A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  The cabinet dithered. One man suggested that the government could stop giving land to people who already owned multiple homes. Another said he’d heard that only thirteen families had been evicted, so what was the problem? Mohammad Mohaqiq, a cold-eyed jihadi commander and the leader of the Hazara ethnic group, said he’d been given twelve hundred square meters (less than a third of an acre) but it would be a public “disgrace” if he was forced to return it. “If we give the land back, it would mean we’ve committed a crime,” another added. The education minister, Yunus Qanooni, considered the whole issue a “political conspiracy” hatched by the human rights commission to defame the government. “They have given me a plot of land in Sherpur, too. We all got it,” he told Karzai. “Your cabinet is not a toy that the human rights commission can play with. I think the accusers should be punished.”

  When it was Fahim’s turn to talk, he calmly addressed Karzai. He acknowledged that Sherpur had been Defense Ministry land but added that according to the city’s master plan, it was zoned for residential housing. “I admit that I gave all the orders but it is also true that nobody got more than one piece of land. If the distribution of this land raises any questions, in my defense I can say that many of the houses around the presidential palace are also owned by a few limited families.

  “If we give the land back,” Fahim went on, “after we have already demolished people’s homes, I don’t think this would have good consequences for us. It would be an insult to ask a commander or a cabinet minister to give the land back. We should take people’s dignity into consideration.”

  Karzai was fuming. He looked around the room. “When Fahim Khan came to my office six months ago and brought me this proposal, I warned him not to do it, and today we have to deal with the consequences.”

  The mayor of Kabul started to say something, but Karzai cut him off.

  “Be quiet!” Karzai exploded. “This is a government of thieves! You are giving Afghanistan to a few warlords, and then you try to justify it. I am the one who should be blamed because I am always easy on you. You have come to Kabul only to loot. People’s lands have been stolen. You have demolished their homes….Everybody is using force against poor people. We are talking as if we are an honest and just government, but we are not an honest and just government….Either you are deceiving yourselves or you are trying to deceive the world.

  “I will issue a decree today and ban the distribution of land,” he continued. “No minister and no deputy has the right to get a single plot of land. No police chief, no commander, can demolish people’s homes. People are sick of our two-faced government’s treason and deception. We are a disgrace to the national interests. We are traitors to our people. We never tried to help them. We never freed them from oppression. Nobody listens to the cry of the poor, the helpless, the have-nots, no matter how loud they cry. This is the government of a few warlords, of the rich and powerful. One cannot see justice and bravery in this government. It is treason, treason, treason!

  “We only think about ourselves; we don’t think about the people. This government needs to change. If it is a coalition government, it should be broken up. All you do is try to cover up every wrongdoing and crime. The people’s cry has reached the sky. The behavior that caused the emergence of the Taliban has come back into our lives.”

  During his tirade, Karzai slammed his hand down on the wooden table so hard that he injured his wrist.

  Was he sincere? Those who knew him best believed he was. Karzai took it as a personal betrayal when he discovered that close aides or associates had taken land in Sherpur. But very little came of his anguish. The Kabul police commander in charge of the evictions, Abdul Basir Salangi, was removed from his post, although he would later get promoted to governor. No one lost his land. And no one touched Fahim. Even Karzai would eventually make jokes to his aides about who got houses. “Sherpur was the first big symbol of corruption,” Jawad said. “People would be bitter at me: ‘Why are you pushing on this, the president doesn’t care.’ I said, ‘The president does care, this is stealing.’ But the president ultimately looked the other way, or he’d joke with them: ‘Oh, did you get one plot? Or two plots?’ I was so disappointed to see that.”

  In later years, Sherpur would become the glittering symbol of wartime greed and nouveau riche bad taste. The mansions built there one-upped each other in gaudy splendor. There were colonnaded layer cakes of shimmering mirrored glass and marble, zigzagged funhouses with cruise-ship prows and wavy balustrades, rooftops crowned with eagles and fountains. Everyone just assumed the money was ill-gotten; the design of these “poppy palaces” was termed “narcotecture.” One had forty-seven bedrooms and rented for $47,000 a month. Another had a poolside crow-shaped machine that enveloped swimmers in its metallic wings and blew them dry with hot air. It was a neighborhood for warlords and private security companies and American television networks. Inside, the rooms felt drafty and cold, all thin walls and marble. Nomads slung up tents in the vacant lots between them. All of it smelled of sewage.

  The lesson seemed to be that even if President Karzai worried about the moral, or religious, or reputational damage that a corrupt government could cause him, those concerns were always subservient to other priorities. Karzai’s ultimate goal was to hold in balance his government’s fragile ethnic coalition. The militia commanders and regional warlords—and his vice president—had artillery and tanks. He would rather have these men enrich themselves on government—or, more specifically, American government—funds than launch rockets at one another. Another dynamic was that Karzai tended to see the problem as imported. He felt the worst corruption came from American defense contractors or private security companies or expat Afghans, like his brothers, who had a taste for U.S.-style consumerism and had returned to Afghanistan not to help people but to get rich. Karzai would tell Eikenberry that corruption was caused not by “real” Afghans but by the Americanized ones. “The problem is with foreign relatives,” he said.

  The Americans considered Karzai the master of looking the other way. But he saw himself as less naïve about the type of government this impoverished, violent, undereducated, opium-producing nation could, in the short-term, create. “In public administration, the first principle is that an administration is as good as the people in it,” Karzai told me in one of our conversations. “Our administration is as good as we are. That means, our level of education, our level of institutional depth, our level of practice, our level of laws, the workability of laws, and the whole environment that we live in. So you can’t detach an administration from the personnel of it. So our ability is commensurate with our education, and our experience. And that’s very low.”

  What American officials tended to forget was that Karzai had sat through waves of emissaries who would come at him arguing with certainty the indisputable, fact-based, essential rightness of whatever policy they had come to present, only to have its opposite argued before him with equal fervor years later. When, in the beginning of the war, he asked for major new highways, he was told that the United States had come to kill the Taliban and did not do nation building—before American officials decided that inundating the country in nation-building money was the only way to defeat those same Taliban. They asked him to sideline dangerous drug-dealing “warlords” while delivering suitcases of cash to the ones of their choosing. They pushed him to drop his vice president, Mohammad Qasim Fahim, from the ticket before the 2004 election, and prodded him to remove appointed governors they disliked. Counterterrorism changed into counterinsurgency only to change back to counterterrorism. “So many messengers,” Karzai once told an American military commander. “What’s the message?”

  “Our whole line on corruption was never really very credible,” Ronald Neumann, the former U.S. ambassador, told me. “To Afghan ears, it was ‘I won’t fire my crooks, but I want you to fire your crooks.’ By the time we really got wound up on corruption, we were also becoming very unclear about where we were going, how long we would sta
y, what we would do. If you’re Karzai, what you’re hearing is ‘I want you to fire people without whom you cannot politically survive, and I know you can’t do that unless I stay around and support you, and I can’t tell you if I’m going to stay around.’ That dialogue is wholly unpersuasive.

  “Karzai has very few tools,” Neumann went on. “His only tool politically is patronage and positions, and if you don’t want him to use that, what is it you want him to do? How do you want him to handle the turmoil of Afghan politics and factional balancing with purity and cleanliness?

  “But then we had the added problem of everything you take to him about corruption…being processed through a filter of ‘What do they really want? Why do they want to weaken me? What is this about?’ Nothing you do on corruption is accepted at face value.”

  Successive American ambassadors and military commanders parried with Karzai over the same questions. Why could he not clean up his government? “It was always a topic,” said General Dan McNeill, the former military commander in Afghanistan. McNeill recalled a conversation with Karzai on the subject. In the fall of 2007, a congressional delegation had visited Kabul, railed against Karzai’s corrupt government, then returned to complain to President Bush. Bush told McNeill to tell Karzai that if he didn’t act on corruption, the money from Congress would dry up.

  “My president has asked me to bring a message,” McNeill remembered telling Karzai when he got to the palace. “Mr. Bush says that you’ve got to show more effort on getting corruption under control. If you can’t, he’s going to have a difficult time keeping these funds coming.”

  Karzai leaned back and considered the question. “General. What’s that thing you have in America? You call it the big something?”

  McNeill didn’t understand.

  “It’s in the northeastern part of your country,” Karzai prompted.

  Boston was almost finished with the most expensive highway project in history, rerouting the main interstate through a tunnel under the city. There had been decades of delays, leaks, cost overruns, and fraud charges, and a woman had been crushed by a falling concrete ceiling panel. Karzai, an avid consumer of news, had read about the project.

  “Oh, you call it the Big Dig,” Karzai said.

  “Mr. Karzai, I understand your message. I’ll take this back to Mr. Bush.”

  “No, no, no, I’m not trying to be obstinate. But I want to make a bet with you. Let’s bet that if we can get all fifty of the major newspapers in each of your fifty capitals in each of your fifty great states, in how many, in the first four pages, we will not find an article on corruption in government.”

  “I will not take that bet, Mr. Karzai.”

  “Okay, then. Well, how about all of your European allies? Let’s go to the major newspapers in each of these European capitals. Let’s look in the first six pages.”

  “Mr. Karzai, I’ve got your message. I will take it.”

  “No, no. Here’s what I want you to tell Mr. Bush. This is not a failed state. This is a destroyed state. And I’m doing the best I can, but this is really hard stuff.”

  McNeill realized that when it came to Karzai, negotiating would take more than sanctimony: “He’s not a witless guy.”

  —

  As the Kabul Bank scandal played out, the relationship between Karzai and Fitrat deteriorated. It was humiliating enough to be denounced in front of the government’s most senior officials. But as Fitrat kept pressing for action, the obstacles got bigger. It was clear that Karzai had little interest in punishing the perpetrators, so Fitrat decided to make his concerns public. In a speech to parliament, Fitrat named names. He talked about Mahmood Karzai and the other shareholders and how they were responsible for the crisis at Kabul Bank. He said they made their decisions together and that they were aware of the criminal activity and had not reported it to the regulators at the Central Bank. Whatever problems the bank faced, Fitrat said, these men should be blamed.

  Whenever Fitrat went to the palace, Karzai’s treatment of him was chilly, almost threatening. At one meeting, Karzai announced to the room that “those who want to make themselves heroes at the behest of foreign embassies are going to have a stick shoved up their ass,” and Fitrat knew that was meant for him. After May 2011, when he wrote to central banks around the world asking them to freeze the accounts of Kabul Bank’s shareholders—because, as he noted, “all of the shareholders are suspected of embezzlement of funds”—he then had to sit in the palace and face the president and all these men and explain his actions.

  He could tell that he’d crossed a line, and he began to worry about his safety. He started preparing for his departure. The governors of South Asian central banks were meeting in Kochi, an Arabian Sea port city in western India, on June 10. Two days before the conference, he booked his travel. Careful not to raise suspicions, he purchased a round-trip ticket. He packed just one suitcase, to suggest a quick visit. The rest of his belongings—books, clothes, furniture—would have to stay in Kabul. He told no one in his office about his plans. Karzai had already warned Fitrat and Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal that they should not leave the country during this period, as the government needed their services.

  On the morning Fitrat booked his tickets, he met Karzai at the palace.

  “Mr. Fitrat, you’re not traveling anywhere, are you?” Karzai asked.

  Fitrat considered whether to lie. Then he reflected that Karzai might have already received intelligence about the trip or could have instructed the airport to report his travel.

  “Mr. President, I will be traveling for a three-day trip to Asia.”

  “No, no,” Karzai responded. “You don’t need to go there.”

  Fitrat smiled. He insisted that the trip was necessary. He had made a commitment. On the third day, he would return to Kabul. His office was already swamped with hundreds of thousands of documents about Kabul Bank that his staff was sorting through. He would not be missed. Karzai agreed. They set a date to meet again: June 22, after Karzai returned from a trip to Kazakhstan.

  “Wonderful,” Fitrat said.

  “Make sure you return very quickly,” Karzai said.

  Fitrat flew to Dubai and on to India for the conference. On the third day, he called the travel agency in Kabul and asked to cancel his return to Kabul. He needed a new ticket: Dubai to Washington. His plane touched down at Dulles International Airport on the morning of June 14. As long as the Karzai government was in power, he would not return.

  —

  With little to show for months of work, morale inside General McMaster’s anti-corruption task force was foundering. His soldiers were referring to themselves as the “Fix the Impossible Task Force” and the “Anti-Gravity Task Force.” They were putting in exhausting hours to please McMaster, trying to match his four hours of sleep, wandering bleary-eyed to their bunks at one in the morning and shuffling back to their desks by five a.m. But the Kabul Bank scandal had made it clear that Karzai’s government didn’t want to crack down on corruption, even when it was blatant and threatened the nation’s economy. “The whole thing’s kind of a fool’s errand,” one of McMaster’s aides said.

  McMaster refused to slow down or change his convictions. He seemed to see corruption in moral terms and believed that through force of will he could impress that on Karzai and his government and convince them to change. The Afghans in his administration, though, had lived through three decades of violent regime change. No one had any illusions about their job security or personal safety. Loyalty was something you needed to pay for. They formed alliances for their own protection. The future was too uncertain for them to act otherwise. “They had a way of thinking that the next upheaval is around the corner, and if it comes, I need a group I can trust,” recalled Annie Pforzheimer, the U.S. embassy’s top political officer in Kabul. “If one of us is in power, they better be helping the rest of us.”

  Many of the Americans working on this issue agreed that they could not change the Karzai government’s behavior
unless there were real consequences—that is, if they could turn off the spigot of foreign aid coming from Washington. They called it “conditionality,” making donations of U.S. taxpayer money contingent on it being spent properly. Sarah Peck, the civilian co-director of McMaster’s team, had written a proposal tying U.S. nonmilitary aid to certain reforms in the Afghan government. But in the post-Salehi environment, where all of the Americans were afraid of antagonizing Karzai, it went nowhere. “It just died,” one embassy staffer said. “There was no political will on the U.S. side to do it.”

  McMaster, for his part, was desperate for arrests. He wanted the Afghan government to put somebody, anybody, behind bars. The pursuit wore on his nerves. One of his staff members assembled a briefing packet for a routine visit to the deputy minister of rural development. Leafing through the folder in the parking lot before leaving, McMaster decided it wasn’t complete. “He just unloaded on me,” the staffer said. “ ‘What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? Fuck! Fuck!’ For like thirty seconds.” The staffer was shocked but tried to recover: “And then I was like, Okay, I’m just going to relax, this is absurd. This is a dinky little packet.

  “The culture was toxic. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Members of McMaster’s team would pull all-nighters to finish papers. They urged him to stick to more normal civilian hours, to lower his expectations. “I’m like, Look man, this place isn’t going to be Sweden with bad roads,” Paul Rexton Kan, a professor who came over for a short stint, remembered telling McMaster. “I don’t know what you’re expecting.”

  Embassy diplomats were avoiding McMaster’s requests for information. They stopped attending the “prioritization board” meetings to pick corruption targets. One day, Earl Anthony Wayne, a deputy ambassador, chaired a meeting in an embassy conference room. He had convened Kirk Meyer, the DEA officer who ran the threat finance cell, McMaster, and several other American officials who worked on corruption issues, to try to reach some agreement on how to move forward. The American mission was deeply divided about whether corruption was even something worth fighting. The CIA station chief had told Meyer directly his work had no bearing on America’s ability to win the war. Others remained convinced that government rot fueled the insurgency.