A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  The day after the coup, Abdul Ahad’s eldest son, Abdul Ahmed, an engineer who was working at the Ministry of Mines, was told he should go home and not come back. A few months later, while driving through town, Hafizullah Amin, then the Communist leader of the country, saw Abdul Ahad walking along the sidewalk in Kabul. Amin’s car stopped. He got out, grasped Abdul Ahad’s hand, and greeted him warmly. But two days later, intelligence agents pulled up in a military jeep at the family’s home. Abdul Ahad’s daughter, Fawzia, was home, with her baby daughter, Minna. “We were scared,” she recalled. “We were under so much pressure.” Fawzia remembers that the spies were respectful as they escorted her father away. We just want to ask you some questions. You should come with us. We will bring you home soon.

  Abdul Ahad Karzai was taken to Pul-e-Charkhi prison, on the eastern outskirts of Kabul. From the air, Pul-e-Charkhi is shaped like a wagon wheel. Built by the Germans from a Czech design, the prison has a circular perimeter with eight rows of cell blocks arrayed like spokes. The roofs, covered with copper sheeting, “glowed in the evening,” according to one British writer, “with a bloody colour.” The guards put Abdul Ahad on the second floor of Block 3, along with many other political prisoners from a cross section of the opposition. There were former senior officials of the monarchy who still supported the king; Muslim clerics and scholars who felt that left-wing propaganda undercut Islamic values; Communist opponents from rival factions; and parliament members, cabinet ministers, governors, and military officers of the former regime. All were thrust into captivity together.

  Abdul Ahad’s younger brother Khalil, who had been arrested in Karz, ended up in the same part of Pul-e-Charkhi. The prison, which was still under construction, had been designed to hold five thousand people. But during the time of the Karzais’ imprisonment, the American embassy estimated that it held between twelve and fifteen thousand. The prisoners were crammed into cells by the dozens or hundreds; many were forced to sleep in the corridors or take turns lying down. The place stank from the shortage of toilets. Fleas and lice and other vermin ran wild. Some of the higher-level inmates lived in solitary confinement or with small groups. Abdul Ahad had two cellmates; Khalil lived with others down the hall.

  Pul-e-Charkhi’s commander, Sayed Abdullah, was known for brutality and sadism. He enjoyed flaunting his lists of prisoners to be tortured and killed. From their cells, the Karzais could listen to the firing squads dispatching new victims each night. Khalil would later tell his children about the nightly roundups, how the guards would choose prisoners, bind their hands, and lead them away to be shot inside the prison, then bulldozed into a pit grave. The American embassy, under chargé d’affaires J. Bruce Amstutz, complained to Taraki’s government about the deplorable conditions at Pul-e-Charkhi. “At a minimum, 3,000 political prisoners had been killed since last September,” Amstutz wrote in a June 25, 1979, cable. “Not a week passed but we did not learn of further political arrests. And I surmised that few households existed in Kabul that did not have a relative or friend who had been purged from his job, imprisoned or executed.”

  When Taraki’s short reign ended, less than three months after the cable was written, the subsequent government began publishing lists of some twelve thousand names of prisoners purportedly killed in Kabul jails. An Amnesty International delegation found that in addition to the murders and disappearances, torture had been systematically practiced in the prisons, and its interviews confirmed “frequent use of electric shocks, prolonged beatings, pulling out of fingernails, burning of the skin, threatened executions and sleep deprivation.” The most common torture device of the period was known as the “telephone.” It was a small square machine about the size of a phone, with wires that attached to a prisoner’s armpits or ears or toes or penis or tongue. The torturers doused their victims in water and pulled or cranked a handle to inflict the electric shock.

  The prisoners endured smaller daily deprivations. The guards ordered them not to discuss politics. Inmates could not listen to radios, read newspapers, or write letters. One poet locked up in the prison convinced a guard to dismantle a pen and slip the inner ink tube to him inside a chunk of black bread. He wrote his poems under a blanket on scraps of cement bags.

  The two Karzai brothers approached these restrictions in different ways. Abdul Ahad tried not to anger his captors and wanted to serve his time quietly. “He was trying to keep himself safe,” one of his fellow inmates recalled. But Khalil was brash and bold and seemed to enjoy provoking the guards. The two had become Popalzai tribal leaders and had grown up together in Kandahar, but they struck their friends and relatives as a study in contrasts (they were half brothers, born to different mothers). Khalil was as bombastic and impulsive as Abdul Ahad was quiet and shrewd. Abdul Ahad was the distinguished politician who favored tailored suits, while Khalil wore a flamboyant Taj Mahal–brand black turban and Italian loafers. When Abdul Ahad moved to Kabul to join the parliament, Khalil stayed in Kandahar and took over some of his problem-solving duties for the tribe. Khalil had been the fifth of seven children of Khair Mohammad’s fourth wife. He had left school as a teen and joined the military. In his tribal role, he had a macho swagger and a reputation as a ruthless enforcer, armed with his ever-present Kalashnikov. Noor ul-Haq Olomi, an Army general and corps commander in Kandahar during the 1980s and 1990s, described Khalil as a “bully” and an “outlaw” who jumped at any chance to fight. A fellow inmate of Khalil’s in Pul-e-Charkhi, Sulaiman Laiq, said that Khalil reminded him of “an American cowboy.”

  Staying alive in Pul-e-Charkhi took some luck and connections. Before Abdul Ahad’s imprisonment, he had befriended a security guard who worked on his street. Each day as he was driven home for lunch from the parliament, he would pass the small security guard shack, and he got in the habit of instructing his driver to drop off food for the guard. When he found himself in Pul-e-Charkhi, he discovered that the same guard had moved on to prison duty and was stationed in his block. “It was unbelievable,” Fawzia recalled. “The guard told him, ‘Anything you want, I can bring it to you.’ ” Twice a week, the guard visited their home, and Fawzia would prepare his favorite dishes: khajoor, a deep-fried, sugary oval-shaped pastry, and rote, a circular, slightly sweet bread. She stuffed packages with grapes, pineapples, and cheeses. Through the friendly guard, Abdul Ahad asked for mementos from his family. One day he requested photos of his youngest son, Abdul Wali, and of his two-year-old granddaughter, Minna, to keep in his cell. When the photos were discovered, Fawzia remembered, he was beaten.

  Khalil flouted the rules with more gusto. The other inmates marveled that he always seemed to have money and new clothes. He smuggled a radio into his cell and even carried around a large knife. The guards routinely beat and tortured Khalil for his transgressions. On one occasion, a prison guard hammered a nail into his foot. On another, a guard used the butt of his AK-47 to smash out four of Khalil’s bottom front teeth. “He never gave in,” one of his brothers recalled.

  The punishments emboldened Khalil, and with each new provocation he mounted, his legend for bravery and generosity grew. Abdul Ahad was a fastidious man, and the prison’s filthy conditions made him miserable. Khalil earned another beating by arranging to find water so his brother could bathe. Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, a prominent politician who was imprisoned at the same time, befriended Khalil after he stood up for Mojaddedi’s female relatives in the jail. One day in the prison yard, an inmate taunted Sulaiman Laiq about his position in the former regime. Laiq had been a minister overseeing radio, television, and film, and a member of the revolutionary council. The argument intensified and was heading toward a fight until Khalil showed up and whipped his knife from his belt. “He showed it to the man bothering me and warned him that if he touched me again he would kill him,” Laiq recalled.

  One of Khalil’s brothers recounted an exchange he’d heard about between Khalil and the prison commander, Sayed Abdullah. The commander said hello to Khalil as he passed him in the prison o
ne day. Khalil ignored the greeting.

  “Why didn’t you greet me?” Abdullah wanted to know.

  “I’m an ordinary prisoner. Why do you need my greeting?”

  “You know what this is?” Abdullah asked, pointing at his holster. “You’re a man of the gun. How many people do I kill each night?”

  “I don’t know. But I hear the sounds.”

  “Your death to me is like the death of a bird,” Abdullah said.

  “If Allah has not made his decision,” Khalil said, “then you cannot kill me.”

  Outside the prison walls, the tumult of Afghan politics was churning through leaders. After less than a year in office, Taraki was arrested and killed, suffocated by pillows. His successor, Hafizullah Amin, was himself killed when the Soviets laid siege to his palace. The Soviet-installed leader Babrak Karmal issued a decree freeing most of the political prisoners. Sulaiman Laiq got released before Khalil. On the day he left, Khalil called out to him from a prison window. “You are leaving us here alone,” Khalil shouted with a grin. Laiq told him he would be out soon, too. After eighteen months in one of the world’s most notorious prisons, the Karzais were set free.

  For Hamid Karzai, his father’s imprisonment, and the subsequent Soviet invasion, changed his own life plans. Throughout his childhood, Hamid had chafed at some of the restrictions of being the son of such a prominent figure, and the stultifying tribal obligations of life in Kandahar. He had wanted to travel the world as a diplomat. But he began to feel his life’s work needed to be closer to home. “I suddenly realized how spoiled I was,” Hamid once told an American journalist about this period. “I realized that I had been consciously rejecting all the things that were really important and now were lost.”

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  Over the next decade, the Soviet war shaped the destinies of many of the Karzais. Hamid and his father lived in exile in Pakistan and worked for a moderate mujahedeen faction fighting the Communists and became prominent on the exile diplomatic circuit, as we’ve seen. Several of his siblings, of course, established their lives and businesses in America. After prison, Khalil Karzai also joined the anti-Soviet resistance, and he used his position as a Popalzai elder to funnel weapons and supplies to rebels in Afghanistan. He lived surrounded by bodyguards and servants in Pishin, Pakistan, a small town not far from the Afghan border city of Spin Boldak. Pishin was close to a sprawling refugee camp called Surkhab, for Afghans who were fleeing the fighting. The treacherous politics of the capital had translated into devastation and violence in rural Afghanistan. Whole villages had been bombarded to rubble.

  Karz was not spared. Within the family, the details of this period blur with the retelling, and little was written down about the events that took place among the mud huts of the small grape-growing village outside of Kandahar. But it’s clear that the Karzai family and extended clan endured their share of tragedy.

  One night rumors raced among the villagers that the Afghan government wanted to conduct a census of Karz. The governor of Kandahar at the time was a man known as Engineer Zareef, a staunch Communist from eastern Afghanistan. The census was part of an attempt to redistribute land to peasant farmers. As the villagers remembered, the landowners would lose 20 percent of their property under the government’s plan. The Karz residents were opposed. They saw the Communists as godless bureaucrats who would only bring them harm. They were also angry about the prospect of the government counting their women. “This was something a lot of people could not accept,” Haji Mohammed Karzai, one of the villagers present at the time, told me.

  “Zareef was talking about which land should be divided and also that the girls should go to school,” another villager remembered. “But the people did not agree. They said no. You are Communists and slaves of Communists. We will not support you and will not agree to your programs.”

  The villagers refused to allow the census takers into their homes. To solve the matter, the local government told men to gather in front of the village school. The governor himself would be coming to speak with them. Engineer Zareef arrived with a convoy of armored vehicles and large German-made buses. More than one thousand people crowded into the school yard. As villagers remember it, Zareef told the crowd that the government didn’t want anything from the women of Karz, that they were also good Muslims. He pointed to one of the old men in the crowd, whose son was a high-ranking Communist. “Look at this person,” Zareef told the villagers. “Does he look like an infidel to you?”

  “Yes, he is an infidel,” one of the village elders shouted. “He is a Communist like you!”

  Zareef ended his attempts at persuasion. He told the Karz villagers that they were enemies of the revolution. He had come to the school with a list of names. The people there remember different numbers—thirty-two, thirty-eight, forty, forty-four—but the outcome was the same. The men, most of them members of the Karzais’ extended family, were rounded up and loaded onto the buses. None of them returned. As the story goes, the men were taken to the governor’s mansion, where the soldiers slaughtered them. “It was brutality,” one relative said. “People were hit by stones, stabbed with bayonets.”

  “The soldiers used shovels and sickles and whatever tools they could find,” recalled another Karzai relative.

  It was said that some of the men were dropped from helicopters into a lake outside the city, and that others were rolled in blankets and then battered with stones. At the end of the killing, the story went, the bloodstained carpets were washed in the rivers of Kandahar until the water ran red. After such massacres, and the Soviet bombardments of the village, Karz emptied out. Those who lived through that period told me that some five hundred people from the village were killed: “elders, women, children, bombardment, rockets.” Ahmadullah, an old grape farmer from the village, said one day as we sipped tea on the floor of his hut, “In that time, they were killing everyone. If they found us sitting here like this, they would just kill all of us. It didn’t matter if you were involved in a crime or an incident.”

  “One day, when the Russians were here, the mujahedeen attacked, and we destroyed two of their tanks,” another villager, Noor ul Haq, remembered. “They started killing everything, even the animals that were in their way. There were many people around that day, and the only people who survived were the ones who hid themselves in their gardens.”

  One day I took a tour of Karz with an old man who had been a servant of the president’s as a child and had witnessed the destruction of his hometown. “The entire village left,” he told me. He pointed at some decrepit mud structures. “These were the only two houses which are still standing from the old days; the rest of the neighborhood was destroyed. What you see has been rebuilt.”

  According to lore, on the day of Engineer Zareef’s visit, one young man watched the others being loaded onto the buses. He called out to the soldiers. “He said, ‘You are taking all these people. How will I go to my wife and what will I tell her? That all my fathers and brothers and family are gone?’ ” one Karzai recounted. “He said, ‘I could never show my face to my wife or family when all these elders have been taken, and I’m still here.’ So even though he wasn’t on the list, he went along with them. And he never came back. That’s the kind of village we lived in.”

  Among those who fled from Karz was a man named Yar Mohammed Karzai. Yar Mohammed was a cousin of Abdul Ahad and Khalil’s, but he’d achieved none of their prominence. He’d attended school for only a few years before quitting to work in the fields. He was a wiry man with close-set eyes, a sunken chest, and a thick mustache. In old photos, he can be seen wearing a worn blazer and a boxy calfskin hat as he stands in knee-high grass or hikes across scrubland carrying a goat. As a twenty-two-year-old, Yar Mohammed was arrested for robbing a bus, and he spent a decade in a Kandahari jail. After he got out, he left Afghanistan with everyone else and ended up in the Surkhab refugee camp. While living there, Yar Mohammed would often see his cousin Khalil, who helped him out with money and food. Khalil had pick
ed up his tribal duties again while living in Pakistan. He thrived on these interactions with his followers. “Among all the brothers, Khalil was the most sociable,” one of the Popalzai elders said. “He liked tribal politics and tribal relations.” When Yar Mohammed had another run-in with the law in Pakistan, Khalil found him a lawyer and helped spring him from jail. “They were close cousins,” one of Khalil’s sons recalled. “They were sitting every day together.”

  Yar Mohammed’s status as a single man in his early thirties caused him considerable shame. Afghans marry early—sometimes as children—and often the marriages are arranged within their families or tribes. The weddings themselves are lavish and expensive. At night, the city of Kabul is lit with the neon glow of wedding halls. The groom or his family often have to save for months or years to pay for the wedding, an event that can attract more than a thousand guests.

  Yar Mohammed had been promised the hand of one of his young cousins. His father and Hamid Karzai’s grandfather had arranged for their daughters to marry each other’s sons, a common occurrence among Pashtun families. Some of those marriages came to pass, but his prison term and the outbreak of the Soviet war had disrupted his own. His bride-to-be, Rahima Karzai, had left Kandahar for Kabul, attended school, become a teacher, and married a fellow teacher, Mohammed Naeem. They’d moved to the United States and settled down in the Maryland suburbs. For Rahima, Yar Mohammed was a path not taken. “She was an educated woman. Yar Mohammed was in jail for killing someone else,” one of her nephews told me. “She said, ‘I can’t wait for him for the rest of my life.’ ”