A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  Among the other guests that morning was the deputy head of the Mohammadzai tribe. His name was Sardar Mohammad Osman—no relation to the policeman—and he had come to discuss a disputed piece of land one of his tribesmen claimed to own. Osman did not consider himself a friend of Ahmed Wali’s. In fact, he blamed him for the death of his cousin, the tribe’s leader, a few years before. The cousin had gone missing after stopping by a house he had purchased inside Aino Mena. Osman often worried that his cousin had become too close to Ahmed Wali, a man not to be crossed. “Then he just disappeared. We made a lot of phone calls. We talked to his friends. But we couldn’t find him. He just vanished,” Osman told me. Outside the Aino Mena house, they found the cousin’s white Toyota Corolla. Inside, there were a few carpets and cushions, but it was mostly unfurnished. In one room, they saw bloodstains on the carpet. “We think they were waiting for him inside. They just killed him,” Osman told me. “Ahmed Wali was involved in those sorts of things. When a tribal leader or political figure was assassinated, everybody would blame him. Everybody knew that it was him.” Osman begged for Ahmed Wali’s help to find his cousin’s body. “And Ahmed Wali’s response was ‘What can I do? You keep searching, and I’ll keep searching.’ ”

  Ahmed Wali had not been generous to the Mohammadzai, a small tribe but one with royal lineage. “He would always oppose the appointment of anybody from our tribe in a government post,” Osman said. “Our great-grandfathers, they have ruled this country for years, and once they were removed from power, then our people had a lot of problems with other tribes. We had land disputes, we had property disputes. So he never helped us, and he would always undermine our efforts to defend our rights and to protect our property and land.” And yet, here Osman was again at Ahmed Wali’s door, because there was only one arbiter in Kandahar.

  Friends who were enemies, enemies friends. The night before, American soldiers had raided a house occupied by bodyguards of Kandahar’s governor, Toryalai Wesa. Until earlier in the year, Wesa had been guarded by Blue Hackle, a private security firm based in Washington, D.C., but that contract had expired. Half of the seventy-man force that replaced those guards was provided by Kandahar’s police chief, the other half by Ahmed Wali Karzai. The governor’s guards had been arrested before. This raid might have been a mistake, or maybe the guards were associated with the Taliban. Either way, it was an annoyance to Fazel Mohammed, their direct supervisor as Ahmed Wali’s personal security chief. One of the guards called him that morning to complain that the American soldiers had mistreated them; he added that he planned to quit. Fazel Mohammed said he’d bring it up when he saw the boss. First he wanted to check with the police chief and the governor about the situation. As Fazel was leaving the house, Sardar Mohammad strode in carrying a sheaf of papers.

  He wore civilian clothes, a brown shalwar kameez, with two pistols tucked into the drawstring of his pants. The weapons were not unusual. Sardar was trusted enough to be exempt from the normal procedure at the gate to search and disarm visitors. But he typically dressed in his gray police uniform. Fazel asked him why that wasn’t the case today. Sardar ignored the question and proceeded up the stairs. Written on the papers he carried were the names of dozens of his policemen. For this often deadly work, the government paid these men $240 a month. Even when their wages arrived on time, they relied on Ahmed Wali for top-ups or tips, bakhshesh. This had lately become more important because the money flow had choked and sputtered with the arrival of the new provincial police chief, Abdul Raziq. Sardar Mohammad had complained before about his men’s provisions: food, fuel, and salaries were all coming late. This was a situation Ahmed Wali should fix. It was one of the responsibilities of being a patron, how the currency of loyalty transacted.

  That morning, Sardar and Ahmed Wali had other topics they might have wanted to discuss. In the preceding few months, Sardar had angered his fellow tribesmen with his treatment of village children. He had apparently violated the unwritten codes that governed when Afghan men could take boys for their sexual pleasure. “He was abusing a lot of children,” Fazel Mohammed said. The villagers, according to Ahmed Wali’s associates, had begun to see him as a predator.

  So what was on Sardar Mohammad’s mind as he walked into Ahmed Wali’s sitting room? Missing police salaries? The public humiliation of losing checkpoints? His predilection for young boys? Something else? They were two comrades fighting a shadow war while running a business empire. They must have harbored many secrets known only to themselves. Sardar approached Ahmed Wali, who sat on his couch, barefoot, in discussion with his guests. Sardar asked him for a private word. They stepped into a small adjoining room. Sardar Mohammad locked the door behind himself. No one witnessed the conversation.

  The sound of gunshots disoriented the other guests. Was that inside? Then there was shouting. People ran toward the adjoining room. Sardar Mohammad opened the door and yelled at everyone to stand back or he would shoot. From the hallway, Mohammed Osman, one of the house drivers, could see the lower half of Ahmed Wali’s body draped over some floor cushions, one of his pant legs pushed up. Osman was a small man whose curly black locks peeked out from his skullcap. “When I saw his bare leg lying there, I lost control of my mind,” Osman told me. “[Sardar] didn’t fire at me. I just reached my arm inside the door and shot at him.”

  When Osman entered the room, Sardar was down and Ahmed Wali sprawled on pillows and cushions, his head slumped back, Sardar’s papers spread out around him. He had been shot twice, in a fashion that suggested a proficient killer. A double tap: once in the chest, once in the head. “They killed Agha Mama!” someone screamed. Dastageri cradled Ahmed Wali’s head while someone else lifted his legs. They wrapped a beige woolen shawl, a patu, around him and ferried him downstairs to an armored Land Cruiser parked in the driveway. Osman had always imagined he would be in that car, behind the wheel, when this day came. “I never thought that something like that would happen inside the house,” he said. “Everybody knew Sardar Mohammad. He was Ahmed Wali’s friend. He was all of our friends.”

  The rage reverberated across the frightened city like a shock wave. It was an unfathomable betrayal. Guards pumped more bullets into Sardar’s downed body, as though seeking to inflict, through sheer physical trauma, some proportionate retribution. They hauled him outside, where policemen tied him with a rope to the bumper of a Ford Ranger and dragged his flopping corpse through the streets. When they reached Charsu, the “Four Directions” market downtown where young Farid Karzai worked, they hung Sardar by his neck, barefoot and pantless, from the second story of a sand-colored brick building, as a warning to all. In photos taken that day, a policeman can be seen standing on the roof above Sardar’s dangling body, looking out over the crowded bazaar. Sardar is suspended high off the ground, next to a window with yellow shutters, his head torqued to the left by his noose, and his thin legs casting a small shadow on the building’s façade. Rickshaws and vans, pedestrians and shoppers, crisscross the streets under his cocked, unseeing gaze.

  When I visited Mirwais Hospital two days later, I found him in the refrigerated morgue, a converted Maersk shipping container, inside a white body bag, lying on his back on a stainless steel tray. He was thirty-five years old. His death certificate recorded eleven gunshot wounds to his neck, chest, abdomen, and face. Despite Islamic custom necessitating swift burial, his relatives were afraid to claim him, and left him lying there for days.

  At the house, chaos. “Everyone was crying. Soldiers. Tribal elders. The people who were visiting. The people who lived there,” Fazel Mohammed said.

  Mond Lala, a guard, screamed at Fazel Mohammed: “Motherfucker, is this how you provide security?”

  Ahmed Wali Karzai was dead by the time he reached the hospital. “No respiration. No pulse. Nothing,” one of his doctors told me. His body would be taken home and left on blocks of ice in a small room, the air conditioner turned to high, to await the president. According to Death Certificate 371, the cause of death was a gunshot
wound. One bullet had entered the left side of his chest, near his heart, traveled across his body, and exited the right side of his back. The other bullet struck under his right eye and passed through his skull’s parietal bone behind his right ear. Before his body was taken from the hospital for burial, someone stole his Rolex.

  —

  Shaida Mohammad Abdali was sitting in his office down a marble hallway on the second floor of the National Security Council building when his cell phone rang. Abdali’s lifetime of service to the Karzais had earned him the title of deputy national security adviser and special assistant to the president. He had come a long way from the boy who washed clothes and poured water onto guests’ hands before meals at the Karzai home in Quetta. He wore dark suits now and occupied the front row at many important events, but other palace aides mocked him for his humble beginnings and somewhat smarmy officiousness. He sat amid a small shrine to his leader—photographs on desks and walls and a vase emblazoned with Hamid Karzai’s face. Abdali used to sleep in the president’s residence and had then moved to a small house nearby, within the palace walls. At night, he kept the president’s cell phone in his pocket and screened his calls. A reliable barometer of the pressure in the president’s office, he was also trusted for his discretion. That morning, he could hear the words coming through his phone, but they wouldn’t cohere in his mind.

  “Ahmed Wali Karzai’s been killed,” Dastageri told him.

  The sentence immobilized Abdali. Ahmed Wali had been President Karzai’s political backbone in Kandahar and across the Pashtun south, and Hamid’s favorite brother. They spoke on the phone nearly every day. “I could not move from my chair. I just sat there. Shocked,” Abdali recalled. “I just felt my head spinning. I thought, How can I move from my chair? How can I tell the president?”

  Abdali rushed downstairs and outside, into the palace courtyard. At that moment, Karzai was meeting with Haji Din Mohammed, his former campaign manager. Abdali walked through the screen door of the Gul Khana and ran into presidential spokesman Waheed Omar. “I think Ahmed Wali’s been killed,” Abdali told him. “Do you want to go with me to tell the president?”

  Standing in front of Karzai, Abdali broke into tears. He fumbled for words, trying to explain. Karzai, who remained seated across from Haji Din Mohammed, grew frustrated.

  “What happened?” he said. “Just tell me.”

  Ahmed Wali, Abdali told the president, had been shot.

  “Is he dead or alive?” Karzai demanded.

  “I think he is dead,” Abdali said.

  “Who did this?”

  “Sardar Mohammad, from the village.”

  Karzai didn’t say another word. He exhaled and looked away. The three men in the room watched the president. Karzai didn’t move for a while. Omar had never seen him appear so shaken. The silence reminded Abdali of Karzai’s reaction more than a decade earlier when he learned his father had been killed. Omar touched Abdali’s arm, and the two men walked out of the office.

  When they left, Haji Din Mohammed sought to comfort Karzai. He had lost his own brother, Abdul Haq, at the start of the war. Haq had been one of the most famous and outspoken mujahedeen commanders, a charismatic leader who met Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and would have been a candidate to sit in the chair Karzai now occupied, if he had not been killed in his own rebellious run into Afghanistan shortly after September 11.

  “Mr. President, we have all lost brothers,” Mohammed told him.

  The palace staff didn’t know how to proceed. Karzai had a busy day. French president Nicolas Sarkozy had arrived in Kabul that morning and was to have lunch with Karzai, followed by a joint press conference in the palace courtyard. After a few minutes, Omar returned to Karzai’s office and suggested that they clear his schedule for the day. Karzai initially agreed to cancel the press conference, then changed his mind. “Afghans die every day and I don’t cancel my press conferences,” he told Omar.

  Karzai began to make calls. He phoned his brother Shah Wali, an engineer who lived with Ahmed Wali in Kandahar. Shah Wali had not been at home when his brother was shot and could not explain fully what had happened. Karzai called the Kandahar governor, Toryalai Wesa, and the police chief, Abdul Raziq, to discuss the situation. In between calls he spoke to the small group of aides gathered in his office. “I used to worry that Afghans would wonder why they are always dying and yet the president’s family is not dying,” Karzai said. “Perhaps this is God’s way of bringing me closer to Afghans. Because they have all lost family members.”

  He would go on with his day. He met with Sarkozy for lunch. Then he walked out into the dappled shade of the courtyard and stood at the podium, on a small stone patio in front of dozens of reporters. He wore his customary peaked wool hat, the karakul, and a dark blue blazer over a white shalwar kameez. He clasped his hands and spoke calmly into the cameras.

  “This morning, my younger brother Ahmed Wali Karzai was martyred in his home. This is the life of the people of Afghanistan, and each Afghan family has suffered in such a way.”

  Karzai had, by this time, developed a reputation as an unusually emotional president. He cried during public speeches, to the shame and ridicule of many Afghans. In one televised address, he sobbed when he spoke about the prospect of having to send his four-year-old son, Mirwais, out of Afghanistan so he could grow up in a peaceful country. This time, in his public address, and in private back at his office, he kept his composure. “This is a personal matter,” he told his staff. “Not a state matter.”

  Abdali wasn’t so sure. The moment reminded him of an Afghan proverb: “The five fingers are brothers, not equals.” For the president, Ahmed Wali had always been the most important. In the political realm, he stood as a bulwark against Pakistan in the Pashtun south, perhaps the only Afghan leader of that stature the president could trust not to succumb to ISI entreaties. Personally, his devotion to the president never flagged. During Hamid’s graduate studies in India, Ahmed Wali had sent him money every month from Chicago. Ahmed Wali’s logistical support from Quetta had eased Hamid’s return to the country, and, since his early days with the CIA in Kandahar, he had accepted the risk of fighting for the Americans. “Ahmed Wali stayed for all those years in Afghanistan when he didn’t have to. He tolerated all the accusations, he knew it was all about politics,” Abdali said. “He was the president’s real hand.”

  Despite his public image as an erratic and mercurial man, Hamid Karzai had endured losses in his personal life that he’d handled with strength and grace.

  “He is a person who feels pain; it is visible on his face,” his cousin Hekmat Karzai told me later. “The man knows the sacrifice he has paid: his father, his uncles, and his dearest brother, who was his right arm.”

  —

  “Why would he do such a horrible thing?” Fazel Mohammed said. “I’ve given a lot of thought to this issue. And I still don’t know.”

  The motive—assuming there was just one—quickly got buried under the sediment of rumor and conspiracy. In the air-conditioned corridors of Regional Command South, at Kandahar Airfield, military intelligence officers working under General James Terry received two interesting reports from the field shortly after Ahmed Wali’s killing. One of them came from an Afghan police unit that responded to Ahmed Wali’s house: “We found a secret room.” The report wasn’t very detailed. There was some type of machinery in the basement. It might be a drug lab. Or a printing press for counterfeit bills. But Terry didn’t want to find out. “He ordered them to get out of there immediately,” one of his subordinates told me. “This is an Afghan issue. Now that [Ahmed Wali’s] dead, he felt it would affect his legacy. All of our people left immediately.” If this was the smoking gun that American officials had looked for over the better part of a decade, that was the last chance to find it.

  The other report the Americans picked up, from sources close to Ahmed Wali, pointed to a potential motive. Sardar Mohammad’s sexual abuse of young boys had apparently gotten to th
e point where Ahmed Wali felt he had to take action. “AWK was trying to fire Sardar Mohammad for abusing the village boys,” one senior U.S. military official told me. “He first tried to get him to stop. And took away checkpoints in areas where things were happening.” Another senior American official in Kandahar at the time related the same story: “Sardar Mohammad was a pedophile, and his pedophilia had gotten way out of hand and had become an embarrassment. The Popalzai fathers had gone to AWK and said, ‘You’ve got to rein this guy in. He’s out of control.’ AWK decided he was going to fire him from his security job and give him some other job. He summoned him over there that day to do it. And [Sardar Mohammad] got wind of it.”

  When I asked other members of Ahmed Wali’s inner circle, they dismissed this theory. They claimed they had not heard until after his death about the extent of Sardar Mohammad’s child abuse. There were other stories, told with equal vehemence. People talked of a police report claiming that the same gun had killed both Ahmed Wali and Sardar Mohammad, apparently shot by a servant in league with Pakistani intelligence, though I never saw such a report. Some relatives believed that Hashmat had hired or convinced Sardar to take Ahmed Wali out. Mahmood Karzai insisted the Taliban had killed his brother, after a slow process of brainwashing Sardar that had involved clandestine trips across the border to Quetta. Sardar’s drug use and drinking were said to have intensified in the months prior to the killing. He had been acting erratic, on edge, demanding to see people’s phones, to know whom they were calling. Another theory in circulation held that Ahmed Wali and Sardar had both had their sights on a pretty young Karzai cousin to marry. Ahmed Wali told Sardar to back off, but Sardar was burning with love. “He had no option but to kill the girl or kill AWK,” as one person put it.