by Ronan Farrow
THE WARLORDS’ FOOTHOLDS in those American-backed power structures bedeviled efforts to create accountability. The mystery of Dostum’s missing prisoners was a prime example. Two successive American presidents effectively evaded questions about the matter. The Bush administration quashed at least three efforts to investigate the grave, across multiple agencies. An FBI agent at Guantánamo Bay began hearing stories about a mass killing from other Taliban prisoners who had survived, but was told to stand down and leave the matter to the military. The Pentagon, in turn, conducted only a brief “informal inquiry,” asking members of Team 595 if they had seen anything, then issuing a blanket denial. There was, one senior Pentagon official recalled later, “little appetite for this matter within parts of DOD.” At the State Department, Colin Powell assigned the investigation to Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Pierre Prosper, who quickly saw opposition from both Afghan and American officials. “They would say, ‘We have had decades of war crimes. Where do you start?’ ” he recalled. His office later dropped the inquiry.
When President Obama entered office, there was renewed hope. During a CNN interview in 2009, he went off script to promise an investigation. “It seems clear that the Bush administration resisted efforts to pursue investigations of an Afghan warlord named General Dostum, who was on the CIA payroll. It’s now come out, there were hundreds of Taliban prisoners under his care who got killed . . . ” Anderson Cooper began gamely. “Right,” said President Obama. Cooper mentioned the mystery of the mass grave and asked if Obama would call for an investigation into possible war crimes.
“Yeah,” said the president. “The indications that this had not been properly investigated just recently was brought to my attention. So what I’ve asked my national security team to do is to collect the facts for me that are known. And we’ll probably make a decision in terms of how to approach it once we have all the facts gathered up.”
“But you wouldn’t resist categorically an investigation?” Cooper pressed.
“I think that, you know, there are responsibilities that all nations have even in war. And if it appears that our conduct in some way supported violations of the laws of war, then I think that, you know, we have to know about that.”
But no one at the Obama White House wanted to touch the issue either. As the State Department official charged with communicating with nongovernmental groups, I was on the receiving end of some of the calls from groups like Physicians for Human Rights. Again and again I pressed White House staff to disclose something, anything; to allow me to convene a meeting about the grave and at least listen, if not talk. The response was always the same: no comment, no meetings. “I spent all day on the phone with the NSC having them tell me to stall meetings we had set up with human rights groups because they’re afraid of questions about the Dasht-i-Leili massacre and don’t want to cop to the fact that we’ve completely abandoned POTUS’s promise to investigate,” I wrote to Holbrooke’s communications director, Ashley Bommer, in March 2010. In a briefing document prepared the same month, there was a bullet point under my outreach to human rights groups: “Dasht-i-Leili w/ Physicians for Human Rights (working with NSC to formulate a clearer position).” In another memo I filed ten months later, the sentence had not changed.
Frustrated with the executive branch’s obstructions, human rights groups tried turning to Congress. In early 2010, another Physicians for Human Rights investigator, Nathaniel Raymond, received testimony from a former translator for American forces at Kunduz and Qala-i-Jangi who had gone on to secure asylum in the United States. He claimed to have witnessed what happened to the prisoners—and whether Americans were present. Raymond brought the information to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its lead investigator at the time, former CIA agent John Kiriakou, who was later sentenced to thirty months in prison for disclosing the identity of a fellow CIA officer (he has maintained that this was a principled act of whistleblowing on the government’s use of torture in the Global War on Terrorism). He considered the story about the grave to be explosive. According to Kiriakou, the reaction from his superiors, including committee chair John Kerry, was explosive too—and not what he expected. “The Staff Director at the time, Frank [Lowenstein], got wind of it and called me into his office and said ‘cease and desist immediately.’ ” Stunned, Kiriakou claimed he took the matter to Kerry directly. “Kerry came down to the office afterwards and said, ‘What is this I’m hearing about Afghanistan?’ ” said Kiriakou. “I told him . . . and he said, ‘You’ve spoken to Frank?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, Frank called me in and said to kill it.’ He said, ‘Ok.’ I got up and said, ‘So what do I do?’ And he said, ‘You kill it.’ I said, ‘Alright, I’ll kill it.’ And that was the end of it.”
Kiriakou saw it as a pragmatic call on Kerry’s and Lowenstein’s part. “Frank devoted his life to protecting John Kerry, and John Kerry wanted nothing more in the world than to be secretary of state. And so, we just couldn’t risk any kerfuffle, even if it was historical in nature, anything controversial, so he killed it. It was a shame. I was very disappointed.” Kerry said, “I’ve never heard anything about this—ever,” and maintained that he “never pulled punches” on Afghan human rights during his time on the committee. Frank Lowenstein at first similarly denied having any recollection of the conversations with Kiriakou, then later suggested that “[Kiriakou] might have interpreted . . . or he might have come away from our conversation with the impression that that wasn’t something that I was particularly interested in pursuing, but I certainly never would have told him to kill it.”
In that interview in 2009, President Obama had pledged to open a new inquiry into the massacre. Four years later, after intermittent refusals to comment to reporters, the White House quietly acknowledged that an investigation had been completed, but would remain sealed. A spokesperson mentioned a finding that no US personnel were involved. The White House otherwise declined to elaborate. “It’s cowardice,” Raymond told me. “I was interviewed by the NSC as part of the investigation. It went nowhere because it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.”
Physicians for Human Rights, through sheer tenacity, did eventually secure a handful of meetings with senior officials. The group also sent more than a dozen letters to officials across the government. Neither tack produced clarity. The consequences were real and specific: after an initial series of forensic missions, and before additional teams could return for a full excavation, the mass grave disappeared. In 2008, a UN team found, where the site had been, a series of large holes—and none of the bodies that had been previously documented. It was exactly the eventuality human rights advocates had been fighting to prevent. “From square one,” said Susannah Sirkin of Physicians for Human Rights, “we realized if anything leaked the site would very likely be destroyed.” It did leak, and world powers did nothing to protect the evidence. “There is now a second layer of violation,” Sirkin told me. “The literal obstruction of investigation and suppression of information by [the US government].” My inability to cut through that indifference weighed on me. When I set out for Kabul, years later, I was determined to come back with answers.
FOR ALMOST FIFTEEN YEARS, General Dostum never sat for a detailed interview on the missing prisoners and the mass grave. But after months of conversation, he warmed to the idea of an audience with me. Securing an interview with General Dostum involves a lot of waiting. There was a year of conversations with his advisers who travel on his behalf in New York and Washington, all of them loyal Uzbek Afghans, some of them younger men from Dostum’s Sheberghan stronghold, who grew up steeped in legends of his heroism. There were introductions to his young sons, Batur, who was being groomed for a career in politics, and Babur, who was in the Afghan Air Force. And then there was a sudden call. Could I be on a flight to Kabul the next day? General Dostum would see me. I agreed, then crafted an email to a dear friend whose wedding the next night I’d have to miss as a result. Diplomacy in that region is ongoing.
Arriving in Kabul on
the appointed day, General Dostum did not see me. General Dostum was tired. General Dostum, an adviser informed me gravely, had a cold. I waited, like Gay Talese at a nightclub. I strolled the dusty streets of Kabul. I drove through security checkpoints to the bunker-like US embassy for meetings with American officials. I sipped coffee with Dostum’s advisers in the gardens of Kabul’s Serena hotel, in sweltering late August heat. Eventually, they asked if I would join a meeting between General Dostum and women’s rights activists from across Afghanistan. This was central to what Dostum wished to communicate to me and, by extension, the Western world. He, unlike some of the other holdovers from the Cold War, had a more progressive view of women. “I’m probably among the very limited people in Afghanistan who are strongly committed to the rights of women, to protect women,” Dostum later told me.
This conviction appeared to be sincere, and he repeated it often over several days of interviews. But General Dostum did not show up for the meeting with the women’s activists, either. An adviser presented me instead. A dozen formidable women had gathered in a cavernous government meeting hall, under a mural inscribed with a verse from the Quran: “Never will Allah change the condition of a people until they change it themselves.” Each had a personal appeal, from the teacher who begged for better wages to the lawyer who called for more women in government. At the first mention of the vice president’s absence, whispers of surprise and disappointment ran through the room. A doctor, who had traveled several hours from the Logar province, left in tears.
By the time I finally got the call telling me that General Dostum was ready, it was late at night. Once I had made my way through the layers of barricades and armed guards to the golden gates of the Vice Presidential Palace, there was another hour of waiting in his strange, grass-carpeted parlor. When General Dostum entered the room, it was 10 p.m.
The feared warrior was now in his sixties. His hair had thinned and whitened, and his gut had expanded prodigiously. But he was still imposing: a slab of a man, built like a refrigerator. His attire—Western jackets over flowing Uzbek robes, accentuated his size. He lumbered into the room and slumped into an ornate throne with a high, carved-wood back and gold upholstery dusted with fleurs-de-lis. Dostum’s eyes, narrow under Asian epicanthic folds, reflected his ancestry, which he claimed could be traced back to Genghis Khan, who got around after all.
Dostum rubbed his eyes and yawned. The much-discussed cold may well have been real, but others, including a former American ambassador to Afghanistan, said the general’s late starts were attributable to something else. “He continues to have an extremely violent temper, he’s an alcoholic, he is nonfunctional,” said that ambassador. “He needs to leave the country to dry out more than he can be here.” Through several of our meetings, Dostum nursed an undisclosed beverage out of an ostentatious designer mug stamped with a gold and rhinestone–crusted Chanel logo. I wondered if his previous meeting had been with the Kardashians or something.
“I don’t know why sometimes the media don’t express the reality,” Dostum was grumbling. I had hit “record” on my phone, and a handler had immediately asked that I stop. A minor fuss had ensued when I’d insisted I continue. Dostum glanced at the phone unhappily. “Unfortunately, nowadays, sometimes journalists, New York Times, they wrote so many things.” He frowned, that same wounded look crossing his face. “ ‘He massacred, human rights, he killed Taliban prisoners, he did this or that.’ My American friends from the CIA and other people, they came to my house and they said, ‘Listen, they are portraying you in the United States this way, but we know you are a different person.’ ”
General Dostum was not wrong about his portrayal in the Western press. Human rights groups had brought well-documented charges of mass atrocities and murders against Dostum dating back to the 1990s. Press reports blamed him for violent reprisals against political rivals and their families—and even, on occasion, allies who strayed from loyalty. Human Rights Watch had, just days before I sat down with Dostum, accused his Junbish militias of murdering and assaulting civilians under the guise of anti-Taliban operations. Even Afghan president Ashraf Ghani—who selected Dostum as his running mate to exploit his status as a “vote bank,” commanding enduring popularity among Afghanistan’s ethnic Uzbeks—once called Dostum a “known killer.” The US State Department had echoed Ghani, calling Dostum “the quintessential warlord,” and then went a step further and denied him a visa to travel to the United States.
The root of the criticism, he insisted, was political. “Our opponents . . . they fabricate a lot of things against us to give a wrong picture to the American public,” he said. The charge that he had assaulted political rivals was, he added, “a very unfair allegation. It’s a political motivation. The reason why is first, I have risen from a very deprived ethnic group. The second, I was from a poor family. Third, I had a vision for Afghanistan. I wanted justice, decentralized system, federalized system, all the people in Afghanistan including my people should have the same rights. So therefore they started blaming me unfairly.” The same, he said, was true of the alleged rampages of his forces. “I went to the northern part of Afghanistan and we fought alongside Afghan security forces to provide security for the provinces. People were so happy, we’ve done so many good things for the people!” He frowned again. “But instead of appreciating and saying thank you . . . they started again these political allegations. . . . I believe that even Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations are not just pure human rights organizations, they are also political . . . they fabricate what they want against you.”
The visa denial seemed to have stung on a personal level for Dostum, who still regarded the Americans who armed him against the Taliban as blood brothers. “I believe I have been betrayed by my American friends . . . we fought together, and after all these things, it’s a betrayal. But still the United States does not have another strong friend like Dostum, they don’t have it.” The Americans, he felt, had used him, “like tissue paper.” Indignant, he rattled off a list of friends who still stood by him, which included various military officials, an NYPD commissioner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Hillary Clinton, with whom he claimed to have bonded over women’s rights. “Ms. Clinton, by then she was senator, she visited Kabul, they invited me. . . . I told the story of that American lady who was coordinating the air force operation in Kunduz, then she laughed and said you should come to the United States and you should share this story with female pilots there.” He paused, eyeing me again. “So she also invited me to visit the United States,” he repeated, in case I hadn’t gotten that part. (When Clinton came to Kabul for Hamid Karzai’s inauguration, Richard Holbrooke had swooped in to prevent her from shaking Dostum’s hand.) In any case, the father of a slain CIA agent had given him a key to the city of Winfield, Alabama. “I don’t need any visa,” Dostum sniffed. “I have the key, I can go anytime I want!”
Still, Dostum appeared to realize that his image was in need of renovation. “It’s our fault we couldn’t tell the American public what kind of good friend to the United States we are.” He sighed. For him, the real story had always been simple. “You have a strong, bad enemy like al-Qaeda who is terrorizing your people and also you have a strong and good friend like Dostum, who is ready to fight against your enemy and avenge the blood of your people who innocently were killed in the United States.” Dostum, like an Afghan Bob Dole, referred to himself in third person a lot. “We’re partners,” he went on. “We fought against the same enemy for a good cause.”
This was General Dostum as seen by himself, or at least how he hoped reporters like me would see him: a misunderstood champion of his people. He was an animal lover who wept over injured deer. A warlord with a heart of gold. The people’s warlord! He was even, briefly, a fitness guru, responsible for “Fitness for All”—the Kabul equivalent of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” “When he needed to fight he did that, but now we need peace and he is doing this,” a security guard at the palace told reporters whe
n the program rolled out. “It will encourage the young to start doing sports when they see the vice president exercising every morning.” Behind him, General Dostum, clad in athleisure, did jumping jacks. Photos of Dostum huffing and puffing his way through aerobics sessions, overlaid with Dari slogans, were “liked” by thousands of loyal followers on his official Facebook page. “Exercise: today’s willpower, tomorrow’s show of vigor!” one was captioned. “Sports attire is the attire of virtue!” added another.
“Do you resent the term warlord?” I asked Dostum.
“The war was imposed on me,” he said. “If any enemy comes to your home, what should you do? You have to defend yourself.” He thought for a moment.
“Not warlord,” he decided. “I would say peacelord.”
At this, the eyebrows of General Dostum’s loyal translator shot up.
WHEN I ASKED HIM about the mass grave at Dasht-i-Leili, Dostum initially gave the same answer the Americans had given for years. “There are so many graves,” he said, shaking his head. “So many bodies.” These, he swore, were from other periods—from when he was in exile in Turkey, before 9/11, and his second-in-command betrayed him. It was that commander, Malek, he said, who was responsible for most of the bodies in the desert. “But specifically,” I pressed, “the prisoners from Kunduz after the uprising at Qala-i-Jangi.”
Dostum grunted wearily. He’d been waiting for this. “The fact is, they took the prisoners in Kunduz on the open lorry car, sent to Sheberghan.” Dostum said he, personally, had seen to it that the prisoners were loaded. It was an ugly process. “Some of them run, some were hiding,” he conceded. But they were, when he was there, in open trucks. This was very possibly true, as far as that particular leg of the journey went.