A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  I asked him to explain, and he sighed. Nothing would change if I published his words, he said, but he’d share them anyway. For nearly two months, Safai had commanded an Afghan army platoon alongside a U.S. special operations team. They’d fought side by side, and he had trusted his foreign comrades. But he’d begun to notice disturbing things. The Americans met inside a clinic with Afghan villagers but refused to allow the medic from Safai’s platoon to listen to their conversations. “Spies were coming and going,” he told me. One night, parachutes dropped from the sky, carrying military crates full of water and ammunition. The Americans gathered their boxes but left one behind in a dangerous village. Safai and his men found it the next day. They pried open the case and discovered mortars and ammunition. Safai photographed the contents, then brought the crate to his American partner.

  “He was yelling at me, ‘Why did you bring this here?’ ” Safai told me. “When he saw the ammunition, he stopped yelling. I said, ‘You were giving this to the Taliban.’ He said, ‘It was just a big mistake.’ ”

  When I got back to Kabul, I asked ISAF about Safai’s story. Lieutenant Commander Nicole Schwegman, a U.S. military spokeswoman, confirmed the airdrop. Twelve supply crates had been delivered by parachute. Two of them collided, and one crashed into the wall of a villager’s home. The soldiers apologized and offered compensation to the family. The other eleven crates were recovered. “No ammunition or explosives were left unrecovered overnight,” she said. “We do not, under any circumstances, provide supplies to the Taliban.”

  Safai’s superior, Captain Mohammad Aref, stood by his story. “He is describing things he has seen with his own eyes.”

  Hamid Karzai was sympathetic to these stories. His view of the war had shifted from opposition to American military operations to a conviction that the United States was in cahoots with the enemy. America’s ultimate goal, as he saw it, was to weaken his government to make it unable to prevent the United States from using Afghanistan for its regional aims against Islamic militants in Pakistan and the government of Iran. This was a paranoid reading of events. But there were grains of truth to it. A large part of the U.S. motivation for keeping so many troops in the country for so long was to stop Afghanistan from reverting to a place where people could plot and train for attacks against the United States. An eight-hundred-man CIA mission was primarily focused on al-Qaeda targets across the border in Pakistan. And to find and kill those targets, they would rely on any Afghan who had information, including those warlords or corrupt mercenaries whom the other parts of the American mission wanted to move beyond. Karzai could see the contradiction in the American approach to the war and understood it for the opportunistic mess it was. When he felt well supported by the Americans, he tended to be the most responsible and decisive. But during periods of insecurity, when he was beleaguered by the foreigners, he went into a defensive crouch, refused to make decisions, blamed everyone but himself.

  “People come and tell of the facts on the ground in Afghanistan,” Karzai said during one of our talks. “The Taliban are actually supported by the coalition forces here. That they drop weapons to them. That they drop supplies to them. That the war is created by the U.S. in Afghanistan.”

  “A lot of stories emerged in Afghanistan that the international forces here, the Americans here are funding the Taliban, are equipping the Taliban. Hundreds of them. Factual stories. Of locations. Of airplanes. Of helicopters. Of how they funded the Taliban and evacuated the Taliban wounded from the battlefield, hundreds of such stories. Southern Afghanistan. Northern Afghanistan. Everywhere. All of it true. I would then verify it. All of it true.”

  It didn’t take General Allen long to realize that he would have serious problems at the palace. In particular, he began to feel that his presence at the Sunday National Security Council meetings was unproductive. During those palace gatherings, President Karzai would enter the room with his usual ebullience, a dramatic flourish of energetic greetings, and make for his customary spot at the head of the table. He tended to disregard whatever agenda ISAF had arduously helped formulate with the Afghan staff the preceding week. Instead, he would look straight at John Allen and say, “Well, General Allen, tell me about…” Karzai would then raise whatever he found to be the most provocative headline from that morning’s news clippings, sometimes referencing stories so recently pulled off the Internet that Allen was completely uninformed. In the midst of difficult stretches, Allen could feel the tension in the Cabinet Room the moment Karzai began talking. The palace had become a stage for Karzai’s anti-American theatrics, his cabinet an attentive and wary audience.

  Just three weeks into Allen’s job, Karzai confronted him during a Sunday gathering about an unusual story out of Zabul Province, a sparsely populated desert along the country’s southeastern border with Pakistan. The facts, as usual, were in dispute. Two days earlier, Afghan police had fired into a crowd of protesters in Qalat, the provincial capital, to quell a riot and had killed as many as four people. The protesters had convened to condemn an American raid the night before, a mission they claimed had killed civilians. To settle the confusion, the provincial police chief, Mohammad Nabi Elham, ordered that the bodies, which had been buried as soon as possible in accordance with Islamic tradition, were to be exhumed and identified. The exhumation apparently further enraged the mob, and Elham’s men, under a hot August sun, resorted to spraying gunfire into their midst, a decision he justified to a Reuters reporter by saying insurgents had infiltrated the protest and had already shot one of his men, so the “police had to fire back.” President Karzai, as he entered the Cabinet Room the following Sunday, lashed out at Allen. He’d heard that American troops had ordered the corpses dug up, and he angrily demanded an explanation.

  There were times, Allen would later learn, when Karzai’s instincts and judgment were spot-on. “When you listened to the thoughtful Karzai, you typically benefited from it,” Allen told me. An example: One night, U.S. special operations troops raided the home of a man they suspected of being a “subcommander” of the Haqqani insurgent network, a group allied to the Taliban that operated in eastern Afghanistan. The man ran a pharmacy in the city of Ghazni and lived with his family outside the city. As the American soldiers scaled the wall and stormed the family’s home, they killed the pharmacist’s mother and wounded his father, who turned out to be a senior member of the provincial government, and shot his aunt in the eye. When he learned of the disastrous results of the raid, Allen asked the special operations commanders how they chose their targets and how they defined a “subcommander”: Had he been leading fifteen Haqqani fighters? Thirty? Forty-five? Allen was told that the man had an informal relationship with just one other suspected insurgent. Knowing one insurgent was enough to be considered a “subcommander” in the military’s definition. And it was enough to send a kill-or-capture team to get him, which had resulted, in this case, in killing and wounding innocent people. Allen remembered Karzai as more resigned than angry when talking about this case.

  “We bagged the son, wounded the father, killed the mother, blinded the aunt, and he said to me, ‘Why didn’t you just arrest him on his fifteen-mile commute to the pharmacy?’ I just hung my head and said, ‘We should have,’ ” Allen recalled.

  In fact, among the most important lessons Allen took from his time as commander was the need to listen, rather than dictate, to those who knew the country far better than any visiting Americans. Others had come to the same conclusion. Karzai could be overwrought and paranoid, but there was often more naked truth to what he said than most politicians shared. “So many of the problems we experienced, when they finally came to a head, were things he had raised three or four years before, and when he raised it first, it was solvable then,” Allen said. “But we either didn’t take him seriously or we didn’t apply the resources or we weren’t listening. If we were ever going to do this again, God help us, the best piece of advice I would give to that commander would be: Listen closely to the leadership
of that country. Listen to them. And if you can solve their problems for them early, do it. The campaign will benefit. They’ll be aggrandized for having exerted what looks like their national sovereignty. Do it. There’s no downside.”

  Yet each day seemed to bring a new flavor of misinformation from the palace: rumor, conspiracy, conjecture, bald-faced lie. When Karzai wasn’t right, he could be astonishingly wrong. On the same night Afghan police were firing at protesters in Zabul—a minor mention in the news of the war—a dual-rotor American Chinook transport helicopter was shot down in a Taliban-controlled valley in Wardak Province, and the deaths of thirty American soldiers, including twenty-two members of the country’s most elite counterterrorism squad, SEAL Team Six, the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden, made it the deadliest day of the war for the United States. The next morning, the day before the cabinet meeting, Karzai called Allen to offer his condolences. The crash was a tragic loss, and Karzai expressed his sadness with genuinely solemn remarks. But that wasn’t all. He was worried. He wanted Allen to come to the palace to speak further about the crash.

  When Allen arrived, Karzai warned him that the war was about to change dramatically. Karzai’s advisers had told him that the Taliban shot down the Chinook with shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles, the same type of weapon that the mujahedeen had introduced onto the Afghan battlefield in the mid-1980s, thereby turning the tide against the Soviet army. History was repeating itself, Karzai warned. The Stinger missile that had decimated fleets of Soviet helicopters had made its way back. The Chinook was the first example. Karzai was convinced there would be more.

  The truth, however, was that the Taliban had shot down the Chinook with a rocket-propelled grenade, a far more prosaic weapon. Allen knew that then, and a subsequent Pentagon investigation confirmed it. It had been, more than anything, a lucky shot. Allen assured Karzai that the insurgents had not obtained the Stinger. But when Karzai latched onto a compelling rumor from his inner circle, it could be hard to change his mind. So when Karzai launched into his accusation the next day that Americans had desecrated Muslim graves, Allen shot right back.

  Credit 17.2

  General John Allen visiting soldiers at Combat Outpost Nerkh to celebrate Thanksgiving, November 24, 2011

  “Let me tell you what I know about your faith. Let me tell you how much I respect your people. Let me tell you how important a Muslim burial is to me. And how I would never do this,” he recalled saying. “I didn’t order the exhumation. That was done entirely at the initiative of the police chief.”

  Karzai, the king of snap judgments, spun toward the minister of the interior, Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, who was sitting at the conference table. “I want him fired today,” Karzai ordered. The press release announcing the police chief’s dismissal went out that afternoon.

  Karzai’s conclusions about the truth in a confusing battlefield sometimes seemed to be based solely on his own assumptions about the inferior capabilities of the insurgency. When the C-17 cargo plane carrying the visiting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, suffered minor damage from a rocket attack on Bagram Airfield, Karzai was again convinced that the Taliban had obtained a new lethal weapons system. An insurgent attack one night a few months later at the main coalition base in Helmand Province, Camp Bastion, left Karzai equally suspicious. A group of nearly twenty Taliban fighters had breached the perimeter fencing and begun firing grenades and setting off explosives inside aircraft hangars and refueling stations. At the end of an hours-long gun battle, two Marines had been killed, including a squadron commander, and eight Marine Harrier fighter jets had been damaged or destroyed, an attack that amounted to the largest loss of U.S. airpower since the Vietnam War. Two American generals would later lose their jobs for failing to protect the base. During Allen’s briefing to Karzai to explain what had happened, the general brought out photos of the slain Taliban fighters who’d participated. Karzai eyed the corpses. They were not, he decided, Taliban. “Taliban are gangly, underfed, malnourished. Look at the muscles on these people,” Karzai told him. “Those are very clearly Iranian trained men or even Iranian agents.”

  Allen stopped attending the Sunday security council meetings. They’d become a venue for Karzai to act presidential, to perform a sovereignty that he did not quite possess, to pronounce and have his pronouncements obeyed, to prove, as much to his own ministers as to the Americans, that he was the president. Allen was tired of playing evil foreign occupier before the royal court. The whole goal of American involvement, as he saw it, was to midwife the birth of a stable and sovereign state. Success, to him, was when the Afghan government made a decision without him around. And anyway, it was clear that Americans were no longer welcome.

  —

  The palace air was thick with paranoia. Even among his aides, Karzai acted like a man surrounded, distrustful yet demanding their fealty. He would promote those who flattered him, humiliate his oldest friends. Karzai often mocked his advisers or treated them with contempt in front of foreign guests. He’d order them to do menial tasks like fetch him tea or bring him a blanket. Karzai liked to nibble on fruit and sweets throughout the day and would sometimes reach over and swipe snacks off his cabinet ministers’ plates. “Awful humiliations,” one European ambassador told me. “The cabinet were all there sitting and burning with resentment against him. They were all sort of toadies. Privately they would come to us and be very rude about him.”

  Karzai encouraged an environment where they competed for his approval. He’d developed a reputation for undercutting his rivals before they could get too strong, but he behaved this way with his allies, too. He would appoint governors to provinces they were unfamiliar with or recall regional strongmen to Kabul, where they would not pose a political threat. In some ways, he’d mastered a politics that mirrored the tactics of the Taliban: no frontal assaults, all deception, hit and run, sabotage. His style kept even his inner circle off balance. If palace aides brought him advice he didn’t like, he would say it probably came from the “yellow building,” as he’d taken to calling ISAF headquarters. The finance minister, Omar Zakhilwal, complained to the U.S. embassy that Karzai was an “extremely weak man” who ignored facts but could be swayed by anyone who reported even the most bizarre plots against the palace. In his palace, his aides all knew that the gravest sin one could commit was to befriend America.

  “He was suspicious of his own ministers,” Rahmatullah Nabil, who led Afghanistan’s spy agency, told me. “Whenever we were bringing something to him, valid points, he was thinking, ‘No, this is coming from the U.S.’ He mentioned it several times to the elders who came to see him: ‘I don’t trust my ministers. They are working for the Americans.’ That put everybody in a corner.”

  The aides who prospered in this environment were the ones who embraced Karzai’s conspiratorial inclinations about the United States. In this regard, none surpassed Abdul Karim Khoram, who took over as Karzai’s chief of staff in early 2011. His predecessor in that job, Umer Daudzai, had been a cunning operative, a former ambassador in Pakistan and Iran who operated with a catlike combination of delicacy and silence (a U.S. ambassador once described him as Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings). Khoram, by contrast, was bearish and crude, a heavy and disheveled man who spoke indelicately and regarded others with suspicion. Khoram had suffered particularly brutal trauma during the Communist era. He had been imprisoned for years and tortured by electric shock before fleeing the country to Paris. He joined Karzai’s cabinet as minister of information and culture in 2006, and developed a reputation as a hard-line Pashtun conservative intent on blocking the broadcast of material he considered un-Islamic. He was famous for removing the Dari sign on the ministry building—the more common language in Kabul and of the government—and replacing it with a Pashto version. For him, the world was full of enemies: in Pakistan, Iran, America.

  He believed that Afghan culture was “under assault,” as he put it, from the Persians, whom he suspected of infiltratin
g the Afghan newspapers, books, and television programs that proliferated during Karzai’s tenure. Khoram opposed, and attempted to ban, Bollywood films because of their racy content. He complained to the U.S. embassy about the Afghan station Tolo TV, which epitomized the new media freedoms, winning millions in American aid money along the way; he maintained that Tolo furthered a Persian agenda. “The Iranians are everywhere,” he told an American diplomat. His purge of nearly seventy members of the government broadcaster, Radio Television Afghanistan, prompted the head of the station to resign, but Khoram defended his move by saying he was protecting the country from cultural attacks from abroad.

  Khoram didn’t make a lot of friends. An American general who dealt with him called him “impenetrable.” Karzai’s national security adviser, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, who’d been a staunch Communist in his youth, found Khoram a “stubborn ideologue.” Another former colleague of Khoram’s described his views as the “Afghan version of the Tea Party.” Mahmood Karzai, in his colorful way, said that instead of the palace, Khoram should be “working in a slaughterhouse for sheep. He’s a complete idiot.”

  The decision to elevate Khoram to chief of staff further divided a palace that was already balkanized into warring factions. Some people chose to quit. The president’s spokesman, Waheed Omar, felt Khoram was the worst possible choice for the job. “I always told the president my job was to make sure he looks good, and this decision went against that—it would make him look ugly,” he said. “The moment I heard Khoram was coming, I knew I was out.”