A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  “He was not what I expected,” Ruggiero said.

  Under the slow ceiling fans, Ahmed Wali lobbied Ruggiero for large-scale development projects—akin to the Kajaki and Dahla Dams USAID had built in the 1950s. He had often offered himself as the organizer for projects that came with large foreign-aid price tags. Earlier that summer, after a devastating truck bomb had killed more than forty people and leveled a city block in Kandahar, he’d proposed to the Canadians that he could oversee the rebuilding—for $2 million. Ahmed Wali also told Ruggiero that the United States needed to empower councils of local elders to resolve disputes between citizens, because so few judges worked in the province. “You can easily bribe the chief of police or a judge, but you can’t bribe fifty elders,” he said. The governor acknowledged that the local administration had little credibility. They could not provide enough electricity for the residents, he said, and more than 150 factories had closed as a result.

  Ruggiero didn’t want to push too hard, as it was his first meeting with Ahmed Wali. In his write-up of the encounter, he noted that given Ahmed Wali’s reputation for “shady dealings,” his recommendation for large, costly infrastructure projects should be viewed with a “healthy dose of skepticism.” He added, “The meeting with AWK highlights one of our major challenges in Afghanistan: how to fight corruption and connect the people to their government, when the key government officials are themselves corrupt.” Before forwarding the memo to Washington, someone at the embassy in Kabul inserted an additional note in the cable: “While we must deal with AWK as the head of the Provincial Council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker.” (When the cable later came out on WikiLeaks, Ahmed Wali complained to Ruggiero about the line: Why say such a thing? You never asked me about drugs. “And he was right. I never did. It never came up,” Ruggiero said.)

  On Christmas Eve, McChrystal dispatched a helicopter to Camp Nathan Smith, where Bill Harris was working on the Kandahar provincial reconstruction team, to ferry the diplomat across town to Kandahar Airfield for dinner with himself and General Carter. It was late in the evening, and the chow halls had closed. They met in Carter’s office, snacking on packets of cheese and crackers. McChrystal wanted to hear his colleagues’ thoughts on Ahmed Wali. Harris described the situation as a manhood test: removing Ahmed Wali would send a strong message to President Karzai that this was a new era in the war, one where impunity would not stand. Other senior American military officials held similar views. “We were getting to the endgame of this war; we needed President Karzai to fall in line and be a wartime leader and be an ally and shut his fucking mouth. And McChrystal was really buying it,” Harris recalled. Harris recognized that ISAF didn’t have a smoking gun: no one could point to cell phone intercepts of Ahmed Wali talking about heroin sales or colluding with the Taliban. Everything was circumstantial, a lot of rumor and innuendo. But if you added up all the stories, “It did seem to be rather damning.

  “McChrystal was tilting, and Carter and I were both avidly in favor of removing Ahmed Wali,” Harris said. They agreed that President Karzai would have to do it, even if it took a call from President Obama. At the end of the evening, Harris thought he’d made his case. “I left believing I had convinced him that AWK had to go. If he didn’t, we couldn’t really credibly win the war.”

  And according to several other military officials, Harris, at that moment, was correct. Both McChrystal and his chief of military intelligence, General Michael Flynn, “were convinced that we’d be far better off with Ahmed Wali Karzai going,” said a top NATO military official. Kandahar, to them, was the war’s center of gravity, and if President Obama’s surge was to be effective, they needed to build a local government that didn’t respond solely to the whims of the president’s brother.

  The Regional Command South military intelligence chief, Steve Beckman, had pored over all of the reports, including those concerning heroin and arms dealing. He was determined to find the “smoking gun” piece of evidence that ISAF could take to President Karzai to convince him to remove his brother from power. There were wiretapped phone transcripts about land speculation that suggested financial corruption but nothing solid.

  The CIA, which had been working with Ahmed Wali at least since the start of the war, presumably had its own thick files on him, as he had been a partner for so many years, but nothing materialized. CIA officers in Kandahar spoke highly of Ahmed Wali to U.S. soldiers, and for good reason. He had worked with American spies at least since the start of the war. Back then, Ahmed Wali had taken up residence in Mullah Omar’s old house, living alongside CIA officers and special operations troops, using his contacts in the city to outfit the residence with a house staff and guards. When the first CIA officers arrived in Kandahar, “they didn’t know the city very well, so we got them everything they needed,” recalled Fazel Mohammed, one of Ahmed Wali’s personal security guards. “The Americans would provide us with money and weapons, and we would give them intelligence and information.”

  In the spring of 2002, Ahmed Wali helped the CIA create the Kandahar Strike Force, a paramilitary unit of Afghans who were used on kill-and-capture raids against the Taliban. The force would eventually comprise about four thousand people, with bases in Kandahar, Khost, Paktia, Paktika, Kunar, Jalalabad, and Kabul. They were considered highly trained and elite troops. They had regular physical training, including jogging and calisthenics, target practice, and class work such as lectures on choosing targets. While Ahmed Wali did not command the unit, he arranged for many of his loyal Popalzai tribesmen to fill these jobs. Given his connections and influence in Kandahar, he was also one of the CIA’s regular paid informants. “He would pass intelligence, a request for a strike, but he was not guiding them,” Amrullah Saleh, the country’s longtime intelligence director, told me. “Through utilization of his tribal networks, he was providing a lot of tactical intelligence to the Americans about Taliban cells in the southern part of the country. He was also providing political support and creating political space for some of their operations, or justifying these operations.”

  American soldiers and diplomats knew that the CIA was an active supporter of Ahmed Wali. In the debates about how to deal with him, they always came out on the side of continuing to use him as an informant. Harris had never seen a full dossier on Ahmed Wali, although he imagined it existed. “What went unsaid was that a really in-depth excavation of this guy’s life and past would of course unearth his CIA connections, and I think that’s what really put the brakes on any serious investigation,” he said. “Ahmed Wali enjoyed maybe not an active protection, but a passive or a de facto protection.”

  Many of President Karzai’s senior aides remember asking their American counterparts about the allegations. “They would always say, ‘No, we don’t have anything,’ ” one recalled. “Especially people who worked closely with him at the agency, they would always say, ‘He’s very helpful.’ ”

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  From the war’s beginning, American officials had taken for granted that Ahmed Wali profited from the opium trade, southern Afghanistan’s most lucrative crop. There had been rumors from the first year of his connection to opium-loaded planes touching down at remote airstrips. Embassy diplomats reporting back to Washington repeatedly referred to his drug-world connections. A classified cable from March 2007 argued that President Karzai “should use his authority to remove corrupt officials from office (including his drug-running brother Ahmad Wali Karzai, in Kandahar).” Two years later, discussing Ahmed Wali and his brother-in-law Muhammad Arif Noorzai, the embassy said, “Both have well-known reputations as narco-traffickers willing to engage in anything necessary to advance Hamid Karzai’s fortunes.”

  “Given his suspected ties to narco-trafficking (and possible militant activities),” the embassy said in another October 2009 dispatch, the Canadians were looking for help dealing with Ahmed Wali. “The Canadians believe the ideal situation would be to have him removed from power, but given his status as a
strong power player within Kandahar, the Canadian Ambassador is likely to ask for the U.S. to lead on the issue.”

  And yet each time an effort was made to document these claims, the United States seemed to come up empty. One day in the fall of 2004, U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad was in a morning meeting of senior embassy staff when his cell phone rang. It was President Karzai, and he sounded distraught. An article had appeared in that morning’s New York Times. It was a modest eleven-hundred-word story about a United Nations announcement that Afghanistan’s poppy crop was now larger than ever before. Almost as an afterthought, the reporter mentioned that the minister of tribal affairs, Muhammad Arif Noorzai, and the governor of Helmand Province, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, “are widely believed to profit from the drug trade, although both have denied any involvement and voiced support for the government’s anti-narcotics stand. Diplomats say there are even reports linking Mr. Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, an influential figure in the southern city of Kandahar, to the trade.”

  On the phone, Karzai, an avid reader of the foreign press, particularly anything regarding himself or his relatives, had waved such stories in the faces of visiting American officials, angrily insisting that their comments were no way for friends to speak about each other’s families. He told Khalilzad that these articles were devastating to his family name. He wanted to know what evidence the U.S. government had on his brother’s involvement, and he said that if there was proof, he would deal with Ahmed Wali himself. Karzai also asked Khalilzad to summon Ahmed Wali to Kabul to talk about the allegations directly. Later, when Khalilzad asked the CIA station chief about Ahmed Wali, he was told that Ahmed Wali lived in the Kandahar house of Haji Azizullah Alizai, a known drug trafficker.

  When Ahmed Wali came to the embassy to meet Khalilzad, he appeared to be exasperated. “Do you know who my father is? Do you know who my brother is? We have been given an historic role. Do you think I would do anything to jeopardize that?” he said.

  “Yes, I know, and you’re not supposed to be asking me questions. I’m supposed to be asking you,” Khalilzad said. “Why are you living in a drug dealer’s house?”

  “Mr. Ambassador, can you name one nice house in Kandahar that is not owned by a drug trafficker?” Ahmed Wali replied. “That’s what I want from the U.S. embassy. Find me a house in Kandahar that has no links to a drug trafficker, and I will move in there.”

  Two days after the Times article appeared, at the weekly Sunday cabinet meeting at the palace, President Karzai was still upset. Under U.S. pressure, Karzai had made eradicating poppy farming a top priority during his first inaugural speech the month before, even declaring a symbolic “jihad” against opium. But he had always been ambivalent about the issue, and he was particularly opposed to aerial spraying of farmers’ fields, which he believed not only threatened livelihoods but posed a public health risk. Khalilzad had watched Karzai get worked up about the issue, shouting, waving his arms, vowing to lead his own jihad against American soldiers if they persisted in spraying herbicides on the Afghans. Before his ministers that Sunday, Karzai mentioned reports of overnight spraying in the eastern city of Jalalabad that had sickened children.

  He claimed that he saw a “British hand” behind the Times article, according to the meeting notes. The British had been involved from the beginning in the coalition’s counternarcotics campaign, including an early, and failed, effort to buy up and burn a large portion of the poppy crop. The Brits, Karzai speculated, had told the Times to “start a negative propaganda campaign against me.”

  “This is a warning for you all. It is a threat. They have even brought your brother into this,” one of Karzai’s ministers told the cabinet. “These people are our national figures. This is animosity. I suggest that our embassy in Washington should be ordered to start the preliminary work of suing The New York Times. I consider this an insult to the people’s will, the cabinet, and the people of Afghanistan. They should apologize. And they should compensate us. We should take a diplomatic and a judicial approach.”

  Near the end of the discussion, Ashraf Ghani, one of the most accomplished technocrats in the Afghan government, who had lived in the United States and Europe for years before the war, called for discipline and unity among the cabinet and tried to put things in perspective. “It would take us ten years to sue America,” he said.

  News stories with allegations of corruption, drug trafficking, and other criminal behavior against Ahmed Wali occurred with ever-greater frequency as the war progressed and intensified. On January 9, 2006, Karzai met with U.S. ambassador Ronald E. Neumann and British ambassador Rosalind Marsden, as well as the CIA and MI6 station chiefs, and complained about a Newsweek story that had raised fresh drug allegations against Ahmed Wali Karzai. That story, by Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai, veteran reporters in the region, quoted an unnamed Interior Ministry official saying that Ahmed Wali “leads the whole trafficking structure” in Kandahar. In the palace meeting, according to a U.S. embassy cable, President Karzai was described as “flailing” and asked the intelligence officials “whether they had any evidence to back that up and repeated the question to the ambassadors. We all said that we had numerous rumors and allegations to the effect that his brother is corrupt and a narco-trafficker but that we have never had clear evidence that one could take to court. Karzai fulminated, talked about taking the case to court for libel.”

  Later that year, before one of President Karzai’s visits to Washington, Neumann’s embassy recommended Ahmed Wali’s banishment from Afghanistan. “One of the most symbolically important things Karzai could do would be to persuade his brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker, to leave the country. Karzai must understand that failure to move in this area undermines his leadership at home but also invites questions from Congress and the American People,” Neumann reported back.

  “We did raise it, I raised it, the British raised it,” Neumann told me later of the drug allegations. “Karzai’s response was always: ‘Show me the evidence.’ And there was no evidence. In my time there was no evidence of Ahmed Wali’s corruption or drug dealing. There were any number of stories—everybody knows it, that level of thing—but there was not one piece of hard evidence, hard intelligence, classified or unclassified, which I had that I could bring forward to Karzai. None. Zero. And that was true of the British as well.” Neumann’s successor, Ambassador William Wood, who spent two years in Kabul, told me the same thing: “I asked the question, repeatedly, and the reports that came to me said that none of our sources had a smoking gun. Accusations were rife. Probabilities were high. Smoking gun? Never got a smoking gun.”

  The cycle of accusation and denial continued. In the year and a half that General Dan McNeill commanded American forces in Afghanistan, European diplomats came to him at least four times asking him to push President Karzai to force Ahmed Wali out of Kandahar. His response was always the same: “I’ve got nothing on the guy.” Many Afghans blamed Ahmed Wali for the July 2008 murder of one of his prominent rivals, Habibullah Jan, an elder of the Alizai tribe, who was shot while returning from a meeting with the Canadian military. The U.S. embassy brushed the claims off as the unreliable assumptions of “conspiracy-minded Afghans.” On October 4, 2008, the Times’s James Risen published the most detailed account to date of allegations that Ahmed Wali Karzai was involved in the heroin trade, citing unnamed U.S. investigators and a jailhouse phone interview with an Afghan informant. The story focused on two drug shipments, from 2004 and 2006, where Ahmed Wali Karzai had allegedly intervened to release trucks that had been stopped by Afghan authorities. Risen would write a series of articles over the years about the Karzai family’s business dealings and feuding that often drew strong reactions from the subjects. In response to these stories, President Karzai met again with the American ambassador. And he once again demanded to see the evidence that his brother was involved in the drug trade, while refusing to remove him from his position as provincial council chi
ef in Kandahar. The United States was never able to provide any proof.

  It was easy to find Afghans in positions of authority who spoke in detail about Ahmed Wali’s connection to the drug trade. I heard the stories from former governors, soldiers, spies—though few who dared to give their names. I sat on the carpet in a Kandahar hotel room and listened late into the night as an Afghan intelligence officer mapped out in detail Kandahar’s drug routes and Ahmed Wali’s perch at the top of the pyramid. The way most people described it, he didn’t dirty his own hands with buying or selling but operated as a fixer, an intervener, his weapon his cell phone, to keep trucks moving, free men from prison. His loyal policemen, the militia commanders who followed him, served, the story went, as escorts just as capable of chaperoning opium loads as accompanying deliveries of fuel or gravel or spare Humvee parts for American military bases.

  “Yes, of course he was involved in drug trafficking,” said General Noor ul-Haq Olomi, a former Army corps commander in Kandahar. “We live there. We have a good relationship with the people. People over there know very well that he was involved with that. With narcotics trafficking and smuggling. Everybody knows who was working with him.”

  The accusations drove Ahmed Wali wild. He held press conferences to rail against what he called the “libel” against him. He screamed curses and threatened to beat up a reporter who asked him questions about the allegations. He repeatedly warned that he would sue the newspapers who published the claims. Bill Harris saw him finish reading a newspaper story and stand up in the middle of a large meeting and go berserk. “He went just apoplectic and purple, all twisted up, then he jumps up out of his chair and starts yelling, in English, screaming about ‘Why are they doing this to me? I’m going to sue these guys. I’m sick of this. I never did any of this,’ ” Harris recalled. “If it was a performance, it was an Academy Award.”