A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  Did Ahmed Wali plan to take his money and move to Dubai when the American troops left, or was he committed to Kandahar for the long haul? Was he worried about Afghanistan, its future and its people, or just about himself?

  Ahmed Wali seemed uneasy that night. He was quiet for a long time.

  “Look, General, I’ve always been the one,” he said.

  Ahmed Wali felt he had inherited this set of responsibilities from his father, to lead his tribe. He had already survived so much. He believed that the war in Kandahar was 90 percent won. Things might change in the future—he worried about Pakistan, Iran, al-Qaeda—but he was hopeful. The Karzais were ahead of the Taliban. If the United States would just agree to keep military bases in Afghanistan, as a show of force, Ahmed Wali felt, the Afghan government would survive.

  Sometimes he was jealous of his brothers, Ahmed Wali told Dahl. They were safe in Kabul or Dubai or America. They could spend their time multiplying their fortunes, meeting with statesmen, enjoying their position in Afghan society. Ahmed Wali knew that he would be staying in Kandahar. There wasn’t any other place for him. Dahl recalled, “He was essentially saying, ‘This is my burden to bear. I’m responsible for this.’ ”

  Dahl felt relieved. “He had just articulated, very clearly, ‘I’m in. It’s my responsibility. It’s time for us to do this.’ ”

  The last time I asked Ahmed Wali about his relationship with the United States, he insisted all the trouble was in the past.

  “I’m telling you honestly, there is no pressure on me from a single American. They treat me with respect,” he said. “I’m trying to make things better for Afghanistan and for the Afghan government. And also they are trying to make things better for Afghanistan. Their success is my success. Their failure is my failure.”

  13

  A MOVIE STORY

  “HEY MAN, HOW YOU DOING?” asked the guard in a blue striped polo shirt, carrying a black M4 assault rifle, standing in the guest room doorway. “You need anything? Afghan food?”

  I asked him when I could see Hashmat Karzai. I had come to visit him at his fortress-mansion in Karz to ask about the killing of Waheed Karzai. Over the phone, Hashmat had invited me to spend the night. I had arrived at the house in midafternoon and been ushered upstairs to wait until Hashmat was ready for me. I’d been sitting alone on the floor for several hours in this carpeted second-story room, and the sun had now set. I was getting nervous, given that this American-funded millionaire had, according to both verbal and written accounts, murdered his own kin. I looked through the window, past the veranda and part of the grounds below, at a walled enclosure of footpaths and rose gardens stretching far into the distance.

  “I not seen him,” he said. “It is big place.”

  Command Sergeant Major Abdul Sami was the head of Hashmat’s seventy-five-man personal security detail, a trusted cadre within the Asia Security Group. He was a northerner, a Tajik from the Panjshir Valley, the son of a colonel in the Afghan army during Soviet times. Standing in the doorway, walkie-talkie in his hand, Sami told me about how he had joined one of the first Afghan army battalions of Karzai’s government and had gotten three months of training by the French. He’d then moved to the Afghan special forces (3rd Battalion, 205th Corps), been retrained by U.S. special operators, and worked at Camp Gecko, the CIA base in Kandahar, in Mullah Omar’s old house. On hundreds of occasions he had choppered in on night raids with America’s most talented killers, he said. “Every night. Every day. Every night. Every day. We were a good unit. A very good unit. ‘Hero, not zero.’ That was our motto.” He’d earned a spot training with the U.S. Army in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and had broken his leg while rappelling down a rope from a helicopter. His salary risking his life each day for the Afghan army was $400 a month.

  Sami told me that the ethnic rivalries within the organization made cooperation impossible: “Pashtuns hate Tajiks, Tajiks hate Pashtuns, you cannot believe it.” That hatred denied him promotion and prompted him to abandon active duty in 2008, moving to the reserves. Hashmat hired him at his private security company, Asia Security Group, badge number 4470, for $3,000 a month for safer work guarding employees at the defense contracting company DynCorp, which was providing services in Afghanistan. Out of the Asia Security Group’s thousands of mercenaries, Sami caught Hashmat’s attention and was brought into his inner circle, into his very own home, a Tajik in the Pashtun heartland, to worry each day about Hashmat’s life and how to protect it. “My hand is on my pistol, and there’s a round in the chamber twenty-four/seven.”

  He hadn’t moved from the doorway. He looked sad.

  “I’m so tired of this shit,” he said. “I could tell you stories. I know many things I cannot tell you. I know many things.” He waited a moment. Then he said, “I have a story.”

  In 2002, he was working on a base in Uruzgan Province. One of the janitors on the base wanted to marry his son to a local woman. The woman’s father gave her hand to another man’s son. The janitor got angry. He told the U.S. Special Forces that the Taliban were gathering one night at a home in the Deh Rawud district, known insurgent terrain. Sami said he went on the mission with American special ops to raid the house. There was a skirmish, and an air strike was called in on the gathering. Sami and the other soldiers went back the next day to check on the damage. The insurgent gathering turned out to have been a wedding. “We only saw dead women and children,” he said. “We called our cleaner: ‘Hey, where are you? Come in.’ He told us, ‘Oh, I’ve left. I’ve finished my work.’ ”

  I thought about what he was telling me. A reporter needs only a few hours in Afghanistan before he stumbles into this type of epistemological thicket. Some horrifying story of brutality, incompetence, corruption, treachery, something that hints at the throbbing, venal heart of the whole brutal struggle, but also a story almost impossible to verify and that seems on its face too tragic and absurd to be true. Something must have snagged in the language barrier. Would American soldiers bomb a wedding party on intelligence provided by their janitor? And yet the record of this war would show that the manipulation of American firepower in the service of personal feuds was a recurring motif. “The longer I stayed there, the more I realized I didn’t understand,” one of the top American commanders in Kandahar told me. “We think we’re clever because we’re playing three-dimensional chess. They’re playing ten-dimensional chess. We don’t even know what the other boards are.”

  It was true that a wedding party had been bombed in Deh Rawud district on the morning of July 1, 2002. In the BBC footage just after the incident Lieutenant General Dan McNeill, three stars across his cap, stands outside, in the wind. “We’re not unmindful of the comments made by the Afghans that there were fires celebratory in nature. Supposedly a wedding. It seems to be a very difficult scenario. But I’m confident that we will work our way through it and do our absolute best to determine that if indeed something went wrong, what it was, and we will do our best to make it right.”

  Six days later, sitting in the palace under a crystal chandelier, to the left of Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, General McNeill was at a press conference he would call “a seminal moment in my life.” That day, he told the media, “On the basis of some intelligence that we have amassed over a number of months and subsequent to this operation, we have determined that there were civilian casualties.

  “I believe it is forty-eight dead and one hundred and seventeen wounded,” McNeill said. “I believe that the more formal investigation will expose a lot more facts.”

  The U.S. embassy sent a fact-finding mission to the site of the bombing and the team eventually reported their findings to President Karzai. In the palace meeting, Karzai informed them that some of the people who died had cared for him during his initial journey into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban. “You killed the women who cooked my meals for me. You killed the women I would talk to at night when I was up there,” Karzai said, as one of the Americans present remembered.

/>   “I went to visit the family in Deh Rawud,” Karzai told me. “I considered this [bombing] a mistake. And the people understood it as such, as well. And later, when this was repeated, I began to tell the U.S. representatives, the generals and the civilian representatives, that they should stop being reckless….The people began to visit to tell me they were troubled by the way the Americans behaved. Barging into people’s homes. Intimidating people. Unleashing dogs against people and their children. And these voices began to increase by 2005. By 2005, I began to speak publicly about it. But in a calculated and careful manner. In 2006, then I began to speak publicly, loudly. In 2007, I began to raise it ferociously. Angrily. To put public pressure on the United States in a manner of confrontation. The real confrontation began in 2007 between us, public and privately.”

  The American reaction, Karzai said, was often contrite. “Just ‘Sorry, we won’t do it again.’ But they would continue to behave that way. So it was this, telling me, ‘All right,’ then not doing anything about it, that caused me to believe that the Americans would not change their behavior for as long as we were nice to them. And that talking to them and reasoning with them is not going to change them. That we need to force them to change things. That’s when I began to force them to change things,” he said. “They would always try to hide the truth. They would deny that they had done it or had that many people killed. Once they were forced to admit to the number of killed, then they would say because the Taliban came we were not at fault. They didn’t behave honestly with us. They tried to suppress the truth. It was the intimidation that they did that caused us to suspect their intentions. So that made me speak.”

  According to an investigation of the incident, declassified in heavily redacted fashion, United States Central Command found that “active AAA [anti-aircraft artillery] weapons [had been] fired into the air and in close proximity to helicopter landing zones and objective area and while U.S. aircraft were overhead” and that “women and children were in close proximity to the AAA fires.” Such fires prompted the American AC-130 gunship to respond with “proportionate and necessary force” and “ultimate responsibility for these deaths and injuries was placed on those who deployed weapons to residential areas and willfully placed at risk innocent lives.”

  The fact-finding team had difficulty collecting evidence because of “the failure of the villagers to preserve the scene; difficult terrain and the lack of helpful guides; and the local Islamic tradition of burying the dead within 24 hours.” The team’s search of grave sites was inconclusive. The fact finders speculated that areas “may have been ‘sterilized’ after the air strikes to remove evidence of AAA fire.” They also found this: “At the Kakraka Clinic, the team found a six by thirty-foot mural in reddish-purple ink that depicted ground personnel using AAA to shoot down helicopters and aircraft. Initially, the locals claimed that the mural was from the Soviet occupation. After further investigation revealed that the mural was freshly painted with berries, remnants of which were found beneath the painting, the locals stated that children had drawn the mural. However, the height of the mural exceeded six feet.”

  Credit 13.1

  Hashmat Karzai speaks with guests at his mansion in Karz.

  “The U.S. made many mistakes like that,” Sami told me from the doorway. “That was the first one I saw. But there were many. People brought a lot of their family problems to the U.S., and they used the U.S. to solve them.”

  Sami’s radio crackled, and he straightened up. He spoke into it for a few seconds, then told me to stand.

  “The boss is coming.”

  —

  Hashmat Karzai is an imposing man. Thick as a stump, he has dark, hooded eyes, which he covers in the daylight with aviator shades. His balding head, thick black mustache, and rough stubble give him the appearance of an aging member of the Hells Angels. He wears a flashy watch and lights his cigars with a butane torch. Hashmat met me on his second-story veranda, a colonnaded expanse of marble appointed with carpets and cushions. Two of his guards lingered to one side, while an old man stared into a large flat-screen television set up on one side of the porch. The summer evening was warm.

  Floodlights in the yard illuminated the domain Hashmat had built for himself. There were several buildings within the castle walls. Next to the white-and-blue, candy-striped guesthouse stood his personal home, a large beige concrete building with a tiled roof; under the portico sat the fleet of four-wheelers used by the staff to traverse the grounds. Across the garden, a stone waterfall had been embedded into one of the perimeter walls, decorated with tropical plants and flowers, the water springing from ceramic gourds at the top and trickling down the terraced steps to the pool below. Gravel footpaths, lined with multicolored roses, cut across the vast lawn, encompassing more than two acres. At the far end was Hashmat’s personal zoo. In more than a dozen large metal enclosures he kept peacocks and pit bulls, a pelican, a hyena, and three ostriches from Pakistan. Hashmat called the zoo a work in progress. The chain-link cages were still rudimentary, with dirt floors and little foliage. He told me he had recently purchased a tiger—he left the logistics of the transaction vague—but it had died in Kabul before he could transport it to Kandahar. He was making arrangements to find a replacement. Maybe this time a lion.

  Behind the zoo opened another stretch of property, out of view of visiting guests. The grass here was somewhat overgrown, and the footpaths made of dirt. Next to pink-and-white roses, several chest-high marijuana plants grew with bushy impunity. In a barn there were speckled cows for milking and a shimmery chestnut-colored horse with white fetlocks that Hashmat used for his afternoon rides inside his castle walls. In a series of cages he kept dozens of carrier pigeons of a rare type that his guards claimed cost $2,000 apiece, and there was an elevated circular concrete platform for dogfighting.

  Credit 13.2

  A guard patrols the grounds of Hashmat Karzai’s mansion in Karz.

  Hashmat had just broken the Ramadan fast and sat cross-legged on a carpet, a plate of watermelon at his feet. He lit a cigar and told me about his childhood and memories of his father and other relatives, about what he thought of young Hamid Karzai (that he used to wear a cowboy hat and loved American Westerns and Clint Eastwood, and how he always seemed “mentally sick”). And then we started talking about his father’s murder, and about Yar Mohammed, and how he’d decided as a young man that someday he would avenge his father’s death. It was dark by then, and his shadowed face glowed as he drew on his cigar. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said.

  “To be honest with you, I had a pistol with me,” he said. “I was young, boiling, angry.”

  It was the winter of 1997, the second year of the Taliban’s government in Afghanistan. Thirteen years had passed since Yar Mohammed had hoisted Hashmat’s father’s AK-47 and shot him with it. After his father’s death, Hashmat had immigrated to suburban Maryland with his mother, grandmother, and younger brother, Hekmat. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Glenallan Avenue in Silver Spring. Several other Karzais lived in the D.C. area at the time, and they tended to help each other. For newly arriving relatives, the others would donate microwaves or televisions or other appliances. A relative gave Hashmat an old police car purchased at auction. Hashmat drove the Chevy Celebrity, which still had holes for the siren mount, for more than a year, until Hekmat crashed it. “We were broke,” Hashmat recalled. “I had to get a job. I didn’t have nothing to eat.”

  The Karzais stuck together in those days. America in the 1980s was not a bad place to be an Afghan immigrant. The nightly news broadcasts portrayed these bearded mountain rebels as freedom fighters relying on faith and grit and Stinger missiles to combat the Soviet occupiers. The war spawned a massive exodus, and thousands of Afghans found refuge in America, with the largest enclaves sprouting up around the Bay Area cities of Fremont and Concord, as well as near D.C. Hashmat and his brother enrolled at Gaithersburg High School, then took classes at Montgomery College and the University of Maryland
, working at night and on weekends throughout. At the time, Qayum Karzai was working as a manager at Bello Mondo in the Bethesda Marriott, the restaurant that employed, as waiters or busboys, nearly all of the Karzai siblings of Hamid’s generation—Qayum, Mahmood, Shah Wali, Ahmed Wali, Abdul Wali—as well as some of their cousins. Just as Qayum and his wife, Pat, helped sponsor his relatives for visas and immigration papers, he introduced them at the hotel.

  Hashmat joined his relatives at Bello Mondo, taking a job as a busboy. He was young and strong—six foot one and 180 pounds—and when he got into weight lifting, he could bench-press more than three hundred pounds. But working for a living was a shock. The night he came home from his first shift, well after midnight, he sat down, exhausted, and peeled off his sweaty socks as Hekmat watched. “It was ironic, because he’d never worked in his life, as the son of a khan,” Hekmat said. “He brought this money, it was sixty dollars, and gave it to my mom. He said, ‘This is my first honest day’s job.’ ” Growing up, the brothers had always had servants; they didn’t even know how to cook the rice they’d eaten every day of their lives. “Imagine,” Hashmat said, “you had everything in your mouth, a silver spoon, and you go to the States, and you become a waiter.”

  For money of his own, Hekmat began working with a cousin who ran a hot dog stand outside the main Silver Spring Metro station. He would wake up each day at five to get to his position before the morning commuter rush. His first task was to brew a giant vat of black coffee for the commuters. He worked six days a week and on a good day earned twenty dollars. “I still hate coffee,” he said. When he was older, and studying criminology at the University of Maryland, Hekmat worked nights at Persepolis, an Iranian restaurant in Bethesda. For a time he also took a job as a bouncer at Viva, a nightclub in the District. His nickname at the time was “Sonny.”