A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  The soldiers had lost the one man they saw as powerful enough to bend public will by gift or intimidation. He lobbied everyone, from illiterate warlords to the president, in favor of the American mission. He kept a fractious coalition of tribal elders marching in line. Who knew what type of chaos might emerge to fill the hole left by his murder? “He was the ultimate Afghan, and I don’t mean that negatively,” said Colonel Chris Riga, the Special Forces commander. “It brought me to tears when he was killed.” General Ken Dahl felt the same way: “I was heartbroken when he got killed. We really were turning the corner.”

  In Ahmed Wali’s absence, the Karzai family’s grip on the Pashtuns slipped. Qayum, who had been spending most of his time tending to the three restaurants he now owned in Baltimore, flew back to Kandahar and stayed for weeks to help manage the fallout. To try to retain control, the family subdivided Ahmed Wali’s responsibilities. Qayum took political and diplomatic engagements. Shah Wali and Mahmood looked after the business interests. They brought in Asadullah Khalid, the former governor of Kandahar and a Karzai ally, to take on a new position as security coordinator for the province. But they couldn’t hold things together the way he had. Soon his inner circle was splintering.

  It was always obvious that Ahmed Wali had been a very wealthy man. His generosity toward his servants and guards and even strangers who came to visit was renowned. I’d heard all sorts of stories about the kinds of things he would underwrite. He paid for truckloads of wheat to be handed out in Kandahar villages. He paid for young people to attend university and for patients to fly to India for medical treatment. He paid to house Tor Jan, a Taliban commander from the Achekzai tribe, and ten of his men when they decided to abandon the insurgency and needed protection. When the Arghandab district police chief, Haji Abdul Ahad, nearly died in a suicide bombing, Ahmed Wali gave him more than $30,000 for his doctors’ bills. “Ahmed Wali Karzai was the only person who helped,” he told me. Ahmed Wali had ordered one of his servants, Lajaward, to give money and food to every single person who came to the house—dozens or hundreds of people each day.

  This was surely appreciated, but fear was what kept people in line. One of the few people who knew Ahmed Wali’s financial details was his accountant, Haji Zmarai. The two were cousins, Zmarai a son of one of Ahmed Wali’s maternal aunts. Two days after his burial, Zmarai flew to Dubai, family members said, and the relatives soon realized that Ahmed Wali’s fortune had gone with him. One of Ahmed Wali’s close relatives said that $300 million was missing. Others who saw Zmarai in that period reported that he spent nights out at dance clubs, dressed like an Arab sheikh, wearing diamond rings and showering money on women. The apparent brazen theft caused a panic within the family. According to relatives, one of the uncles flew to Dubai to find Zmarai. He supposedly told Zmarai that Ahmed Wali’s mother missed him, and that he should come back to Kandahar to visit. When the plane landed, police trucks were waiting on the tarmac. Zmarai was arrested and locked away inside Kandahar’s Sarposa prison. But the money wasn’t coming back.

  There were other defections from Ahmed Wali’s inner circle. Mond Lala had been a loyal servant to several of the Karzai brothers. He’d joined Hamid Karzai’s rebellion against the Taliban and later worked as a security guard with the brothers in Kandahar. When I met him, he had recently quit and had moved into a tiny, barely furnished town house in Aino Mena. He showed me his scrapbook of photos: standing alongside the president at the palace; his arm around Greg, the CIA officer who traveled with Hamid early in the war; shooting pool with Ahmed Wali. “Look at me: I was one of the very close people to Ahmed Wali and the family. And now I’m living in this rental house,” he said. “Over the last year, nobody paid me a single penny.”

  The fight between Shah Wali and Mahmood over money and control of Aino Mena had disappointed him. Neither of them were the man Ahmed Wali had been, he felt. The new young sycophants at Shah Wali’s house didn’t pay him much respect. “I couldn’t work with them anymore, so I resigned,” he said.

  Afterward, Mond Lala spent a couple of weeks at the palace, visiting President Karzai. “I told him what had happened and why I had resigned, and the president told me, Bravo. Good for you. You did the right thing to resign. They should be ashamed.”

  —

  Since the killing, Shah Wali had relocated to a two-story yellow concrete house inside Aino Mena, surrounded by twelve-foot-high concrete blast walls. To reach it you had to pass several checkpoints and undergo pat-downs and metal-detector scans. A gray Lexus with tan leather seats (license plate 4444) was parked in the driveway. In addition to his four children, Shah Wali and his wife were now caring for Ahmed Wali’s five kids as well. None of them were attending school, as that seemed too risky, given the assassination. When they weren’t having sessions with their tutor, the kids watched cartoons. “They stay in the house all day,” Shah Wali told me. “It’s like they’re in jail.”

  Two of the boys bounded into the room one afternoon as we were talking.

  “So, do you like to play soccer?” Ahmed Wali Karzai’s eldest son, Ismail, asked me.

  I told him I’d enjoyed playing when I was his age.

  “I was the greatest goalkeeper—now I’m the best shotter,” he said. “I’m with Brazil.” He looked at Adam, Shah Wali’s eldest son, who was playing with his iPad. They were both eight.

  “I don’t know what he does,” Ismail said.

  “America,” Adam said.

  Ismail said he liked Brazil. “Any player in Brazil. ’Cause one of them, no, the specialty is to shoot very fast. And one can, when the other team gets trying to get the ball, but he doesn’t miss it.”

  “I would say that he’s a crybaby,” he said of Adam. “Somebody hurt his feelings, he rush like a bull. He rush like a bull. Put his two fingers like this and controls you and they push you and then he comes up and comes to you like a bull and he doesn’t stand a chance. He only stands a chance against his fat sister. His fat sister. I have a sister named Summa. She’s very thin. She’s very thin, but sometimes when we hurt her she’s like a volcano. She’s going to come and burst like a volcano.”

  “Then she’s going to bite us,” Adam said.

  “She doesn’t have teeth, but she has terrible black like teeth,” Ismail said.

  They talked some more about their sisters, and about soccer, naming all the Brazilian and German players they could think of.

  “You’re a snail,” Ismail said.

  “I’m not a snail,” Adam said.

  “Did you watch a film called Criss Angel Mindfreak 2?” Ismail asked me.

  The plot, as he explained it, had something to do with a lamp, and a clock, and a guy who could fly and lifted a cat. They watched a lot of cartoons.

  “We want to go to the United States,” Ismail said.

  “And President Obama,” Adam said. “What’s his name? B…A…R…S…A…C…K.

  “Do you know President Obama? President Barsack Obama?”

  “Washington, D.C. If it’s so near, why don’t you meet him?”

  “I have heard about Washington, D.C., so much. Washington, D.C. The White House. The White House is all white, right?”

  “Is that where the real king of Washington, D.C., lives?”

  Sometimes it was easy to forget that the Karzais were real people. Then you met their kids.

  —

  Mahmood Karzai met Abdullah Nadi and other partners at his apartment in Kabul to discuss getting their company’s money back from his brother. At the meeting, they tried to reason with him. They proposed hiring a professional management company to take over the project. They drafted a letter to the Central Bank about how Shah Wali had defrauded them.

  Shah Wali insisted that he was only protecting the project. One of the partners recalled, “His response was: ‘Mahmood is a corrupt person, and he’s trying to take the money like he took from Kabul Bank, and transfer it to Dubai. And I have a responsibility to the Kandahar people. I will not allow that to ha
ppen.” Shah Wali said the others had offered him $5 million to give them access to the project’s bank account again, but he had refused.

  The tensions kept reaching a breaking point. Security guards for rival partners threatened each other. Relatives came to blows. The investors who had purchased land in Aino Mena were firmly behind Shah Wali. They believed Helmandi was misusing funds and that Mahmood was too engaged in politics to pay enough attention to Aino Mena. “In the U.S., they have big brands: Red Bull, Coke—people trust these brands,” Mohammed Nadir, one of the investors, told me. “In Afghanistan there are no brands. People are the brands. Shah Wali Karzai is our brand.”

  From the palace, President Karzai tried to mediate this latest family dispute, and he even flew to Kandahar to discuss the problem. The president ordered the Afghan government to freeze the account until the problem could be resolved. Work on Aino Mena ground to a halt. Contractors streamed into Helmandi’s office day after day, demanding payment. In his bedroom, he slept next to loaded guns. His son told him he should move back to California, but he couldn’t let the development go. “I started this project in a tent,” he told me. “There was no building here. I can’t let it go. I’m so much attached to it. I wish there was a medicine or a tablet I could take to get away from this madness.”

  On November 28, 2012, Abdullah Nadi typed out a two-page e-mail to Mahmood Karzai and the other partners. “As we all know the project is in a very critical state; we must act now legally and responsibly to save the project from being overrun by those acting with impunity and nepotism.” As Nadi saw it, the construction of Aino Mena, from its inception, had not been managed as a partnership, with input from all and group deliberations, but on the whimsical and secretive fancies of Mahmood Karzai. Or as he put it in another e-mail: “The Reality of this project: Oligopoly-dominant players, Collusion-inflated price, Patronage dependency, behave with impunity, Project Oversight non exist and inadequate, Corruption, nepotism, flow of funds to the wrong hands.”

  “Mr. Shawali [Shah Wali] has cheated our company by selling construction materials from his own company, to the project and made millions of dollars illegally through monopolizing the market with unfair prices,” Nadi wrote. “As I understand the new scam is to give a gift to Mr. Shawali, $5 million dollars although, he has made money and has received a regular salary with benefits.”

  Nadi’s e-mail set off more bickering among the partners. Helmandi took offense at Nadi’s suggestion that all the managing partners were involved in criminal activity. “As one of the managing partners, it is insulting for me to hear that coming from someone who has done absolutely ZERO to try to make this project successful,” Helmandi wrote back. “This was a hands on project, you cannot expect us to play a secretarial role for you and micromanage ourselves for you. You were welcome to come and work.”

  Everyone was furious at everyone else. Mahmood Karzai got upset with Helmandi for renting his own auger to AFCO to dig holes to plant trees. “You should [have] asked our company before you rented your machine to Afco this is clearly a conflict of interest,” Mahmood wrote in an e-mail. “When I am here and I see the Afco’s money is wasted it my duty to stop it.”

  In further correspondence with the group, Helmandi proposed that the partners meet in Dubai to hash out a way forward for the company. He sent out a list of questions and issues for discussion, including what the role of the partners should be, how much they should be paid, and how a partner could be terminated from the group. Abdullah Nadi chose not to attend the meeting in Dubai. His wife needed inner-ear surgery, and he wanted to remain home in Alexandria to help her through the process. Furthermore, he didn’t trust the partners to treat him fairly. Some of his friends had warned him that his life could be in danger if he returned. Nadi did, however, have some last feelings he wanted to share. He wrote out six pages, listing all the things accomplished by himself and others. “As you can see no one is the champion,” he wrote. “We do not need to belittle each other’s contributions. There is enough credit for everyone.”

  He ended his appeal by saying that they should all feel proud to have been able to contribute to rebuilding Afghanistan. “Second,” he added, “I don’t believe we are dreadful people. Some of us couldn’t handle the opportunities and found themselves like ‘a kid in a candy store.’ ” The project, he urged, deserved better management—people who were independent and could follow basic rules.

  “I conclude by saying that I can only hope that with this letter, highlighting of what seems to be our tragic historical pattern; we seem to be our own worst enemies; jealous; envious; lack of understanding; lack of fairness and obstructive to ourselves. The success of our true enemies lies in this fact. I can only hope that God will give you all the strength to take proactive measures to ensure our joined hope that one day we can work, and trust each other.”

  He signed off by paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin: “If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.”

  17

  EVERYBODY IN A CORNER

  Honourable Citizens! Implementation of peace by America is Lame Execuse. They want to Cupture Middle Asia

  —Banner hanging outside ISAF headquarters in Kabul

  GENERAL JOHN R. ALLEN, an earnest Marine with a high-and-tight haircut and a riveting baritone voice, landed in Kabul in July 2011 to take over the war, with clear instructions from the White House: fix the relationship with President Karzai. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, back for his second Afghan tour, had been told the same thing by Obama. “Our president was not very happy with where we got in the relationship,” Crocker recalled. “He said, ‘You know him. Get us to a better place.’ It was a very, very high priority.”

  But by then, Hamid Karzai had changed. The leader Crocker had known a decade earlier—hopeful, eager to please, optimistic—had eroded into a more jaded and distrustful man. His suspicions of America and its motives had etched themselves firmly into his political worldview. Karzai remained courtly and eloquent, but Crocker could sense a new degree of cynicism and exhaustion. “He had aged decades in a decade,” he said. “He was so burned out.”

  Crocker and Allen wanted to present a unified American front. The previous years had frayed relations within the American mission almost as much as between the Americans and the Afghan government. Petraeus, before he’d left Kabul to run the CIA, had all but abandoned taking Eikenberry with him to the palace, wanting to avoid the bad blood with Karzai. He wished Eikenberry had quit earlier. Allen and Crocker wanted to clear the air. They intended to meet with Karzai often, and together, so that Karzai would perceive them as a team. They also wanted Karzai to become familiar with their thinking, so that he wouldn’t be surprised by American decisions. Crocker often told Karzai when he planned to meet other Afghan politicians and would ask if there was anything Karzai wanted him to mention. “Karzai had become very, very allergic to us just going off and doing things on our own,” Crocker said. “His perception was that we were doing things unilaterally without consulting with him or even informing him. And clearly by that time he was extremely sensitive to the Taliban’s accusation that he was nothing but an American puppet.”

  —

  Allen was commanding the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. He saw his mission as shifting the burden of responsibilities to Karzai’s government and shepherding the emergence of a sovereign state. He wanted, like his predecessors, for President Karzai to take ownership for the war and act as its commander in chief. But the war had gone on for so long and with so little resolution that even the most basic assumptions about what was happening were called into question. Why were the Americans even in Afghanistan? Why couldn’t the world’s most powerful army defeat a bunch of farmers in plastic sandals on dirt bikes? Their inability to win or leave made their motives suspect. From the palace throne to the fruit vendor’s stall, nobody trusted this foreign coalition, the mysterious kharajee who lived behind razor wire and ballistic sunglasses, who arrested the wrong people and frightened
women and killed the innocent. What did they want with Afghanistan?

  That question seemed to fascinate Hamid Karzai. He had come to see foreign conspiracy everywhere he looked—or at least he found it a convenient scapegoat to account for his government’s failings. He had watched as United States forces drove out the Taliban in a matter of weeks in 2001 and then added tens of thousands of troops and spent billions of dollars as they steadily lost that advantage. He seemed to think Americans did nothing by accident or by mistake. He would tell American diplomats that the only logical explanation was that the United States didn’t want to win the war. This wasn’t a particularly extremist view among Afghans.

  When it came to the motives of foreign troops, suspicion and distrust were the default emotions. In Kandahar at one point, I heard a story that Afghans were worried about answering their cell phones, because they believed American soldiers could kill them by firing a laser from the phone into their ears. In Helmand Province, one story went, the American bases were strategically located above uranium deposits, for clandestine mining. In the Arghandab Valley, a myth had spread about men with white faces and blue eyes who dressed in Afghan robes and black turbans and spoke Pashto as well as any village farmer. This ghostly band of Special Forces had a name—Spin Taliban, Pashto for “White Taliban”—and their elusiveness simply seemed further proof of their unusual abilities. “Afghanistan is a country built on legends,” Habib Zahori wrote in The New York Times as he described the phenomenon.

  Credit 17.1

  General John Allen, right, shakes hands with another American general while visiting the prison at Bagram Airfield on April 14, 2012.

  In the desert hills of Badghis Province, a forlorn and neglected corner of the war, I once stopped by an Afghan army outpost on a berm overlooking a small American base. I found Mirwais Safai, a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant, sitting under a tarp, smoking a cigarette. We started chatting about how things were going against the insurgency, and he looked hard into my eyes. “I will tell you the truth,” he said. “The Americans themselves support the Taliban.”