A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  When it came time for McMaster to speak, he reiterated the same talking points he’d been making for weeks. How the Americans and Afghans needed to establish a “common understanding of the problem.” How they needed to diplomatically isolate “bad actors” and create “islands of integrity” within the Afghan government. When he told them that the embassy needed to cooperate more with his task force, Meyer rolled his eyes. McMaster snapped.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Kirk, am I fucking boring you?” he said loudly. “Are you tired of hearing about corruption, Kirk? Because you should be very interested. You should be leaning forward.”

  Meyer had already been frustrated with how McMaster was trampling on his investigations. Meyer was a trained law enforcement officer with authority to conduct criminal investigations, and he didn’t need this rampaging dilettante getting in his way. McMaster was meeting with Afghans all over town, gathering his own intelligence, talking about sensitive details of Meyer’s investigations. Meyer felt McMaster should work on trying to clean up the Afghan army and the police, not duplicate his own work. Meanwhile, he’d been forced to listen to these “Corruption 101” briefings for weeks while nothing changed. Meyer had already told McMaster that he was tired of rehashing the same ground.

  “We need to have a common understanding of the problem. I got it. Corruption’s bad. Okay. What are we going to do? What are you doing?” Meyer had told him before, one of their colleagues recounted.

  When McMaster called him out at the meeting, Meyer started to apologize. He wasn’t rolling his eyes, he said; he just wasn’t feeling well. Meyer had been sick for the past four days and only attended the meeting because two generals and two ambassadors were present. Then he reconsidered.

  “Wait a minute—fuck you,” Meyer shot back, as one member of the meeting recalled. “You don’t get to raise your voice at me.

  “I’m not the State Department,” Meyer told him. “I’m law enforcement and you are not going to talk to me the way you have them. Or we can take it outside.”

  A U.S. embassy conference room was not normally a place where fistfights were proposed. Although McMaster actually hugged Meyer after the meeting, and they would eventually even become friends, the blow-up had left the room, as one person put it, “completely stunned.”

  McMaster “went into Patton mode,” another official remembered, “and none of our great leaders said, ‘Okay boys, knock it off.’ ”

  —

  The American anti-corruption effort was failing in two ways. The American teams were fighting among themselves, undercutting their own efforts. But that squabbling also arose from a pervasive sense of frustration about not being able to do much to solve the problem they’d been handed. With the U.S. government unwilling to take the political leap of cutting off money to an embattled ally government, they had no effective leverage to encourage change, and no way to force Afghan prosecutions that might make a difference.

  In early November, Sarah Peck had flown from Kabul to Bangkok for the Fourteenth International Anti-Corruption Conference, a four-day event that convened experts from around the world. On opening day, a video message was piped in from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. While Peck was away, McMaster invited Robert Lunnen, the lead justice department lawyer in Kabul, and other members of Lunnen’s embassy team to come to his office. McMaster was frustrated that the Afghan attorney general, Mohammad Ishaq Aloko, was not sharing the files his office kept on corruption cases. Lunnen agreed with McMaster that Aloko served as a puppet for Karzai and had no interest in prosecuting the powerful. But he felt reform needed to come from Karzai’s palace, or nothing would change, according to his colleagues. McMaster wanted Lunnen’s team to push the attorney general harder to make prosecutions.

  Since the DOJ lawyers mentored the attorney general’s prosecutors and worked in their offices every day, McMaster wanted them to get the corruption case files for him. Lunnen refused. Raiding their file cabinets would be both illegal and a breach of trust with the Afghan lawyers. McMaster’s military task force, in any event, had no business with the criminal files.

  McMaster erupted and started shouting at the lawyers. He said he had “never been treated so poorly by a dickhead I agree with.” McMaster snapped his notebook shut. He stood up, kicked a chair, stormed out of the meeting, and slammed the door.

  Sometimes these fights stayed within Kabul, battle scars of the secret war within. This one didn’t. The lawyers reported McMaster’s outburst to their bosses, all the way to Attorney General Eric Holder. He wrote a letter to Petraeus complaining about McMaster’s conduct and demanding an apology. The people in the meeting were asked to give affidavits describing what happened. From then on, the lawyers in Kabul referred to themselves as the “Dickheads of Justice.”

  “That’s the way he handled every meeting,” one member of the task force said. “If you didn’t agree with him, he threw a temper tantrum.”

  Peck learned about the meeting only after she returned to Kabul from the conference in Thailand. McMaster didn’t mention it to her; she had to learn about the fight from another colleague. For her, this was the final insult. Two days after she learned of the lawyers’ meeting, she quit her job and flew home.

  —

  The longer McMaster stayed in Kabul, the more blatant the corruption cases that faced his task force seemed to become. An Afghan governor was accused of taking bribes in exchange for government contracts, using donor aid money to build a slew of homes, and colluding with the Taliban. Afghan prosecutors eventually dropped the case. Members of the Afghan air force were suspected of using their aircraft to ferry drugs and illegal guns around the country. One of the Afghan officers thought to be shipping illicit cargo burst into a U.S. military meeting room at the Kabul airport in April 2011 and murdered eight of his U.S. Air Force mentors. The investigation fizzled.

  The Dawood National Military Hospital, where Afghan soldiers wounded in battle were sent for treatment, was looted by its administrators to the point that patients were allowed to die of starvation. The American-funded hospital allowed Afghan veterans to languish in soiled sheets with maggot-infested wounds. McMaster’s task force helped discover that the surgeon general, an ally of President Karzai, had stolen tens of millions of dollars from the defense ministry and in medicine intended for the wounded troops.

  These revelations were almost never followed by punishment. Of the roughly 2,000 corruption cases investigated, only a couple of dozen people suffered consequences and almost all of them were minor figures. With the military hospital, Karzai initially suspended several officials, including the attorney general, but later demanded evidence that McMaster’s team had already shown him. McMaster’s task force managed to convince an American general to threaten the Afghan minister of defense with a loss of U.S. aid if the hospital investigation didn’t proceed, but the inquiry never amounted to much and the scandal eventually faded away.

  McMaster’s team periodically asked the coalition command that mentored the Afghan security forces to cut funding that benefited certain units, such as an Afghan border police team in western Afghanistan believed to be running drugs into Iran. They debated freezing budgets and halting the delivery of helicopters to Afghan forces. But the American mentors would always decline, saying “it would demoralize the units,” one of McMaster’s aides recalled. When the task force tried to develop a political strategy to lobby Afghan politicians, NATO’s civilian representatives in Kabul shot it down. “They saw any suggestion that Mad Dog McMaster would be meeting with anyone in parliament as dangerous,” another team member said.

  Some of McMaster’s colleagues admired him. They considered him intense, but not cruel, a man with a relentless drive to bend the bureaucracy to his will, to “reverse the slide toward the acceptance of defeat—in the realm of corruption and in our mission more broadly,” as one subordinate put it. But by then the battle against Afghan corruption had been lost. The Obama administration ultimately did not have the political wi
ll to confront Karzai’s palace. In the spring of 2011, the State Department issued guidance to the Kabul embassy that the priority should be on “predatory” corruption, the local cop demanding a bribe on the street, the kind of corruption that supposedly made normal Afghans look to the Taliban for help. The veterans of the corruption wars saw the guidance for what it was: a warning to stay away from high-level politicians, or anything else that might rile up President Karzai, as the focus turned to withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.

  As a postmortem, embassy staffers and members of McMaster’s team drafted a long cable deconstructing their failures. The document was both memorial to a dead effort and a lesson intended for future diplomats who might tread this path. The draft cable, dated June 8, 2011, was called “Impunity Incorporated: The Demise of the Afghan Counter-Corruption Program.” After input from various agencies within the embassy, it needed to get top-level approval before being shipped back to Washington. But somewhere in the upper reaches of Eikenberry’s embassy, the cable got killed, and it never reached home.

  —

  There were no brass bands or fanfare when Eikenberry finally took his seat next to his wife on a Safi Airways commercial flight out of Kabul. When he left, in July 2011, he didn’t regret his opposition to the troop surge or his diagnosis of the problems with Karzai’s government. “When it comes to your reporting and your analysis, you’ve got to call it like you see it,” he told me. “Don’t feel under pressure to always say the glass is half full when it might be near empty.”

  During Eikenberry’s tenure, the Americans saw all the problems, but that didn’t mean they could solve them. Just exposing corruption, they’d learned, didn’t mean anyone would care. That was one regret that would linger with Eikenberry after he got home: that the Americans had become activists. They’d tried to change too much. “I think we just let it get out of control,” he said. “Just like we did in Vietnam.”

  The most frustrating thing for Eikenberry was the view in Washington that he had failed in his most important task, keeping Hamid Karzai quiet. He’d tried to be rational and civil with Karzai, but the fights had become too personal. Even a diplomat could swallow only so much. Not long before Eikenberry left, Karzai gave a speech likening U.S. troops to an occupying army and made another order that all bombings of Afghan homes should stop. Eikenberry stood at a podium in Herat and let his frustration loose.

  “When Americans, who are serving in your country at great cost—in terms of lives and treasure—hear themselves compared with occupiers, told that they are only here to advance their own interest, and likened to the brutal enemies of the Afghan people, they are filled with confusion and grow weary of our effort here.

  “At the point your leaders believe that we are doing more harm than good, when we reach a point that we feel our soldiers and civilians are being asked to sacrifice without a just cause, and our generous aid programs dismissed as totally ineffective and the source of all corruption, the American people will ask for our forces to come home.”

  For Eikenberry, a career military man who’d been in Afghanistan for half the war, that time had come.

  Two days before he left the city, he visited the Kabul Zoo. He’d always liked that quiet enclosure, despite its rather sad collection. I went along with him for the tour. He brightened up immediately when he saw the animals.

  “You’ve got camels now?” he asked the zookeeper in surprise.

  Eikenberry noted with pleasure the four-horned ram from Badakhshan.

  “Boy. There’s none like them in the world.”

  But it was the lone pig—people used to call it Afghanistan’s only pig—that was his favorite. When he returned home, Eikenberry would get a job teaching at Stanford, including a class about the war and all that had gone wrong. He would drive among the campus’s sandstone buildings with their red-tiled roofs in his yellow Mini Cooper. On the dash he kept a pig in a hula skirt.

  “There he is,” Eikenberry said when he saw the Afghan pig standing in a mud puddle. “Does he have a name?”

  “Khuk,” the zookeeper said.

  “How old is he?”

  “Twelve year.”

  The pig’s thatchy white hair was filthy. He was one of two pigs given to the zoo by the Chinese government at the start of the war; the other had died. The pig was an oddity in this Muslim country, and had even been quarantined by the superstitious staff during the swine flu pandemic in Mexico.

  “Is he in good health?” Eikenberry asked.

  “Yes. He is happy in the water and mud.”

  Eikenberry squatted in the mud in his khakis and blue blazer and fed the pig a sugar cube.

  “Boy. He is happy there. His name is Khuk?”

  Eikenberry patted the pig on the back. A small entourage of aides and security guards were watching. Eikenberry had several pictures of himself taken with the pig. He would ask about his well-being long after leaving Afghanistan.

  “If he could talk right now, he would be saying, ‘I, for one, like the United States of America.’ ”

  The entourage moved on. A young aide turned to a colleague.

  “Khuk, I think, just means ‘pig’ in Dari,” she said.

  Credit 11.1

  U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry next to Khuk the pig at the Kabul Zoo

  12

  COULDN’T BE MORE HELPFUL

  THE INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE that was mounting on Mahmood Karzai and the president over the financial scandals and anti-American criticism had all but disappeared from Ahmed Wali Karzai. After the investigation of his possible drug-dealing ties turned up nothing, he became the official ISAF-approved power broker of Kandahar. President Karzai took satisfaction in declaring Ahmed Wali innocent of years of charges against him. He stood at his podium and cast the whole issue as another tired example of foreign attacks on his government. “There have been many things mentioned about my brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is the chief of the provincial council in Kandahar, particularly in foreign media and by foreigners. We have been in touch with the foreigners regularly, continuously, and consecutively asking them to put forward their evidence or documents if they have any….No matter how hard we tried, nobody brought us any evidence,” he said. “I have called them and talked about it twenty or twenty-five times in the past five weeks.”

  ISAF officials had decided that they would not harass or investigate or attempt to force Ahmed Wali from his perch in Kandahar. Instead, they wanted to harness his power. This turnaround in relations proved extreme. Instead of being the reason the United States was losing the war in Kandahar, he became central to the military strategy for its next phase.

  Nick Carter crafted his political strategy for the upcoming Kandahar offensive with Ahmed Wali at its heart. Carter felt he had to be pragmatic. The line outside the Kandahar governor’s office would never match Ahmed Wali’s. Afghans knew who could solve their problems. As much as he might want the power balance to match the bureaucratic flow chart, in Kandahar it didn’t. Every eighteen hours, one of Carter’s soldiers was dying. He couldn’t waste time on appearances. Wesa could attend ceremonies and ribbon cuttings and posture all day long, but Carter intended to leverage Ahmed Wali’s influence to make appointments throughout local government deemed sympathetic to ISAF’s cause. He would rely on Ahmed Wali to pave the way with tribal chiefs for military clearing operations, to gather intelligence on enemy movements, to bend President Karzai’s ear when Karzai hesitated about supporting ISAF’s plans.

  “It really boiled down to a case of realizing that to succeed, we’d have to try and deal with the devil we knew,” Steve Beckman, the military intelligence chief in Kandahar, told me. The American strategy was now to build Kandahar through Ahmed Wali, and everyone would abide it. But the generals and diplomats in charge still wanted to keep their meetings with him out of the public eye. On one occasion, when Ahmed Wali came to Kandahar Airfield to meet Carter, he was whisked out a back door, so that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t see him as she
arrived.

  The actual combat was a relatively small part of the military offensive in Kandahar. The American soldiers would make foot patrols through villages or drive their armored trucks to meet local tribesmen. They would hire construction firms to dig new wells or build bridges and roads. If Afghan police needed a solar-powered highway checkpoint so they could more effectively search passing cars for explosives, the American soldiers would comply. If the Taliban were ambushing convoys with homemade bombs placed in drainage culverts, the Army would spend the day installing mesh screens over the mouths of the culverts. The broader goal was to be seen making life better and safer for more people, and to share that credit with the Afghan government. If the government could win the respect of the people and entice the Taliban to rejoin society, that would amount to victory.

  But for all sorts of reasons, General Carter’s team was not happy with most of the local government officials. In the neighborhoods in and around Kandahar, some district chiefs colluded with the Taliban. Some stole foreign aid earmarked for schools or hospitals or peasant farmers. Those based in the more dangerous outskirts, places like Panjwayi or Zhari, often lived in the city and rarely even made an appearance for these people they purportedly represented. Finding an honest, educated person to take a local government job in Kandahar was not easy.

  For years, the Taliban had been systematically picking off bureaucrats associated with the Karzai government, from the presidential palace staff to the lowest district official. In Kandahar in 2010, government officials were dying at the rate of more than six per month. The office manager of the city’s Sarposa prison was shot by a bicyclist who pedaled up to his car window during his morning commute. The city’s deputy mayor was executed as he bent to pray in a mosque. Six months later, his successor was shot by young men on motorcycles as he drove home from work. And nine months after that, their boss, Kandahar mayor Ghulam Haider Hamidi, a close friend of the Karzais’, died when a suicide bomber blew up inside his office.