A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  Watan hired a prominent American law firm, Venable LLP, sued the Army over the proposed debarment, and had it reversed. But the suspicions remained about Watan’s behavior on the Kandahar highways. People thought its guards could turn the violence up or down when they chose. Many American soldiers believed that these types of business interests lurked behind many attacks that might otherwise appear to be insurgent violence.

  “Why would they go and pick a gunfight like that?” asked Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Cooper, the battalion’s officer in charge of governance and development projects. “Well, if you go and you pick that gunfight, it illustrates the need for security. In reality, there wasn’t a lot of need for security on a lot of those convoys.”

  The security guard violence became such an acute problem that French’s battalion would lie in wait for its own supply convoys, to catch the guards in the act of shooting into villages so soldiers could document the crimes. The guards were killing innocent civilians while working for the U.S. government, which was making the battalion’s job that much harder. “Think about it,” Cooper told me. “If every time you’ve got a convoy rolling through town, and it’s got U.S. military shit all over it and some Afghan shooting at you, what do you think if you’re the locals? The U.S. military is trying to kill me.”

  Ahmed Wali always denied that he owned any particular company and never admitted to a salary of any kind, even as American officials at Kandahar Airfield were estimating his annual income at around $250 million. The way he made money, many of his colleagues and relatives insisted, was by making the other military contractors in southern Afghanistan pay him a percentage of their contracts. Rival private security owners all knew that this was how the system functioned. If it was a man as strong and politically connected as Ahmed Wali, you respected his territory. One company owner told me that he wouldn’t consider working in four southern provinces—Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul—without Ahmed Wali’s permission. Once, Ahmed Wali offered him part of an Interior Ministry contract to do convoy security between Kandahar and Helmand. The owner would get to keep the contract in his name, but out of the $1,500 per guard it paid—there were two thousand guards—he would receive only $350. The rest would go to Ahmed Wali.

  “That’s the way it used to work,” he said, estimating that Ahmed Wali had that arrangement with at least fifteen companies. “He was a well-orchestrated person. He knew what to do.”

  On one occasion, a convoy of guards opened fire as it passed through the Hutal village in an area of Kandahar called Maiwand and killed a young Afghan girl of about five years old. An elder from the area, Mohammad Yusuf, led a delegation to Kandahar City for a gathering where Ahmed Wali and other city fathers were meeting. As Yusuf started to complain about the girl’s killing, Ahmed Wali “came over and grabbed him and told him to be quiet, very forcefully,” said Captain Casey Thoreen, a company commander in Maiwand at the time. “And he wouldn’t do it. [Ahmed Wali] grabbed his arm and told him to shut up and sit down and wouldn’t let him speak. [Yusuf] was highly, highly insulted and wanted justice, and wanted revenge.”

  The view on Ahmed Wali looked different depending on where you stood in the chain of command. The generals saw him as a man with the political clout to execute their plans. To the lower-ranking soldiers out trying to make Kandahar’s highways safer, he was the enemy. The goals were always out of balance. Local government officials who were staunch opponents of the Taliban might also be stealing aid money; or they could be so accommodating to the Americans that people saw them as foreign lapdogs.

  “Does anyone else see this as a problem?” a lieutenant colonel with the Army Corps of Engineers asked some forty soldiers gathered in a muggy tent in Kandahar Airfield one afternoon during a meeting I attended. He was discussing how the Afghan border police commander, General Abdul Raziq, had just offered to give the U.S. military prime land at a border crossing to build a waiting area for NATO cargo trucks. And yet this same Raziq, everyone knew, was believed to earn millions of dollars a year trafficking opium and extorting drivers of those same cargo trucks. Silence followed the lieutenant colonel’s question. Raziq was a key ally because he had the ruthlessness to keep his patch of Afghanistan quiet. Corruption was a tricky enemy when it had to compete with security, intelligence, or killing the Taliban. “What is the focus?” Lieutenant William Clark, an American squadron commander at the border crossing, asked me. “Is it security and stability? Or is it governance and anti-corruption? That’s a discussion well above me.”

  Credit 12.3

  General Stanley McChrystal, right, and General Abdul Raziq tour the Afghan-Pakistani border crossing in the town of Spin Boldak.

  —

  It was weird how the Afghan war did actually work in one-year cycles. The embassy emptied out in the summer, and dozens of new diplomats arrived. New military units rotated in, and the old lessons disappeared with the departing soldiers. The same debates got recycled and the same problems rehashed. Carter’s successor in Kandahar was a silver-haired American general from Georgia named James Terry, commander of the 10th Mountain Division, the final unit of the surge. At his division’s pre-deployment briefings at Fort Drum, Terry would ask his subordinates how, in the ninth year of their stalemated campaign, was the senior American general for the entire Pashtun south supposed to behave. “What role do I play? Am I a soft-touch guy? Am I a powerbroker? Am I a heavy hand? What face do I wear when I get down there?” One of his subordinates, Brigadier General Kenneth Dahl, recalled telling Terry: “Sir, you’re a powerbroker, whether you like it or not. You own all the money. You own all the combat power. Nothing’s going to happen without you enabling it. Whether you want it or not, you’re a powerbroker.”

  During their pre-deployment preparation, ISAF advisers and D.C. think-tank types briefed the division’s officers on how the Karzais ran the country for their own enrichment and got them well acquainted with Ahmed Wali’s reputation. The new American military forces came into Kandahar seemingly oblivious of Carter’s change of heart about Ahmed Wali. It was as if the whole fraught soul-searching and deep-diving of the past year had never even happened.

  “We were absolutely convinced that AWK was the source of all evil,” Lieutenant Colonel Ketti Davison, the military intelligence chief for the division, told me.

  Davison and other division leaders designed their strategy to isolate and marginalize Ahmed Wali. They would frustrate him and work around him, bring new people under the tent. They would establish Terry’s dominance and the authority of the provincial governor. They would shower their attentions on Afghans whom Ahmed Wali considered rivals or subordinates or peripheral players in the politics of Kandahar.

  They made a list of everyone Terry would meet, and “Ahmed Wali was dead last,” Davison said. “Well, maybe Mullah Omar was after him.” This strategy held for about six weeks. During that time, Ahmed Wali’s emissaries made several inquires to Regional Command South headquarters, asking when Terry would be meeting the most important man in Kandahar. Terry eventually accepted an invitation to see Ahmed Wali at Camp Gecko, the CIA base in Kandahar. The setting was familiar to Ahmed Wali: his aides said he visited the base three to four times per week. And just like generals before him, Terry came away impressed with Ahmed Wali’s knowledge of Kandahar and eagerness to help. Ahmed Wali promised his support for all the anti-Taliban district governors and police chiefs that the Americans liked. He was ready to cater to all their needs. “That first meeting set the tone,” Davison recalled. “It was surprising to us that he wasn’t the obstacle we imagined.”

  The notes of months of meetings between Ahmed Wali and Terry show that above all, he was their guide to a foreign land. Ahmed Wali told them whom to trust and fear. He informed Terry that the reason the town of Ghorak was important stemmed from its relationship with Sangin and Khakrez, two other violent towns where U.S. soldiers were dying. He described how the Taliban would stage in Ghorak for their attacks elsewhere; they could do this because the ap
pointed police chief was not from the area and not respected by his townspeople. Ahmed Wali explained that the U.S. military needed to worry about a land dispute within the Kakar tribe in Pashmul because the tribesmen were leaning toward the Taliban and this might be enough to push them to the insurgency. He told Terry that the district governor in Maiwand was worthless and should be dismissed.

  He lectured the Americans on their propaganda strategies, informing them that by describing car bombs or suicide explosions as “spectacular attacks” they were appearing weak to the Afghan audience. Another time, Ahmed Wali warned Terry that his soldiers patrolling in the city’s Loy Wallah neighborhood, who were showing residents photographs of Mullah Neda Mohammad, asking for information, were in danger. Mohammad was a prominent cleric, and even if he sided with the Taliban, his arrest by American soldiers could prove explosive and would only enhance his reputation. Ahmed Wali told Terry that if they planned to capture the cleric, it needed to be with Afghan soldiers, preferably flown in from outside Kandahar.

  It is evident from the notes of these meetings how Terry tested his decisions against Ahmed Wali’s local knowledge. Terry told Ahmed Wali he believed the villages of Nalgham and Shah Joy were ready for local anti-Taliban militias. Wrong, Ahmed Wali said; Kolk and Sanjeray were better options.

  “By far the best intel we would get would be from Ahmed Wali Karzai,” Colonel Chris Riga, commander of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group in Kandahar, told me. “They know who people are. We don’t. I could go to him for anything and everything. And I constantly would.”

  The Kandahar where Riga fought was moved by forces difficult to understand and impossible to control. Everything was lies and rumor. He had a mission to defeat the Taliban. He could forgive almost anything for a trusted guide who furthered that mission. He didn’t care about Ahmed Wali’s bank account, even though his gut told him the drug allegations were probably true. He’d come to the realization, as soldiers and spies had before him, that Ahmed Wali couldn’t be marginalized. “I have zero negativity toward him,” Riga told me. “We had a common goal. If you’re going to assist me, I’m going to assist you.”

  They met or spoke several times a week. One of his battalion’s missions was to set up pro-government militias across Kandahar. The program, known as the Afghan Local Police, had been one of Petraeus’s top priorities when he took over as ISAF commander. The theory went that hiring local tribesmen to fend off the Taliban would bolster the unseasoned Afghan army and the incompetent police; it would fill in the holes in security forces spread too thin. President Karzai had opposed the program when Petraeus first proposed it.

  Ahmed Wali had none of his brother’s qualms. He spoke publicly in favor of the ALP program. If villagers balked at working with the Special Forces, Ahmed Wali intervened. One of the places Riga had trouble was in the Arghistan district, in northeastern Kandahar. He wanted to talk to the elders from the area to pitch his militia idea, but they didn’t want to meet him. Riga asked Ahmed Wali if he could convene the Arghistan tribesmen, maybe sometime in the next week? By nine o’clock the next morning, they were all at Ahmed Wali’s house. “That kind of thing just doesn’t happen,” said Andy Feitt, one of Riga’s intelligence officers. “This guy can accomplish what you ask of him—it’s not just bluster. The military is a results-oriented organization; if you promise something and you deliver, we tend to like you.”

  Khakrez, a district north of Kandahar, was another problem for Riga. His Special Forces team was fighting every day with young Talibs racing down dirt trails on motorbikes. A provincial councilman from the area, Haji Sayed Jan Khakrezwal, wanted no part in any American militia program. At Riga’s request, Ahmed Wali summoned Khakrezwal and the village leaders to his home to meet Riga’s men and discuss the problem. Faced with Ahmed Wali, Khakrezwal caved. “The things said about me, and how I do not support the local police, are all lies,” Khakrezwal told the gathering.

  Ahmed Wali looked around the room. “So now we all understand?”

  Ahmed Wali turned out to be insistently and passionately pro-American, beyond what anyone could have hoped. As his brother was railing against the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, Ahmed Wali was begging the American commanders to stay. In the palace, President Karzai angrily condemned American troops for any harm they inflicted on civilians, but Ahmed Wali brushed off such mistakes. One August evening in 2005, American soldiers on patrol in the Zhari district of Kandahar spotted three men at a gas station carrying AK-47s, standing next to their red Toyota Hi-Lux pickup truck. The soldiers called out to the men, who ran for their vehicle. The soldiers fired warning shots, then pumped thirty rounds into the truck, striking the tires, gas tank, truck bed, and all three men. One of them would die from his wounds and another was gravely wounded, shot in the arm, back, and leg, with eight pieces of fragmentation lodged inside him, a military report on the incident noted. The men turned out to be guards for Ahmed Wali Karzai.

  “Colonel, this is not good,” Kandahar’s governor at the time, Asadullah Khalid, told Lieutenant Colonel Bert Ges, the battalion commander responsible.

  “I apologize,” Ges later told Ahmed Wali Karzai. “I’m so sorry.”

  “He looks at me and he goes, ‘Colonel Ges, things like this happen amongst warriors. We are both fighting the same enemy. Mistakes will happen. We will overcome this.’ ”

  “I was so shocked,” Ges said. “I’ll never forget it.”

  When President Karzai’s aides claimed that U.S. air strikes had caused $100 million worth of damage in the Arghandab Valley, Ahmed Wali called on behalf of his American friends to tell his brother the information was wrong. Ahmed Wali often insisted that the president, in his heart, also wanted the troops. The cabinet ministers in Kabul fed the president bad information to suit their own personal motives, he said, and Terry should consider sending delegations to Kabul to convey all the good news. He promised that if America agreed to a permanent presence—say, two thousand soldiers based at Kandahar Airfield—the whole southern region would have a solid backbone. But if the United States left, Pakistan would arm more fighters and send them flooding back into Afghanistan. “Leaving” was a very dangerous word, Ahmed Wali told Terry, and should not be uttered by the Americans.

  General Kenneth Dahl, one of Terry’s subordinates, began to meet with Ahmed Wali more often, usually at the offices of the provincial council or at Camp Nathan Smith. Dahl enjoyed his company. He saw Ahmed Wali as a leader, a man of conviction and action. Their friendship developed to where Ahmed Wali would call Dahl before he traveled to Dubai, telling the general when he’d be away and how he could be reached if anything came up. “This guy is very, very capable. He clearly is the guy who’s making shit happen,” Dahl said. “We both wanted stability. We both wanted progress. He hated the Taliban as much as we did. Hated the insurgents. I wanted electricity. He wanted electricity. I wanted roads. He wanted roads. He’s a very practical guy.”

  Dahl trusted Ahmed Wali so much that he led him on a tour of the Joint Operations Center inside the Kandahar Airfield headquarters. On the tour, Dahl showed Ahmed Wali the Predator drone footage broadcast on large flat-screen monitors. He gave him statistics on ISAF medevac missions. This expression of friendship toward a man who was likely manufacturing violence to profit off the U.S. military was something that worried others. Terry even warned Dahl not to get too close.

  A year after the first deep dive, the division decided to update the file on Ahmed Wali. Its personnel would do a new assessment of the available intelligence and see whether he had violated the boundaries set for him. Ketti Davison put one of her intelligence analysts, Todd Rump, in charge of the project. He spent two weeks researching Ahmed Wali’s actions in the previous year and wrote a paper of about forty pages. That spring, both Ahmed Wali and Qayum had worked with American military planners on a strategy to unite the tribes across a swath of southern Afghanistan, resurrecting the old term for the area: Loy Kandahar, or “Greater Kandahar.” The idea wa
s to rally competing Pashtun tribes around a common identity. They wanted the concept to drive efforts to demobilize Taliban fighters. This was, at its heart, the embrace of old tribal ways rather than the grassroots democratic machinery engineered by foreign diplomats on one-year tours.

  This type of political cooperation helped convince Rump that Ahmed Wali was a changed man, one whose worst abuses had occurred in earlier years, when the Taliban was stronger and his survival was at greater risk. Now that U.S. military operations seemed to be taking back territory from the Taliban, Ahmed Wali could start governing rather than fearing for his life. As with all his predecessors, Rump found that there wasn’t evidence for the drug-trafficking allegations. Rump concluded that Ahmed Wali had not crossed the “red lines.” He was proving useful, and he seemed to be walking a more virtuous path. He believed that Ahmed Wali was making Kandahar safer.

  “My recommendation was we needed to engage him,” Rump said.

  —

  On the evening of July 11, 2011, Ahmed Wali came to Camp Nathan Smith to meet Ken Dahl in his office. It would be the last time the two men spoke. Dahl had a couple of months left on his tour before rotating out. The 10th Mountain Division, like the soldiers before them, had won some battles, cleared some villages. But they had not defeated the insurgency. There would be another summer fighting season after they were gone, and another after that, and then another. Dahl was looking ahead. Since the two men were alone, he hoped they could have a candid talk. He wanted to know where Ahmed Wali stood with all of this. He felt they trusted each other enough by now to speak honestly. Dahl told Ahmed Wali that staying in Kandahar, prevailing against the insurgency, would only benefit him. “If you’re interested in more money, more influence, more power, then stability in Afghanistan and stability in the south will contribute to that. And contribute in a legitimate way. There is a lot of money to be made here. And your power and your influence will only grow if things go well,” Dahl told him.