A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  Karzai never publicly retracted his statements, but he stepped back from the brink, and he let his spokesmen announce vague assurances that things were still okay with the Americans. By that time, relations with the palace, one senior American official told me, “were already in a death spiral.” I could tell how bleak things had gotten when Karzai’s chief of staff e-mailed me the day Karzai’s interview was published. “Dear joshuan [sic],” he wrote. “Read the story. You have done very well. ISAF is not happy.”

  Petraeus was frustrated with Karzai’s behavior. But he also felt that the palace made many of its decisions based on bad information about what was happening on the battlefield. Karzai carried his own unencrypted cell phone, and he would take calls from around the country. ISAF generals believed that Karzai’s ears were poisoned with incessant rumor and unverified gossip, often at their expense. To improve communications, ISAF tried one thing after another. After reports of civilian casualties, ISAF officers would type up their version of events into PowerPoint presentations they called “storyboards” and rush copies over to the palace for Karzai’s perusal. They devised a crisis hotline, so that they could reach Karzai at any moment and try to get the facts to him before he heard rumors from elsewhere. They gave one of the deputy national security advisers, Shaida Mohammad Abdali, a special “red phone” that ISAF could call in an emergency. But the few times they dialed the number, Abdali never picked up.

  Petraeus wanted more ISAF eyes and ears in the palace, besides Kotkin and Bruha. So he decided to create a new office, akin to the White House Situation Room, modeled on an organization he had established in Iraq. It would operate inside the palace, staffed with American military officers and Afghan liaisons from the Army, police force, and intelligence service. The Presidential Information Coordination Center (PICC) would be staffed around the clock, taking reports of breaking news from across the country, meshing them with ISAF’s version of events, and presenting the information to Karzai every morning in a daily briefing. The model was tested during the parliamentary elections that September, and Karzai liked the real-time information flowing into the palace. Petraeus told Captain Ed Zellem, a fluent Dari speaker who had been serving as the senior intelligence officer at the Afghan National Police Coordination Center in Kabul, that he would be in charge of the new operation. Petraeus gave him one piece of advice before he started: “Don’t get kicked out.”

  Zellem embraced the work. He had an unusual fondness for Afghan culture. He discovered Afghan proverbs and began to collect them (he would later publish a book of 151 of them with a grant from the U.S. embassy). He saw his responsibilities as a link between two foreign cultures that rarely understood each other and often suspected the worst. When ISAF security officials suggested that the PICC should have barriers separating the Afghans from the Americans, Zellem flatly refused, to avoid insulting his hosts. When a group of visiting tribesmen spotted Zellem’s deputy walking across a courtyard and informed Karzai of their displeasure about foreign spies inside the palace, Zellem and his American colleagues decided to lower their profile as much as possible. They traded in their camouflaged fatigues for suits. They drove to work in an unarmored Land Cruiser. They carried no weapons and wore no body armor, even though the frequency of Afghans killing their American counterparts was picking up. Under the guise of computer technicians, Zellem brought in a Special Forces team to do a security assessment of the office. If his staff needed to be rescued, Zellem was told, the Americans would have to kill so many Afghans that it would probably not be worth trying. In case of trouble, he should just lock the door. Zellem tried not to dwell on those risks. Da qismat leek na noregey, the proverb says. “What is written in fate cannot be changed.”

  The PICC was located in an office under a stone watchtower near a palace soccer field. The staff grew to seven Americans and twenty-six Afghans. The Americans installed flat-screen televisions and computers that operated on the classified NATO network. Since the power would regularly go out in the palace, Zellem had a giant backup battery installed to keep the office lights on twenty-four/seven. Every day at seven-thirty a.m., during Petraeus’s morning “stand-up” briefing, Zellem would be beamed in by videoconference from the palace to give his daily update. Since Afghanistan doesn’t have a navy, or navy captains, the Afghans in the situation room addressed Zellem by his equivalent Army rank. In Dari, zaalem means “merciless.” So to them, Captain Zellem was Colonel Merciless.

  One of his basic goals was to teach the Afghans how to verify the reports they were getting from the field. If a low-level police officer in a far-off province called to say that fifty civilians had been killed in a bombing, that should not go directly into a report for President Karzai. They should get names, ages, hometowns. He wanted his Afghan officers to learn Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, and he brought in a tutor for English classes. He felt that if Karzai’s palace had access to the best information possible about American military conduct, the relationship would improve.

  Even so, he was regularly reminded about how difficult it would be to dispel Afghan notions about American soldiers. One weekend, an Afghan army colonel who worked at the PICC went home to visit family near Bagram Airfield. He told them about his job with the Americans in the palace. The colonel’s relatives had seen Americans leave Bagram: suited in armor, draped in weapons, scowling. It must be terrible to work with them every day, they said to the colonel. How often do the Americans beat you? they wanted to know.

  Zellem chose an Afghan proverb for the PICC’s motto: “Aaftab ba doo angusht pen han na mey shawad”: “The sun cannot be hidden behind two fingers.” The truth will out.

  —

  On the night of February 17, 2011, American Apache attack helicopters and F-15 fighter jets made bombing runs over the forested mountain valleys of the Ghaziabad district in Kunar Province, the remote eastern borderlands where fact and fiction were always in fluid interplay. The provincial governor announced that the Americans had caused “tremendous civilian casualties,” slaughtering sixty-five innocent villagers, men, women, and children. That number, if true, would have made it one of the deadliest civilian tolls from one attack in the war. President Karzai immediately condemned the attack and dispatched an Afghan fact-finding team to the site of the violence. ISAF could count on him to provoke further confrontation. The situation became known as “the Kunar 65.”

  Civilian casualties were fraying the last shreds of mutual respect between the two sides. But these had been Karzai’s longest-running complaints, even when he was an eager participant in all of America’s new plans and programs. Karzai’s comments caused intense discomfort at ISAF headquarters, but his position was remarkably consistent and, in many ways, a legitimate reflection of the common sentiment in Afghanistan, one that the American leadership often minimized or ignored. In May 2006, Karzai had written an eight-page letter to President Bush warning about the growing strength of the Taliban and the harmful mistakes of American troops. “We may have won the war, but we might risk losing the peace unless we review our strategy at this juncture, and take corrective measures where necessary,” Karzai noted, asking that “avoidable mistakes should not be repeated.

  “Heavy aerial bombings and other practices that are perceived heavy-handed by the population have contributed to the misperception that US forces are distrustful of the Afghans, and worse still that the US do not value the lives of common Afghan people,” Karzai wrote to Bush. “Mr. President, I fear we have not only failed to harness the goodwill of the Afghan people, we are facing a certain possibility of losing it altogether.”

  Zellem and his team at the PICC worked overnight to collect as much information as they could about the bombings in Kunar to share with the palace. His initial assumption was that the Afghan account must be exaggerated. ISAF learned from the soldiers in Kunar that no civilians were killed; nor were their homes attacked. Petraeus’s chief spokesman, Rear Admiral Gregory J. Smith, said that Apache helicopters, using rockets, Hellfire missiles
, and 30mm Gatling-type guns, had targeted Taliban insurgents. Surveillance drones hovering overhead had videotaped the air strikes, he noted. “I have reviewed the footage and found no evidence women and children were among the fighters,” he said. ISAF had intercepted phone calls, he added, between insurgents discussing how they might pressure the Americans to stop bombing by reporting fictitious harm to civilians. But an Afghan investigator who went to the scene documented a far different, and more visceral, story. He reported seeing twenty-seven graves, women’s and children’s garments, quilts and blankets, dried blood. He described how terrified villagers ran from the sound of helicopters to hide in an old Soviet-era trench, which collapsed under the bombing, burying those below.

  Zellem was sure that the Afghan reports were a fiction. He had seen the aircraft gun-camera footage. The video showed what appeared to be armed Afghans moving in small teams down the mountainside. He and the rest of Petraeus’s team were convinced that the men killed in this operation were legitimate military targets. But the reports of dozens of dead women and kids? “No way,” a member of the PICC said. “This never happened. We knew it wasn’t true.”

  Three days after the violence, Petraeus went to the palace for a meeting of the National Security Council, as was his Sunday routine. The next morning, I received an unusual e-mail from a senior aide to President Karzai, a man who was not normally proactive about contacting reporters. “This is anonymous,” it began. “In the National Security Council of yesterday, PK asked Gen. P. about alleged civilian casualties in Kunar. The honorable General furnished the meeting with a very interesting explanation. He claimed that in the midst of the ops some pro-Taleban parents in contact with a government official decided to create a civilian casualty claim to pressure international forces to cease the op. They burned hands and legs of some of their children and sent them to hospital. Ha ha ha. Most interesting explanation i have ever heard.”

  The story I cobbled together, after talking to other Afghan officials who attended the meeting, was that Petraeus had suggested that it was a customary Afghan form of punishment in this part of the country for parents to discipline their children by dipping their feet in boiling water, and that these wounds might explain what the Afghan investigators had been reporting when they’d talked about casualties among children. I’d come to know many of the Afghan officials in the palace pretty well. As they discussed Petraeus’s comments in this meeting, I’d never heard them so angry. “I was dizzy. My head was spinning,” one of them told me. “This was shocking. Would any father do this to his children? This is really absurd.”

  “Killing sixty people, and then blaming the killing on those same people, rather than apologizing for any deaths? This is inhuman,” said a third Afghan who was there. “This is a really terrible situation.”

  I was told later that President Karzai didn’t react immediately to Petraeus’s comments. At the end of the meeting, however, he walked back into his office and turned to his spokesman, Waheed Omar.

  “Did you hear what Petraeus said?” Karzai asked.

  “Yes. Which part, sir?”

  “He said that children are burned in boiling water as discipline in Afghanistan,” Karzai said.

  “Yes sir. I heard that.”

  When I later asked President Karzai about this meeting, he told me he remembered Petraeus’s comments “very vividly.”

  “Very unfortunate for America to have officials like that,” he said.

  In Karzai’s account, the Afghans confronted Petraeus with evidence that American forces had killed innocent civilians. “He said, ‘Well, it’s not us. It’s those parents, mothers and fathers themselves, who burned their children in order to blame us, the Americans,’ ” Karzai said.

  “You know what this means?” Karzai told me, getting worked up. “That the Afghan people hate America so much, that in order to blame America, they burn their own children. So if it is true, it’s even worse than the U.S. having bombed. Because it shows the immense anger in the Afghan people. To get rid of the United States, they burn their own children. But perhaps he didn’t think of this.”

  The U.S. military’s public relations machine dug in its heels. Admiral Greg Smith said the U.S. military “did have initial reports that the feet and hands of the children appeared to have been burned. We have observed increased reporting of children being disciplined by having their hands and feet dipped into boiling water. No one is claiming this is the case in this instance, but it may well be.” Waheed Omar responded by calling Smith’s comments “outrageous, insulting, and racist.”

  Because of mistranslation, cultural misinformation, or just clumsy delivery, the story had now become not about whether sixty-five civilians had died in Kunar, but about whether Afghans like to boil their own children. The offense taken by the palace seemed to overwhelm any desire to come to a mutual agreement on the facts in Kunar.

  Even if the Americans could prove they’d acted correctly, they could not dwell on these victories, because sooner or later another tragedy would occur. Just two weeks after the Kunar 65 incident, American helicopters killed nine young Afghan boys, between the ages of nine and fifteen, who were gathering firewood near a military base in the same province. There was no denying this one, and Petraeus issued a contrite apology. President Karzai, on a subsequent trip to Kunar, made an impassioned speech calling for an end to the combat. “With great honor and with great respect, and humbly rather than with arrogance,” Karzai told the crowd, “I request that NATO and America should stop these operations on our soil.”

  —

  Kotkin and Bruha were feeling ever less useful in their jobs. Their purported bosses in the National Security Council clearly didn’t want them around. They took on menial tasks to fill the time. Bruha taught rudimentary English to some of the palace staff. He helped set up the NSC library from books donated by the U.S. Air Force. The officers did not feel gainfully employed. The palace staff used their American mentors for personal favors or as messengers to pass on complaints. One time when Vice President Biden was in the country and moving about, the sound of his hovering helicopter bothered President Karzai. The president’s aides demanded that Captain Zellem quiet the clatter. If a palace staffer wanted a scholarship to study abroad or help getting a relative a job at ISAF or a visa to the United States, they would pester Bruha or Kotkin.

  Once, Zellem received an emergency call about trouble with “the treasure.” President Karzai’s son, Mirwais, had appendicitis, the caller said, and needed to see a Western doctor. “The treasure has to get to the ISAF hospital,” one of Karzai’s aides told Zellem. The hastily arranged convoy of palace staffers, bodyguards, and Karzai’s wife and mewling son raced across town to the French-run military hospital near the Kabul airport. Zellem and the others waited outside the operating room in a tense cluster to hear the diagnosis. “Well, sounds like Mirwais probably ate too many cookies,” the doctor said when he’d finished the checkup. “He had a stomachache. He’s fine.” The Afghans had a boiled-down proverb for such occasions: Tu ba ma. Ma ba tu. “You do for me. I will do for you.” These little quid pro quos were about all the allies had left.

  Kotkin and Bruha started writing up their complaints about the NSC, and their role within it. They recommended that the American and British governments stop all salary top-ups to NSC staffers, who were earning a few hundred to several thousand dollars a month on top of their government salaries from NATO, depending on their rank. Those salary payments, not to mention the ranks of palace staffers on intelligence agency payrolls, added to President Karzai’s conviction that his staff members didn’t work for him but were beholden to other agendas. Plus, the money didn’t seem to be helping. “None of the work we have ever been associated with in the ONSC has ever been followed through to completion (or even accepted as a viable and actionable effort),” Kotkin noted.

  “We have no definable job, we serve no purpose in support of the campaign plan, we have no actionable guidance from which to proce
ed,” he added. “There is simply nothing to occupy 95% of any day at the Palace.”

  By the first week of February, their NSC colleague Daud Yaar had decamped for a new job at the Foreign Ministry. That month Bruha wrote up a letter for a Navy captain who ran the Afghan Hands program in Kabul, outlining his frustrations in the palace. He described the work helping to write the transition plan and serving as a conduit for information between ISAF and the palace, especially on civilian casualty cases, which laid the foundation for establishing the PICC, and he explained how their responsibilities had steadily diminished. Bruha concluded that “we have to accept that we cannot force the Afghans to conduct business the way we think they should—it is their country and their government, and we have to work within their system and what they are content with.”

  Bruha had decided that he could stand no more and confronted his Australian boss, Ash Power, with an ultimatum. Take him out of the palace and reassign him, Bruha told his superior, or send him home. “He wasn’t particularly happy,” Bruha said. “But the bottom line was, I was very frustrated. If the Afghans don’t want us there, there’s nothing more that I can do. I want to feel like I’m making a difference in Afghanistan, and right now I’m not.”

  The attempt to mimic the White House in the palace of the Afghan ruler never worked. The graft wouldn’t take.

  11

  WHERE EVERYONE GETS ACCUSED

  THE NEW CHIEF EXECUTIVE of Afghanistan’s largest and most important bank arrived for his first day at three p.m. on August 31, 2010, the day after the Central Bank forced out its chairman and chief executive. He arrived alone. He walked through the main lobby, past the row of glassed-in booths with young Afghan tellers—dark suits for boys; head scarves for women—past the Western Union window, and up the stairs to the plush executive suites. He was introduced in a conference room, then shown to an office—not the chief executive’s, as he’d expected, with its dark wood-paneled walls, leather chairs, and soft blue recessed ceiling lights, but the deputy’s desk. Still, he felt surprisingly little hostility. He received the customary warm Afghan greeting for a new boss. The staff surrounded his chair, clapped, and presented him with flowers. A thought crossed his mind: This might not be so bad.