Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  Drugs and Corruption

  MEANWHILE, OUT IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, FARMERS FOUND A SOLUTION TO their problems. They could grow opium. Opium had many advantages over other crops. For one thing, it was drought resistant. You could grow it just about anywhere that was warm enough, even without any irrigation system to speak of. Second, opium sap could be stored for years without any loss of potency, making it immune to the vagaries of the market. Third, once processed into heroin, it was light and easily transportable. Fourth, it sold for so much more than wheat or grapes that farmers didn’t have to risk their own lives or their children’s clearing many acres of land mines. They could grow enough opium on small plots to support their families.

  It’s true that cultivating commercial quantities of opium takes special expertise, but Afghans had this know-how. The Taliban regime had gotten much of its revenue by taxing opium farmers, so they had worked to raise production, in part by sending “consultants” out to teach farmers how to grow opium, how to score the bulbs to let the sap weep out, and how to glean and process the precious gum. They also sent enforcers out to make recalcitrant farmers switch to opium from other crops. The program worked so well that by 1999 Afghan opium had flooded world markets, the Taliban had a glut in their warehouses, and the price of opium crashed. At that point, the Taliban banned opium farming to bring prices back up, exactly the way oil-exporting countries cut production to control the price of oil (giving rise to an enduring but mistaken myth that the Taliban were at least against narcotics).1 The Taliban restricted the harvest in their last years, but Afghan farmers had not unlearned the skills the Taliban had taught them.

  Moving this illegal product to market requires special skills too. But here again Afghans were equipped, for smuggling was a familiar business in these parts. In earlier decades, smugglers used to sneak bricks of gold from the Middle East to China and automobiles from Dubai to Pakistan, evading the tariffs governments and their corrupt agents would have levied at each border. Skills developed for smuggling gold could easily be applied to smuggling narcotics.

  Every industry needs appropriate workers in order to flourish. Digital technology bloomed in California’s Silicon Valley because schools like Stanford and Berkeley were pouring out computer engineers, the category of skilled worker most needed by that industry. What illegal drug-smuggling enterprises require above all else is experienced gunfighters, and, in this type of workforce, Afghanistan led the world. A quarter century of war had spawned a generation of men who were expert at little else, and with the wars winding down these experts needed jobs. If the narcotics industry had not opened up, they would have resorted to robbery to keep body and soul together. In a sense, then, opium farming actually promoted peace.

  It also generated income. The industry quickly acquired a hierarchical structure. At the bottom of the pyramid were the opium farmers—the peasants. They could support their families but remained poor. The smugglers who transported the goods to markets in Iran and Pakistan and later to central Asia (whence it could be shipped to Russia) were professionals: they could get downright rich before they got dead. Even they, however, soon found themselves working for clever, sophisticated men who had the skills needed to organize complex enterprises, administer far-flung corps of workers, and keep track of finances. These new lords made their homes in Herat and Kandahar and Kabul, where they used their drug profits to invest in other enterprises, often legal ones, such as airlines, telecommunications, banks, trucking, construction, and real estate—yes, I know I mentioned all these same sectors when I spoke of the exiled elite coming back to Afghanistan, and I don’t mean to suggest that the old exiles were the new drug lords. I only mean to say that in booming Kabul everything got sort of intertwined. Certainly, the money did.

  In short, the neoconservative vision of a country rebuilt by private entrepreneurs unrestricted by petty regulations was working: Afghanistan was growing! The money was great! Everybody was happy, except for the poor, who were legion, and the drug addicts, whose numbers skyrocketed to at least a million in Afghanistan and far more than that in Iran and later spread throughout the central Asian republics of the north and on through Russia and eventually into Turkey and then Europe. And of course, as the industry became more profitable, the stakes went up. Drug militias began fighting for routes and territory. Innocent bystanders got killed. Also, because drugs were still technically illegal, the wealthy drug mobsters had to budget some money to buy off the government officials and police officers whose job it was to block their activities. The narcotics industry thus became one more factor in the corrupting of all government operations from top cabinet ministers to lowliest border guards.

  Iran, the chief victim of the Afghan drug trade, stationed some hundred thousand troops on this border and built a six-hundred-mile fence between the two countries to keep out Afghan drug smugglers; but the smugglers just bought off the guards with cash and/or drugs. Iranian soldiers posted on the border to stem the flow of narcotics ended up colluding in the trade or getting addicted to narcotics themselves. Drugs came to permeate Afghanistan, and its social fabric changed accordingly.2 This social fabric, which was already weakened by pervasive small-time corruption, took even worse hits from big-time corruption and from charges and countercharges of corruption. Consider the case of Ibrahim Adel, whose job it was as minister of mines to negotiate with foreign firms for the rights to Afghanistan’s minerals. In 2008, his office awarded the copper concession to a Chinese company for $3.5 billion. The Washington Post reported that he took a $30 million kickback in exchange for giving that contract to the Chinese company. The accusation came from an unnamed US official who cited a military intelligence report, according to which the money changed hands in a Dubai hotel room. Adel denies the charge and was never indicted or tried, but, by the time the allegations surfaced, Karzai had replaced him.

  Adel had originally been appointed to privatize the government-owned Ghori cement factory. He imposed an interesting last-moment condition on companies bidding for the contract. They had to show they were serious by delivering $25 million in cash to the ministry. The only firm able to come up with that much moolah on such short notice was the Afghan Investment Company, owned by Mahmoud Karzai, the president’s brother. Flanked by hired gunmen, Mahmoud Karzai took the money to the ministry in a cardboard box and placed it on the minister’s desk in person.3 His company won the bid and contracted to raise the plant’s cement production from forty thousand tons a year to three million.4

  How did Mahmoud Karzai come up with that much cash? Well, he borrowed it from the country’s biggest private bank, of which he happened to be a shareholder. Kabul Bank was launched by two financial swashbucklers, Sher Khan Farnood and Khalilullah Ferozi. Farnood, who was born dirt-poor, went to school in Moscow during the Soviet occupation. In the nineties, he roamed the world as a high-stakes poker player, earning more than $600,000. His deputy Ferozi had once worked for Ahmad Shah Massoud, selling gems and using the profits to print millions of dollars’ worth of Afghan currency to fund Massoud’s military campaign. Massoud ditched him upon discovering that he was also printing currency for the Taliban.

  How could two such characters build a bank with $1 billion-plus in assets?

  Well, they had the skills best suited to the moment and the circumstances. They could form personal links with people who were politically connected. They loaned Mahmoud Karzai $6 million, which he used to buy a share of the bank, a loan he then paid off with his share of the bank’s profits. Another prominent shareholder was Abdul Haseen, half brother of General Fahim, the country’s vice president. Fahim took over as commander in chief of the Northern Alliance after Massoud’s assassination; he was one of that handful of men who could not be denied a powerful post in the new government after the American intervention.

  Fahim used his position to get his brother Haseen started on the road to wealth. First, he helped Haseen secure contracts to pour concrete for the new NATO base and for the US Embassy renovation
s. Haseen used these profits to build a high-rise mall housing a cluster of jewelry stores on a prime patch of downtown real estate that his brother acquired for a song. Nothing illegal in this: the guy who owned the property could sell it for as much (or as little) as he wanted. Apparently, he felt it was worth taking a loss to build a relationship. Haseen used the profits from the mall to start several more businesses, including a private security firm that scored rich contracts protecting foreign government officials and CIA bases. Haseen also acquired a share of Kabul Bank. As a shareholder, he borrowed more than $100 million from the bank not just to finance further business ventures but also to speculate in Dubai real estate.

  Some Kabul Bank shareholders also owned shares in Pamir Airlines, which was founded by alleged drug lord Hajji Zabi Shekhani. Another private airline, KAM, was established by the godson of Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum. Both airlines competed with the venerable national airline Ariana, whose chairman Dr. Nadir Atash moved to privatize the airline and was then shocked—shocked!—to discover that most of the shares were acquired by top government officials and their cronies in the business community.5 Atash later came under fire from an anticorruption commission run by another returning exile, Zabiullah Asmatey, who was assigned to investigate charges that Atash had pocketed $6 million on a deal to buy airplanes from Boeing. Nothing was proven, no charges were filed, and Atash fled the country to write a book accusing his accusers of corruption. Anticorruption crusader Asmatey briefly took charge of Ariana Airlines, before dying suddenly of unknown causes. In 2011, a new attorney general issued arrest warrants for Atash and two of his associates.6

  The attorney general in office when Atash fled was Abdul Jaber Sabet, later fired for grossly corrupt practices himself. (Later still, the poor guy was kidnapped, and, at this writing, his whereabouts remain unknown.) Sabet worked for the US government radio station Voice of America after 9/11. He visited Guantanamo to inspect the facilities and came back with a very favorable report, whereupon US and British officials pressed Karzai to appoint him attorney general of Afghanistan because, they said, he was a “crime fighter’s crime fighter.” Once in office, Sabet used his prosecutorial powers to undermine business rivals by going after them on charges of—you guessed it: corruption. During Sabet’s tenure, contraband trafficking out of Kabul Airport allegedly skyrocketed. In the end, rumor had it, Kabul Bank officials were smuggling up to $10 million worth of raw currency out of Kabul every day on Pamir Airways, but the crime fighter’s crime fighter was too busy fighting crime to notice. Sabet arrived in Kabul a relatively poor man, but, after his stint as attorney general, he had enough money to develop a prime housing site in Kabul’s poshest neighborhood.7 I have to smile when I hear that the State Department has recently brought in some experts to teach Afghans how to network.8 It seems to me that Afghans are already pretty good at networking.

  Meanwhile, another of the Afghan president’s brothers, Ahmad Wali Karzai, had grown huge in Kandahar. He headed up only the provincial council, but everyone in Kandahar knew he also controlled the police and gave orders to the mayor. Anyone who wanted a project approved came to him because, if he didn’t broker it, the thing would not get done. The CIA paid Ahmad Wali Karzai to recruit a paramilitary force to patrol Kandahar and its environs. This was something they wanted to do, and to get it done they had to go to the go-to guy. Ahmad Wali Karzai was such a well-known power broker that allegedly even the most dangerous of drug lords curried favor with him.9

  I say “allegedly” because much was alleged about Ahmad Wali Karzai, and nothing was proven. When he was finally assassinated in late 2011, the killing was ascribed to some private quarrel: it was a crime of passion, not of politics or drugs. In fact, the key figures in this emerging corruptocracy (to coin a term) were not warlords but power brokers.

  Some ambiguity shrouds the word corruption in this context. From Ahmad Wali Karzai to the minister of mines, most of these power brokers were simply doing business the way it’s done in these parts, and the way it is emphatically not done in the West. Patronage is built on personal relationships, civil service on impersonal abstractions.

  The very statement “carried $25 million in cash in a cardboard box” sounds criminal. And in 2010, when the media discovered that Hamid Karzai—the president himself!—had been receiving monthly payments totaling millions—in cash—euros—from Iran . . . an uproar erupted.10 Media commentary kept circling obsessively back to the way the payments were made: in plastic bags, brought to Kabul by a Karzai associate as carry-on baggage! In the United States only a criminal would do such a thing. Actually, not even a criminal would do it because it’s so risky and so foolish; but it’s not, when you come right down to it, illegal. In devastated Afghanistan, not so long ago (and perhaps still), carrying your cash around in a box with armed men protecting you was probably safer and less foolish than putting it in a bank.

  The big-time corruption in Afghanistan has mostly consisted of nepotism in various forms. People have used their positions to enrich their kinfolk and close friends. In Afghan culture, however, helping one’s kin is not only legal, it’s honorable. In fact, it’s an obligation. If you’re an Afghan, you can damn well count on your own family standing with you, against whatever outsiders might be coming. Who are you going to help if not your own family—some stranger? Have you no shame? Every family that has come to prominence in the new Afghanistan has therefore done its best to place at least one of its own in government to help others of the family make their way. That’s what the government is for. Just a few generations back, when most Afghans were tribal nomads or poor villagers living in a harsh environment on the edge of survival, an ethos that said you do not, in any circumstances, abandon your kin was essential. Bring that ethos forward into an urban landscape through which billions of dollars are flowing into a ruined country, and it’s not such a good thing. Combine that ethos with the neoconservative doctrine that the public good is best served by people vigorously pursuing private profit, and you have the phenomenon commonly referred to as monumental corruption.

  American neoconservatives, of course, did not envision free enterprise happening in a state of nature. There had to be rules. Laws were laid down, and everyone was supposed to operate within those parameters. The idea was, if private entrepreneurs were free to compete by any legal means in pursuit of their own interests, the process would weed out the incompetents and let the best and smartest thrive and rise and run things.

  Under those ground rules, however, when two business competitors went head-to-head, and both were smart and both were well educated and both had funding, the one who played closest to the line of legality was apt to win. They were not necessarily criminals, just folks willing to take the chance that they were doing something illegal, willing to gamble that they would not be charged or that the charges wouldn’t stick. The system attracted and rewarded risk-taking gamblers like the men who founded Kabul Bank: a high-stakes poker player and a gem smuggler willing to counterfeit money for both sides in a war. Most of these gamblers have been right so far. Lots of anticorruption commissions have been formed, but few government officials have been charged or tried or convicted of any crimes. Add the rise of the corruptocracy to the things that went wrong with reconstruction.

  32

  Talibanism

  OUTSIDE THE CITIES, SEEDS OF TROUBLE WERE GERMINATING IN THE SOIL from the start, but the widespread optimism sparked by the American intervention created an environment hostile to violence at first, so these seeds germinated in quiet secrecy. Christoph Reuter and Borhan Younus tell the story of Mullah Farooq, a former madrassa student—hence, technically, a Talib—who lived in a rural part of Ghazni province. He was angry about the ousting of the Taliban and wanted to do something dramatic, something to show the world his people were not dead, were still fighting, and would fight to the last drop of their blood. In late 2002, he went to his friend Abdul Ahad, a more experienced commander, and proposed that they cook up some violence.
“No,” said Ahad. “It’s too early . . . The people would not follow us yet.” The time was not ripe because “the people”—the masses of Afghans—still had high hopes that America would improve their lives.1

  So Ahad and Farooq waited for things to go downhill, and downhill they went. The failures of reconstruction were only one part of it. The month after that first loya jirga in the summer of 2002, US warplanes flying over Helmand Province mistook a wedding party for a band of insurgents because the men in the party were firing rifles into the air, as is the festive custom at weddings in that area. The warplanes strafed the wedding party, killing 47 civilians, including women and children, and wounding another 117. Upon discovering the error, US officials in Kabul tendered profuse apologies. The episode left a bad impression, and yet, at the time, I heard people in Kabul saying they understood that the situation was chaotic and mistakes happen. They were willing to forgive the Americans so long as they learned from their error and never repeated it.

  By the end of the year, however, US violence in Afghanistan was, from the Afghan point of view, being institutionalized. The United States took over the big Soviet-built airbase at Bagram, just north of Kabul, and converted it into an impregnable fortress that no random Afghan could approach, much less enter. The few Afghans who got a glimpse inside reported that an entire ready-made American city had gone up within Bagram, complete with nightclubs, cinemas, restaurants, and shops (a gross exaggeration). Soldiers and private contractors from many countries lived and worked there, and the base therefore cost millions to sustain, but the spending had no impact on the economy of the surrounding area because everything the inhabitants of Bagram used or consumed was airlifted directly from some foreign country. The beef served in the mess halls, for example, came from Australia. And there were even rumors of pork.

  At Bagram, the United States set up a detention center whose dark reputation quickly came to rival that of Guantanamo. US Special Forces and intelligence agents brought Afghans suspected of involvement in terrorism to this detention center, the biggest in the region, for interrogation by specialists. The specialists were not all US military personnel; they included private contractors hired by the US government. Sometimes the United States admitted they had swept up some innocent individual mistakenly, and these detainees were released—but not necessarily before they had been “interrogated.” Those who went into Bagram and came out to tell the tale reported that people were beaten in there or chained, hooded, and made to stand for several days and nights on a box. One man, a taxi driver believed to be innocent of any connection to the Taliban, was beaten to death, apparently because the specialists interrogating him got a kick out of hearing him shout “Wakh! Allah!” each time he was dealt a blow.2 These reports mingled with similar stories seeping out of Guantanamo and spread a sense of horror among Afghans.