length, the population of Mazar-i-Sherif, with some intervention from the U.S. and European military contingents there, ended the siege. Sending delegations to Akrem, and to the foreigners and the government in Kabul, Mazaris conveyed their solid support to Akrem and his men. They said they had confidence in the central government and they had confidence in their police chief; he had pacified the town and they wanted him back.
And thus, as I fully grasped only later, Akrem had performed a miracle. Using his own person as the girders and cables, he had bridged the gap between the two Afghan cities that were the farthest apart, the two cities that hated each other the most bitterly, that had fertilized their vows of eternal enmity with the most gruesomely spilled blood. Akrem had gone to Mazar and done his job. He had patrolled the streets, making them safe for people to travel. He had structured the police department. He had taken no bribes, stolen no land. His Persian improving every day, he had gone to meet community leaders, across all the divides. He had hired Mazaris as bodyguards, enlarging his inner circle to make room for them. Akrem loved Mazar, and Mazar loved him—and loving him, realized: if this man is a Pashtun from Kandahar, perhaps Pashtuns are not so bad after all.
It was a huge step toward turning Afghanistan back into a nation.
But there was a punch line. When it was all over, President Karzai appointed Ustaz Ata, the very warlord who had besieged Akrem, as governor of Mazar’s Balkh Province.
I called Akrem. “So. How’s your new governor?” I asked sarcastically.
He made a noise.
“You know that book I’m writing?” I asked. “You know what I’m going to call it? The Promotion of Vice and the Punishment of Virtue.”
The Taliban religious police, who used to beat women caught outside without a male escort, or men whose beards weren’t long enough, were part of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Punishment of Vice.
“Woh…” Akrem assented with a chuckle, getting the joke immediately. “That’s it exactly. The promotion of vice!”
He could laugh. I wondered where he got the resilience from.
By the middle of 2004, it was becoming clear to me that my parting of the ways had not gone far enough. I realized I was going to have to leave Afghanistan altogether. For a while, anyway. It had been almost three years now—punishing years—and I had to get away for a while. I had to stand back and take stock.
I informed Akrem on the phone, almost as an afterthought, tacked onto another sentence: “Comandan Saab, I’m going for a while. Outside.” The communicative Pashtu word.
“For how long?” He was used to my trips to the States.
“I don’t know…six months maybe.”
“Six months?”
Not long before I left, Akrem was down in Kandahar for a visit. We got together in the private side of his home, for the first and only time. His wife was there: almost as large as he was, intelligent, canny—though kept inside—a true life partner.
“Sarah,” Akrem was looking back on his own punishing year. “You were right. I remember what you said so long ago. You told me I should leave government, that this government wasn’t what I thought it was. I should have listened to you.”
But then he stopped himself and revised. “No…it’s going to be OK, I think. Mr. Karzai will get better. After the presidential election he’ll have legitimacy and he’ll improve. You watch.”
The vote, Afghanistan’s first general election in history, was scheduled for that fall. I could see the confident dream of it in Akrem’s face.
“You have to be kidding me,” I replied, laughing at his stubborn optimism, my exclamation just a little off-key. During our chats, Akrem had always seemed slightly uncomfortable at my irreverent and sometimes caustic criticism of Karzai. He would agree, in private, when I said Karzai was frightened, or weak, or couldn’t tell the difference between his friends and his enemies. He would air his own puzzlement that Karzai seemed incapable of keeping tabs on the people he appointed to office, or of properly defining their job descirptions. But, even now, Akrem seemed to be clinging to his loyalty.
“That’s what we said before the first Loya Jirga,” I argued, “and he didn’t improve. Then we said the second Loya Jirga would do the trick. But it didn’t. What makes you think this will be different?”
“No, you’ll see. This is an election. It will be different.”
“Let’s bet on it. You know your white wool shawl?”
He’d had that shawl draped over his legs one winter day. To Pashtuns, legs—even when swathed in baggy trousers and calf-length tunics—are vaguely indiscreet, and men often spread their shawls over them when they’re sitting down. I took a shine to Akrem’s white wool shawl that day. When I was getting ready to leave, he asked if we could take a picture together.
“Of course,” I answered. But my hair was uncovered. I guessed he might show the picture to people, so I touched my head with an embarrassed grin, and put out a hand for his shawl. He passed it over, and I slung it around me for the picture. I was hoping he would take the hint and give it to me. He didn’t.
“You know that white wool shawl of yours? If Karzai doesn’t improve, you have to give it to me. If he does improve after the election, I’ll give you a pistol. I’ll give you a SIG Sauer. I’ll get it in through the base.”
We shook. We called on his wife to witness the bet.
That shawl is covering my legs now, as I’m writing this.
CHAPTER 29
KABUL
MAY 2005
“OH, ONE MORE thing, Sarah.” I was standing up by the phone in Paris. It was one of my former employees, on the line from Kandahar. “I knew you’d want to hear this news. Khakrezwal has been moved to Kabul.”
“To Kabul? As chief of police?”
“That’s right!”
I called Akrem. “So! You’re in Kabul?” I could hear distraction in his voice; it must have been bedlam. “Comandan Saab,” I released him. “I’m coming in a few weeks. I’ll call you when I get there.”
I wrote Interior Minister Jalali an e-mail—the first in over a year: “Congratulations. You’ve finally seen the light.” With characteristic indulgence, he wrote me back right away,
and told everyone about my “cute note.” I started thinking maybe I was going to have to get Akrem that pistol.
A little more than six months had passed since I’d left Afghanistan. I had spent the bulk of it writing this book in my apartment in Paris, sitting sideways on my red couch, my legs stretched out the length of it; and at my mother’s place in Boston, taking up one of her bookshelves with my Post-it encumbered findings from the library, sharing girlish hilarity with her, and hungered-for companionship, and contemplation of public affairs.
But then I had decided; I was going back. Most of my friends tried to argue me out of it. “You’ve done Afghanistan,” one commented.
That line would never have worked. It seemed to me that Afghanistan was not something one “did,” the way war correspondents in hotel bars had “done” Goma or “done” Iraq. Afghanistan was not a stamp in a passport, not for me. I had always argued the importance of continuity. I had always mourned the precious time that was wasted, the mistakes that were remade, when humanitarian workers or diplomats or military men rotated out after a few months or a year, just when they were beginning to catch on. Afghanistan, I thought, was starving for continuity. If no one else was going to provide it, the least I could do, I felt, was live by my own precept.
But I was not going back to ACS, and I was not going back to politics. I wanted to start something new, something I had been turning over in my mind for several years: making and marketing products that capitalized on Kandahar’s fabled fruits—soap, skin-care products, precious oils. I wanted to found a small-scale, artisanal agribusiness.
Amir Soltani, who had been our U.S. coordinator, immediately caught the symbolism. “Soap for Afghanistan,” he wrote me in an e-mail. “You still think you can clean the place up.”
I was amused, above all, by my conversion to economics. A subject I had refused to take a single course on in college. And now, after three years in Afghanistan, I had become converted to the idea that private enterprise held a key to its recovery. I, pointy-headed Sarah Chayes, was going to start a soap factory.
