A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  Ahmed Wali was always categorical: “I was never in the drug business. I never benefited. I never facilitated. I never helped anyone with transportation of any kind,” he once told ABC News.

  But there were always tantalizing leads. One of the new interagency units that came to Kandahar with the surge was known as Task Force Nexus; its job was to investigate the connection between drugs and the insurgency. The task force’s first operation was targeting a district police chief near the border town of Spin Boldak who was believed to be moving marijuana into Pakistan. The American intelligence—the DEA had wiretapped his phones—suggested that the police chief oversaw several large farms and warehouses containing dozens of tons of hashish for shipments and deliveries. His police trucks—donated by the United States—were used to move the drugs. DEA officers eventually lured the police chief to Kandahar Airfield for a meeting and arrested him and five of his bodyguards.

  “The reason we picked him was because he’s a district-level chief. We didn’t know of any connection to anybody. He’s a low-level guy. We can go get him and get an early win. We won’t hit that point where we’ve suddenly tripped a political connection that negatively impacts on the [counterinsurgency] campaign,” said one person involved. “So we intentionally went after this guy because we thought he was low.”

  Within a day of the arrest—as they tracked the phone calls—the arrested police chief had called the young border police commander in the area, Abdul Raziq, to complain. He, in turn, had called Ahmed Wali Karzai, who’d called the president. The American officials got berated for making the arrest. The Afghans insisted that the police chief had done nothing wrong and should be released. And they complained that the Americans should not be arresting police chiefs without informing them first.

  “It was interesting because okay, that’s the first time Ahmed Wali popped up for us,” the person involved said. “Ahmed Wali wasn’t trafficking, but he was using his influence to say, ‘Why was this guy arrested?’ This guy’s a major trafficker. Why is he interceding on his behalf?

  “But in my whole time there, that’s the only hard connection I ever saw.”

  —

  By late January 2010, Steve Beckman was coming to the conclusion that “while AWK was clearly crooked and capable of undermining our efforts” in southern Afghanistan, “we didn’t have the goods on him.”

  Even if the United States planned to demand action on Ahmed Wali, there was no consensus on what that action should be. Some wanted him arrested. Others felt his departure from Kandahar would be sufficient. Ambassador Eikenberry had been trying to persuade McChrystal not to present Karzai with an ultimatum. “Do we really want to go to Karzai and ask him to get rid of his brother? Do we really want to do that?” one of his subordinates recalled Eikenberry asking. People in the palace discussed the possibility that Ahmed Wali could be appointed ambassador to Saudi Arabia or Oman.

  In late February, despite growing concern from his subordinates in Kandahar, and hesitance from the U.S. embassy, General McChrystal visited President Karzai in the palace and told him he felt Ahmed Wali had to leave. Given the history of Karzai’s responses to this very question, McChrystal should have been able to predict his response. McChrystal was, however, “rather surprised,” one of his subordinates said, when Karzai replied, in effect: “No problem. Bring me the evidence.”

  In the following days, McChrystal ordered his subordinates to collect all the available intelligence on Ahmed Wali Karzai. They would finally settle the question of what Ahmed Wali was really doing. This “deep dive,” as they called it, would provide the evidence that President Karzai had demanded. Military and civilian agencies would comb through their records and report back in a classified briefing to McChrystal.

  Before the briefing, Ruggiero met with Ahmed Wali again, one-on-one, in late February, to deliver a sterner message. The military focus of the war would be shifting to Kandahar, and the U.S. government would not tolerate people who were working against American aims.

  “Nobody is that stupid,” Ahmed Wali replied. He insisted to Ruggiero that he was not involved in selling drugs, and he offered to take a polygraph. He said he had hired a lawyer in New York to help clear his name. The allegations were just a campaign to discredit him, he said, and the media ate it up, “like a spice added to a dish to make it more enticing to eat.”

  The briefing took place on March 8, 2010, at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, the Situational Awareness Room, a high-tech command post with a horseshoe of desks facing a wall of flat screens. The room was packed: Eikenberry, McChrystal, their subordinates. Generals at the Pentagon and Centcom and Kandahar Airfield all videoconferenced in for the performance. One of General Mike Flynn’s military intelligence subordinates walked the audience through a series of PowerPoint slides. As he talked about Ahmed Wali’s alleged misdeeds, the air seeped from the room.

  “It started off with a lot of ‘we believe’ and ‘we guess’ and ‘we assume,’ ” one of the participants recalled. “McChrystal’s a four-star. ‘What do you mean, you assume? Do you know that?’ ‘No.’ ‘What do you mean, you don’t know that? How do you make that statement?’ ”

  As his subordinate went over the PowerPoint slides, McChrystal grew frustrated.

  “So there’s nothing?” he said, as another participant recalled. “So I went to the president of this country and I had nothing to go on?”

  At the end of the presentation, McChrystal looked toward the flat screens, at the faces of the military officials beamed in by videoconference.

  “Nick [Carter], what do you think? You’re the tactical commander down there.”

  Carter and his subordinates had already decided that they could not succeed in southern Afghanistan and also work at cross-purposes to Ahmed Wali. In distant capitals, one could argue with righteous conviction against the wisdom of aligning with Ahmed Wali, and be right, and still not convince the soldiers who had to sit staring at a cross-legged circle of tangled beards and unfathomable Afghan faces, day after day. The soldiers in Kandahar felt the Kabul headquarters’ obsession with forcing out Ahmed Wali was reckless.

  “Well, sir, you’re not going to like this, but I’m afraid he hasn’t made the case for me. I can see no reason to remove him based upon what you’ve told me.”

  McChrystal went around the room. Others agreed with Carter. They had nothing left but anodyne pronouncements. They would ask Ahmed Wali to “reinforce the central role” of the Afghan government and its institutions. Seek his help finding “political equilibrium” and representative local councils. They would, as Ambassador Sedwill put it, “manage and constrain” him.

  McChrystal circled back to Carter at the end of the meeting, more than an hour after they began.

  “What do you think we should do?” McChrystal asked.

  “We’re going to work with him,” Carter said. “We don’t have any choice.”

  McChrystal’s order was unequivocal: “We’re going to stop saying bad stuff about AWK. Okay? Stop.”

  8

  SMASHING THE CHINA SHOP

  THE SALEHI DEBACLE FORCED AMERICANS in Washington and Kabul to rethink their whole approach toward Hamid Karzai. The debate came down to this: What will cost more, billions of squandered dollars or a three-sided war? Can we risk losing Karzai as an ally and start fighting both the Taliban and his government, just to save a few bucks and frog-march some perps to the slammer? The counterinsurgency credos had been ball-peened into the collective military skull enough times that everyone knew that nothing could be accomplished without an obliging “partner” government. All the propagandistic slogans dreamed up at ISAF HQ, the soldierly assurances that everything with the Afghans was shona ba shona (“shoulder to shoulder” in Dari; or the more cavemanesque version in Pashtu: ooga pa ooga) ultimately sought to express this hoped-for result. But the fact remained that the Taliban, drawn predominantly from the president’s own ethnic group, had won over growing portions of the country on the argument that A
mericans were occupiers and Karzai nothing but a foreign stooge presiding over a godless government. Even an emotionless analysis would conclude that Karzai had to demonstrate some of his own authority over, if not outright opposition to, his American partners.

  But did that explain his outbursts? Was the puppet just posing as anti-American or did he really hate us more than we hated him? And did we need him more than he needed us? These questions could go round and round. Should we confront him about the behavior he seemed so happy to condone in his government: the theft, extortion, drug trafficking, the endless enrichment of his loyalists? Or should we preserve a veneer of civility in the hopes of securing future cooperation when we needed it most? Or had the time when we needed it most already passed?

  Inside the embassy, some of the senior diplomats were skeptical about what the United States would gain from rooting around in the sludge of Afghan bad business practices. A country with $1 billion of its own annual revenues was taking in more than $10 billion in American aid. The prospect that such a transaction could be done without kickbacks and quid pro quos seemed naïve. The American project in Afghanistan had never seemed capable of holding in its mind any fixed definition of its enemy. There were always allusions to “al-Qaeda” and “extremists” when it came time for the president to stand at a podium at West Point or Annapolis and justify sending more of those young faces in front of him to Afghanistan, even though the day-to-day combat these men and women would encounter had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. “The Taliban” itself was an elusive term for an unknown quantity of people with unclear motivations and conflicting allegiances. If the upper strata of Afghanistan’s business and political elite, a group of people actively encouraged, paid, protected, and enriched by the American government throughout most of the war, were now considered the most dangerous enemies, what would defeating them accomplish?

  “The challenge was, the further we got into discovering this, the further we saw how widely corruption had spread,” one of Eikenberry’s deputies at the embassy told me. “There were more corrupt people than there were noncorrupt people, and even the relatively uncorrupt people would not do everything we would say was the straight and narrow way of doing something. It was a hard situation. And then a number of our people were just sort of like, ‘Straight ahead. We’re just going to do this. This is a bad target.’ ”

  Brigadier General Herbert R. McMaster, ISAF’s point man on corruption, was a straight-ahead type guy. In his ascent through the U.S. Army, McMaster had checked all the boxes of a rising star in the counterinsurgency era. A West Point graduate, he had earned his doctorate and written an influential book criticizing the failures of generalship in the Vietnam War, called Dereliction of Duty. After winning a Silver Star in the Gulf War, he’d earned a reputation as a maverick during the Iraq war, commanding an armored cavalry regiment in the northern city of Tal Afar with aggression and creativity. Lieutenant General David Barno, who commanded coalition forces in Afghanistan for a time, said McMaster “might be the 21st century Army’s pre-eminent warrior-thinker.” McMaster was loud and brash and smart. A former tank commander, he was also physically imposing, a former rugby player with a broad chest, a bald head, and a flashing grin. He resembled an armed Mr. Clean. “He looks like somebody who could strangle a Taliban by himself,” one of his subordinates said.

  McMaster got to Kabul right around the time of the Salehi arrest. Unlike others who took the political crisis as instruction to back off, he wanted fresh scalps. He came into his job frustrated by the failures of American officials to push harder for prosecutions, and by the sense of resignation and futility starting to seep through the American mission in Kabul. The teeth-gnashing at the embassy over Karzai’s tantrums looked to him like sissy weakness and capitulation. McMaster believed that Afghans were no more inherently greedy or deceitful than anyone else, and so any suggestion by his colleagues that this problem was some irredeemable cultural defect offended him. This view was “bigotry masquerading as cultural sensitivity,” he would say, his subordinates recalled. Much like Kirk Meyer of the DEA, McMaster felt outrage that criminals had hijacked the Afghan government, and he wanted to stop them because what they were doing was morally and legally wrong and threatened, at a fundamental level, the future of the country. “Our main goal was to keep Afghanistan from becoming a failed state,” Pete Orchard, an FBI agent and one of McMaster’s deputies, told me. “All the other stuff is gilding the outhouse. If you do nothing, over time it’s going to collapse.”

  When General David Petraeus became the new commander of the Afghan war in July 2010—after President Obama fired McChrystal over inflammatory comments in a Rolling Stone article—he decided to make fighting corruption a priority. And as was Petraeus’s way, the world’s most powerful military—his military, not the tentative bureaucrats down the road at the U.S. embassy—would be in charge. Petraeus was also hyperattuned to the politics in Washington, as well as his reputation and his legacy, and he saw the benefits of appearing proactive on this issue. Setting up an ambitious military-run countercorruption program could help shield him from a Congress increasingly vocal about wasted tax dollars in Afghanistan. Also, some influential Washington insiders had been lobbying Petraeus with the argument that the military risked failure in its mission if it did not do something about the predatory nature of the Afghan government. Within a few weeks of assuming command, Petraeus chose McMaster to lead his anti-corruption effort. The group became known as Task Force Shafafiyat (using the Dari word for “transparency”), and it was supposed to coordinate the work of the disparate teams of soldiers and civilians—such as Meyer’s group over at the embassy—trying to deal with this problem.

  From the start of his command, Petraeus took a harder line with Karzai than his predecessor had; McChrystal had won Karzai’s affection with his deference. When Afghan civilians had been killed by soldiers under his command, McChrystal had apologized publicly and profusely, then passed down orders intended to minimize such casualties, to the point where some soldiers felt hamstrung by the restrictions. He’d regularly invited Karzai to be flown around the country on military aircraft and had treated him as if he were McChrystal’s own commander in chief.

  Petraeus, when he took over, felt that McChrystal had capitulated too often to Karzai. Petraeus couldn’t believe that McChrystal had agreed to Karzai’s demand to transfer all American-held prisoners to Afghan control by January 2011. Petraeus canceled that agreement, angering some in his own command who felt he had recklessly broken a promise to Karzai. Petraeus would ratchet up the violence level far beyond what it had been. His soldiers dropped five times as many bombs. Special operations troops launched kill-and-capture raids at far higher rates. Everything that troubled Karzai about the American military posture in Afghanistan—the intrusiveness and collateral damage and his own inability to change anything—intensified under Petraeus. Before Petraeus arrived, Americans were releasing more prisoners than they were taking in, partly as a concession to Karzai’s demands to let all but the most dangerous insurgents go. Under Petraeus, the release rate dropped toward zero and the detainee population at Bagram Airfield’s prison soared.

  Credit 8.1

  U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, right, walks with General David Petraeus, center, at the Camp Phoenix military base in Kabul, July 24, 2010.

  Petraeus set the tone in one of his first meetings with Karzai in Kabul when he informed the president that he would be expanding the number of American-paid Afghan militiamen across the country, mirroring the Sunni Awakening plan he’d championed in Iraq. Karzai, who was against the prospect of blindly adding to the ranks of armed vigilantes, opposed the project, and his relationship with Petraeus stumbled from the start. “Many people didn’t want to play hardball with Karzai,” recalled one of McMaster’s aides. Under General Petraeus, “ISAF wanted to play hardball with Karzai.”

  With Eikenberry and McChrystal, the embassy and the military had fought each other on issue after issue—wheth
er to arm militias in Nangarhar Province, whether to buy diesel generators or rebuild the hydroelectric dam in Kandahar, whether more troops were ultimately needed for Afghanistan—and Petraeus’s most obvious public relations problem was defining just who the U.S. military was actually there to fight. At a Fourth of July party (held on the third), under the harsh glare in the embassy courtyard, with hot dog and ice cream tents, Petraeus and Eikenberry engaged in some stage-managed reconciliation for the Afghan crowd, which included Abdullah Abdullah, the losing presidential candidate, wearing a polka-dotted pocket square, a female Afghan pop singer, and the chairman and the CEO of Kabul Bank, the country’s most booming business, in dark pin-striped suits and heavy cologne (I stood behind them). The army band from the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) from Fort Campbell, Kentucky (motto: “Rendezvous with Destiny”) struck up an anthem. Eikenberry took the podium first.

  “What a great day to be in Afghanistan,” he began. “On this occasion, as our attention turns to our founding fathers of the United States of America, the birth of our own nation, and it’s fitting at this time to recall Samuel Adams, the American revolutionary leader who said, ‘True peace is not merely the absence of tension. True peace is the presence of justice.’ We come here to support the Afghan people with this spirit in mind in hopes that they, too, will enjoy true freedom, true peace, and true justice for hundreds of years to come.”

  That was the tone of these kinds of gatherings. The Americans always hewed to optimism, right till the end. Eikenberry said America was “committed for the long term” to Afghanistan because this country, “free of extremist threats, will contribute directly to America’s safety and for our security.”