A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  Qayum had come to the Devil’s Fork after working part-time as a busboy at a golf course restaurant in Olney, Maryland. That job was enough to pay for the studio apartment he rented a block from Dupont Circle for $82 a month, including utilities, which he shared with two other Afghan men. But the manager would only hire him for a couple of days a week, and he wanted something full-time. He found that at the Devil’s Fork. Qayum started as a busboy, learned to cook in the kitchen, and later became a waiter.

  As a newly arrived Afghan from a conservative Muslim society, he sometimes felt out of place. He was scandalized when one of the owners, a retired colonel, would saunter in with his pals for lunch, flaunting various girlfriends. “They were a bunch of womanizers, my goodness,” he said. And when Qayum once stood up for a fellow staff member who was getting berated, he got mocked for it: “Oh, you speak English,” the owner said, clapping like a child. But Qayum generally didn’t mind the work. The tips were good, and they paid for his classes at Montgomery College, a community college in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he studied biology and took classes in American government and economics.

  By the time Mahmood arrived in America, on a tourist visa, Qayum and Patricia were living in Wheaton, Maryland, a suburb north of the Beltway, and Mahmood moved in with them. He had a blustery self-confidence and little interest in waiting tables. He felt that handing people their Jell-O molds was beneath him. “It was difficult, for this prestigious family, to be waiting on other people,” Patricia Karzai recalled. But Mahmood needed cash. He had enrolled in summer school classes at Montgomery College. He had also promised one of his friends in Afghanistan that he would send money. He was not intimidated by hard work. He decided to become a logger.

  Mahmood had seen an advertisement for a timber company in southern Maryland, about an hour south of Washington, on the rural peninsula of rolling tobacco fields and Amish farms between the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay. He bought a chain saw and set out to make his fortune. Each day, he left the apartment by sunrise and returned long after dark. “He would come back bruised up, really messed up, tired,” Qayum said.

  “The first couple days, he came back and said, ‘I’ve only cut down fifteen trees. I’m not making any money at this. I need a bigger saw,’ ” Patricia Karzai said. “He’s always been very ambitious. Always.”

  The tree-cutting foray turned out to be a short-lived failure, but Mahmood was enjoying America. He and his brother played volleyball and soccer, shot pool, and hung out in a large park near their apartment. He had his favorite pizza joint, where he marveled at how you would take a number and it would show up on a screen when your order was ready.

  “I thought the U.S. was absolutely amazing: eating pizza, going to college—everything was beautiful,” he said.

  Mahmood eventually took a busboy job at the Devil’s Fork with Qayum; he also worked at a restaurant in a Sheraton hotel in Silver Spring. He worked two shifts a day, while also taking community college classes. He began by six a.m. and did not get home until after midnight. “He was an extraordinarily hardworking person,” Qayum said of his brother.

  “I felt like I was made from steel,” Mahmood recalled.

  He earned enough money to buy a bright red Chevrolet Camaro two years after he arrived, financing the purchase price of $5,900 with payments of $180 a month. He sent money back to Wazhma in Afghanistan; she joined him in the States the following year, when the Soviets invaded. Mahmood’s ambitions were difficult to contain. While Qayum continued to work for years as a waiter, then a restaurant manager at the Bethesda Marriott, Mahmood yearned to become his own boss.

  In 1981, the year his first daughter was born, while he was living with Wazhma in a three-story brick apartment building on South Buchanan Street in Arlington, Virginia, Mahmood decided to buy his own restaurant. He had saved about $30,000, and he wanted to invest. He settled on Cagney’s Restaurant, a D.C. lunch spot that doubled as a trendy New Wave nightclub (David Bowie stopped by one night during his Glass Spider Tour), nestled amid boutiques and bookstores on Dupont Circle. The deal ultimately fell through when the owners backed out. Mahmood tried to recoup his $17,000 deposit in court, but the sellers had filed for bankruptcy, and Mahmood never saw his money.

  —

  On January 14, 2002, less than a month after Hamid Karzai was sworn in at the palace, Mahmood registered a new company, AFCO International, LLC, with the state of Virginia. In the two decades since his failed restaurant venture, he had recovered nicely. In partnership with Qayum, he had opened a successful Afghan restaurant, the Helmand, near Wrigley Field in Chicago, then branched out on his own with two more Afghan restaurants, in San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose total gross sales in 2001 exceeded $2.5 million. Mahmood would go on to open two Mexican restaurants, the Viva Burrito, in Boston, and the Tampico Mexican Grill, in Baltimore, while dabbling in real estate in Oakland and owning buildings and parking lots in Baltimore. He had two daughters, and he lived in a spacious house on Shady Lane in Glenwood, Maryland. Mahmood had separated himself from Afghanistan more than almost any of his siblings—Hamid had stayed in politics while in exile in Pakistan, and Qayum was active in diaspora circles in Washington—but for all of the family members, the lure of the country of their youth remained strong. With Hamid installed in the palace, and the U.S. government eager to pay for rebuilding Afghanistan, Mahmood saw an opportunity to expand his business ambitions on an entirely different scale.

  For many Afghans living in exile, September 11 presented a fork in the road, a chance to return to the homes they’d fled because of war or oppression or lack of opportunity, to use the skills they had developed in the West to help rebuild their broken country. They saw a way to make money, but just as real was the rekindled patriotism, an eruption of nationalism that had lain dormant through years of foreign invasions and civil war. Mahmood was full of enthusiasm for new ventures. He would talk at length about the virtues of an unfettered free market economy, the theories of Adam Smith, the rebuilding of postwar Japan. Dubai and Singapore and the boomtowns of Asia and the Middle East were his rivals and role models. If Afghanistan could be pulled into the modern world, Mahmood believed, businessmen, not soldiers, would get them there. What his country needed, more than reconciliation with the Taliban or ethnic unity, were jobs, industry, wealth.

  Within the first year of the war, Mahmood had helped establish the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce and become its first chairman. His enthusiasm for private enterprise and rebuilding his native country won him new friends among business-minded Republicans in Washington. At the first large Kabul gathering of the chamber, a fellow Afghan-American businessman, Abdullah Nadi, gave a heartfelt endorsement of his friend, telling the crowd that Mahmood was a man whose heart and mind were devoted to all Afghan people, regardless of ethnic group or social status.

  “I believed in him,” Nadi told me.

  Abdullah Nadi’s life had run parallel to the Karzais’. He had immigrated to the United States in 1973, three years before Mahmood, and in early 2001 was living at the end of a cul-de-sac on a wooded lane in Alexandria, Virginia. Nadi was an imposing man, with a bald head and stern bearing. As a young man, he had been a standout volleyball player at Kabul Polytechnic University, where he’d studied civil engineering. In the States, he had worked as an engineer for the Virginia Department of Transportation, reviewing plans for its compliance with zoning ordinances and traffic laws. He had developed a small shopping center in suburban Virginia and owned a string of Jerry’s Subs and Pizza franchises in the suburbs. Nadi had talked with Mahmood about the prospect of opening a wedding hall like those popular in Kabul. He helped Mahmood review potential sites for the project, but their plans ended abruptly one sunny Tuesday morning. “September eleventh happened,” Nadi said. “And that changed everything.”

  Almost immediately, Mahmood began outlining his plan for modernizing the city of his birth. Kandahar was a rough crossroads town in the desert of southern Afghanist
an. It was all dirty peasants, opium traffickers, danger. It was where the Taliban movement was born, and it had been a place for smugglers and invaders and tribal war since before Alexander the Great. There was suffocating heat, sporadic electricity. Vendors sold marble headstones on the sidewalks next to the fruit stands.

  Mahmood’s Kandahar would be different. It would have clean water, a sewage system, electricity, paved roads, streetlights, cul-de-sacs—a lifestyle he had discovered in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Washington. Mahmood was by then an American citizen, and he wanted to bring Afghanistan up to American standards. He envisioned a place of solar-powered homes, with air-conditioning and indoor plumbing; trash trucks that ran on schedule twice a week; a neighborhood with zoning and building codes, with homes for the poor and the middle class, as well as the rich, with environmental standards and tasteful architecture, unlike the garish Pakistani-style layer-cake homes in vogue among the Kabul wealthy—a place where Afghans could for once feel civilized. He would tell his relatives that he wanted to build a place like Columbia, the neatly ordered suburban subdivision in Maryland that had been designed in the 1960s as a racial utopia, where his sister, Fawzia, lived.

  Through contacts in Washington, Mahmood soon assembled a team of Afghans and Americans undaunted by the prospects of doing construction work in a war zone. Mahmood wanted to include Americans to give the project more credibility and help secure U.S. financing. One of them was Terrance C. Ryan, a West Point graduate with a PhD; a twenty-year veteran of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, he had helped build a military academy in the Saudi Arabian desert. Ryan had started the Civil Engineering Institute at George Mason University, then run it for a decade, and had also opened his own firm to help train others, the Engineering and Surveyors Institute, which was based in a low-slung office park in Chantilly, Virginia. Ryan’s office was cluttered with rolled-up schematics, stacks of bar charts, enough computer screens and rolling chairs for a small tech start-up, and one plastic mounted bass. He had a white beard and the friendly, direct manner of a former soldier.

  “My early impressions were these guys, this bunch of Afghans, were motivated by an altruistic, idealistic notion of jump-starting their country and bringing it back to the cosmopolitan place it used to be decades ago,” Ryan told me when I visited his office. “It was intended to be a modern city. Not quite Dubai, but something that would take them into the next century. The plan was large. Huge.”

  John Howell, one of Ryan’s former West Point classmates and a colleague of his from George Mason, also joined Mahmood’s team. Lawrence Doll, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam veteran who owned Doll Homes, which built subdivisions across the Washington suburbs, signed on as an investor. The other AFCO partners were Afghan-Americans: Hamid Helmandi, who ran a construction firm in Los Angeles, and Hashim Karzai, one of Mahmood’s cousins, who owned a small telecom company and had lived in the Washington region for years. Mahmood deemed himself chairman of the board, while Abdullah Nadi was president and chief executive. Each of the five paying partners would own 20 percent of the company.

  Mahmood and his partners had plenty of ambition but not very much cash. They estimated they would need $10 million to get it off the ground. They started to shop their idea around Washington, taking meetings at the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Their idea received the warmest welcome at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. OPIC was the U.S. government’s development finance corporation; its mission was to fund projects abroad to help spur growth in foreign countries while furthering American foreign policy goals. At the time, OPIC had projects in more than 140 countries and a financing portfolio of about $3.7 billion, funding telecom, oil and gas, mining, and manufacturing projects from Argentina to Madagascar.

  Mahmood already had a plot of land in mind for his new city: thousands of acres of desert on the east side of Kandahar. It sat along the ring road and was within a few miles of the airport. Kandahar appealed to Mahmood because it was his hometown, and also because he could conduct this grand experiment with fewer red-tape entanglements than in the capital. “Further away from the central government, the better,” Mahmood told me. “Less bureaucracy.” Plus, Mahmood’s family connections and the strength of his Popalzai tribe in Kandahar would protect him against rivals. The Karzais had just banished the Taliban; there was goodwill in abundance. There was enough land there, he calculated, for thousands of houses and more than a million people. It would be the largest residential development in the country—a gated community he hoped would someday contain more people than the city that surrounded it.

  A few months after they registered AFCO as a company, Mahmood and some of the partners flew to Afghanistan to survey the site. Since no commercial airlines traveled to Kandahar in those days, the group flew on a United Nations humanitarian flight to the Kandahar Airfield, then occupied by the U.S. Marines and Special Forces hunting for Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. The white passenger plane touched down on the base tarmac next to jets and helicopters and the brown tents where the troops slept side by side on cloth cots. Ryan felt like he was back in Vietnam. Driving out to the site was hardly more encouraging.

  “It was god-awful,” said Michael Ogden, a civil engineer who specialized in wastewater treatment. Ogden had worked in the developing world—Mexico, Costa Rica, China, Panama—but looking at the sand-blown plain, he found it hard to imagine a worse place to build a new city. “There was no development potential at all. It was barren desert. No roads, no water, no power, none of the basics. There was absolutely nothing there.”

  Over the course of three days, the group crisscrossed the terrain on dirt tracks and open desert, traveling in SUVs with an Afghan security detail Mahmood had assembled and navigating by GPS. During their drives, they stumbled upon old military equipment—tanks, trucks, artillery pieces. Ryan thought the area could have been a military range or camp. This was to be the site of Aino Mena. Mahmood gave them the impression that the land could be theirs with a bit of finesse: “Potentially claimable by the family based on some hereditary rights” was how Ogden remembered it. “Of course, if your brother was the president, you’d have a better chance.” To others, it was even murkier: “I never did understand the ownership,” Ryan said.

  What the Americans didn’t realize at the time, and Mahmood and his partners didn’t bother to spell out, was that the land was owned by Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense. The area was known as Kishla-e-Jadeed, or New Garrison, a tract of desert that stretched north to the foothills of the Kotal-e Murcha mountains. This fact was well known to the Afghans involved in the project.

  “It was a military site,” recalled Hamid Helmandi, who oversaw the building in the early years. “This place was just mines and all kinds of things. It was a war zone.”

  But for Kandahar, this was prime real estate. Despite the arid appearance, there was groundwater below the surface. Wide canals, which ran from the Dahla Dam, built by the American engineering firm Morrison Knudsen in the 1950s, crossed the property. Ogden found the type of native plants that would flourish in the wetland water-treatment system he envisioned. The team began work on a topographic survey. They gathered soil and water samples.

  Real estate in Kandahar bore little resemblance to the American system. Afghanistan did not have mortgages. New homes for the wealthy in Kandahar were selling for $50,000 or less. It was customary to pay the total agreed-upon price before construction began. The typical home is known as a qala—what American troops called a “compound.” There is a house, often made of earth, and an interior yard enclosed by a tall mud wall. Wealthier Afghans have gardens and multiple buildings inside their qala, with separate houses in which to entertain guests so that women can be kept out of sight. Mahmood wanted an American design, but some local flavor was included. In Islamic countries, for example, bathrooms should not be oriented to face Mecca, and women’s bathrooms would be separate from the men’s. They also wanted the neighborhood’s main boulevard, a four-lane divided high
way with a thirty-foot median in the middle, to face toward the Muslim holy site. The partners assumed people would flock to Aino Mena. They wrote in their business plan that “once on site mobilization occurs, a large demand will appear.”

  The partners had little trouble convincing the new governor of Kandahar, Gul Agha Sherzai, to back the project. Sherzai was a beast of a man—American soldiers called him Jabba the Hut because of his big blubbery lips and hands like catcher’s mitts. During the initial battle against the Taliban, as Hamid Karzai had moved on Kandahar from the north, Sherzai led his militiamen into the city from the south, along with a group of American Marines. Without coordinating with Karzai, Sherzai seized the Kandahar Airfield and would not let go. Sherzai and his Barakzai tribesmen used that early advantage and relationship with American troops to corner the market on American dollars flowing in to expand, supply, and defend Kandahar Airfield—the greatest source of wealth available in southern Afghanistan outside of the opium trade. Sherzai had installed himself in the governor’s mansion, where he took in sacks of American cash and disbursed it to his supplicants in envelopes.

  The power was out in the governor’s mansion the night Mahmood presented his plan to Sherzai, so the meeting was illuminated by flashlights, Nadi recalled. They taped the plans to a wall and described their idea. Sherzai, enthusiastic about the plan, asked them how much land they wanted. Nadi suggested ten thousand jeribs (equivalent to five thousand acres). Mahmood, always thinking bigger, said: