A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  General Allen assigned his French chief of staff, Lieutenant General Olivier de Bavinchove, as his liaison to Khoram, because of Khoram’s admiration for French culture. Khoram spoke nearly unaccented French and was both intimidated by and smitten with de Bavinchove, a paratrooper with aristocratic lineage. For the United States, however, Khoram held nothing but disdain.

  One day, Khoram arranged a youth conference at the palace. Teenagers stood to address the president, reading from note cards about their worries for the future. One boy said that U.S. Marines had been using biological weapons against the people, and that babies were being born with severe birth defects as a result. Palace staffers suspected that Khoram had written the note cards for the children, but the biological weapons claim piqued Karzai’s interest. After the conference, he asked his staff for more information on the subject. Khoram told the president that serious research had been done on the biological weapons used by American forces. A scientist he knew could come to the palace the next day and brief the National Security Council. Over the objections of his other aides, Karzai agreed to hear the man out.

  The prospect that a man with unknown medical or scientific credentials would get this type of audience with the president worried several Afghan officials, including Rahmatullah Nabil. The man coming to talk was “some crazy Afghan-American,” the spy chief told me. According to Nabil, the man had relationships with Taliban leaders in Quetta. One of Afghanistan’s former presidents, Burhanuddin Rabbani, had recently been blown up by a suicide bomber disguised as a Taliban negotiator, and Nabil didn’t want this strange scientist briefing Karzai on anything. Nabil, like others, believed that the whole episode was just Khoram’s attempt to make the Americans look bad.

  The scientist came to the palace the next day. As he waited in a sitting room, Khoram asked the president if he was ready for his special briefing. Nabil interrupted. He told Karzai it was not a good idea to meet this man. He said there were recorded phone conversations of the man boasting to someone in Quetta about his appointment with the president and how it’s “a great success for us.” Khoram argued with Nabil, but the spy chief’s intervention was enough for Karzai to cancel the briefing and send the man home. Nabil won that day, though he worried that Khoram’s pro-Pashtun, anti-American agenda was shifting the direction of the palace. “Khoram changed the mentality of the president,” he said.

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  Khoram used his newfound authority to overhaul palace messaging: both the government propaganda that went out to the world and the advice that reached the president. One of his first targets was the Government Media and Information Center, or GMIC. The office, funded by the U.S. government, had a staff of more than 130 people; they organized press conferences and pumped out news releases. Nearly every day, some cabinet minister or senior official stopped by to talk to the Afghan and foreign press. The office was organized, and its events ran on time and on schedule. A small team of five Americans, two of them soldiers in plain clothes, worked inside the GMIC. They helped schedule events and brought over information from ISAF headquarters about battlefield events from across the country. The Americans saw the office’s role as refuting the claims of the Taliban, who had a thriving public relations operation of their own, tweeting and texting every day about their valiant fighters and the cowardly infidels. When the GMIC opened, in 2008, embassy officials told the Afghan palace staff they didn’t want Khoram, then the information minister, involved in the project, which was partially intended as a shadow information ministry “away from Khoram’s control,” as a State Department official put it. Khoram was always bitter over this U.S.-funded rival, and when he became palace chief of staff, he finally had the power for revenge.

  He began by suggesting that there were not enough Pashtuns in the office and that the Americans were hijacking the message of the Afghan government. He fired one of the spokesmen and replaced him with a young Pashtun. He ordered another, who had spoken positively about the partnership with the United States, to stop talking to the press. Afghans who had worked closely with Americans grew cagey; the GMIC director told an American colleague that if he showed up at the press conferences, he should act like they didn’t know each other. Omar, Karzai’s spokesman, and Khoram battled over the language of press releases, especially when they involved the United States or civilian casualties. Khoram always wanted to dial up the outrage. “He would argue that I was not as patriotic as he was,” Omar recalled.

  The problems came to a head on Christmas Eve. That day, the GMIC director was sick at home. Earlier in the week, an American air strike in Kunar Province had killed several people. Without informing the director, Khoram arranged for dozens of the victims’ relatives to come to the GMIC for a news conference to denounce the Americans. One after another, the relatives blasted the United States for its brutality. In the audience, David Snepp, a State Department official on the team, sat frozen in shock. “It was a shitstorm,” he said.

  That night, Crocker and Allen ordered the Americans out of the GMIC. They would not be going back. The United States had spent $8.8 million on that office, had renovated the building, built a TV studio, and paid the staff’s salaries; there were plans to replicate the office in three other Afghan cities. Within months, the funding would be canceled, the expansion scrapped. The staff of 130 dwindled to 22. Waheed Omar quit as Karzai’s spokesman and wouldn’t return. Another plank in America’s relationship with Karzai’s government had rotted through.

  18

  NOT RELIGION BUT HISTORY

  A GROUP OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS at Bagram Airfield were cleaning out the prison library. The soldiers suspected that some of the inmates here—considered among the most dangerous Taliban captives—were communicating via margin notes. So they separated out about two thousand books and carted them off to a base burn pit for incineration. Torching books normally carries some troubling symbolism, no matter the titles. This case turned out to be no exception. An Afghan laborer at the burn pit started screaming when he saw what was happening: copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, were being tossed into the flames.

  No atrocity—no killing of the young, the old, the unarmed—and no destruction of homes or razing of crops could galvanize the Afghan public like the desecration, in any form, of their religion. In 2005, riots erupted in several cities, police fired on protesters, and government buildings were ransacked following a story in Newsweek that included allegations that American interrogators at the prison in Guantánamo Bay had flushed a Koran down the toilet. Five years later, the Florida preacher-provocateur Terry Jones caused an uproar in Afghanistan by threatening to burn the Koran, then backed down under White House pressure. When Jones actually followed through, in March 2011, the act went mostly unnoticed in Afghanistan. Then President Karzai, in a speech and palace statement on March 24, 2011, brought the issue into public discussion, calling it a “disrespectful and abhorrent act” and demanding that the United States prosecute the perpetrators. The next week, Karzai spoke out against photographs published first in Der Spiegel, then in Rolling Stone, of U.S. soldiers posing with dead Afghans. Five Americans on the “kill team,” as it became known, had been charged with murdering innocent Afghans and posing with their corpses. “They killed a young boy for entertainment, they killed an old man for entertainment, and even planned to kill children, to throw candy and then fire on them,” Karzai said in a speech at a graduation ceremony for teachers. The photos would outrage the world, Karzai said, “if there is conscience left in the West.”

  Anti-American furor was breaking out across the country. Religious groups, leading clerics, and Afghan parliamentarians took up Karzai’s call against Jones and the Koran burning, with one Muslim cleric demanding a “day of anger” in response. On April 1, the day came, and a mob left a mosque in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif after Friday prayers and stormed a lightly protected United Nations office, flowing past the Afghan police outside, who tried in vain to block their entry with a log. The mob torched U.N. tr
ucks and heaved bricks at the building, then pried open the fortified door to the “safe room” where some of the foreign staff were hiding. Three European diplomats were murdered, including a female fighter pilot from Norway, along with four of their Gurkha guards.

  Even on calm days, rage coursed just below the surface. At one point, I canvassed mosques in Kabul to listen to the Friday sermons and get a sense of what the general run of Kabul residents were hearing from their religious leaders. The rhetoric made Karzai’s most harsh fire-and-brimstone speeches seem bland. “Let these jackals leave this country,” an imam named Habibullah told the crowd at one mosque. “Let these brothers of monkeys, gorillas, and pigs leave this country.” For anyone who supported a long-term American military presence, Habibullah said, “they should know that God will take revenge on them and turn their bones and flesh into dried spiderweb powder.”

  These were not Taliban preachers disparaging the United States but mainstream imams at government-funded mosques that received weekly talking points for their sermons from the Ministry of Hajj and Religious Affairs. Under the weathered blue dome of Kabul’s largest mosque, Pul-e-Khishti, its famous mullah, Enayatullah Balegh, pledged support for “any plan that can defeat” the American forces in Afghanistan and denounced “the political power of these children of Jews.” When I interviewed him later, Balegh, who was also a professor of Islamic law at Kabul University, told me, “If you see a feeling of xenophobia these days, that’s understandable. I don’t think even a single Afghan is happy with the presence of the foreign military forces here.”

  So when the phone call woke General John Allen in his quarters on the main ISAF base and he heard “American soldiers,” “Bagram,” “Korans,” “incinerator,” it was a nightmare scenario. Terry Jones burned one Koran in Florida, and an enraged mob slaughtered several people at the United Nations mission in Mazar-e-Sharif. “This was immeasurably worse,” Allen recalled. “I believed this could be the end of the campaign.”

  Allen went public with his apology as soon as he could. Afghans woke to the news of his contrition even before they understood what had happened in the Bagram burn pit. He videotaped his statement, addressed to the “noble people of Afghanistan,” for broadcast across the country. “We are thoroughly investigating the incident, and we are taking steps to ensure this does not ever happen again. I assure you—I promise you—this was not intentional in any way,” he pleaded. By the end of the day, he had issued orders for every coalition soldier to receive new training in how to handle religious materials.

  But the backlash had already begun. An angry crowd shouted outside the Bagram gates. Protests erupted in a half dozen other cities. Local authorities were already reporting a handful of deaths, and the tension showed no sign of abating. President Obama issued an apology. The Taliban whipped up fervor with their own statements calling on their followers to attack American troops, and particularly for Afghan soldiers and police to start “turning their guns on the foreign infidel invaders.” Allen visited Karzai in the palace and warned him that if he chose to condemn American soldiers for these actions, as he had done with the Florida pastor, it could set in motion a series of events that could sweep him from power and cause the streets of Afghanistan to “run red with blood.”

  Wars seen over time seem to move like amoebas, bulging out in one direction, receding in others, growing new limbs, changing colors. The “green on blue” mutation became visible in 2011, a decade into the war. This was the term for Afghan security forces murdering their American partners: “green” meant indigenous forces, “blue” friendly ones. These types of attacks had gone on for years, but they were suddenly accelerating rapidly. Apart from the first months of the war, the whole point of the American presence was to train the Afghan troops so they could do the fighting, forestall an overthrow of their government, and allow the Americans to leave. Americans paid, almost entirely, for the Afghan security forces: their black M4 rifles, tan combat boots, forest-green Ford Rangers; for their elementary reading and writing classes, drug tests, chow halls, latrines, air conditioners, bunk beds. American and Afghan soldiers lived on the same bases. Walked the same patrols. The closer the partner ship, the theory went, the faster the Afghan forces would improve, and the better their chances of defeating the Taliban. If they could become a professional army that could feed and equip itself, treat its wounded, and replenish its ranks, there seemed a chance—or at least you could argue so—that the whole Afghan government enterprise might not come crashing down the day the Americans left.

  The only Afghans the Americans couldn’t afford to have as their enemy were the soldiers and police. And so green on blue posed a potentially fatal risk to the mission. All the fortifications—triple coils of razor wire, V-shaped blast-resistant hulls, Kevlar helmets—would not protect against it. The attacks came from the inside. One day you patiently listened to your American adviser lecture you about marksmanship on the firing range. The next day you raised your gun and killed him. The Soviet war in Afghanistan had turned on a new weapon that a single man could carry and use to shoot down a helicopter. Green on blue acted like an autoimmune virus, sapping the host of its ability to defend itself. A strategy conceived around the idea of two groups of people working together could not completely eliminate this risk of treachery. Repeat these attacks enough and the partnership would disintegrate. Green on blue was “the greatest crisis I faced as commander,” Allen said.

  Allen was in Berlin when he received the phone call telling him that an Afghan soldier had shot and killed four French soldiers and mortally wounded a fifth on a base in Kapisa Province. The Afghan soldier, Allen would later learn, had heard about the YouTube video that had appeared the week prior of American Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. The Afghan soldier had not seen the video, but he had apparently dreamed about it, woken up, and decided something had to be done.

  Allen made it a habit to stop in European capitals when he was traveling to or from Afghanistan, as a way to rally international support for his mission. Europeans had long since lost enthusiasm for the war in Afghanistan, and he believed it was important to explain the mission’s significance whenever he could. That morning he was scheduled to fly to Paris to meet the French defense minister. From the airplane, he called Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak. Days earlier, Allen had asked Wardak to allow counterintelligence agents from Afghanistan’s spy agency, the National Directorate of Security, to infiltrate the Afghan army in order to learn more about the insider threat. Wardak had opposed the idea. Afghan spies had a bad reputation. During Wardak’s formative years with the mujahedeen, the agency had been called the KHAD—Khadamat-e Aetla’at-e Dawlati—and it had functioned as a brutal secret police force trained by the Soviets. Its agents had tortured and killed political opponents. The name had been changed and the intelligence agency reformed in ensuing years, but the spies were still hardly humanitarians. Interrogation remained synonymous with torture. “I’m not going to let the KHAD back in our forces,” Wardak had told Allen. After the killing of the French soldiers, however, Allen demanded more. From the airplane he told Wardak, “You’ve got a real crisis on your hands here.

  “You better get some NDS agents in your formations, and we’re going to talk about it when I get back,” Allen recalled saying. “I’ve got to have something to say to the French. And if I can’t say to them that you all are gripping this problem, then we’ve got a very serious issue.”

  As Allen drove from Charles de Gaulle Airport into Paris, the military attaché at the U.S. embassy there handed him a copy of the International Herald Tribune. The newspaper referenced a classified study by a political and behavioral scientist named Jeffrey Bordin. Bordin had been sent to Afghanistan as part of a U.S. Army team to study the green-on-blue phenomenon. He went to a base in the eastern city of Jalalabad after an Afghan policeman murdered six American soldiers in November 2010. Bordin, who had a PhD from Claremont Graduate University, found that Afghan security forces had been re
sponsible for 16 percent of all the killings of coalition soldiers over the five months before the report was finished, in May 2011. His interviews with some six hundred Afghan soldiers and policemen found that they viewed their American partners as “violent, reckless, intrusive, arrogant, self-serving, profane, infidel bullies hiding behind high technology.” The American soldiers he interviewed considered the Afghan forces “cowardly, incompetent, obtuse, thieving, complacent, lazy, pot-smoking, treacherous and murderous radicals.” The threat of green-on-blue attacks, Bordin concluded, was a “rapidly growing systemic threat” that could doom the whole American mission, and he noted that the scale of killings “may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern history.”

  When The Wall Street Journal first found the study and published a story on it, ISAF disavowed it, branding Bordin’s work poor scholarship based on lazy assumptions conveyed through bad writing. But Bordin’s conclusions haunted the American efforts with each new insider killing. As Allen thought about it, driving in that morning to meet with French military officials, he decided that there were two ways to look at this problem. You could consider that Afghans and Americans were sociologically incompatible and could not exist as humans in a joint enterprise, or you could view the insider killings as a problem that could be overcome by tactical changes. “There were very strong opinions on both sides,” Allen told me. “There was that element that wanted to say, ‘This is a lost cause. What are we trying to do here? We can’t get along with these people. They’re so foreign to us. We’re so foreign to them. This is ridiculous.’ And then the school of thought: ‘This is a military threat. Let’s treat it like one and take action to stop it.’ On one hand, a course of despair. On the other, it was a problem that might be solved.”