by Ronan Farrow
It was the beginning of 2002, in the remote north of Afghanistan. Leaning and Heffernan had been dispatched by the watchdog group Physicians for Human Rights to investigate the treatment of the prisoners of the new war on terror. Instead, they had stumbled into a deeper and more dangerous mystery, one which would fuel more than a decade of recrimination, land on the desks of some of the most powerful people in the world, and trigger a cover-up spanning two administrations. The investigators were staring down one of the earliest illustrations of the costs of a strain of post-9/11 foreign policy led not by diplomats, but by soldiers and spies. The unmarked grave was in part the product of American relationships with warlords that filled the void created by the sidelining of diplomats. The consequences were about more than human rights: in Afghanistan, American support for provincial despots would reshape the country, helping to create the conditions for the longest war in American history.
The investigators had no idea of any of that as they sought to measure the scale of the grave. War-crimes experts are trained not to eyeball body counts from afar, but it was clear that this was a large site: body after body, stretching as wide as a football field. As Heffernan took pictures, Leaning got out her notebook. She carried the black-and-white marbled kind favored by middle-school students. The stiff covers made them easy to balance on a knee in the field, and her messy handwriting fit in the wide lines. She didn’t have much time for notes. They had only been there ten minutes when they saw the dust cloud on the horizon, and, emerging from it, the dark vehicles. There were four or five covered Jeeps or Toyota Land Cruisers, Leaning guessed at a distance, and they were heading their way fast.
Leaning and Heffernan scrambled back into their own weather-beaten Toyota. The interpreter looked ashen. Their driver, a grizzled man in his fifties, revved the engine. He, too, had been afraid of this part of the desert—he’d spent the drive there nervously glancing in his side mirrors, scanning the horizon. Now he slammed on his accelerator as the Jeeps gave chase, tailing the investigators as they crossed the barren half mile back to the provincial capital, Sheberghan. They didn’t stop until they had put Sheberghan behind them, continuing east toward the larger regional hub of Mazar-i-Sharif. Leaning and Heffernan sat in tense silence during the drive. Everyone in the car suspected they’d dodged a bullet—or several.
The grave was within visual range of the stronghold of one of the most feared and mythologized warlords in modern Afghan history: a horseback-riding, sword-wielding Uzbek warrior named General Abdul Rashid Dostum. He had been an ally and a traitor to every side in the Cold War. In the months following the September 11 attacks, he was at the heart of the United States’ new strategy in Afghanistan. Armed by the Americans and shadowed by special forces, his horseback fighters toppled Taliban strongholds across the country’s north. The prisoners the Physicians for Human Rights investigators were tracking had surrendered in Dostum’s battles. And the Jeeps had pulled out from behind his gates.
FOURTEEN YEARS LATER, I stood in General Dostum’s court, and stared at his reindeer, and tried not to act surprised. The reindeer seemed confused as to why he was there, and I must have seemed confused as to why the reindeer was there. But there he was, at least 200 pounds, one antler broken, thrashing against the rope around his face. I stepped out of the way to avoid getting impaled by an antler. As an attendant struggled to hold onto the other end of the rope, Dostum indicated to the deer with both hands, like Vanna White presenting a Wheel of Fortune prize. He beamed at the deer and then at me—a magnanimous smile that said “see, I brought a reindeer,” as if this was the most normal way in the world to arrive at an interview. I pursed my lips for a moment. He was waiting for a response. “That’s a beautiful animal, General,” I said. You choose your words carefully in the courts of warlords, especially when they’re flanked by men with M4 carbines slung across their chests. Plus, the antlers.
It was August 2016. General Dostum had by then gone from anti-American warlord, to American proxy fighter, to vice president of Afghanistan. He was a living embodiment of the militarization of American foreign policy: a warlord, who had, off the back of collaboration with the Americans, ascended to the very top of the new power structures created in his country by the United States. That night in 2016, we were in the Vice Presidential Palace in Kabul, which was like a cross between a James Bond villain’s lair and Liberace’s dressing room. Dostum had carpeted the entire place in live grass, and, as far as I could tell, wherever one could possibly fit a plant, he had attempted to do so. Hundreds of trees and bushes in mismatched terra-cotta planters crowded the place. Festooning every branch was a wild array of Christmas-tree lights, like someone had cleared out a section of Home Depot. There were the big bulbs that flashed in sequence, and the fake icicles that illuminated in a dripping pattern, and, everywhere, yards of rainbow rope light. You had to push through the foliage and lights to reach the seating area in the center, a dais with a mismatched collection of rattan patio chairs and leatherette La-Z-Boy recliners. Vases of fake flowers and Hummel-style porcelain statuettes of horseback soldiers stood on Louis XIV–style end tables. In a wicker cage, a fat chukar partridge clucked mournfully. There was, of course, a giant tank full of sharks. This was warlord chic.
Here is how one journalist described General Dostum: “Over six feet tall with bulging biceps . . . a bear of a man with a gruff laugh, which, some Uzbeks swear, has on occasion frightened people to death.” (That reporter, Rashid Ahmed, claimed that shortly before he visited Dostum’s stronghold in Northern Afghanistan, Dostum tied a soldier who had been caught stealing to the tracks of a Russian tank and drove him around until his body was reduced to a meat slurry, a charge Dostum later denied.) But Dostum was also, he reminded me frequently, an animal lover. “When people bring some birds, or some sheep, or some animals to be slaughtered, to eat, I tell them ‘please take it away, take it. I don’t want to kill this bird, this sheep, or this goat . . . ,’ ” he said, visibly moved. General Dostum was not an animal lover in the way you or I might be a cat person or a dog person. He was an animal lover as only a powerful Uzbek warlord could be, with a menagerie of hundreds of deer and horses and game birds. On at least one occasion on each day I spent with him, he would mention a horse or a deer being injured, and his eyes would fill with tears, and his lower lip would jut, like a child who had just been told the family hamster went on to a better place.
“It is very rare that I agree to give any interview for a journalist,” General Dostum said in Uzbek through an adviser-slash-translator doing his best. A lot of the Uzbek language is formed in the back of the throat, and Dostum’s delivery was particularly deep and throaty. He spoke in a lazy, slightly slurred drawl, like a tape played at half speed. “I have friends who are saying to do interview and so far I never agree to,” he continued. His comments to the press had been limited to rare quotes given over the phone, and he’d sat down only with academics and adventurers who transcribed his legends into rapt panegyrics. “You’re a good fellow from a friendly country, therefore I agreed to accept you here today,” Dostum said, his eyes flicking up and down my person, regarding me with some suspicion.
But I had not come to tell the tale of General Dostum, or at least not in the way General Dostum seemed terrifyingly assured I would. I had come to Dostum’s grass-carpeted palace in Kabul to ask about an unmarked grave at the ends of the earth.
ORIGINALLY, DOSTUM WAS JUST ABDUL RASHID, one of nine siblings, born to Uzbek peasants in the desert plains of Afghanistan’s Jowzjan Province. The nom de guerre “Dostum”—literally, “my friend” in Uzbek—came later, as he marshaled power as a military commander. His family owned a simple, clay-brick home: three rooms, dirt floor, no electricity. Surviving in the desolation of Northern Afghanistan was a feat, and Dostum showed particular resilience. He claimed that, as an infant, he was once swept away by a flash flood of melting snow water, and clung to a branch, and survived, alone in the icy water. A villager eventually spotted his tiny hand above
the waves and pulled him out. “What is this?!” Dostum intoned, theatrically channeling his rescuer. “Oh it is a hand of some baby!” The villager took him to a nearby mosque and held him upside down against a mud wall until water poured out and he regained consciousness.
Other childhood legends speak to a different quiddity: his constant flair for violence, starting with schoolyard scraps. “I was always fighting with the other kids,” he conceded. “And still, I’m the same person.” He paused, sounding, for a moment, a little rueful. “But, never in my life I attacked anyone else. When they attacked me, I defended myself.”
His favorite pastime, then and since, was the ancestral Central Asian game of buzkashi, or “goat grabbing,” in which fifteen horsemen brawl for control of a headless goat corpse they have to maneuver from a pole at one end of the field to a circle of chalk at the other. The game was famously violent and chaotic, with terrified stallions galloping and whinnying as players whipped, punched, and trampled each other. It was not unusual for referees to carry rifles to keep rowdy players in line. Buzkashi required “strong horses for a strong man,” Dostum explained. Plus, he said, “I love horses. I have very good memories of horses.” Once again, his eyes misted over. I said he’d have to teach me to play. He withheld his appraisal of my competitive prospects. The skeptical once-over he gave me didn’t bode well. (Like Petraeus, Dostum correctly surmised my athletic prowess.) But he invited me to Sheberghan to watch. He warned gravely that his team had grown strong enough to best him on occasion. In his prime, Dostum was unbeatable.
Dostum spent brief stretches as an oil refinery worker, a plumber, and a wrestler, but war was his true discipline. He was conscripted into army service as a teenager and rose through the ranks, effortlessly mastering the low-tech cavalry combat of his ancestors. Later, he joined the Afghan army, staying aligned with them, and the Soviets, even as the anti-Soviet mujahedeen gained strength.
Those anti-Soviet fighters were, over the course of the 1980s, flooded with American money and guns. Ronald Reagan dubbed them “freedom fighters,” and they became a cause célèbre for Americans gripped by red panic. A Texas socialite named Joanne Herring—all fake lashes and big hair and scriptural quotations—managed to goad her lover at the time, a louche alcoholic congressman named Charlie Wilson, into drumming up support on the Hill. At the peak of the pro-mujahedeen frenzy, Congress was allocating more money to the fighters than the CIA wanted. That many of the anti-Soviet mujahedeen were radical hard-liners was, at the time, a feature, not a bug. By the mid-1980s, the CIA was even commissioning local-language translations of the Quran, and paying to distribute them by the thousand behind Soviet lines. Milt Bearden, the CIA handler who brokered some of the relationships with the mujahedeen, defended that thinking years later. “Let’s be clear about one thing: moderates never won anything,” he told me. “Moderates. Don’t. Win. Wars.” The CIA was more concerned with small-scale tactical challenges. “You had to make things ‘mooj proof,’ ” Bearden recalled of the equipment being dispersed. “So he couldn’t put the pink wire on the green post and then screw it down and then BAM it blows him up!” He laughed thunderously. “A couple of guys got blown up, but they weren’t suicides.” Not then, anyway.
This was history that would echo uncannily after 9/11, when the United States again banked on the enemy’s enemy to turn the tide. Even Joanne Herring cropped up again in that later era, bursting into the State Department in a cloud of perfume and hairspray during my time there. She was eighty, taut and tweaked and still “saving” Afghanistan, this time by soliciting hundreds of millions of dollars for a coalition of development groups she ran, dubbed the Marshall Plan Charities. She took me by the hand, and called me a “blessing,” and had the diplomats of the South and Central Asia bureau join hands and pray before a meeting. Eyes pressed shut, she delivered an impassioned prayer to the Lord, and to the Commanders’ Emergency Response Program funds she wanted. After she left, Holbrooke shook his head in disbelief and called her something too colorful to repeat here. When I asked Herring about her role in propping up the mujahedeen—in the view of some, laying the foundations for 9/11—she grew testy, saying the Stinger missiles provided to the fighters had a limited shelf life and her legacy ended with those.
When Aaron Sorkin’s original script to Charlie Wilson’s War, the Hollywood film of Herring’s and Wilson’s fight to rally support for the mujahedeen, ended on a shot of smoke coming out of the Pentagon on 9/11, Herring was reported to have had her lawyer saber rattle until it was changed. But the film still ends on a cautionary note: As the Soviets withdraw and Wilson celebrates, the CIA agent Gust Avrakotos tells the story of a Zen master who sees a young boy being given a horse and his village celebrating the blessing. “We’ll see,” says the Zen master. When the boy falls off the horse and breaks his leg, and the villagers declare the horse a curse, the master only offers another, “We’ll see.” Later, when war breaks out and the boy avoids conscription due to his injuries, the village celebrates the horse as a gift again. “We’ll see,” the Master says again. As Wilson takes in the implications, we hear a plane roar by overhead.
DOSTUM WAS NO RADICAL. But by the end of the Cold War, he had proved himself dangerous in other ways. His religion was survival, which he ensured through a dizzying succession of crosses and double-crosses. Even during his years commanding the most powerful unit in the Soviet-aligned army, he kept contact with the mujahedeen commanders on the other side of the battlefield, and mused openly about defecting to their cause. The pragmatism paid off—as the Soviet grip on Afghanistan weakened, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the favored son of the Americans among the mujahedeen, passed word to Dostum that the Soviet regime felt threatened by Dostum’s growing popularity and was planning to force him out. Dostum crossed Moscow before Moscow could cross him, joining his 40,000 soldiers with the Islamist mujahedeen he had been fighting for years on the battlefield. The move proved decisive in tilting the balance of power against the Soviets.
After the Soviets pulled out, the former freedom fighters descended on Kabul and drenched it in blood. Dostum was on the frontlines—his militias were reported to be behind a campaign of rapes and executions. But when a new government began to take shape, he found himself frozen out. As ministerial positions were doled out to the other commanders, Dostum retreated to his fiefdom in the north, where his power diminished as the Taliban encroached. When his second-in-command betrayed him and defected to the Taliban in 1997, he fled the country altogether, to Turkey. By early 2001, though, Dostum was back, arraying his tattered forces against the Taliban. He would soon become an expedient solution to the United States’ latest problem in Afghanistan.
AMERICA’S LIMITED OPTIONS in the region after 9/11, and the resulting decision to arm Dostum and his fellow warlords, were a direct result of a vacuum of diplomacy. By some combination of ideological opposition, inertia, and inattention, no one had sought a meaningful conversation for years with the medieval Taliban regime that had harbored bin Laden in Afghanistan. American officials did take a number of meetings with the Taliban over the course of the 1990s, but all were either perfunctory or focused on the narrow demand that the Taliban turn over bin Laden. Despite advocacy from supporters of dialogue like Robin Raphel, those meetings never evolved into anything resembling real negotiations. In early 2001, as the threat from the region became more dire, the United States did champion UN Security Council sanctions, entailing an arms ban and a freeze of Taliban assets. But it was all sticks, no carrots. Sanctions were not an attempt to bring the Taliban to the table; this was about breaking a brutal regime.
In the late 1990s, the United Nations briefly pushed broader regional dialogue that showed promise. Lakhdar Brahimi, the Algerian UN envoy to Afghanistan, maintained civil contact with the Taliban’s second-in-command, Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, who was skeptical of his group’s growing dependence on al-Qaeda and deepening bond with Osama bin Laden. A Taliban official even joined as an observer at 1999 talks in Tashkent, Uzb
ekistan between the Americans, Russians, and Afghanistan’s six regional neighbors, to discuss a peaceful resolution to the country’s civil conflict. But these efforts were swiftly overpowered by the United States’ military alliance of choice in the region, with Pakistan. Just days after the countries at Tashkent agreed to stop arming the parties to the Afghan conflict, Pakistan worked with the Taliban to launch a major offensive against opposing military commanders.
After the September 11 attacks, opportunities for negotiated settlements were dismissed or undermined. When General Dostum’s forces, working with the Americans, surrounded the Taliban stronghold of Kunduz, there was a three-day negotiation process, involving Dostum and more than a dozen American Special Forces officers and intelligence agents. Taliban who had peacefully surrendered were offered a generous deal: they could return to their villages safely in exchange for laying down arms, with the exception of targets of high intelligence value chosen by the Americans. In exchange, Dostum promised two Taliban generals, Mohammad Fazl and Nurullah Nuri, amnesty, which he publicly announced as a sign of wider reconciliation to come. But both commanders soon wound up at Guantánamo Bay. It was, for years, a subject of mystery and consternation for those following Afghanistan’s descent into chaos. “Fazl and Nuri were by your side and you were promising them amnesty, then they end up in Guantánamo,” I started to ask Dostum. He grunted. “Short question. I don’t feel good.”
“Did the Americans pressure you to turn them over?” I pressed.
Dostum laughed mightily. “I didn’t surrender them to the United States forces. But they didn’t take by force. They came to take them, and I told them, ‘Listen, they’re Taliban, they are Muslim. I am also Muslim, you are not Muslim. If I surrender them, if I give them to you I will be blamed. ‘General Dostum is a Muslim but he gave the Taliban to the Americans. . . . ’ It would damage my credibility. . . . Bush was talking on the TV about how to approach prisoners . . . ” he said, referring to early comments about respecting the Geneva Conventions. “Then the military people came and said, ‘Listen, we have to implement the order, I don’t care what Bush says. If I want to take them, I will take them.’ ” Dostum shrugged. He was wiggling his knees, restless. “I said ‘OK, whatever you want.’ ” In the early months of the war in Afghanistan, that same dynamic played out repeatedly, including in Kandahar, where Hamid Karzai’s attempts at reconciliation were overruled by Donald Rumsfeld, who bristled at the thought of dealing with the Taliban.