A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  Hamid lived simply. When his elder brother, Mahmood, would send money from the United States, Hamid would spend it the first few days by giving it away and helping to feed others.

  “Then he would eat salad or boiled eggs,” Mahmood said.

  A friend, Ezzat Wasifi, recalled how boys from Kandahar who visited Shimla would rib Hamid about his formal, cautious nature. He recalled one episode where they kept pushing Hamid to show them a Shimla brothel until he shouted back at them in embarrassment and demanded that they walk on the other side of the street. “Hamid said, ‘You guys are rascals, I’m not going to walk with you,’ ” Wasifi remembered.

  While his Afghan friends in India don’t remember him as particularly active in protests or gatherings, Hamid began to develop his political consciousness while at university. He started paying closer attention to the changes in Afghanistan as communism, and the opposition to it, began to take hold. Hamid had grown up in Kandahar and Kabul during the last peaceful years of the reign of King Zahir Shah, before the Soviet invasion and subsequent civil wars scattered his family into exile. The family business had always been politics, but initially Hamid wasn’t sure if that was the path for him. His grandfather Khair Mohammad Khan had been a military man; he had served as a brigadier in the Afghan army. He lost a hand and earned a medal for bravery fighting the British in the Third Anglo-Afghan War, in 1919. He was also a Popalzai tribal leader and became an adviser to Sardar Mohammad Hashim Khan, who served as prime minister from 1929 to 1946. Khair Mohammad was a devout Muslim known for his recitations of the Koran. A family friend of the Karzais’ recalled that for a period, one of Khair Mohammad’s roles in the palace was to entertain the king, telling jokes or stories or offering religious interpretations. His title in the king’s court translated as “jubilant companion.” At other times, he also served as the number two official in the Interior Ministry and as a deputy to the prime minister. He was known to friends and family as Moin Khairo Jan, moin being the word for “deputy.”

  Hamid’s father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, was Khairo Jan’s second oldest son, born in 1925 in the village of Karz. As a younger man, he held a series of local government posts around Kandahar. One of the first was in the municipal office that regulated commodities such as sugar, oil, and gasoline, products imported to Afghanistan whose prices could be manipulated by unfair market practices. He was later appointed hakim, or chief, of a small village in Kandahar. Slender and balding, with a trim mustache and no beard, Abdul Ahad was described by his friends as quiet, thoughtful, discreet, wise, and cautious in his political strategies. As his influence grew, he was chosen as district governor in two parts of Kandahar that would become notorious for their Taliban violence during the American war: Arghandab, the fertile river valley of lush pomegranate orchards to the north of the city, and Panjwayi, the farmlands to the southwest.

  Abdul Ahad and his other male siblings had inherited land from their father in Kandahar, as much as thousands of acres of farmland in Karz and elsewhere in Kandahar. But the Karzais were not the wealthiest landowners or the most powerful merchants. They had a reputation as educated government bureaucrats whose power derived from their political, rather than economic, influence. Abdul Ahad had inherited the leadership of the Popalzai tribe, and he was also an ally of the king, who ruled for four decades until he was overthrown by his cousin in 1973.

  “In those days, even a low-level government position afforded more prestige than having thousands of acres of land,” said Sardar Roshan, who was close with the family and went on to serve as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan. “People wouldn’t trade a government position for land. No matter how poor or rich, if you were in government, you’d be respected, you’d be special, you would feel important. Abdul Ahad’s political weight was due to his close relation to the royal family.”

  The government positions and affiliation with the king added credibility and influence within their tribe. But the king’s authority didn’t impinge very heavily on his rural subjects, so local leaders such as Abdul Ahad had great autonomy to solve the issues of their tribesmen.

  He was a conduit for patronage passed down from the royal palace and also saddled with the responsibility of helping the impoverished farmers of his tribe. The job of tribal leader had many duties: judge, counselor, headhunter, benefactor. Villagers from all over southern Afghanistan would come to his house with their problems. These could be a plea for a new canal or irrigation system; a verdict on which family owned a plot of land or which son had the rights to a daughter’s hand in marriage; a request to free a relative from jail or to find a job. It was a leadership style followed a generation later by his sons Ahmed Wali in Kandahar and Hamid in the palace. Abdul Ahad’s children remembered that sometimes there would be so many people waiting to see their father that they would spill out of the guesthouse and line up along the walls in the spacious courtyard. If they had come from far-off villages, they would often sleep there, too. “He couldn’t always afford to give them all food, because settling disputes with them would take weeks and months,” his son Qayum said.

  This job required endless patience for listening to complaints and an orientation toward consensus and compromise. Poverty was a fact of life in Kandahar. Most people were peasant farmers whose lives depended on the vicissitudes of drought and harvest. Abdul Ahad, in his tribal rulings, made distinctions, as the rest of the villagers did, between crimes of necessity and those of predation. He allowed flexibility according to the level of need of his tribesmen. “I remember as children, we used to define the difference between good thieves and bad thieves,” Qayum recalled. “There were stories of a good thief who went to rob a bus, and when he saw that the bus would be filled with children, women, older men, he would apologize for trying to steal, and leave. A bad thief, on the other hand, would have stolen from the children and the older men and women. That is a man who has no limits. We used to dance when the bad guy was caught. But we would be sad if the good thief was caught.”

  Karz was a small village—fewer than one thousand people—and the Karzais lived in a home clustered closely with those of several other relatives. The children all remember their youth as idyllic, spending their days outside playing all manner of games: baseball with a ball fashioned from rolled-up cloth, marbles, cards, chess. They played a game called “carrom,” popular in India, that uses a square board and is similar to billiards, and a version of bocce but with stones. They put up a makeshift net on the dining room table to play Ping-Pong. For their barefoot soccer games, they used a tennis ball. In the sweltering Kandahar summers, they would swim in the silty water of the creek that ran through the grape fields near their house. They would often bicycle miles from home for picnics. Each night, between the early evening prayers when the sun was still up, and the late evening prayers when the sun had set, there was an hour of downtime, when the villagers congregated outside to talk about the day’s happenings. The kids were free to run around in the evenings without fear for their safety. The only dangers came at night, when they’d fall asleep to their mother’s warnings to watch out for scorpions.

  “The whole town was like your own house,” Qayum’s sister, Fawzia, recalled. “It was so safe and secure.”

  In those first years, their lifestyle was not lavish. When I asked Qayum what he remembered about his childhood village, the first thing he said was: “I remember a scarcity of food.” He recalled how his father would give him one pair of shoes per year. On his walks to elementary school, he didn’t want to get them dirty, so he would put them in a cloth sack and walk barefoot, then put them back on for class.

  “It was a very humble life,” Qayum said. “But it was peaceful.”

  Abdul Ahad’s first wife, Durkho, was also from a wealthy family in the Popalzai tribe but grew up in Kabul. She was known as a devoutly religious woman, and one with a penetrating intelligence. Hamid has written that his mother fasted often and that he learned from her “a great deal about high moral standards.” Neig
hbors spoke of her generosity: she donated food and cooking oil to other families in Karz. She gave birth to the first five of the Karzai siblings—Abdul Ahmed, Qayum, Mahmood, Fawzia, and Hamid. Several people close to the family remarked on the special bond she had with her youngest.

  “She was with Hamid all the time,” her daughter, Fawzia, recalled. “She really loved Hamid.”

  She would not live to see Hamid move into the presidential palace—she died in 1999 from cancer—but she had predicted that the palace was where he would end up. “Everybody in the family heard her say that he will be the president of Afghanistan,” Fawzia said. “She would tell that to everybody.”

  Shortly after Hamid was born, Abdul Ahad took a second wife, Nazo, the daughter of a farmer from the Babur tribe who lived in the Arghandab Valley, where he served as district chief. Multiple wives were common in Afghanistan then, as they still are. But according to some accounts, Hamid’s mother was against Abdul Ahad marrying Nazo, and it left lasting strains on their relationship even though they never divorced. Hamid was the last child of the first marriage, before his half brothers Ahmed Wali, Shah Wali, and Abdul Wali were born. As author Bette Dam has written, “Abdul Ahad Karzai never really bonded with his son Hamid.”

  Hamid was a bit of an unusual child. He would play games and sports with his siblings, but he was also more bookish and introverted. Where his elder brother Mahmood would be the ringleader of many little adventures and schemes with the neighborhood kids, Hamid had other solitary pursuits. He described himself as “quiet,” usually spending time with a “small circle of friends.” As an older boy, he liked to ride his horse and play guitar. He listened to the radio for news of the world. As Khalid Pashtun, a Kandahari who knew the Karzais in their youth and later became a parliamentarian, described it: “He was not normal, from the very beginning.”

  Ezzat Wasifi, another Kandahari from a rival tribe, believed that Hamid’s aloofness stemmed from a strained relationship with Abdul Ahad, particularly after he married his second wife. Hamid “was kind of downgraded,” Wasifi recalled. “To be ignored, to be not loved and cherished, and to see other kids getting all the love of the father: he was totally discarded.”

  Some believed that Hamid kept himself apart because he was a shy, intelligent child, mature beyond his years. “He never fought with anybody,” Fawzia said. “I think for some reason God gave maturity to young people like that. To prepare them for the future.”

  Political changes in the monarchy sometimes trickled down to the villages. Halfway through King Zahir Shah’s reign, he appointed his cousin Mohammed Daoud as prime minister. Daoud developed a reputation as an economic and social reformer. He cultivated ties with the Soviet Union to attract foreign aid to build factories, airports, and roads, and to modernize the Afghan army with Soviet weapons. He tried to pit the Soviets against the United States to encourage investment from both sides. “I feel the happiest,” he once said, “when I can light my American cigarettes with Soviet matches.”

  While Daoud was not a Communist, the economic ties with the Soviet Union increased to the point that they could even be seen in places such as Karz. One evening, a short man carrying a stick knocked on the Karzais’ door. It was unusual for an outsider to show up, and the man didn’t speak Pashto. He informed Abdul Ahad that the district chief now wanted the village to grow cotton, which would be purchased by the government and exported to the Soviet Union. The family hosted the stranger for dinner, and he left the house before the morning prayer the next day without saying good-bye.

  The villagers were left to work out the details of the plan. The normal family arrangement would be to devote a third of one’s land for grape vineyards, a third to grow wheat for bread, and a third for cash crops, such as tomatoes or eggplants or cucumbers. The Karz villagers debated the mandate for hours in a public gathering. In such settings, the traditional customs prevailed. If one person objected to a decision, the elders would consider the meeting disrupted and continue until there was unanimity. Silence was taken to mean consent. The Karz villagers agreed to devote just one-third of their fields, the cash-crop portion, to cotton. The village malik informed the district chief of the decision, and it was respected. Soviet airplanes soon began touching down at the Kandahar airstrip and loading up bags of cotton.

  The villagers of Karz hewed to more conservative religious customs than did people in the major cities. In the late 1950s, after Prime Minister Daoud moved to relieve women from wearing head scarves, Saleh Mohammed Khan, a cousin of Abdul Ahad Karzai’s, rebelled against the measure. He led a mob from the village into Kandahar City and torched the cinema, which he saw as a symbol of dangerous, un-Islamic ways. Afghan soldiers entered Karz and hauled Khan off to prison for seven years. Four decades earlier, Karz villagers had revolted over a decree from the king ordering women from every province to come sing at the prince’s wedding. The angry villagers went searching for the governor of the district but found an unlucky judge instead. As the story went, they bludgeoned him to death with pumpkins. “People from Karz didn’t want a woman to sing,” one of the elder Karzais told me. “Karz is famous for rebellions.”

  The Karzai family was far less conservative. At home, Abdul Ahad stressed education and achievement with his children. He wanted them to aspire to top jobs in medicine, business, engineering, and politics. He had a tutor come to the house and teach them English from a young age—a man who later got a job in President Karzai’s palace. The boys started school at about age five, but there was no school for girls in Karz, so Abdul Ahad sent Fawzia, his only daughter, to live with one of his brothers in Kabul when she was a little girl. When she was in the third grade, she returned to Kandahar and attended the Zarghuna school for girls.

  Abdul Ahad’s children had greater access to the outside world than most kids in Kandahar. Afghanistan was a popular destination in the 1960s and 1970s, a famous route on the hash-smoking “hippie trail.” American and European travelers would hitchhike through Kandahar, and Abdul Ahad would rent them rooms. American Peace Corps volunteers taught at their boys’ middle school and showed them how to play basketball. Sometimes there would be copies of American magazines, and they remember listening to the radio in stunned silence when the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination was broadcast. Abdul Ahad was also more cosmopolitan than other Afghan leaders. He wore dark suits and bow ties and drove his Land Rover or green Mercedes around Kandahar. “He was a modern leader,” his nephew Hashim said. “He was not a guy with a big turban.”

  King Zahir Shah ended his cousin Daoud’s tenure as prime minister in 1963, after a decade, and began experimenting with democracy. He had a committee draft a new constitution, and he established a new parliament. Abdul Ahad was chosen as a member of that first congress to represent Kandahar, a position that was still somewhat ceremonial. Even though it generated spirited debates, the legislature did not allow political parties, and the royal family still held all meaningful control. The next term, Abdul Ahad was chosen as deputy speaker. To fulfill his parliamentary duties, he moved his family back to Kabul. The Karzais lived in a spacious house downtown, with a modern kitchen and a stone fireplace. There were fishponds and gardens with enough room that Hamid could ride his horse inside the walls.

  In 1973, while the king was traveling in Italy, Daoud staged a coup d’état against his cousin and captured the palace. To avoid civil unrest, the king stepped down from the throne. Daoud abolished the monarchy and created the Republic of Afghanistan. His five-year rule was marked by increased repression, rising Communist sympathies, and deteriorating relations with the Soviet Union.

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  On the morning of April 27, 1978, while Hamid Karzai was back in Kabul on a break from school, the 4th Tank Brigade of the Afghan army rumbled up to the Arg palace. The shooting started at noon while President Daoud was hosting a cabinet meeting to discuss the arrests he’d ordered against leading Communist agitators. Hamid was visiting a friend in a house near the palace when the tank
s laid siege, and he could hear the blasts of artillery shells rattling the windows. At 7:05 p.m., the music on Radio Afghanistan stopped, and air force colonel Abdul Qadir Dagarwal, speaking on behalf of the military revolutionary command of the Afghan military forces, announced that “for the first time in the history of Afghanistan an end has been put to the sultanate of the Mohammadzais.” The Mohammadzai were a Pashtun tribe who had been a part of the dynastic rule of Afghanistan for the previous 230 years. The nation’s new Communist leader and the chairman of its revolutionary council was Nur Mohammad Taraki, a sixty-one-year-old son of a shepherd.

  As the battle intensified throughout the night, pilots loyal to the rebels flew bombing runs out of Bagram Airfield that strafed the palace. Tank rounds crashed into the French embassy nearby and destroyed the consular building. Before dawn, the last of the presidential guard had surrendered to the Marxists. Two dozen members of Daoud’s family gathered unarmed in the ground-floor living room. Daoud, holding a pistol, confronted his overthrowers in a marble hallway of the building where Hamid Karzai would take office twenty-three years later. “It is said that he was holding the Afghan flag as he faced them,” Hamid Karzai would recount later. Daoud was gunned down, along with most of his family, and dumped in a ditch.

  The Communist takeover—known as the Saur Revolution, for the month of the Afghan calendar when the coup took place—“laid the foundation for the devastation of Afghanistan,” as Hamid Karzai later put it, and also marked the moment of great fracture for the Karzai family. The Soviet invasion would come the following year and suck the United States into one of the defining Cold War battlegrounds, leading to the deaths and forced displacement of millions of Afghans. Prominent political allies of the former king, such as the Karzais, were now seen as enemies of the state. The new government also saw Abdul Ahad as a threat because it did not want him to rally opposition through his Popalzai tribal network in Kandahar.