A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  “I think my brother and I realized we had to start working fast—otherwise we’d be on the streets,” Hekmat said.

  Money was always tight. In the summer of 1994, when Hashmat was twenty-four years old and living in Gaithersburg, his daughter, Henna Karzai, was born. He had been dating the girl’s mother, Awista Salimi, for two years, since the fall of 1992. She was having trouble making ends meet. In the court filings in a subsequent paternity case, she claimed that she earned about $500 a month, but her rent was $400, and with the other costs, she was falling further behind each month. Weeks after her daughter was born, she filed a petition in Montgomery County Circuit Court, seeking child support from Hashmat. A year later, the case was thrown out because the couple decided to get married.

  Hashmat eventually found better-paying work at a Toyota dealership along the toll road out to Dulles Airport in Vienna, Virginia. He worked in the finance department, arranging car loans. Even as it stretched into years the brothers felt their time in America was temporary, a holding pattern until they could resume their rightful lives in Afghanistan. The death of their father was one debt that Hashmat still burned to settle.

  When Hashmat learned that Yar Mohammed was living in Kandahar, hanging around a jewelry shop, he decided to find him and take his revenge. He bought a ticket to Karachi, Pakistan, then drove to Quetta and over the border into Kandahar. Standing outside the store, Hashmat realized that he’d never actually seen Yar Mohammed before; he’d just been told that the man had blue eyes and wore a turban.

  “So I looked inside and there were like five or six people sitting in there. I was wearing a turban and I had…maybe a three-week-old beard. This is the Taliban time, nobody could carry a small knife. So I had a pistol in my hand. The Makarov. The big one, with twenty rounds in it. Shit. I was fucking boiling. I stood in front of [one guy]. I said, ‘You and I have to talk.’ I was holding my pistol. This other guy stood up. I’m looking around. I couldn’t see him at first. I see this guy sitting in the corner, almost like a blanket over him. I looked at him. He said, ‘Who are you looking for?’ I said, ‘Not you. Sit down.’ He looked at my pistol. I looked at the other guy. Maybe him. ‘You. Get up.’ So he got up, other guy stood up, too. I said, ‘No. You sit down.’ I took my pistol. Big Makarov. The big one…I said, ‘What’s your name?’ He said, ‘My name is Yar Mohammed.’

  “At that time I was bench-pressing. I was fucking huge. I was playing football. This guy is standing in front of me. Shit. I could just eat him. Seriously. I said, ‘You’re Yar Mohammed?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Do you recognize me?’ He looks at me. I said, ‘Take a guess.’ He said, ‘Are you Hashmat?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘You owe me something.’ He starts shaking. I swear. I said, ‘Let’s go outside.’ I didn’t even care that he has anything in his pocket or not. I held him by his neck. Like this. Like a ten-year-old boy. I hold him by his neck. The other guy got up. I said, ‘I told you once. Next time you get up, all the twenty rounds are going to be in your stomach. Your shit is going to be all over the wall.’ I was watching movies and all that.”

  Hashmat dragged Yar Mohammed out the door, flagged down a rickshaw, and told the driver to take them to police headquarters. The Taliban had been hosting public executions in the stadium in Kandahar, and Hashmat wanted a Taliban judge to order Yar Mohammed to be killed in public. The judge, however, told Hashmat that ordering such a killing required two witnesses to the crime. Since his father’s murder had taken place in Pakistan more than a decade earlier, the witnesses had dispersed. Hashmat bargained the judge down to one witness, but he didn’t know where he would even find that. He left Yar Mohammed at the police station while he thought about what to do. He couldn’t stay with relatives in the city, because of the family trouble he was stirring up. After spending a few days meeting with Taliban representatives, Hashmat returned to the police station. He asked to have Yar Mohammed brought outside. He was torn between demanding a confession from Yar Mohammed and just shooting him and getting it over with. “I was as frustrated as I possibly could be,” Hashmat recalled.

  “So I’m sitting there, face-to-face. I said, ‘Tell me, face-to-face, what’s going on? Why did you kill my father?’ I recorded this conversation. He was telling me a story, he said, ‘I swear, I didn’t kill him.’ He was crying. ‘I didn’t kill him. I took a weapon and suddenly the weapon discharged and shot him.’ ‘Why did you take his weapon? His pistol? His money? His watch? Why did you run away?’ He said, ‘I was afraid.’ I said, ‘At least you could have come back to the family. You didn’t do that.’ He’s crying. Sort of. Nose is running.” Hashmat asked the police guard to go get some tea. When he stepped away, Hashmat told Yar Mohammed, “Follow me.”

  “I sat him in the car. Go straight toward Spin Boldak. You could say I was foolish or young. I had two things in mind. I had these things in my mind. On the road he was crying like a baby. I have this on tape. He’s crying, ‘I haven’t eaten. My babies this and this.’ I’m sorry.”

  They drive toward the Pakistani border.

  “I’m thinking about this. He’s crying….Shit. What am I going to do now? I reach to the Arghasan bridge. Under the bridge. I said, ‘Shit. This is getting too much.’ Frustrated. Tired. Why don’t I just shoot him and get it over with? Get it over with. I didn’t care. I get him outside. Park the car under the bridge. About eleven-thirty a.m. ‘Let’s pray right here. Then we’ll go to Pakistan. We pray. We have a long way to drive.’ I’m trying to convince him, but he’s crying. I get out. I took my pistol out. I come outside. Come on his side. I open his door. He sees the pistol. He knows for a fact that I’m shooting him now. Shit. There’s no time to pray. Nothing is going on. I said, ‘Get out.’

  “As soon as he puts his first step, second step, he falls down. I say, ‘Get up.’ He said, ‘I can’t. My feet are not working.’ I said, ‘What do you mean your feet are not working?’ I said, ‘It’s okay. You need to make your last prayer.’ We’re talking eighteen years ago. He’s crying. Falls down on my shoes. I still have those shoes. I see everything coming out of his nose on my shoes. Begging me. I mean. The begging. Unbelievable. ‘My kids. I haven’t eaten for a month.’ This and that. Blah blah blah. Shit. I said, ‘We are praying. What’s wrong with you? Get up. Just look at me.’ He won’t look at me. I have this pistol on fully auto. Twenty rounds. Boom. Everything comes out. Or you can do semiauto. I have it on fully auto. I’m not worrying about these freaking Talibs. Worrying about kidnapping. Shit. I have a thing on him. It’s my thing. That’s not what the other people think about. He’s crying. Shit. I put him back in the car. Turn around.

  “I couldn’t do it.

  “I swear.

  “I couldn’t do it.”

  Hashmat stopped talking. In the darkness, there was the click and blue hiss of his butane lighter, the brief illumination of his face.

  “He was crying. He was crying sitting in the car. I have this thing: if you start crying, I can’t do anything. Regardless how pissed I am. The minute you start crying, I can’t do it. I said, ‘Okay.’ So I grabbed some oranges. I said, ‘Why don’t you peel this?’ He was crying. He was shaking. He couldn’t do it. I said, ‘What tape would you like to listen to?’ I had two cassette tapes. This is fucking Taliban times, you couldn’t hear tapes. Are you kidding me? I said, ‘Would you like to hear Nashnas or Obaidullah?’ He said, ‘Whatever you want.’ One is Kandahar musician. One is Kabul, Pashto singer. Famous. Both of them. He said, ‘You play whatever.’ ‘Okay, I’ll play cassette. You peel orange.’ He couldn’t peel it. I said, ‘Okay. I’ll play cassette.’ ”

  They drove on, approaching the border.

  “I turn the car back off road. We are off the road. Soon as I go this way, he starts crying again. I stopped the car. ‘Let’s go.’ By that time, about one or one-fifteen p.m. I said, ‘Get out. Let’s go. It’s time to pray.’ He knew, that son of a bitch. He said, ‘Something is going to happen.’ This time he wouldn’t get out of the car. He put
the lock on. He wouldn’t get out. I can’t shoot him in the car, because the blood is going to fuck up my car. Oh man. I said, ‘Okay. Let’s do this.’ Let’s take him back to Pakistan.”

  Hashmat gave up on his plan to murder Yar Mohammed. But he still wanted the Taliban to convict Yar Mohammed of his father’s killing and have the man publicly executed. He traveled to Quetta to meet with his family and convince someone who was there from the time of his father’s death to testify as a witness to the crime. In the family meetings that followed, various Karzai relatives, including Abdul Ahad (Hamid Karzai’s father) and his brother Habibullah, a veteran diplomat who had been an aide to the king, impressed on Hashmat that he should forgive Yar Mohammed. “This is not a good time,” Hafiz, another of Abdul Ahad’s brothers, told Hashmat. “Even if you kill half of Kandahar, it will not compensate for the death of your father. Don’t do it.”

  “If you kill him,” Habibullah said, “then war starts.”

  Hamid also weighed in on the family dispute. He wanted to convene an official tribal reconciliation. They would assemble the elders and use an old Pashtun custom for forgiveness: tying shoes together by their laces and draping the shoes around the person’s neck like a garland. One of his aunts pleaded with Hashmat to give up his desire for revenge. Hashmat remembered her standing there, so many years ago, wrapped in a white shawl, her eyes red from crying; her eyes reminded him of his father’s eyes.

  “Look at me,” she said. She handed him a Koran for him to kiss its cover.

  “Let him go,” she said.

  Hashmat bought a plane ticket the next day and returned to the United States. He did not go back to Afghanistan until the American invasion. And until he did, he understood, he wouldn’t be satisfied. “Where’s the justice? You’re telling me to forgive him and let it go and that’s it? Nothing happens? That’s it? That’s not good enough.”

  That was the story he told. It was Hashmat’s way of arguing that he hadn’t been the one twelve years later standing in Yar Mohammed’s house that night, shooting his son in the stomach and the leg. Hashmat called the story of Waheed Karzai’s death a “movie story.” “Guy goes in. Brothers and sisters doing homework. First of all, what homework? Which school you going to? Fine. Guy comes into the room and shoots him. When he shoots him? What happens next day? Why wouldn’t he tell the police I came in and shot him?” Hashmat’s alibi was that from five to ten o’clock that evening he was at a funeral. “How could I be there the same time? How come son not saying, ‘I was shot by Hashmat’? Why he waited and waited and waited. Written on grave son was killed by enemy of Islam. Why wait all this time? Why would he go to police eighteen days later and do the report? Eighteen days later he does the report. Yar Mohammed goes eighteen days later and did a report.”

  I asked him who killed Waheed Karzai.

  “I don’t know, Josh.” He laughed. “I don’t know. Whatever it was, I don’t know. Okay?”

  —

  A popular conception of the Karzai family was that of a united cabal of colluding interests. The reality was far more complicated. President Karzai was keenly aware of their reputation and often intervened—or gave the appearance of intervening—to block his relatives from profiting off his name. The Karzais have all sorts of stories of Hamid thwarting their plans. Early in the war, after a relative demanded that a Kabul high school make him its principal, Karzai sent a letter to all government ministries ordering them to report to him any time one of his family members attempted to win preferential treatment. Jamil Karzai, a cousin, told me that his brother had been considered for a commerce ministry job in Kazakhstan until President Karzai personally intervened to block his selection. “He ignores his family,” Jamil said. Another cousin, Hashim, complained that the president stepped in to keep him from obtaining a license to open one of the first cell phone companies in Afghanistan. “If it wasn’t for Hamid Karzai, I would have two or three hundred million dollars today,” he said. When Ahmed Wali wanted money from the palace safe for his political activities in Kandahar, the president demanded that his aides give him an exact accounting of the funds. When Qayum visited U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and asked for his help being named speaker of parliament, Khalilzad shot him down; President Karzai then applauded the decision, saying, “God be with you. I agree with you.”

  Why couldn’t he give his relatives government sinecures? they wanted to know. Or pay for one hundred Karzai kids to study in India? Or let them start a few contracting companies?

  “The president is responsible to the Karzai family, and he has benefitted nobody,” Hashim said. “The Americans will not give you a job because you are a Karzai. The president will not hire you because it’s nepotism. In the history of Afghanistan, he will be remembered as a president who has done nothing for his family.”

  When Mahmood Karzai got the license to sell Toyotas in Kabul, President Karzai complained to Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad that the deal would ruin his reputation and solicited Khalilzad’s help to cancel the arrangement. President Karzai later told me that he had written to the Japanese embassy in Kabul to oppose the contract and asked Mahmood to back out. “I told him, clearly. That’s not the right thing. That doesn’t suit our name and our way of life. I explained it to him: When I wasn’t the president, when you were not here, did Toyota ever come to you to offer you a deal? So naturally, they’re coming to you because you’re my brother. The brother of the president. So it’s my position that has attracted them to you. They wouldn’t have come to you if I were not the president, if I were a district administrator in Kandahar. They would not have given a damn.”

  Karzai’s critics would insist that this outrage was just for public consumption and that he was privately pleased to profit from his family’s exploits. That never felt true to me. Karzai’s political legacy and his place in the history of Afghanistan seemed to mean far more to him than material wealth ever would. President Karzai believed that by lodging these complaints against his family’s attempts at government jobs or contracts, he had fulfilled his moral and political obligations. Whatever his siblings did after that was up to them. “The U.S. media accuses me of cronyism and nepotism, which I have completely and at great cost avoided and not done,” he said.

  Hashmat was one of the president’s most determined enemies. He was steadily trying to chip away at Ahmed Wali’s control over Kandahar to become the most powerful Karzai in the south, to thereby restore some of what had been lost when his father died. He’d been staking this claim for years. When Abdul Ahad was killed, in 1999, Hashmat insisted that he should be the new leader of the Popalzai tribe, rather than Hamid. At the tribal gathering in Quetta where Hashmat made this appeal, Ahmed Wali turned to his assistant and whispered, “What a motherfucker.”

  But to be recognized as a leader, Hashmat needed to deliver for his tribesmen. The Karz villagers, much like many rural Afghans, felt frustrated by the government’s failures over the previous decade. The grape farmers here had won no particular benefit from residing in the ruling family’s home village. They could list the accomplishments of President Karzai’s father the parliamentarian, including bringing new roads and canals to the village. But the only recent aid they’d received had come from foreigners. They had grown to depend on organizations such as IRD, a USAID contractor, which gave six-dollar cash handouts for day-labor work planting seeds or dredging canals. It was the United Nations that had paid to put up a rock retaining wall along the riverbed to keep the one paved road from washing out in floods, and the U.S. government that had paid to fertilize the fields. “The government itself has not done anything,” Abdul Ali, a village elder, told me. “I can tell you that the president has not served the tribe. He has not done good things for the people.”

  “Many of our young people are jobless now,” said another old farmer, Ahmadullah. “And the main reason for insecurity is when people don’t have jobs.”

  Hashmat had plans to build a hospital and a new mosque in Karz. He wanted to start a
new shura, a council of his own loyal followers, which he hoped would become more influential than the official provincial council, run by Ahmed Wali Karzai. Using profits from his security company and from a hotel he ran for foreign contractors outside Kandahar Airfield, Hashmat paid more than $2,000 to repair all the broken windows in the Karz school after a bomb went off nearby. He claimed to have spent $70,000 of his own money to bring power lines to Karz, which had no steady source of electricity.

  Hashmat had loyal followers, but he was still not widely recognized as a leader of his tribe by the other Karzais. The president and his siblings had opposed Hashmat’s power grab each step along the way. In 2010, when Hashmat campaigned to represent Kandahar in parliament, he came in first place in the preliminary results. But during the review process, election officials threw out thousands of his votes, citing fraud, and disqualified him. Hashmat attributed the result solely to the dirty work of Ahmed Wali and the president. He later told me that Ahmed Wali had offered him the parliament seat but only in exchange for $1 million. “Originally, I got thirty-seven thousand votes. At the end, I was left with fifty-eight hundred,” he said. “Why was I kicked out of parliament? The president doesn’t want anybody who’s not kissing his hand.”

  The same year, when President Karzai decided to shut down certain private security companies, the Asia Security Group was one of the first to close. Hashmat and his partners felt this decision had been motivated by the family rivalry. The company regularly clashed with the government. On another occasion, Hashmat had tried to get some imported pickup trucks out of customs, but President Karzai had ordered the Afghan spy agency to seize them until all taxes were paid, a former senior British official who had entered the private security world told me. Company insiders saw the presidential decision to close Asia Security Group as an extension of this family feud. “It is my understanding that this was politically/personally motivated due to the friction between the President and Hashmat,” Hashmat’s business partner Asad Khan, a former U.S. Marine, wrote to me. “In reality the two did not get along.