“No. We need twenty thousand.”
On September 10, 2002, Governor Gul Agha Sherzai ordered the Kandahar municipality to transfer twenty thousand jeribs of government land to Mahmood Karzai. The terms of the transfer stipulated a price of $6 million, or $600 per acre, that Mahmood would pay in the future as he sold the houses and shops he planned to build. The governor took the project to Kabul and presented it to the cabinet, which gave its approval, and Hamid Karzai, as chairman of the interim authority, issued a decree authorizing the governor to transfer the land from the Ministry of Defense ownership to the city. The fact that Mahmood had to put nothing down for this sought-after land pleased his business partners, who considered the transfer almost a gift for the president’s family. “It was an extremely good price,” Nadi said.
In a letter to Kandahar’s municipal court three months later, Governor Sherzai explained why he had granted Mahmood the land: “As you are aware that our country was devastated in the past quarter century of occupation and internal strife. Today, however, our countrymen and humanitarian world community have intended to rebuild Afghanistan. They are very eager to see it prosper again. The fact that the number of our countrymen is increasing day by day, and immigrant families return home, it is incumbent on us to expand residential area and housing facilities for them.”
The plan Mahmood and his partners submitted to OPIC in early 2003 gleamed with ambition. On the ten thousand acres, their model city had the potential, they claimed, to contain ten thousand to twenty thousand homes, plus public amenities such as parks, hospitals, and mosques and a type of modern infrastructure unknown in Kandahar. They projected that sixty thousand people could live inside, and that the gated community would eventually be worth $150 million. The entire build-out of what they were calling Kandahar Valley would take a decade, by which time, they expected, American troops would be long gone.
Nobody involved had attempted anything of this size. To convince OPIC of their qualifications, they printed glossy brochures touting the business prowess of their team. Mahmood’s bio highlighted his ownership of the Helmand restaurant in Cambridge and his role as “chief strategist” of his brother’s Baltimore restaurant, which he described as one of the country’s top 100 eateries. “Karzai has exceptional talent in budget and project management,” the brochure assured readers.
At the time, several partners, both Afghans and Americans, believed that Mahmood’s motives were driven more by patriotism than by greed. He did not seem to be trading on his name as the new Afghan leader’s brother, or demanding VIP treatment.
“I traveled with him several times to Afghanistan,” Nadi recalled. “He always traveled economy, and when we got to the airport, although he could go through diplomatic channels, he never did. At the beginning, he refused to do that and stood in line next to me like any normal passenger. That’s what attracted me to him. He never used or abused his position.”
Mahmood was always pushing the team to go faster. An e-mail from him arrived in John Howell’s in-box at 3:33 a.m. on February 4, 2003. “First,” he wrote, “I like to congratulate everyone involved in Afco.” The governor’s letter selling him the land had been signed by the Ministry of Justice, and the deed would be transferred to AFCO that very day. There would be a scramble for government contracts soon, Mahmood wrote, and they had to hurry: “this I am sure of that time is not on our side.”
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In the OPIC offices in Washington, Mahmood’s project looked appealing. Those assessing the loan application assumed that many of the millions of Afghan refugees would be returning home, and the housing stock was low. The project would put impoverished Afghans to work, bring modern amenities to a backward place, and generate goodwill for the Bush administration.
“Mahmood Karzai was their golden boy at the time,” recalled Virginia Sheffield, an American business consultant who helped Mahmood negotiate with OPIC.
His biggest asset was his last name. The Bush administration was willing to do almost anything to help him succeed.
“We knew he was from a very prominent family,” recalled an OPIC lawyer on the project. “We undertake a pretty thorough character-risk due diligence. There was no negative information about Mahmood Karzai.”
When OPIC gave initial credit approval for a loan to AFCO, the sterling reputation of Mahmood and his partners was an important factor in its decision: “Four of the five sponsors of this project are successful Afghan-American businessmen, and two of the four are brothers of Afghanistan’s current President,” an internal OPIC memo said of the concept, albeit misstating the last fact, as Hashim Karzai was a first cousin of Hamid Karzai’s.
Over the next few months, however, officials at the agency started to realize that the arrangements in Kandahar were not exactly as they had been led to believe. While the land documentation mentioned that some people were living on it illegally, the OPIC officials reviewing the loan application had assumed this meant squatting nomads or temporary refugee camps that could be relocated easily. Within weeks of the initial approval, OPIC learned from Karzai’s team that the squatters included a “warlord” living in a compound guarded by his entourage of gunmen. Another problem was that Karzai’s team didn’t have enough money. By OPIC’s standards, loan recipients should contribute a down payment of 25 percent. In this case, that would have been $750,000 on a $3 million loan. But Mahmood and his partners had only cobbled together $100,000. To make up the difference, OPIC had initially wanted to count construction equipment that Hamid Helmandi owned—graders, loaders, tractors, dump trucks—as $615,000 worth of equity for the project, but Helmandi refused to sign over the equipment to AFCO because he wanted it available for other construction projects in Kandahar. Eager to find some way to push the project through, OPIC decided to value the land at $615,000, “in order to maintain the original leverage,” as Dan Horrigan, the project lawyer, and Deborah Smith, an investment officer, wrote in an internal memo to one of their superiors.
“We have no data upon which to base this valuation,” they admitted. “The right to build on the land could be worth much more than that, or it could be worth nothing.” It was simply a way “to get the project off the ground,” and it would be a “significant exception” to the agency’s normal credit standards.
The invented valuation was made worse by the fact that it was becoming less clear who actually owned the land. Governor Sherzai’s order did not amount to a “deed,” as Mahmood claimed, because it did not convey ownership immediately but, rather, granted the right to Karzai and his partners to build in the desert. OPIC learned after the initial approval that these rights could be rescinded if the builders did not make enough progress on the project. “The land arrangements, upon which the whole project depends,” Smith and Horrigan wrote, “are not as solid as in normal circumstances.”
Despite the credit risk, the unmet loan criteria, and the questionable land ownership, the agency decided that the project had “strong developmental and foreign policy benefits,” in a country where OPIC was clamoring to do business. President Bush, in a 2002 letter to President Karzai, wrote that he agreed with Karzai’s “economic focus to use aid as a magnet to attract trade and private investment,” and he touted how OPIC had made $50 million available to finance U.S. private investment in Afghanistan. Now that money had to be spent. And so on September 12, 2003, the Bush administration agreed to give $3 million to Mahmood Karzai to build a gated city in Kandahar.
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Just as American officials had intervened to help Hamid Karzai reach the palace, they had ignored their normal procedures to help Mahmood realize his outlandish dream. Eight years later, when I stood with him in the second-story office of Aino Mena’s headquarters, behind the barricades and blast walls and police guard booths, I could not deny that there was much he had accomplished. But in front of the room-sized diorama, he seemed gripped by anxiety about all he still needed to do—all the parks and lakes, restaurants and mosques, schools and clinics to be bui
lt. He had plans for a new six-megawatt coal-fired power plant. He was going to build the biggest mosque in Kandahar. He wanted thirty-story apartment buildings.
This should have been a moment for him to relish. His city was being made. But he felt harassed and misunderstood. His business practices that had helped realize Aino Mena and his other companies were being called into question. The U.S. government, which had once helped and defended him, was now leafing through his bank records and listening to his telephone calls. Agents had subpoenaed his daughter’s Georgetown University tuition records and were reviewing his tax payments. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan were building a case against him. The U.S. military had blacklisted his company. Hamid Karzai was furious with him. His brother Shah Wali wanted to take Aino Mena from him. His business partners didn’t trust him. He had become the living symbol of the corruption that was eroding faith in the government and encouraging citizens to join the Taliban. Normally gregarious and funny and outspoken, he had become bitter and conspiratorial.
“There is a vast power in the U.S.,” he said. “They can literally destroy a person.”
5
BECAUSE WE SEE MORE, WE DO MORE
BEFORE DAWN ON THE MORNING of his daughter’s wedding, Mohammed Zia Salehi stared down into the darkened parking lot from the window of his modest third-floor apartment in a boxy, Soviet-built complex known as Microrayon. Still groggy from sleep, he could make out what looked like police trucks and gunmen in balaclavas and black body armor. Voices echoed in the concrete stairwell. Someone was banging on his door. Salehi knew that the Taliban often masqueraded as police when they attacked. His mind, he recalled later, was a frazzle of panic, but he was sure this was a kidnapping. He picked up his cell phone and began calling everyone he knew.
After three decades in the Afghan government, Salehi knew almost everyone. He was a consummate insider and political survivor: discreet and loyal, but canny at reading the winds and helping the powerful. He had worked in Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed intelligence agency and Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the Communist era, and had served as a low-level diplomat in India. He’d been the personal translator for the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. He had gone on hundreds of official government trips and had even met President George H. W. Bush. In Hamid Karzai’s government, he ran the palace Situation Room, where he worked on sensitive issues, including the transfer of Afghan detainees from the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay to holding cells at Bagram Airfield; later he was director of the administrative affairs department of the National Security Council. Inside the palace, his benefactor was a man named Ibrahim Spinzada, a top aide to Karzai whom Salehi helped handle the dark arts of governing Afghan-style: covert operations, liaisons with CIA officers, payouts, deal making—all the patronage dispensing that was so central to how power was exercised in Afghanistan and that the American countercorruption officers found so repellant.
In some respects, Salehi was not an important government official, such as a cabinet minister, or someone whose name appeared in the papers. He was a functionary, but one who tiptoed through politically delicate ground. As administrative affairs director, Salehi handled the money. “He’s the bag man,” one of his colleagues told me. He paid salaries, bought government vehicles, gave out money for cabinet ministers’ rent, and dispensed rewards to pro-government allies from the palace slush fund, much of it provided by the CIA. Palace staffers estimated these secret funds totaled roughly $10 million per year. A separate palace slush fund, referred to as Code 91, was filled with a similar amount each year and could be dispensed at Karzai’s whim. One of Ibrahim’s assistants told me that the palace paid more than seventy people—cabinet ministers, warlords, tribal elders, Islamic clerics—up to $7,000 a month to be “advisers” and to ensure their loyalty. The CIA had been paying him as an informant for years, I had been told by American officials, a common arrangement for palace staff. When I asked Salehi about that, he said, “We have a very good relationship with the CIA. This is part of the job.” But he played down the covert nature of his work.
“I just buy the palace toilet paper,” he said.
Salehi was not the type of guy who would do well in Taliban captivity. Nothing about him was tough. Chubby and boisterous, with a happy laugh, he enjoyed whatever small pleasures a Kabul lifestyle could afford. He didn’t take his work too seriously. He referred to his boss, National Security Advisor Rangin Dadfar Spanta, as “Comrade Spanta” because of his old Marxist sympathies. He liked to make sex jokes with the head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency. He was a proud hedonist who enjoyed the company of women, openly drank whiskey, and struggled to quit smoking. “A little bit of enjoyment never hurt anyone,” he told me one night, raising his glass. Life was too short, in his opinion, for the ridiculous dictates of Taliban law.
Pressed up to his apartment window that dark summer morning, Salehi didn’t know who was coming for him, but he knew whom to call. In a matter of minutes, he talked to the national security adviser, the attorney general, and the country’s spymaster, National Directorate of Security director Rahmatullah Nabil, whom he woke up by saying, “I’m being kidnapped.” Within minutes, Nabil dispatched a quick reaction force to Salehi’s apartment, a few blocks from the U.S. embassy. The spies drove into the parking lot, and Salehi could hear shouting as they confronted the other group of gunmen.
“They were about to clash,” he said.
The masked gunmen were not kidnappers, it turned out, but Afghan police officers with the Major Crimes Task Force, an FBI-mentored police unit under the command of a slight, grandfatherly general named Nazar Mohammad Nikzad. The general hadn’t known very much about that morning’s target. He had been given the arrest warrant, signed by the attorney general and a judge with the anti-corruption tribunal, and he’d dispatched one of his trusted subordinates, a colonel, along with ten of his men in three police trucks, to execute the arrest. In the parking lot, the colonel showed the arrest warrant, and the intelligence agency response team stepped aside. “I came out,” Salehi recalled. “I didn’t want to cause problems.” The morning ended without gunfire, and Salehi was driven to the American-built counternarcotics detention center behind the Kabul airport.
The man responsible for Salehi’s arrest was a singularly determined DEA officer named Kirk Meyer. It was Meyer’s investigation, conducted with the blessing of the U.S. embassy, that resulted in a team of Afghan policemen speeding through the empty streets of Kabul that morning, July 25, 2010, to arrest a man as close to the center of President Karzai’s palace as it was possible to get without aiming for the president himself.
—
The resurgence of the Taliban, and the inability of the U.S. or Afghan troops to decisively defeat them, provoked a roiling undercurrent of soul-searching among the leadership of the American war effort. Why were we losing? By the time President Obama’s “surge” forces had arrived, and more than 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops were fighting and sometimes dying on behalf of the Afghan government, finding an answer to this question became more urgent. When Obama announced his troop buildup, he also established its duration. Within eighteen months, the soldiers would be coming home. The American commanders and diplomats had one last chance to win.
Everyone had a theory about what was going wrong. It was because of the sanctuaries across the border that kept Taliban leaders safe. Or because Afghans didn’t respect their puppet president. Or because they were culturally ingrained to drive foreign invaders from their soil, as they had done for millennia. Or because Pakistani intelligence officers were funding and arming the insurgents to fight a proxy war to keep the Afghan government weak while allowing Islamic terrorists to flourish and therefore attract for Pakistan billions more in American foreign aid to confront the very problem they were creating.
During the first half of 2010, another explanation became ascendant. The war was being lost, the argument went, because regular Afghans were angry. They were angry about cabinet ministers who b
ought their confirmation votes from corrupt parliamentarians; about the fact that Afghan police demanded bribes at highway checkpoints; that judges and lawyers required payoffs at every turn; that just to acquire the right to pay your taxes you had to grease someone’s palm. During this phase of the war, a growing number of senior American officials believed that Afghan farm boys were picking up their AK-47s and joining the insurgency because they were angry about corruption. “Afghan government corruption was manufacturing Taliban,” Sarah Chayes, a former radio reporter who became a U.S. military adviser and leading advocate for this position, wrote in her book Thieves of State. “I was sure that unless they recognized the danger it presented and addressed it head on, they would never win the war.”
The U.S. embassy in 2010 had a budget of $4 billion. Ambassador Eikenberry told Karzai’s foreign minister—in a plea for Karzai to show some public gratitude—that it would be the largest foreign assistance budget for any one country in American history. Since 2008, the embassy had quadrupled in size to more than one thousand staffers, making it the largest embassy in the world. The diplomats filled up the embassy apartments and spilled over into a trailer city that looked like a shipping container depot. There was more of everybody: State Department political officers, Treasury Department economists, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants, USDA farming and livestock experts, wiretapping specialists, logisticians, cooks, cleaners, mechanics. Once fixing the problem of Afghan corruption became central to the American strategy, this cause generated its own unstoppable momentum. “There were more justice lawyers on the ground than anywhere in the world,” Ambassador Eikenberry told me. “More DEA agents. More U.S. marshals. And consistent with my guidance—we’ve got two years here, and we’re going to go as fast as we can. With so many more people, we start to see a lot more, we get better awareness of what’s going on. And because we can see much more, and potentially do much more, we do.”
A Kingdom of Their Own Page 11
