The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan

by Graeme Smith

  Karzai’s opponents were not so inflexible. Shortly before our interview with the president, a Pakistani journalist who worked with me as a translator had submitted a list of questions to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of an insurgent faction in eastern Afghanistan. Three days after receiving the questions, the warlord sent back a computer disc with his video-recorded answers. His staff showed off their technical capabilities by offering the video in low- and high-resolution formats, even including a transcript for easy reference. The old militia commander wore a neatly pressed suit jacket, looking rather professional for a leader whose gunmen beheaded their enemies. The substance of his reply was also surprisingly nuanced, as he offered his suggestion for ending the war:

  The current situation has a solution in the following way. All foreign troops must leave Afghanistan. Also, the Afghan people must sit together and make a decision that the foreign troops should leave. The Americans must accept this, and they must leave. We will never participate in the meetings in which they don’t discuss this issue. Therefore we take up weapons for the independence of Afghanistan. There is no other way. Also, we want peace and security in Afghanistan like everybody else, but for that to happen the foreign troops should leave and foreigners should stop meddling in Afghanistan: Moscow, Washington or our neighbouring countries. Power should be handed over to other temporary government, and they will have a shura, a new constitution, and they must work in Islamic rule and we should have real and fair elections, which follow Islamic rules. In this case, I am ready for negotiations.

  There were plenty of reasons to be skeptical about Hekmatyar. He did not speak for the Taliban leadership, as he ran his own insurgent group, and he was probably toning down his language for the sake of appealing to a foreign audience. But his statement fit with the general trend of Taliban demands, which usually focused on political aims inside Afghanistan, without straying into the realm of global jihad. Their central demand, a troop withdrawal, could have plunged the country into civil war if implemented too abruptly, but in the long term it was a goal shared by the international forces. Perhaps most importantly, the insurgents seemed ready to talk about everything, including the basic rules of political engagement in Kabul. By refusing to discuss the constitution, Karzai was taking a strong position on negotiations. This did not help to quell the conflict, however; it was another case of the government being “too strong.”

  Not that it mattered, at the time. Neither the insurgents nor Kabul seemed genuinely enthusiastic about peace talks, and sometimes it was hard to tell which side was being more stubborn about the process. Cynicism pervaded the talk about negotiations: on a flight from Kandahar to Kabul I sat beside an officer from Afghanistan’s intelligence service, and from the moment we buckled up to the time we stepped off the plane, he grilled me about the foreigners’ true intentions. He wondered if the US–NATO strategy was to prolong the war as a means of cementing positions at Afghan airfields within range of Iran and China. The insurgents had similar conspiracy theories, worrying that the international troops wanted to stay forever.

  Even the smallest efforts at détente ran into problems. In December 2006, a delegation of elders from villages southwest of Kandahar city visited the palace of the provincial governor. They were a group of serious men with an offer that seemed sincere: withdraw the military outpost from Sperwan Ghar, the hill overlooking their houses, and they would keep the Taliban away themselves. They felt capable of delivering on this promise because they had already raised the idea with Mullah Mohammed Mansoor, a former minister in the Taliban regime who had since become a major insurgent commander. It’s easy to see why the NATO forces would have been reluctant to give up their hilltop outpost, a commanding piece of high ground from which an artillery gun could hit almost any part of the rebellious Panjwai valley. But the foreign troops might also have been tempted by the idea of bringing some calm to a district that has suffered so much. As it turned out, NATO never got a chance to talk with the elders about their proposal: Kandahar’s provincial council rejected the idea, in another misplaced show of strength.

  One wet morning in January 2008, I drove to the one village in southern Afghanistan where the government’s strength should have been most appreciated. It was a short trip, five kilometres south of Kandahar, but the situation had grown so bad that it was a considerable risk. In better times, after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001 and 2002, many journalists had visited this particular village. It was only a cluster of mud huts, but the name on the map indicated its importance in the new regime: Karz. The president’s hometown is where correspondents stopped, in the early years, for a quick story about ordinary people cheering the new leader. In those initial stories, Karzai’s tribesmen crowded around the television cameras and described their wish lists for their village: a school, paved roads, maybe a soccer team. In fact, some of those things had been achieved by the time I arrived. The new regime had paved the main road and re-opened a school that had been closed by the Taliban. Children scrambled over new playground equipment as workers carried bricks for classrooms under construction. It was a hopeful scene, nothing like the neglected places I had visited in the rest of the province. But the people themselves did not speak optimistically about their country. The school’s deputy director decorated his office wall with two large portraits of Karzai, whom he described fondly as a former classmate. Despite that personal connection, he couldn’t bring himself to say anything nice about the president. The economy had improved in recent years, he said, “but the economy is mostly for rich people.”

  His biggest concern, though, was security. The fighting that ripped through the south rarely touched Karz directly, but the villagers were now outnumbered by families that had fled the violence west of the city and sought refuge in relatives’ homes and temporary camps. Many of the displaced people had lived in makeshift shelters for more than a year, refusing to go home as the bombing and artillery strikes increased. “The fighting gets worse and worse,” the schoolmaster said. “Under the Taliban we had better security, no corruption, no stealing, no murders.” He tried to make apologies for the president he knew in boyhood, saying these failures were not all the fault of Karzai, but a teacher who had been listening to our conversation interjected with a sharp contradiction. The schoolmaster’s bare office echoed with their argument; my translator whispered that the teacher was asking his boss to tell the truth. Finally the school director slumped back in his chair, defeated, and allowed his teacher the last word. The white-haired instructor faced me and picked a few words to summarize the Karzai regime.

  “It’s corrupt,” he said. “Morally and economically.”

  On rare occasions, the foreign troops managed to protect people in the south from their own government. In the Panjwai valley, the gunner of an armoured vehicle became a local hero for using cannon fire to scare off a group of police who had been harassing villagers. For the most part, however, people took affairs into their own hands. The assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai was the most prominent example of a trend that grew every year during my time in the south, a rising tide of killings among prominent citizens. Sometimes the deaths were private matters, old feuds settled violently. More often, the killings fit a pattern. The Taliban’s enemies, and potential enemies, were being eliminated one at a time. We were about to feel the heavy significance of those assassinations.

  Flare in a downward spiral

  CHAPTER 11

  DEATH OF A WARLORD OCTOBER 2007

  A Canadian battle group commander walked into the media tent at Kandahar Air Field one morning. It was unusual for a high-ranking officer to step into our den, which stank of unwashed flak jackets. I tried to get up and shake his hand, but it turned into a clumsy spectacle as I struggled out of my canvas recliner and got tangled in a headphone cord. The grey-haired commander waited until I composed myself, then asked: “Do you have a phone number for Habibullah Jan?” Of course I had his number, and numbers for two of his sons; staying in touch with the old
warlord was essential for any journalist covering the districts west of Kandahar city. Habibullah Jan was part of a generation of hard-bitten former mujahedeen commanders, men who rose to power as brave warriors against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and then squandered their reputations in a civil war amongst themselves. The Taliban drove them away in 1994, but they returned and flourished under the new regime, reincarnated as police chiefs, security contractors or implementing partners for development aid. In the case of Habibullah Jan, he had gotten himself elected to parliament in Kabul, a job he subsequently ignored in favour of supervising his private army in Kandahar. He also assisted foreign troops with the planning of Operation Medusa, and collected tokens of appreciation like certificates and plaques from senior military leaders. I was a little surprised that the Canadian commander didn’t already have his contact details. The officer noticed my confusion as he was scribbling down the numbers, and explained: “This guy is a pain in the ass. I’m thinking about killing him.” He snapped shut his notebook and walked out, leaving me wondering if he was joking or if I’d just inadvertently put the old warlord’s life in danger.

  As it turned out, international forces did not kill Habibullah Jan. He died much later in a Taliban-style ambush. The uncertainty over his allegiances, however, as well as the larger ambiguity about who qualified as NATO’s friend or enemy, reflected the strange relationship between the foreigners and the warlords. The military labelled many of them as “white”: a third category on the battlefield, neither “red” enemies nor “blue” allies. One intelligence officer told me this category was often ignored by his colleagues, who did not see the relevance of studying figures who weren’t directly taking sides. Foreign diplomats also tended to dismiss the ex-mujahedeen as a bunch of rogues who needed to be shepherded into the new government system. Fear of their local fiefdoms had encouraged the post-2001 planners to give Afghanistan one of the most centralized systems of government in the world. You were either “with us, or against us.” Politics was not so binary in the south, however, making it hard to define who was “with us.” A thug who executes contracts for the military in the daytime and executes prisoners at night: Is he an ally? What about the drug dealer who keeps the peace in his district, but quietly does business with the Taliban?

  These questions became even more difficult to answer when applied to the biggest warlords, the leaders of powerful tribes. Much of the previous generation of tribal leaders had died or fled during the three decades of war, and the men who replaced them often clawed their way to prominence on the battlefield. Maybe they were simple gunmen in the 1980s when they faced Soviet tanks, but by now they were dignified elders who sat on tribal councils and represented thousands of kinsmen. Tribes traditionally served as the main political forces in southern Afghanistan, especially when the government has been weak. In the uncertainty of life in Kandahar, tribalism had again emerged as an important way of deciding whom to trust. The major tribes had no official power in the government, but seemed capable of reaching decision with broad authority. The United Nations spent millions of dollars on successive programs to disarm the warlords and tribal chiefs, but in Kandahar these programs had little practical effect on the tribal strongmen. Everybody assumed they could mobilize thousands of armed men if necessary.

  I didn’t realize quite how much authority rested with these unofficial chiefs until I looked into the death of a diplomat. Glyn Berry, fifty-nine, political director of Canada’s reconstruction team, died in January 2006 when a suicide bomber drove a silver minivan packed with explosives into a military convoy. The Canadians evacuated their injured and dead, and left the lead investigation to the Afghan police. Officers poked through the wreckage until they found the identification numbers on the chassis and engine block of the attacker’s vehicle, a four-cylinder diesel Toyota Town Ace. They also deciphered the licence plate number, and went looking for its owner. This kind of police investigation did not usually work in Kandahar, where people make deals in cash with no records. Hundreds of nearly identical Toyotas stand in huge lots on the edge of the city, a waypoint for car smugglers. But the investigators got lucky in the hours that followed the diplomat’s death: the traffic department pointed them to the vehicle’s last registered owner. He showed them letters certifying that he sold the vehicle to a second man, who in turn could document the fact that he sold the minivan to another pair of men. One of the buyers was missing a leg, he said, and the other was named Pir Mohammed. Police arrested Mr. Mohammed the next morning, when he couldn’t come up with a good explanation for what he did with the vehicle. They searched his house and reported finding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a Kalashnikov rifle, ammunition, documents in Arabic and a photograph of a reputed Taliban leader. His home also had car parts strewn around the courtyard, which relatives explained as the detritus of a second-hand car business, but which the police saw as evidence that he ran a chop shop for turning vehicles into bombs. The officers threw him into the cramped holding cells at police headquarters. In his mug shot, he looks like any other local resident, perhaps thirty years old, wearing a suit vest over his traditional clothes, with a mop of curly black hair sticking out from his turban. The police report called Mr. Mohammed a “terrorist” and a “mastermind.” The document offers little to support the idea that he was any sort of ringleader, but under the circumstances it did seem reasonable to hold him.

  However, the investigation did not seem reasonable to Kandahar’s most powerful tribal warlord, Mullah Naqib. He was sometimes called by his full name, Naqibullah, and sometimes people used labels other than “warlord” to describe him because that word didn’t seem big enough for his hulking presence. Looking back through my newspaper stories, it’s interesting to see how my shorthand for him started out cold and analytical—I described him as a “powerbroker” in 2006—but later became warmer, and by 2007 I was calling him a “jovial, grey-bearded strongman.” Among all the old warriors who fought the Soviets and later became leaders in southern Afghanistan, he was easily the most prominent. His forces turned the Arghandab valley north of Kandahar city into a killing ground in the 1980s, repelling wave after wave of Soviet troops from the pomegranate orchards and grape fields. After the Russians finally retreated, the communist administration reached an understanding with Mullah Naqib that recognized his authority in the valley—a truce that likely saved the local government from being overrun by mujahedeen rebels. The communist regime eventually collapsed in 1992, and Mullah Naqib’s tribesmen joined the rush to divide the spoils among the former resistance fighters, but he played peacemaker again in 1994 when the Taliban started sweeping away the squabbling mujahedeen factions. Mullah Naqib’s faction was the largest, and he represented a tribe, the Alokozai, whose fighting strength had been noted by every commander in the region since Alexander the Great. Mullah Naqib avoided a bloodbath with his decision to pull his men back into their strongholds north of the city, handing over power to the Taliban. He later served as kingmaker for a third time after 2001, when he helped broker the Taliban’s surrender and threw his support behind the new regime of Hamid Karzai. Despite his lack of official status in the government, he continued his role as adjudicator of disputes, holding court in his comfortable house on the north side of Kandahar city, so it was natural that his tribesmen would ask him for help with the case of the slain diplomat.

  The man arrested for the bombing, Pir Mohammed, belonged to a family of Islamic teachers, respected members of the Alokozai tribe. In the hours after his arrest, they visited Mullah Naqib and pleaded their case, arguing that it wasn’t possible for him to have assisted the insurgency. Their family had feuded with the Taliban in previous years, they claimed, over a disagreement about a holiday on the lunar calendar. The warlord considered their case, and what happened next became a study in the way power worked in Kandahar. This was the moment of transaction, when a family trades its status within the tribe for a favour. Mullah Naqib led a delegation of elders to the home of Ahmed Wali Karzai,
the president’s half-brother, who made a phone call to the governor. The governor called the police chief, and the suspect went free. All of this happened in less than two days. It illustrated whom ordinary people trusted to solve their problems—a tribal leader, not the government—and showed the hierarchy within the local administration, ostensibly run by the governor but supervised by Ahmed Wali Karzai, a member of the ruling family.

  My newspaper articles about this incident suggested that Mullah Naqib was an anachronism, following ancient rules of tribal leadership that did not belong in modern Afghanistan. I wrote at length about interference in the courts, and international efforts to build a new system of justice. Canadian officials were not pleased about Mullah Naqib’s meddling with the investigation, and responded to my articles by raising the issue with Afghanistan’s intelligence chief in Kabul. One of my stories was accompanied by a photo of Mullah Naqib shaking hands with Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, and the affair got picked up by blogs under the headline, “Harper shakes hands with terrorist warlord.” I had not intended to portray the warlord as a villain, but the tone of the coverage rankled Sarah Chayes, an American author who was then living in Kandahar city. She scolded me via e-mail, complaining that I painted the warlord as a “monster” and suggesting that the international community should try to improve its relations with respected figures such as Naqib.