A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  At learning this, a Pashtun man stood up in the middle of the crowd and addressed the mullah.

  “Praise be to God for his virgins, nymph boys, and gem castles, and I wish that God grants me heaven and streams of milk and juice,” he said. “But I want to know if there will be evil in heaven as well?

  “If there will be enmity between tribes and cousins? If people will kill each other in heaven and whether men will receive women as compensation?”

  The Pashtun man said that he didn’t need heaven and that the mullah should sell his heaven to cowards. He said what would be the difference between a man and a goat if no one owes him the death of a relative? He said that the greatest enmity is the one that lasts for centuries and that grandfathers speak about to their grandsons. He said that life only becomes enjoyable if you harbor a boiling rage, carry a loaded gun with a hundred bullets. He said you cannot call it life if there is no fighting and enmity and if your hands are not stained with the blood of your cousin. He said you cannot call it life if there is no talk about who is superior and inferior and no spark of swords. You cannot call it life if there is no…difference between Ghilzai and Durrani. He said this heaven is not the place for brave men and Pashtuns, indeed it is a place for people who live on others’ charity. This heaven is for mullahs, clerks, and cowards. He said God created Pashtuns for enmity. Brother is the enemy of brother. When God has created someone superior to others then how is it possible that all of them be equal in heaven. If there is no blood shed between brother and cousins then this heaven is not the place for Pashtuns.

  —

  After Ahmed Wali’s death, Hashmat grew into the man he aspired to be: the khan, the chief, the dispenser of punishment and mercy. He won a seat on the provincial council. The former car-loan specialist at the Toyota dealership in Virginia had become a national figure in Afghanistan. Shah Wali resented his new tribal responsibilities, but Hashmat thrived on them. He made his mansion in Karz more lavish, adding a neon fountain, and brought in a pet lion, which he would stroke for the pleasure of his guests. “He thinks he’s Michael Jackson,” Shah Wali said.

  Hashmat gave conspicuous donations to the people of his city, hosting meals for several thousand people at a time, distributing cartons of milk to the poor. He brought electricity to Karz. He fashioned his own image after his father, the fearless Pashtun fighter, often referring in public to his middle name, “Khalil.” The stories that circulated showed this growing defiance. He would tell people about a visit to the president’s residence in the early years, and how a big Panjshiri guard would come late at night and lock the front door from the outside, so they could not leave until morning, and how pathetic that was. He told how his Kabul neighbor Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, the famous Northern Alliance commander from the Panjshir Valley who rose to Karzai’s cabinet, sent a servant to Hashmat’s house to tell him to quiet his barking dog, because his sick mother was trying to sleep; Mohammadi suggested that Hashmat send his dog to Kandahar. “Tell Bismillah Khan I will not send my dog to Kandahar,” Hashmat replied, as the story went. “Tell him to send his mother to Panjshir.”

  Before the 2014 presidential election, Hashmat ignored the entreaties of his cousins Qayum and Mahmood and signed on as a supporter for candidate Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister. He led campaign rallies in Kandahar’s stadium and hosted feasts for the masses and fully expected to be rewarded as governor of Kandahar. The choice of Ghani was significant because he came from the Ghilzai branch of the Pashtuns, the historic rivals of the Karzai Durranis. But as one relative recalled advising Hashmat, it was time to worry about uniting the Pashtuns, because “the minorities” were gaining strength in Kabul. With his rising stature, Hashmat felt free to publicly criticize the ruling Karzais.

  On July 6, 2014, he posted several pictures to his Facebook page (under occupation it read, “chief executive officer at Kandahar”) of a crumbling wall and piles of dun-colored debris. They showed a destroyed part of his compound near the airport, Asia Village, which he’d rented to the United Nations and other foreign contractors. The dispute over ownership of the land had gone on for a long time. The former mayor, a friend of the Karzai brothers, believed that Hashmat had stolen the land to build his hotel, allegedly forging documents to redraw the property boundaries. The mayor pressured the governor to take action, but then a suicide bomber blew up the mayor, and the issue, for a time, was forgotten. A couple of years later, the government began bulldozing part of Asia Village’s wall to make room for an expansion of the highway that ran to Spin Boldak.

  “Friends, you know that politics requires sacrifice and winning politics without sacrifice is not tasty,” Hashmat wrote in Pashto. “I have one son, and I am ready to sacrifice to such an extent that I would sacrifice him in the name of God for the peace of the country.

  “Friends, one of the sacrifices you saw yesterday is that in front of the airport [in his compound] a 620 meter long wall is being destroyed, despite all legal documents, on the order of crazy Hamid Karzai, by the incompetent governor, and the illiterate commander, [Police Chief Abdul] Raziq.” The destruction was part of their “failed policy” and an attempt to anger him and “use violence against their gangster.”

  “Dear nation,” Hashmat concluded, “I assure you that till the last drop of blood in my body I will stand against these oppressors, and will call traitor, traitor, and will ask for legal punishments for them.”

  The last time I saw Hashmat, we were talking about the day of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s memorial. Customarily, the service, known as a fateha, begins the morning after the burial and runs for three days. Ahmed Wali’s occurred in Kandahar’s Red Mosque, a stately and colonnaded building a few blocks from his house. There were serious risks in convening such a high-profile crowd. In the three years he had been the imam at the Red Mosque, Mullah Abdul Qayum Popalzai had been shot, beaten, kidnapped, threatened, and forced to move his family. His predecessor in the mosque had been murdered in his home. The head of Kandahar’s ulema council, the group of clerics paid by the government, was issuing fatwas on the radio against suicide bombing, a position that angered the Taliban. Young fighters would regularly turn up at his mosque to pray or attend classes at the madrassa. “I would always refuse to allow them to stay. I would tell them that the government doesn’t let me and it’s not only a threat for them, it would be a threat to me and my family. If they get settled here, the foreigners might raid the mosque,” Popalzai said. He tried to stay neutral. “What I want is that no blood should be shed.”

  President Karzai had visited the mosque the year before, on his trip to consult Kandahar elders about the upcoming American military offensive in the city. The day before the visit, Popalzai stood on the concrete patio under the mosque’s pink-and-white minarets and looked across the V-shaped grounds hemmed in by two city streets and low-slung walls. As he glanced around, he happened to notice a man crawling down into the concrete well at the far end of the garden. He crossed the dirt footpaths that wound through the grass and the flowering bushes and peered down at the man crouched on the straw and dirt at the bottom of the old dry well.

  “What are you doing here?” he recalled asking the man.

  “I was just checking it,” the man replied.

  The mullah kicked the man off the property and called Kandahar’s intelligence office to report the intruder. Later in the afternoon, he stumbled across another man, this one hiding in one of the minarets, inside the arched windows beneath the loudspeakers used in the call to prayer. That same night, while he was busy with the evening prayers, someone from the Taliban came to his home, not far from the mosque, and threatened his wife. “He said I should not come between them and the government, that if it wasn’t for me, they would have been able to kill a lot of government officials, including Karzai.” The president’s visit went off without incident, but the imam had been shaken by the threats. Afterward, he got in the habit of checking the mosque and its grounds thoroughly before every gathering or memorial
service, poking around for hidden men or explosives.

  Many of Popalzai’s relatives lived in an area on the southwestern outskirts of Kandahar known as Malajat, where the Taliban had a large following. Not long after these first threats, he went to visit them. As he was preparing for dinner, there was a knock on the door. Men with weapons ordered him outside. One of the Taliban held a Kalashnikov magazine in his hand. He waved it as he accused the imam of siding with the government and the infidel Americans. Popalzai was not a small man. He had a thick chest and a trunklike neck, a black beard, and a stern demeanor. He stood in silence. The Talib tapped the magazine on his chest and stared into Popalzai’s eyes, then grabbed him by the neck and led him away to a nearby home. Inside, several men took turns punching, slapping, and kicking him, then released him with another warning not to interfere with their plans.

  The threats continued. The imam began receiving harassing phone calls from numbers he did not recognize. He swapped out his SIM card and changed his phone number. The calls would resume until he stopped using his cell phone altogether. His children received ominous taunts about their father from other boys in the neighborhood. Strangers would come to the house and tell his wife they should leave town. One day, while he was teaching Koranic verses in a mosque classroom, a tall man with long, dark hair walked into the room. The man sat down cross-legged in front of the imam.

  “Who has appointed you as the imam of this mosque?” the man asked.

  “The people have chosen me,” Popalzai replied.

  “Your predecessor was chosen by the government. Whoever serves this mosque serves the government and the children of America,” the man insisted.

  The stranger lectured the imam about his refusal to allow young followers of the Taliban to study at the mosque. He asked him how well he knew Ahmed Wali Karzai, whose house was a couple of blocks from the mosque. He did not seem to believe the answer when Popalzai told him he’d never met the man. As the stranger stood to leave, he lifted up his shirt and revealed a pistol underneath. “If you don’t want to go where the imam before you went, you shouldn’t support this government.”

  After this visit, Popalzai wrote a letter to the Kandahar office of the Afghan intelligence service. He detailed the intruders hiding in the well and in the tower, the threats and beatings, the phone calls and harassment. He asked for a police outpost to be set up at the mosque. At the very least, he wrote, he would like a gun for his own protection. He received no response.

  The security for Ahmed Wali Karzai’s memorial service was like nothing Popalzai had ever seen. Police and intelligence officers swept the mosque and its surroundings starting the day before. Cabinet ministers, governors, and several members of the Karzai family would be attending the ceremony, which began with a series of prayers in the morning and continued until noon, a rotating crowd of dignitaries sitting on the plush red-and-green-striped carpet to pay their respects. President Karzai decided not to attend, as it was too risky. His intelligence officers had received information from an intercepted cell phone call indicating that someone had tried to attack him at Ahmed Wali’s burial the day before. The caller had been saying, “I’m close, but I can’t find my way” into the cemetery, one of the president’s aides told me. The man on the other end of the line told him: “Go back and see him again tomorrow.” So the president returned to Kabul.

  The first mourners began arriving at the Red Mosque at eight-thirty a.m., with the sun already hot and throbbing. The normal traffic around the mosque—painted rickshaws, pushcarts teetering with potted plants, flocks of dusty gray and black sheep—had thinned out that morning in deference to the police pickups and hulking armored vehicles that plugged up the lanes. After getting through the police checkpoints, mourners were frisked at the gate and again when they went into the mosque. Nine archways ran the length of the front of the mosque, each leading to a doorway, most of them closed for the event as police funneled visitors through the central entrances under the big pink dome. Security guards were everywhere on the ground, and American helicopters flew overhead. Haji Dil Jan, a border police commander from Herat whose brother was on the Kandahar provincial council, was searched three times on his way in, even though he flashed his badge.

  When the service began, the Karzai brothers—Qayum, Mahmood, Shah Wali, and Abdul Ahmed—were sitting near the front of the room, off to the left of the microphones, under a slowly turning ceiling fan, with other dignitaries, including the Kandahar governor. Hashmat was not allowed to sit with them and stayed farther back, next to his brother, Hekmat. Thick concrete pillars, painted white and blue, were interspersed throughout the prayer hall. They sat next to one of the pillars, facing a series of clocks that showed the times allotted each day for Muslim prayer. Popalzai, the imam chosen by the Karzais presided, intoning passages from the Koran in a droning chant. Mourners placed their heads to the floor and held their palms to the sky, then stood to leave as others took their place near the front of the hall.

  Mahmood felt uneasy about the whole spectacle. He told Qayum he was worried that something might happen. The service progressed for three hours, and when it was finished Popalzai stood in front of the gathering, at least two hundred people, and announced that a special luncheon for dignitaries had been arranged at Mandigak Palace, the hall where the provincial council met, and the rest of the visitors could eat inside the mosque. Dozens of young boys appeared at the doorways with platters of rice and lamb and plastic mats to spread on the floor. Popalzai concluded the service. He called over his two sons to help him with the microphones and speakers, opening a white wooden cabinet at the front of the room that held the sound system. When the explosion occurred, his back was to the room. He was thrown against the wall and fell to the floor. To Shah Wali, the blast sounded as if it were outside the mosque: “It was loud, but the light seemed to come from outside the windows. Then people started running.” Someone shouted, “There’s two more!” as smoke filled the room. The wounded screamed and writhed on the floor. Frantic guards and mourners formed a circle around the Karzai brothers and began hustling them out of the mosque. Popalzai picked himself up off the floor. He looked at the carnage.

  “I saw some people were gutted. My clothes were covered in blood and small pieces of bone and pieces of brain.” Windows had blown out. The curtains were tattered. Shrapnel speckled the walls and columns. He stared at a severed head on the patio.

  The chief of the ulema council, who had waged a publicity campaign against suicide bombing, had been slain by the blast. At least two other visitors had been killed as well, and many suffered wounds from burns and shrapnel cuts. The phone intercepts the palace picked up after the attack suggested that the bomber had wanted to kill the president. He had sat patiently in the mosque for more than three hours, through the entire service, waiting for Hamid Karzai to arrive. At one point he’d made a phone call, saying, “I’m here, I’m sitting down, he’s not here,” an aide recalled. When the prayers concluded, and everybody rose, he realized the president would not be coming. So he blew himself up.

  For the Karzai family, it was the narrowest of escapes. Investigators later determined that the bomber had hidden the explosives in his turban, which until that point were generally not unwrapped and searched. “It was a very, very, very close call,” Mahmood Karzai said when I talked to him hours after the attack. “The guy didn’t recognize us. It was a miracle we got out of there alive.”

  Hashmat, in his house in Karz, thought back to the moment of the explosion. “Boom,” he said. “If you’ve ever been in a war, there are things like that—everything stops. That moment. It stops. It gets everything in slow motion. It gets in slow motion, and every minute is like a frickin’ hour. Especially when people are yelling, screaming, running around. ‘There’s two more!’ I sit down. I see people jumping from the windows, hitting the windows. I see people…” He broke off and laughed. “Unbelievable.”

  Hashmat looked exhausted. People kept arriving at his house, approachin
g him, kissing his hands, groveling, sitting and waiting silently for his attention. Once when he stood to greet a guest, I noticed that he had a black handgun under his shirt. “Eight a.m. till nine at night,” he said. “I maybe get up about a thousand times. My feet at the end of the day. My God. I can barely stand.

  “Sometimes, honestly, I’m not joking with you, every time I sit here when someone walks in, every individual I don’t recognize, I know for a fact he’s going to blow up any minute. He’s going to blow up. He’s going to blow up. He’s going to blow up. Every minute. You can’t search every individual deeply. Sometimes these new explosives are in a turban. Now they have these new things in their underwear. The old one when they put a turban under you and blow up, now they jump on you and sit on you and explode. That is basically the scariest part. I’m serious. You sit here. You watch these people. It’s, like, crazy. A friend of mine once told me, ‘I’m not sitting here. Look at these people.’ That is the scariest part. That is the scariest part. That people are walking in. We’re not talking about ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred. We’re talking about thousands of people, and you cannot search everybody.”

  Popalzai, the imam from the ceremony, survived the day of the blast. But he would later be stabbed to death inside his own mosque.