A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  Salehi would later insist that the conversations had been misinterpreted. He said he was the one buying the car for a pro-government mullah, one of the regular palace payoffs he made to fortify the support for Karzai. “And I even bought the cheapest model,” Salehi claimed.

  The tapes recorded Salehi talking about more than just car prices. In conversations with a prominent Afghan female parliament member, Salehi also made comments that were, according to a person who heard the tapes, “very sexually explicit, even by American standards.” In one, Salehi asked the lawmaker, at the time traveling in India, to return for a dalliance, saying he’d pay for the ticket. These recordings were so shocking to the Afghan wiretapping monitors that some didn’t want to translate them.

  After thousands of man-hours investigating the minister of religious affairs, only to have the Afghan government let him slip out of the country, Meyer did not want to make the same mistake again. From what he had learned about Salehi, Meyer believed he was involved in several layers of shady and possibly criminal dealings. He thought Salehi helped pad the palace slush fund by selling the release of Taliban prisoners, and that he was smuggling gems to India. But Meyer didn’t need another labyrinthine investigation; he needed a conviction, an open-and-shut case. The car provided one.

  “This was the simplest thing that we could identify with the Afghan police, for them to pursue,” Meyer said. “It was a very simple crime. Easily understood by anybody. And that was the reason the focus was on the car.”

  Ambassador Eikenberry recognized that the case was veering into dangerous terrain. He made sure that Salehi’s boss, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, the national security adviser, was aware that an arrest was coming. Spanta wanted to hear the evidence for himself. Eikenberry invited him to his embassy residence, an elegant rooftop apartment with an expansive outdoor patio. Eikenberry and his wife, Ching, regularly held dinners and receptions in their home, and they used it as a more private meeting space for Afghan officials and visiting dignitaries. On occasion, journalists would be invited to the residence for interviews or for gatherings that were supposed to remind people of home but could be somewhat awkward—like the time they hosted an evening of Halloween pumpkin carving, complete with a PowerPoint presentation on how to properly handle a knife. Spanta normally preferred not to visit Eikenberry in his home. He already had enough trouble at the palace with Karzai assuming that he was one of the pro-American ministers. But the case was sensitive enough that he made an exception. Spanta sat with Eikenberry in a small side living room while he listened to the recordings.

  When they’d finished, Spanta stood up, agitated, and paced the room.

  “Our system is more rotten than I thought, Karl. It’s horrible,” Spanta said. He hung his head, and tears welled in his eyes. “It’s terrible.”

  “Now do you see the point about Salehi?” Eikenberry asked.

  On the scale of Afghan bad behavior, a $10,000 bribe and marital infidelity, even if true, hardly merited a second look. Passing cash in and out of the palace was a tradition as old as the war. Karzai’s chief of staff, Umer Daudzai, kept a money-counting machine on top of a safe in his office. (When asked about it by an American diplomat, Daudzai replied calmly that “part of my responsibility is to distribute resources to our friends.”) But American officials were convinced that government corruption lay at the heart of their problems in Afghanistan. And Meyer had found a way to do something about it.

  “It was about as clear a case of what we would call honest services fraud in the U.S. as you could imagine,” an American official involved told me later. “A quid pro quo.”

  —

  In the palace, President Karzai exploded when he learned of Salehi’s arrest. After the election, explosions were becoming his default reaction. Everything the Americans did tended to set him off. But the New Ansari operation took his fury to a new level. The manner of Salehi’s capture, with masked gunmen in the early morning darkness, reminded Karzai of the Soviet jackboots of an earlier era. Until that point, Karzai had not followed the work of the American-mentored police units very closely. But he felt the Americans had crossed a dangerous line, opening a new front in their campaign to unseat him and aiming further into his inner circle than ever before. “It was seen as an American attack on the palace. An entry point,” recalled Waheed Omar, Karzai’s spokesman.

  Salehi was being held in an interrogation room at the counternarcotics prison. He was not cooperating. At one point, a group of Afghan police were around Salehi, including Colonel Hamed, who had taken him from his apartment that morning. Salehi asked him who the commander was.

  “Hamed pointed at me,” General Nikzad recalled. “Then Salehi said, ‘I swear if I don’t put you in jail for two years, I will change my name.’ ”

  Salehi refused to be questioned. “He said, ‘If you guys could keep me one night in this jail, then I will answer all your questions tomorrow morning. If you cannot keep me tonight, I’ll be the one interrogating you.’ ”

  General Nikzad was taking calls all day from angry Afghan officials demanding Salehi’s release. His FBI mentor told him to ignore them. But by four p.m., Nikzad had received a new letter from the attorney general ordering Salehi freed. President Karzai had personally initiated it. By early evening, Salehi was out of jail.

  It took a week before anyone outside of a small group of palace and American insiders heard the name Mohammed Zia Salehi. Then The Wall Street Journal published an account of his arrest, and the political crisis broke into the open. Karzai quickly went on the offensive by publicly blasting the operation and its American backers.

  “This man was taken out of his house in the middle of the night by thirty Kalashnikov-toting masked men in the name of Afghan law enforcement,” Karzai told Christiane Amanpour during an interview with ABC on August 15. “This is exactly reminiscent of the days of the Soviet Union, where people were taken away from their homes by armed people in the name of the state and thrown into obscure prisons and some sort of kangaroo courts. It reminds the Afghan people of those days with immense fear.

  “So I have intervened,” Karzai went on. “As I am the president of this country, I must uphold the constitution and do things legally from now onwards.” He announced that by the next day Kirk Meyer’s team and the Major Crimes Task Force would be brought under “Afghan laws and within the sovereignty of the Afghan state.”

  In subsequent meetings with Eikenberry, Karzai demanded to know who else in the palace the Americans were wiretapping. The president could only assume that his calls were also monitored. Karzai had no secure communications; he made his office calls on a normal cell phone. He had been worried about this for years. When he wanted to share something particularly private with an American commander or ambassador, he would sometimes invite them into a small sitting room behind his main office that he believed was free of bugs. Once, at a palace lunch for NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Karzai made droll quips about his office being a den of spies, with the Iranians lurking around every corner, the Brits surveilling the Iranians, and the Americans sucking up every word with their high-tech NSA listening devices. “He was joking about how the Americans listen to every word that’s said in the palace, and he’s absolutely right,” a NATO official at the lunch recalled. It became a dark joke for Karzai: “When he said things on the phone about Americans, he’d say, ‘Let the bastards listen,’ ” an aide related. “Or he’d say, ‘You know, I do this intentionally so they know what I think about them.’ ”

  Karzai and his aides, even those critical of him, considered the Salehi case a ridiculous witch hunt. “They came up with some bullshit excuse to get the warrant,” one of his aides said. “That he’s a front man for Afghan United Bank? He’s a front man for narcotics? The courier? Bullshit. They wanted to use this wiretap to figure out the Karzai patronage network. To be frank, it was a white coup d’état against the Afghan government. It’s like us trying to take down [David] Axelrod and you wonder what th
e problem is.”

  Karzai saw the episode as another blatant attack by an American government bent on destroying him. “Clearly politically motived. Clearly politically motivated,” he told me when I asked him about it. “That’s why I intervened and had him released. Clearly.” If Salehi hadn’t been freed, Karzai said, he would have broken him out of the American prison. “I was ready to send Afghan forces, actually.”

  Ambassador Eikenberry had rarely seen Karzai so infuriated. He seemed to be in an alternative universe when he talked about the case. The two men exchanged words, but it was not a conversation. In subsequent meetings, embassy officials tried to mollify the Afghans. The investigators wiretapping Salehi were Afghan, they said, while the Americans were simply mentors. Arrests at five in the morning were perfectly normal. They’re safer, because there are fewer people on the streets. The masks protect the identities of the police. Arresting the powerful, no one needed to mention now, was dangerous. Besides, Salehi had diplomatic visas for foreign travel, so he could have gone to Germany or the United Kingdom, the American officials explained; Salehi’s investigators had wanted to preserve some element of surprise.

  American momentum for a Salehi-style showdown with Karzai’s government had been building for months. At U.S. embassy meetings, Eikenberry often said this was the “decisive year” for fighting corruption and establishing the rule of law. Yet Karzai’s ministers had consistently defanged other attempts to graft American-style accountability onto the Afghan government. Attorney General Aloko, hounded by his ever-present Justice Department mentors, had agreed to opening an anti-corruption tribunal, but neither Aloko nor anyone else in authority would presume to bring members of Karzai’s coterie before such a court. To the dismay of the U.S. embassy, Aloko and the Supreme Court had also agreed to exempt soldiers and police officers from the tribunal, even though a cursory glance at the security ministries would lay bare elaborate frauds and criminal rackets. The investigative prosecutors with the Attorney General’s Anti-Corruption Unit were supposed to take thirty days or less to decide how to handle a case, but these decisions often dragged on for months. Usually, they chose to move on a case depending on if bribe money was paid.

  Seemingly simple reforms frittered in limbo. Embassy staffers wanted to raise the paltry salaries of Afghan judges and prosecutors, in the belief that higher pay would lessen their reliance on bribes. Provincial judges and prosecutors at the time earned less than $200 a month. Such remuneration hardly compensated for the risks they faced in adjudicating, as the Taliban saw it, on behalf of the puppet regime. The American embassy kept a prominent female prosecutor in Herat under surveillance because they feared her assassination. The chief judge in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif told American diplomats that the Taliban would call him at night threatening to kill his children. The Taliban had their own system of justice that traveled by motorbike between dusty towns and villages, listened to local complaints, with no lawyers or juries needed, and anointed the winner and sentenced the loser, sometimes with lashings or death. No bribes, no interminable meetings or inconclusive results, no wait for punishment.

  After the arrest, Karzai’s instructions would effectively block the Major Crimes Task Force from ever again taking on politically sensitive cases. The day after Salehi was picked up, Karzai issued a decree creating a commission to investigate the work of these teams and what had happened to Salehi. He would form subsequent commissions on the same matter and the people he appointed demonstrated how seriously he took this issue: two vice presidents, his national security adviser, the attorney general, and a top legal adviser. By the end of September, the group had recommended sweeping changes: all detention facilities should be secured by the Afghan police and not foreigners, and everyone in the Major Crimes Task Force should be replaced with people of their choosing.

  Karzai’s government demanded an agreement, on paper, to set boundaries on the work of the MCTF. His administration saw such police teams as American tools to pursue unfavored members of the Afghan leadership. The female Afghan prosecutor who had been in charge of the Salehi case, Zargouna Sediqi, was ordered by one of her superiors to drop the investigation, and referred to as the “whore of the Americans” by her bosses. Aloko ordered his prosecutors to steer clear of their American mentors from the Department of Justice.

  General Nikzad, the MCTF commander, was ordered to hand over his files and sat through rounds of interrogations by three Karzai-assigned generals—one police, one army, one intelligence—who worked in the palace administrative affairs department. “They were not actually asking me about how I arrested Salehi,” Nikzad recalled. “The questions were mainly about how closely I was working with the Americans.

  “The atmosphere of the office changed 100 percent,” Nikzad said. “One or two weeks later, I wanted to arrest another general on corruption. I went to the Ministry of Interior. The minister said he’d talked to Karzai and Karzai told him, ‘Even if I talk on the phone with my wife, I think Nikzad is listening to our conversation.’ All of our authority disappeared. We were not allowed to make any arrests on corruption. Our activity dropped to zero.”

  In the months after Salehi’s arrest, the number of Major Crimes Task Force investigators trained and the hours of training both dropped by half. The Afghans on these teams faced more than a crisis of morale. Their association with the Americans suddenly put their lives in danger; their president saw them as traitors. Nikzad received phone calls from people threatening to kidnap him. “The law in our country is like a spiderweb,” Nikzad told me before leaving Kabul. “If mosquitoes or flies land, they will be trapped there. But if a bird or a falcon comes, it will destroy the whole thing. I don’t want to face the falcon anymore.”

  In February 2011, the FBI arranged to fly Nikzad and his family out of Afghanistan and settled them in Fremont, California, a Bay Area city popular with the Afghan diaspora. He had served in the Afghan police for four decades, including twenty-five years as an instructor. The transition to life in America, at sixty-five, was not easy. He enrolled in adult education classes to try to learn English. He survived on money sent to him by his children. When I talked to him two years later, he said nobody from the U.S. government had helped him in any way.

  “They just brought me, threw me here like an animal, and disappeared,” he said.

  —

  Most of the Americans involved in the case came to regret the Salehi arrest. Even though the war on corruption was just starting, in many ways that episode marked America’s defeat, and it intensified the feeling that those obscure distant fighters, the Taliban off in their rugged hideouts, were almost irrelevant; the real enemy was the Afghan government, which was supposed to be an ally. But at the same time, the Americans were unwilling to cut off aid, or take any other significant move, to fight that new enemy. The leaders of the Obama administration had spent millions on law enforcement efforts only to be confronted with the fact that they did not have the courage of their convictions.

  “The fallout from the Salehi case has had a ripple effect throughout the Afghan programs with which we work,” concluded an internal memo circulated within the American rule of law community in Afghanistan nearly a year after the arrest. “We have lost influence and access.

  “Those who suffered no consequences because the international community led by the US did nothing meaningful to stand up to the palace in the Salehi matter are less likely now to believe that there will be significant consequences if they interfere in investigations or prosecutions,” the memo went on. “One thing for certain, the situation as it exists in Afghanistan when it comes to corruption at the highest levels will not get better if we don’t insist that the palace lead and demonstrate the necessary political will to aggressively attack corruption in the political and criminal elite in Afghanistan. We will look weak across the board, not just in rule of law, but in other areas as well, if we continue to back down when presented with situations like Salehi.”

  It took a while fo
r Salehi to cool off, but eventually he could joke about himself as “the internationally famous Mr. Salehi,” as he did the first time we talked on the phone, inviting me, with a guffaw, to his “lavish and luxurious apartment.” He had survived, and President Karzai had prevailed. Over drinks at his apartment, Salehi told me that Brigadier General Herbert McMaster, the commander of a U.S. military counter-corruption team, had even given him a certificate of appreciation.

  “For me this was a really difficult period,” Salehi said, swirling his whiskey. “If they needed me, they could have just called.”

  6

  GOVERNMENT IN A BOX

  THE SENSE THAT HAMID KARZAI WAS either unwilling to address the greedy thieving within his government or incapable of doing so effectively was one of the basic strains on the country’s relationship with the United States. The other was his position on what to do about the Taliban. The U.S. military, given the troop presence and the size of its financial commitment, wanted an Afghan president who would act like a bold commander in chief, publicly leading his Afghan troops into battle against the evil Islamic terrorists and taking responsibility for American soldiers’ actions, even when tragic, as a necessary cost in the struggle for a greater good.

  Karzai would do no such thing. He was in no way a military man. He loved poetry and literature and following television news. He could avidly debate geopolitics and grand strategy for hours, but he would get bored when the discussion got into the weeds of military tactics or troop movements. He would often cut short his weekly National Security Council meetings. American military commanders were always encouraging Karzai to give speeches in front of Afghan troops or discuss their bravery and sacrifice, but he rarely took them up on the offer. Diplomats who spent a lot of time with him could watch him begin to fidget as he sat through U.S. military PowerPoint briefings. Sherard Cowper-Coles, a British ambassador to Kabul, wrote that Karzai didn’t even have a map available in his office when they were discussing an important battle in Helmand Province, so the ambassador pulled a Royal Air Force map from his briefcase to finish the chat. “He had no idea of distances. He can’t read a map. He’d be saying to me, just move your soldiers from there to there. [U.S. General Dan] McNeill would be getting crosser and crosser,” one European diplomat told me. “Karzai had very little authority over his own Army. He wasn’t really interested in military dispositions or military campaigns.” William Wood, the U.S. ambassador before Eikenberry, found the same thing. “Karzai did not want to hear, or at least did not want to hear from the foreigners, about military developments.” General McNeill offered to give Karzai a military briefing every morning and respond to any concerns from the battlefield, but Karzai declined. His interest in his own forces also seemed limited. In a meeting with his defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, Karzai predicted that two weeks after American troops pulled out of Afghanistan, Kabul would fall to the Taliban. “That is what I think of your military,” he said.