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Authors: Sarah Chayes
The Punishment of Virtue (47 page)
In Kandahar there were five people, I told him.
“I'll get rid of them.”
He promised. I was elated. I was understood.
We moved to other matters. What did I think of Isma'il Khan for interior minister, the president wanted to know. Exhausted Jalali was planning to resign.
Ismail Khan? That warlord?
I paused. “You know who would have been a great interior minister?” I pointed to the sketch-map. “Him.”
“You think I wasn't thinking of that?”
Oh. The revelation traversed me. Oh how well this blow had been calculated. It was not just revenge, this murder of Akremârevenge for his skillful obstruction of Pakistani demolition work. It was a future Afghan interior minister the ISI had just assassinated. I thought another second. I thought about Mazar-i-Sherif, about those Uzbeks in tears up at the graveyard in Khakrez, about the funeral oration in Persian. Akrem was the only person who could unite the country so. He was better at it than Karzai even, for Karzai had begun to alienate his own Pashtuns without really winning over the other ethnic groups. Akrem won people over, and not just with words. Akrem won them over because he did something. He was effective. And he had vision. He had compassion too, but also the decisivenessâharshness evenâneeded to function in this place. There was no reason Akrem could not have run for president. Mazar would certainly have voted for him, and Kandahar, and Kabul, by the time he had been there for a year. Maybe the next election would have been too soon, but the man had been only forty-six.
The “suicide bombers” in Pakistan were looking ahead, well ahead of the rest of us. This murder had shattered one of the foundation stones of Afghanistan's midterm futureâand with it, that of the whole interconnected region.
Nonetheless, I left that meeting on air. At least President Karzai seemed to finally understand. At least Akrem's death would not be for absolutely nothing. It would serve to reverse some of the policies he had fought so hard against. There might be a way forward.
As I drove back to Akrem's former quarters by the King's Garden, I thought of a few more things I wanted to tell the president, just to make sure everything was clear.
I composed one of my letters to him. I hadn't written one in over a year.
“Dear Mr. President:
“I have some further thoughts about steps to be taken in the wake of Khakrezwal's murder⦔
Six of them, to be precise.
I urged Karzai to use the event as an opportunity. It was the final gift Akrem had given him: a ringing justification for long overdue policy shifts. Just as 9/11 had served as a pretext for major initiatives in the United States, Karzai could explain that Akrem's murder was an event of such magnitude that it obliged him to take extraordinary action in its wake.
But to do so, he would have to treat it as something extraordinary, and not “allow it to be covered over by Afghanistan's drifting dust,” as I put it.
I told Karzai to stop playing musical chairs with criminal public officials. Stop allowing the agents of foreign countries free rein in Afghanistan. “To blame Pakistan for Akrem's murder is correct,” I wrote, “but not sufficient. You must also blame yourself, Mr. President, for making Pakistan's job easier by maintaining its agents in power in Kandahar.”
Then there was the United States. I suggested that Karzai help the United States devise a new policy toward Pakistan. U.S. officials had been bullied into believing that any alternative would be worse: black turbans with their fingers on the button. Washington was paralyzed. I thought that President Karzai, with his unparalleled feel for Pakistan, could suggest different directions for the United States. I reminded him about “most likely/most dangerous” planning and suggested he draw up a policy brief. I'd be happy to help, I added.
Two days later, I delivered this letter to Karzai's chief of staff. The president was sick; he couldn't see me, though he had insisted I check in with him before leaving for Kandahar. The letter, said the chief of staff, would be on his desk as soon as he could sit up to read it. I was back in the game.
But in the end, none of it came to pass.
Blindly, obstinately, in the face of everything Shafiullah and I had brought to light, Kabul officialdom continued to call Akrem's murder a suicide bombing. And I realized: the truth just didn't matter. Another ream of evidence, had we collected it, would not have made a bit of difference. Reality did not matter. Reality was not going to dent this fiction; it was too useful. It shielded the true perpetrators; it absolved Afghan officials of responsibility, incompetence, or even the duty to investigate; and it played to the obsession of the Americans. Shirzai and Karzai had hit upon an explanation that satisfied everyone. My knight, my championâtruthâproved impotent. Quickly, the issue died.
Gul Agha Shirzai was removed from the governorship of Kandahar once more. But he was appointed to Nangrahar, another Pakistani border province whose capital, Jalalabad, commands the only other road connecting the continents across Afghanistan. A strategic place, yet again.
“Let me handle the strategy,” President Karzai retorted when I called him on it during a second meeting, over breakfast.
How ironic. I had begun this Afghan journey convinced that Karzai and Shirzai were opposites: white and black, cultivated and doltish, visionary and evil. But here they were, three and a half years on, welded together as solidly as the contradictory elements in the collective character of the Afghansâif there is such a thing.
At that second meeting with President Karzai, over jam and bread and orange juice arrayed on china and white linen, I read off a list of people in Kandahar he simply had to fireânearly the same list I had sent to Jalali two years before. For nothing had happened yet. President Karzai had promised me when we bent our heads over my sketch map three weeks earlier, but these people were still in placeâthe people who had killed Zabit Akrem, or allowed him to be killed. I had told the president. He had agreed. He had promised. But except for one, they still held their positions, as if nothing had happened.
Were my list a fly, buzzing over his breakfast table, Karzai would have used the same gesture: “Those are details!” he said, then seemed shocked by my retort:
“You know, most Kandaharis think you're actually allied with the Pakistani government
against
Afghanistan.”
“Did you hear that?” he exclaimed to his chief of staff. Then turning back to me: “What is it the people want me to do?”
“This
is what they want you to do! Take concrete action, don't just talk about it.
Do
something.”
But President Karzai steered the conversation back to the theory of America's Pakistan policy. He wanted to show me some satellite photos; he wanted me to expose to America what Pakistan was up to. He was interested in a media campaign. The fault lay elsewhere, not with him. He wiped his lips, scooted out from the table, and cantered off, waving byebye to me over his shoulder.
“Do you think he heard me?” I was flopped on the couch in the chief of staff's office.
His voice was dry. “You certainly made your point strongly enough.”
It took about two days for the whole experience to sink in. Looking back, I suspect that Karzai's charm offensive, his enthusiastic approval of what I was telling him about Akrem's murder, was aimed mainly at discovering exactly what information I had.
Well, now he knows.
The revolution in me had been swift. It was as though all the changes I had gone through over the course of the past three years had just taken place all over again. For a brief moment, I had believed again. I had seen the manner of Akrem's dying as his final gift. That flash of light that had thrust through the carpet in the mosque had illuminated everything so clearly, I thought. There was no escape from action this time. I only had to reengage, to step forward and point out the incontrovertible facts that the flash had brought to light. Then the truth would work its magic. So I thought.
But I was wrong, again. I had traveled the whole cycle from inspiration and devotion to bitter disillusionment in a few short weeks.
And yet this process had electrified me, even if for a brief moment. The sense it gave me of carrying Akrem's work forward had carried me across that devastating period, and had deposited meâin the company of new friends: Shafiullah, Akrem's younger brother, a new deputy chief of policeâback in Kandahar.
When Akrem was killed, I had wondered searchingly if it was not finally time to go. Without him, who was left to fight for? Who was left to support, to contribute my capacities to, such as they were? With him gone, the last rational hope for the future of Afghanistan had been quenched. Of what value could my presence be?
And yet this feeling, acute at first, did not stop to dwell in me. Instead, illogically, what I found myself experiencing was an inarticulate, renewed sense of commitment. I couldn't leave, there was too much to do.
Besides, I loved the place.
I think it was then that I fully understood Akrem's equally illogical commitment. It wasn't that he didn't see the flaws in the Afghan government he served. He saw them in clearer detail than most. But he saw something else too: he understood that, in this specific time and place, this government provided him the framework to keep trying. That was one way he knew to honor his own fallen friends. And they must have been legionâthose scraps of cloth on poles in all those graveyards. This Afghan government, flawed as it was, gave Akrem a means to act, and to act his way, on the ground, daubed in the messy reality of it, among the people, helping them concretely, committing faults and trying to rectifyâtrying.
This isn't much of a conclusion, I know it. It's too abrupt; it's inchoate, unspelled out. It's just the note of a tuning fork. But I am thinking this: I think Akrem understood that it doesn't really matter if there is a chance you will succeed. You have to keep trying. That's what matters. You have to try. You have to give your all.
CHAPTER 2: COVERING CRISIS
1.
For this term see Samuel Huntington,
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999); and for one of many rebuttals, see Roy Mottahedeh, “The Clash of Civilizations:An Islamicist's Critique,” in Qureshi and Sells, eds.,
The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
2.
Two examples (orthography as received):
“I'm writing you because this coverage is very upsetting and sad. Specifically the details about the wounded child crying and for that matter all the facts regarding the family members that were killed. I consider myself very liberal and opposed to war and violence but what do you expect to gain from this kind of coverage? What is your reporters motivation? Do you assess the value or damage your reports can cause? The only thing I can compare this to is if we had American reporters in World War II covering the bombing deaths of women and children in Germany. I consider it irresponsible and right wing thinkers may go as far as calling it treason.”
“While I am listening to the whimpers of afghany children, the pleas of parents who have lost loved ones due to accidental bombings, or even on purpose bombingsâ¦What I would like to know, is where are the voices of the US children that no longer have parents because they were disintegrated in the World Trade Center. Where are the voices of the families and loved ones of the five or six thousand people that where anihilated to the point of unidentifiable dust!â¦I am truly getting tired of, and becoming angry; listening to the whimpers and the voices of those who have lost something in Afghanistanâ¦. What is the purpose, what is the intent, of broadcasting this information? If NPR must broadcast these reports, then let us be fair, shall weâ¦broadcast interviews of the children that have lost their parents in the World Trade Center. Broadcast the interviews of the injured people, the wives of the firefighters whose husbands will no longer be coming home, lives ineffably changed foreverâ¦. I have had enough and I am one individual that will not listento Morning Edition for a while. I am embarrassed for the news media of NPR and I am angry that they would use their listening public, who supports them, to be subject to this kind of propaganda for the sake of ratings or some twisted idea that Americans want to hear this! What on earth were you thinking? I think I will listen to a Mozart CD for the rest of the morning.”
CHAPTER 3: MOVING IN ON KANDAHAR
1.
Tyler Marshall, “Warlord's Politics Could Prove Problematic,”
Los Angeles Times,
October 24, 2001, p. A9.
2.
A public call office (PCO) is an office where people without phones in their houses can make calls. There is one on just about every street corner in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.
3.
Sarah Chayes, Newscast spot, National Public Radio, November 25, 2001 (from author's text).
4.
Ibid., November 28, 2001.5. Ibid., December 1, 2001 (from author's text).
CHAPTER 4: REPORTING THE LAST DAYS
1.
Locally the trademark ghostlike blue garment with its square of mesh in front of the eyes is called a
chadri,
or
bughra.
CHAPTER 5: THE FALL OF THE TALIBAN
1.
See Tyler Marshall and author's NPR spot on November 15: “Today [Pashtun opposition leader Hamid Karzai] called on the Taliban to join a broad-based Afghan government.”
CHAPTER 7: TAKING THE CITY BY FORCE
1.
See Chayes NPR spots December 8, 9, 2001, and Q&A,
All Things Considered,
December 8, 2001.
2.
Bradley Graham and Thomas E. Ricks, “Rumsfeld Says War Far from Over, Tribal Politics and Hunt for Taliban Leaders Pose New Challenges,”
Washington Post,
December 8, 2001, p. A-1.
CHAPTER 8: A CHOICE OF ALLIES
1.
In a deal with Pakistan, Washington channeled all of its assistance to Afghan resistants through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI. U.S. officials only began forging direct links to some Afghans a few years into the conflict. (See Steve Coll,
Ghost Wars
[New York: Penguin Press, 2004].) One of them, Mullah Naqib, described to me his secret nighttime meetings with U.S. intelligence agents in Peshawar, Pakistan. When he asked the CIA agents how they had heard of him, they told him that Karzai had suggested his name.
2.
My gratitude to Jonathan Shay for his breathtaking work in this field. Please see his
Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming
(New York: Scribner, 2002), especially “Pirate Raid: Staying in Combat Mode,” pp. 19â34. Note also the habitual lying on the part of people suffering unhealed combat trauma, or retention of the “Army habit of commandeering anything of uncertain ownership,” p. 32.3. For a full exposition of this argument, see Michael Barry,
Le Royaume de l'Insolence
(Paris: Flammarion, 2002).
4.
Ibid., p. 235.5. See George Crile,
CharlieWilson'sWar
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2004).6. Steve Coll,
Ghost Wars
(New York: Penguin Press, 2004).7. The use of the masculine pronoun is deliberate. On the attractions of a criminal career to combat veterans, see Shay,
Odysseus,
pp. 26â33.
8.
This reputation has held for at least two hundred years. In 1810, Mountstuart Elphinstone, a British envoy to Kabul, wrote: “The Achekzais differ so much from the other Durranis that I have reserved them for a separate descriptionâ¦. No traveler can enter their country without being plundered, and they often make nightly expeditions into the lands of their neighbors to steal. Skill in theft, and boldness in robbery, are great qualities among themâ¦. Their robberies, however, are never aggravated by murderâ¦. They wear their clothes unchanged for months, their beards unclipped, and their hair long and shaggyâ¦. Their manners are rough and barbarous, but they are not quarrelsome among themselvesâ¦. They are not hospitable, they have nomosques, and seldom pray or trouble themselves about religionâ¦. All tribes are loudin their complaints against them, and the Durranis will hardly acknowledge them for clansmen.” See Elphinstone's
An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul
(Graz: Akademische Druck u. Verlagsanstalt, 1969), pp. 421â22. (Spellings changed for conformity.)
CHAPTER 9: DEALING FOR THE GOVERNORSHIP
1.
U.S. officials have repeatedly made the same mistake. When a secretary of defense or a U.S. ambassador, for example, goes to Herat to pay a visit to the virtually independent governor there, a man who regularly flouts the laws of the central government, the American is abased in the eyes of Afghans, and the governor's prestige is immeasurably enhanced.
2.
President Karzai told me, when I asked him in mid-2004, that he had wanted to “reconcile the two sides” and that when Mullah Naqib was attacked, he “strongly defended him.” This does not jibe with what other participants remember.
3.
Roy Gutman,
How We Missed the Story
(forthcoming) (Washington, D.C.: USIP,2006).
4.
Karzai family loyalists, including, the Abdullah, who was living in the same house with Hamid Karzai in Quetta, Pakistan, at the time, confirm his démarche to Mullah Naqib. They also confirm Karzai's intimate involvement with the nascent Taliban movement, including the regular meetings he hosted with its leaders, and the fact that they would enter the house armed. The family's public version of these events is that these were traditional religious leaders acting in good faith to put an end to the civil strife. “We were all fooled,” says Hamid's older brother Qayum Karzai. “We all thought they wanted to organize a
Loya Jirga
and bring back the former king.” In conversation with me in 2004, President Karzai referred to the Taliban leaders he met with as his “buddies,” saying they were “ordinary people” whom he desperately hoped might halt the chaos. He said some months after the Taliban took Kandahar, when his friends among them told him that another faction was getting copious arms from an unknown source, he began to suspect there was more to this Taliban movement than he had thoughtâthat the Pakistani ISI was behind itâand he broke off official relations, “though personal relations were maintained.” Other family members counter that it was impossible not to be aware, from the earliest days, of the ISI role and ambitions in launching the Taliban. And, several noted, this was a cause of bitter disagreement between Hamid Karzai and his father, who opposed any involvement with the nascent Taliban movement. According to U.S. diplomatic documents uncovered by Roy Gutman, Karzai was still identified as Taliban ambassador-designate to the United Nations in late 1996. Cf. John Lee Anderson, “Letter from Afghanistan,”
The New Yorker,
January 28, 2002.
CHAPTER 10: KANDAHAR, AFGHAN CAPITAL
1.
E.g., Olaf Caroe,
The Pathans
(Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1990) (1st ed.,1958), p. 256.
2.
Abdurrahman Khan (amir of Afghanistan, d. 1901),
Mustatab Siraj at-Tawarikh
(Kabul: Kabul Matba' 1331 [H]), p. 10. See also Mahmud al-Huseini al-Munshi (d. c.1775),
Ta'rikh-i Ahmadshahi
(Moscow: 1974), p. 50.
3.
Ganda Singh,
Ahmad Shah Durrani
(Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1959), p. 29, describes three hundred camels under escort of an Afghan guard. Singh opines that the convoy “had encamped in the city to rest for a few days and to collect five hundred animals for their onward journey.”
4.
According to some accounts, they were moved there by force, in a form of ethnic cleansing, by Safavi Shah Abbas I. See Laurence Lockhart,
Nadir Shah
(London: Luzac, 1938).
5.
See Laurence Lockhart, “The Revolt of the Abdalis,” in
The Fall of the Safavi Dynasty and the Afghan Occupation of Persia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1958), pp. 95â108.
6.
Lockhart, pp. 473â85.
7.
On long-distance overland trade, see Rudiger Klein, “Caravan Trade in Safavid Iran,” in
Etudes Safavides,
Jean Calmard, ed. (Paris/Teheran: Institute Français de Recherche en Iran, 1993). On the Safavid dynasty, see ibid., Lockhart, and Peter Jackson, Lawrence Lockhart, eds. “The Timurid and Safavid Periods,”
Cambridge History of Iran
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 189â412.
8.
Note that Safavi Shah Isma'il assisted Babur in one of his briefly successful efforts to capture Samarqand, which he considered his Timurid birthright. See R. M. Savory, “Safawids,” in
Encyclopedia of Islam New Edition
(Leiden: Brill, 1994), VIII: p. 767.
9.
Wheeler M. Thackston,
The Baburnama,
trans. Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, (New York: Modern Library, 2002), p. 254.
10.
Ibid., p. 256.
11.
Ibid.
12.
Klein, p. 310.
13.
Ibid., p. 313
14.
Michael Barry,
Le Royaume de l'Insolence
(Paris: Flammarion, 2002) (1st ed.,1984), p. 95. Cf. M. Longworth Dames, “Afghanistan: Islamic, to the Rise of the Afghan National State,” in
Encyclopedia of Islam,
p. 229.
15.
Singh, pp. 11â13; Lockhart, “The Campaign Against the Abdali Afghans,” in
The Fall of the Safavi Dynasty,
pp. 321â27; Lockhart,
Nadir Shah,
pp. 31â33, 51â54.