A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  During his first months in office, Raufi was told of other, darker activities carried out by top officials in the provincial police and intelligence service, men who he believed had the approval and complicity of Ahmed Wali. “They didn’t spare any wrongdoing. They were involved in drug trafficking, they were involved in assassinations; they were involved in raping boys and girls. They did all sorts of horrible things. It was a team,” he said. “When I was appointed, they wanted me to be part of their team. That was something I didn’t want. And that was how the problems I talked about started emerging between me and Ahmed Wali.”

  One lucrative sideline for these complicit officials in the customs office, border police, and transportation department was the trade in used and stolen cars. The vehicles would be dismantled in Pakistan and shipped into Kandahar to be reassembled in warehouses and sold along the road. The main area for this trade was Shorandam Hill, in the eastern part of the city, where a couple of dozen dealers had car lots. American military convoys also regularly passed by, so the Taliban planted IEDs in the area and waited for the passing targets. The explosions often killed and injured civilians. After at least three such bombings, Raufi decided that the car dealers should be moved to another part of the city so that the customers would not be blown up.

  One day, Ahmed Wali visited the governor’s mansion. He asked Raufi if he could make an exception and allow one of his friends, a Popalzai named Mohammed, to keep his car lot in the same place. Raufi assumed that Ahmed Wali stood to gain financially if his friend was the only dealer left in the old location. As Raufi recalled, the conversation rapidly deteriorated:

  “I said I cannot do that because people will start talking. The other dealers will come and grab my collar and they’ll say, Who is this guy and how much money did you get from him that you allowed him to keep his dealership there? And Ahmed Wali said, ‘Mohammed is a very nice guy, and I promised him.’ I told him, ‘I didn’t say he was a bad person. To me he is a car dealer like any other car dealer, and I cannot make an exception.’ When he insisted, I told him, ‘Look, I’m telling you again, I’m a representative of President Karzai, and I only report to him, and obey his orders. You are his brother, I respect you, but you are not my boss.’ Then he got angry and we started shouting at each other. And then I told him that he should leave my office. And when he continued shouting at me, I shoved him.”

  Ahmed Wali left the office, and Raufi suspected that things would not turn out well. Within the hour, he had received a call from a deputy minister of the Independent Directorate of Local Governance, summoning him to Kabul. When he arrived, he was told that his services as governor would no longer be required. Raufi was out of his job on December 4, 2008, less than four months after being appointed. He never spoke with President Karzai, nor did he talk to Ahmed Wali afterward, or return to Kandahar.

  —

  Like his brothers, Ahmed Wali Karzai had lived a double life. He was the second-to-last sibling in the family, born in Kandahar to Abdul Ahad’s second wife. Along with Hamid and his other siblings, he had attended Habibia High School in Kabul, built in 1903 for the education of the children of the elite. His classmates remembered him as a good soccer player and an unassuming student. Sayed Shalala Bakawali, who would go on to become headmaster of the school, was his classmate there for four years. He found Ahmed Wali “quiet, polite, and tidy.” Ahmed Wali graduated in 1980. Years later, he donated a few thousand dollars to the school for a rose garden and to fix the electricity—and then fled the Russian invasion and joined his siblings in Maryland.

  He followed the path of his older brothers. He worked as a busboy at the Bethesda Marriott Hotel and later joined them when they moved to Chicago to open their first restaurant. By that time Qayum, Mahmood, and Ahmed Wali all had experience in the restaurant business, having worked as waiters and managers around Washington, D.C. Mahmood’s failed attempt to buy Cagney’s had not dimmed his ambition to be his own boss.

  In the family lore, this is a key moment in the brothers’ American lives. In Quetta in the early 1980s, their father, Abdul Ahad, had been appointed the head of the Afghan National Liberation Front’s local office, overseeing the party’s southern efforts for the jihad against the Soviets. Because of his prominence in the Afghan parliament and as a tribal leader, and to honor his time in prison, the party bosses, including Sibghatullah Mojaddedi and his relatives, felt that Abdul Ahad would be an effective leader. After the Peshawar headquarters, the Quetta office was the most important. They directed their rebel efforts across the southwestern Pashtun provinces. His job was to distribute weapons and money—from the CIA and others, funneled through Pakistan’s intelligence service—to the anti-Soviet fighters. Abdul Ahad held the job for about a year. “Unfortunately, he was not successful,” Zabi Mojaddedi, the party’s secretary-general, said. “I think he failed to understand the mechanism of the resistance.

  “His approach was more of a tribal approach, while ours was about the war of attrition, the guerrilla war. What he would do when he received weapons to distribute was, he would give them to each tribal leader. While our policy was, we would concentrate on particular groups,” Mojaddedi said, meaning those that were effective in battle. Some believed that Abdul Ahad’s priorities were to the former king, and not to the party. There were rebel commanders in Kandahar, such as Haji Magash, who were unhappy with the weapons dispersal and felt they had no tools with which to fight. In late 1984, the two men got into an argument. As Mojaddedi recalls, Abdul Ahad scoffed at the commander, in a particular Afghan way. “He told me, ‘Who is this Haji Magash? I told Haji Magash I’m going to hang my shoes on the door of the gate of the office. He wouldn’t even dare touch my shoe.’ I thought this was too much to say to anyone, let alone a commander.”

  Magash didn’t seem to care for it, either. He gathered a number of his rebel fighters and seized the office and threw out Abdul Ahad. Zabi Mojaddedi was dispatched from Peshawar to take over the office.

  “I found everything in shambles,” he said. “There were no operations coming up. The mujahedeen were all in despair and distress. All the furniture was in the yard, and people were there—these tribal leaders who were receiving weapons were using that as their sleeping quarters. Everything was a mess. I feel bad about this because he was a person of good repute, and I’m sure this hurt him very much.”

  Before Abdul Ahad left the office, there were allegations of another important development. People who know the family, as well as some relatives, believe that Abdul Ahad sold some of the weapons he was given to distribute, earning a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and that some of that money made it to his sons in the United States, a claim the brothers deny. Before 1985, the Karzai siblings had been restaurant employees: busboys, waiters, managers. The next year, they would become owners.

  “This was the seed money,” one of the Karzais said.

  —

  Ahmed Wali and his siblings Mahmood, Qayum, and Fawzia moved to Chicago in the mid-1980s to start their own restaurant in a city that was a barren culinary landscape for Afghan food. Mahmood, who complained about the overcrowded Afghan restaurant scene in the Washington, D.C., area, arrived first, along with his wife and daughter, and took a job as a waiter at the 95th restaurant, atop the John Hancock building, where he received his education in wine. Qayum set to work finding a location for their new restaurant, securing permits, and buying furniture. Fawzia, who had been working in a grocery store in Washington, also moved to Chicago with her husband, Zaki Royan, to help.

  The Karzais found a location they liked on the corner of North Halsted Street and Belmont Avenue, a one-story brick building with bay windows and cheap rent. The neighborhood was bustling and eclectic, its garbage-speckled grittiness being swept up in a gentrifying wave, casual by day and frenzied in the evening, a hodgepodge of antiques shops, vintage toy stores, dive bars, bakeries, boutiques, factories, cafés, and a few of the city’s best restaurants. Neighbors had fought to keep fast-food chains
away but welcomed exotic ethnic fare. The Karzais’ building had once housed a grocery store but was a barren box when they took over. The brothers spent about $40,000 to renovate the space and pitched in on the painting and construction. The expenses exhausted their resources and ran up their credit cards. They were two months behind with the rent on the building before the restaurant opened, but the owner allowed the lapse. “We took such a huge risk in the United States,” Qayum said.

  Although it was situated next to a hot dog place called Relish the Thought, their restaurant aspired to an air of civility. They draped the tables in white tablecloths and decorated them with fresh flowers. Ahmed Wali and the other waiters wore starched button-down shirts and black bow ties. The family members all shared duties in the kitchen and serving the customers. A review in the Chicago Tribune in January 1986, not long after the Helmand opened, described the Karzais as “gentle spokesmen for the food of Afghanistan.” More people than they expected arrived the first night, and the restaurant ran out of food.

  “People loved it,” said Wiroj Worrasangusilpa, an immigrant from Bangkok who owned Relish the Thought and went by “Victor.” “Packed every night.”

  The Helmand was profitable. A business biography Mahmood later wrote said that the restaurant grossed $250,000 per year. In the cities where they opened, the Helmand restaurants tended to flourish. The restaurants were elegant, some with fireplaces, wood-burning ovens, and Afghan rugs. The menu featured warm dishes of eggplant, okra, and lamb, spiced with cardamom and cinnamon. Reviews touted their homemade ice cream with sprinkled pistachio or the baked pumpkin dish, kaddo bourani, with its garlic-mint yogurt and coriander meat sauce.

  “In capitalism, you invest,” Mahmood told one reviewer.

  The Karzais all shared an apartment in Westmont, a suburban community west of the city. They seemed to their friends in Chicago to live comfortably; they didn’t complain about money.

  The Karzais recall both the difficulties and the rewards of those years. The winters were crushingly cold. As Mahmood remembers it, his car, when he was lucky enough to get it started, was endlessly skidding on the ice and snow. He and his wife worked day and night and took no vacations. At home, exhausted, they would stare at the television before falling asleep.

  “I sometimes drove her home at night,” Victor said of Fawzia. “She would say, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ There was too much work.”

  —

  Ahmed Wali was popular with the neighbors around the Helmand. He liked to play the lottery inside the New Modern Grill, a diner across the street. People found him polite, well mannered, approachable. He dressed well. He was thin and handsome, with a thick black mustache. “I thought he was gay,” Victor said. “People would come in and ask about him. He was good-looking.”

  The Karzais were open about their desire to return to Afghanistan, if the regime changed and their family was not at so much risk. “They said the Taliban wanted to kill them,” Victor said. “When they came here it was to survive, it was not to get rich running a restaurant. They wanted to go back home. They were waiting for their time.”

  “They were political people,” he added. “They seemed to know about power.”

  Two years after the restaurant opened, Mahmood sold his share to Qayum and moved with his family to San Francisco. Qayum returned to Maryland when he and his wife decided to buy the insurance company she worked for. Ahmed Wali stayed on in Chicago for several more years. This period, he would tell the American generals and diplomats he met in later years, was formative for him. “I love America,” he told one of them. “It really pains me that people in America think I’m a bad guy. Because I’m not a bad guy.”

  One day, he stepped into the hot dog shop to say good-bye to Victor. He told Victor that his brother Hamid was the new leader of Afghanistan. “I couldn’t believe it,” Victor said later. “He was just the guy across the street. I thought he was bullshitting me.”

  Harry Karountzos, who owned the diner, saw Ahmed Wali the day he was leaving Chicago. He was waiting for the bus on the sidewalk, holding a small suitcase.

  “I’m going home,” Ahmed Wali told him. “My brother’s going to be president.”

  “Where?”

  “Afghanistan.”

  “Get outta here.”

  Years later, Karountzos would see Ahmed Wali on TV in exotic Afghan attire. On the sidewalk that last day, Ahmed Wali fished in his pocket. He pulled out a winning lottery ticket.

  “Here,” he said, handing it to Karountzos. “Cash it for me.”

  —

  Even if Governor Wesa had been inclined to challenge Ahmed Wali, he had little ability to do so. As the public face of the American occupation, Wesa lived with the perpetual threat of violent death, and his security was guaranteed by Ahmed Wali. Two of the deputy governors had already been killed. At night, Wesa slept in a bunkerlike downstairs room at the mansion as a precaution against rocket and mortar fire. He had about two dozen Afghan security guards, all chosen by Ahmed Wali, who worked with former British military advisers. Even among his own tribe, the Mohammadzai, Wesa had little support.

  “People go to see him and they wait for a month. He doesn’t have the time to see them. That’s not how you run a province,” remarked Sardar Mohammad Osman, the deputy head of the tribe. “I don’t see a single person in the entire government who has competence and capability. It’s like appointing a doorman as head of an administration.”

  Hameed Wafa, one of the governor’s aides, had watched Ahmed Wali order the governor to fire a British guard’s translator after the man engaged in an argument with one of his own security guards. “Within five minutes, the interpreter was gone,” Wafa said.

  Wesa was a Karzai loyalist. He reserved his hatred for other local strongmen, particularly Gul Agha Sherzai, whom he detested, and he referred to Sherzai’s tribe, the Barakzais, as “scorpions.” And Wesa was no risk taker: the U.S. embassy described him in a cable as “usually supine.” But in his private conversations, Wesa let it be known that he would be in favor of the Americans clipping Ahmed Wali’s wings. He had to be careful about such statements; even his two personal secretaries had family ties to the Karzais.

  “My recollections were that the governor thought it would probably be a good idea to diminish AWK’s power,” said Neil Clegg, the Canadian adviser. “I did detect there was some resentment.”

  General Nick Carter asked Wesa whether Kandahar would be better off without Ahmed Wali. He did not equivocate. Ahmed Wali “had to go,” Wesa said, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

  —

  For the Americans, their research into Ahmed Wali’s activities was picking up. The more people learned, the more they worried.

  “As the kingpin of Kandahar, the President’s younger half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai (AWK) dominates access to economic resources, patronage, and protection. Much of the real business of running Kandahar takes place out of public sight, where AWK operates, parallel to formal government structures, through a network of political clans that use state institutions to protect and enable licit and illicit enterprises,” the embassy wrote in a cable in early December.

  The overriding purpose that unifies his political roles as Chairman of the Kandahar Provincial Council and as the President’s personal representative to the South is the enrichment, extension and perpetuation of the Karzai clan, and along with it their branch of the Popalzai tribe. This applies equally to his entrepreneurial and his alleged criminal activities. AWK derives authority and legitimacy from his relationship to President Karzai, from the relative discipline and elite position of the Popalzai tribe and from his access to resources. In Kandahar’s political realm, he is the unrivaled strongman.

  Accusations against Ahmed Wali had accumulated like sediment over the course of the war. For years, the Canadian military had been the primary foreign presence in Kandahar, and it had its own rich history with Ahmed Wali. When Canada’s top diplomat in the south had been killed by
an IED explosion, there had been rumors that Ahmed Wali had had a hand in it. Richard Colvin, the slain man’s successor, found that Ahmed Wali’s dominance was “sucking up the political oxygen in Kandahar.”

  “He sat at the top of everything,” Colvin told me. “Anything that existed, whether it was legitimate or criminal, it had to get his say-so, and he would collect and kind of manage the whole system. He wouldn’t get his fingers dirty because he was sitting on top of it, kind of pulling the strings like a puppet master. Not [quite] a puppet master, because these are independent actors. He was the godfather for the whole system. And the whole system was an unhealthy and corrupt system because there was so much money coming from drugs. This was the big problem. He was the top guy in the south. And the south was awash with drug money. He’s making decisions based not on what’s in the interest of the government or us but what’s in the interest of him, his family, and the drug empire. That becomes a problem.

  “His interests and our interests did not really coincide. He was seen by local people as that kind of mafia godfather. And therefore to the extent that we were propping him up, our firepower was keeping him in power. We had the airpower and the heavy weaponry. We’d installed these guys and were fighting and dying to keep them in power. And if locals looked at us and just saw us as foreigners coming in to prop up the local drug lords, then we’re not going to win a war on that basis. People are going to kick us out. And, frankly, we deserve to be kicked out, if that’s all we’re doing. Why are we in Kandahar? Are we just there to prop up some local drug baron?”

  Frank Ruggiero, a square-jawed American diplomat with graying hair, visited the governor’s mansion to see Ahmed Wali for the first time. They met, along with Toryalai Wesa, in the governor’s wood-paneled office, under a giant photo of President Karzai. The Ahmed Wali mythology had Ruggiero expecting a glowering crime boss. Instead he found an anxious, diffident man in a crisp white shalwar kameez and a pin-striped vest. “He was so shy and quiet and nervous,” Ruggiero recalled. “All he wanted to do is offer assistance. That’s what he kept saying to me. ‘Whatever you need to get done. Whatever you want to get done. Just tell me and I can help you.’