by Ronan Farrow
But according to multiple eyewitness accounts, the convoy from Kunduz didn’t go directly to Sheberghan. Instead, it, and, eventually, surviving prisoners from the uprising at Qala-i-Jangi, stopped at a fort called Qala-i-Zeini. One driver who talked to the press in 2002 said he had been hired to drive a closed container truck—the kind with a sealable metal enclosure for freight, generally about forty feet by eight—to the site. According to him, other drivers, and surviving prisoners, Dostum’s men herded screaming detainees into the containers. In some cases, they hogtied prisoners and threw them in. Ten prisoners who survived and made it to Guantánamo Bay told an FBI official they were “stacked like cordwood,” hundreds to a truck, before the doors were slammed and locked. A villager told reporters that those who didn’t move fast were beaten viciously. “The only purpose” of the operation, he said, “was to kill the prisoners.” The horror stories that survivors told are what followed Dostum most forcefully all those years. They spoke of screaming and beating the walls, of licking sweat and urine to stave off death by dehydration, of gnawing each other’s limbs, from hunger or madness.
It was a well-worn method of execution in the Afghan desert—locking prisoners in containers and allowing them to burn alive or suffocate, depending on the season. That November, the cold air would have made suffocation and dehydration the method of killing. Dostum’s men allegedly carried out the entire operation. Each driver was joined by at least one soldier in the cab of the truck. When drivers tried to punch holes in the containers for ventilation or to discretely pass in water bottles, they claimed they were beaten by Dostum’s forces. Survivors claimed that in some cases those soldiers even opened fire directly into the trucks, silencing the screams. The drivers who talked said the convoys continued for days. A top secret cable sent by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research concluded that “we believe the number of Taliban deaths during transport to Sheberghan prison may have been higher than the widely reported 1,000.” A three-letter US intelligence agency, redacted in the version of the cable released through a Freedom of Information Act request, “puts the number at least 1,500, and the actual number may approach 2,000.”
Dostum sighed when I raised the allegations. In the past, one of his spokespeople had said only that there were accidental deaths from preexisting injuries. Dostum told me a different story. “The road,” he explained, “It was closed. Chimtal road and also Balkh road was closed because the Taliban was there, revolting.” Most of the prisoners, he insisted, stayed in open cars. “But in probably one container there is Taliban.”
“One container?” I asked. This would allow for perhaps one sixth of the count given by even the most conservative eyewitness estimates.
“In one container,” Dostum’s translator said confidently. As he spoke, Dostum began tilting his head back and forth, jutting out his lower lip, reconsidering.
“Probably two or three containers,” he conceded.
“Who put them in the containers?” I asked.
“This commander, the local commanders who were supposed to transfer them, probably they were scared because of revolt in Qala-i-Jangi. The road was blocked in Chimtal and Balkh. They thought they might also escape and they will attack them, and they put them in two to three containers.”
I asked for a name. Dostum was impatiently wiggling his knees again. “The commander, his name was Kamal Khan, he was one of them, yeah.” Dostum ran a hand down one side of his face. “Plus one commander, his name was Hazarat Chunta, he probably opened fire.” Dostum and his aides didn’t suggest that either commander had faced repercussions for the incident, and said they were unsure of where they were, years later.
Dostum sidestepped questions as to exactly how much of this he had ordered. The fact that prisoners had died, he said, was a surprise. According to his version of events, he was eating lunch at Kunduz when an aide arrived to inform him. “ ‘Some Taliban prisoner were killed in container,’ ” the aide told him, “And I asked them, ‘Have you showed them to Red Cross?’ They said ‘no.’ Then [I] was very upset with him: ‘Why didn’t you show it to the Red Cross?! You are just trying to undermine my credibility. My enemies will use it against me. I’m trying to be fair in this war. . . you had to show to the Red Cross.” But according to the Physicians for Human Rights investigators, the Red Cross didn’t gain access until weeks later, when the killing was done and the secrets buried. I struggled to envision Dostum telling anyone to call the Red Cross, ever.
Whatever Dostum’s knowledge of the deaths, the available evidence suggests that he was involved in the subsequent cover-up. The declassified State Department intelligence cables said more needed to be done to protect witnesses, who were disappearing. Dostum and one of his commanders had “been implicated in abuses perpetrated against several witnesses connected with the events surrounding the Dasht-e-Leili site. One eyewitness reported to have operated a bulldozer used at the site to bury bodies was killed and his body discovered in the desert. At least three Afghans who worked on issues involving the mass grave have been beaten or are missing.” The UN concluded that still another witness was imprisoned by Dostum’s forces and had been tortured.
I had to ask Dostum twice about the disappearing witnesses. Finally, I handed him a copy of the cable itself. He eyed it with no discernable reaction then handed it to an aide. “Is it possible,” I asked, “this accusation that witnesses were killed and intimidated afterwards?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t recall.”
Thornier still was the question of how much the Americans saw. The witness whose testimony Nathaniel Raymond brought to John Kerry and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had been a translator for American forces at Kunduz and Qala-i-Jangi. He claimed to have been present during the transfer of prisoners into containers—and to have witnessed two Americans, in blue jeans, speaking English, at the site, watching the proceedings. “Who’s going to be at Dasht-i-Leili on November 30th and December 1st, 2001, speaking English and wearing blue jeans?” Raymond said.
“When I left Qala-i-Jangi . . . all the time, American colleagues accompanied me,” Dostum told me. He was adamant about this, a point of personal pride for him as he defended his faltering relationship with the nation that had used him to achieve victory, and now seemed intent on turning its back on him. He said that Mark Nutsch, the captain of Special Forces Team 595, had been by his side almost constantly, an assertion Nutsch said was generally accurate: “Yeah . . . ,” he recalled, “we worked very closely with [Dostum] nearly every day.”
“Were any of the Americans assigned to Qala-i-Zeini [where the containers were loaded]?” I asked Dostum.
“All of them was with me,” he replied, tapping his foot impatiently. “They wrongly accused,” he added, referring to suggestions in the human rights community that Americans may have been involved in the slaughter. “They say ‘oh, Dostum he killed, Americans were firing.’ It’s not true.” Dostum offered this exoneration as evidence of his loyalty to the Americans. But his conviction that the Americans were by his side during the incident raised another set of difficult questions about whether the Special Forces and CIA personnel witnessed any of the communications between Dostum and his commanders about the murders, and failed to either stop them, or report them after the fact.
Nutsch told me he knew of no abuses. “My team has been investigated multiple times over this,” he said. “We did not witness, nor observe, anything.” Just as Dostum considered the American special forces blood brothers, the camaraderie was apparent on Nutsch’s side. “I saw him as a charismatic leader. Led from the front. Took care of his guys,” he added. In a celebratory Hollywood rendition of 595’s collaboration with Dostum called 12 Strong, Nutsch was portrayed, with exaggerated brawn and smolder, by Chris Hemsworth, the actor who played the superhero Thor. Nutsch grew testy when I asked a series of questions about the more complicated realities of the story. “Dostum’s enemies are the ones accusing him of these things,” he sai
d. When I told him Dostum had admitted the killings may have occurred, and suggested two of his commanders may have been involved, Nutsch paused, then replied, “I don’t have a reaction to that.”
As I pressed Dostum on how much the Americans knew or should have known, he grew restless. He had a cold, he reminded me. At one point, he stopped me mid-question. “Listen, every school has a break after one hour,” he growled, and changed the subject. “You should have some [questions about] women, children,” an aide offered hurriedly. When I turned to the Americans again, Dostum narrowed his eyes at me. “You are asking so many questions. . . . I’m curious, the way you are asking questions, it’s not for the book, not for creating a scenario . . . why in so much detail, asking this questions?” The warm air in the Vice Presidential Palace was heavy. Dostum seemed to be reaching his limit. “I was always very truthful, committed to my friendship, I never betrayed,” he said at one point. His eyes darted to his son Babur, who stood at attention, M4 in hand. “But I hope you will not do the same to me.” I debated how to respond to this. Then Dostum roared with laughter. “You asked for only thirty more minutes!” he explained. I laughed, relieved. “I’m over time! I’ve betrayed your schedule!” General Dostum knew a good warlord joke.
As we wound down our last night of interviews, soft gymnasium mats were being laid out in the hall of the palace, in anticipation of a match of kurash, a traditional Central Asian martial art. Soon, about fifty boys and men in blue and white Adidas judo robes filed in, pairing off, circling each other, jabbing and sparring until one slammed to the ground. It was, Dostum remarked with pride, completely intertribal: Uzbeks against Pashtun, Hazara against Tajik. The men hailed from nine provinces. After each fight, the combatants kissed. But it was hard to say whether this looked more like reconciliation or war: the audible snaps of twisted limbs sounded through the hall late into the night, and some of the boys limped away, wincing. As the fights began, a dombra, a traditional Turkic lute, sounded spare notes, and the assembled spectators broke into song, in Uzbek:
Let’s be strong
Let’s live like a man
Like Dostum,
Let’s serve our country
Let’s respect each other
Like Dostum
Be born like a man
Live like a man
Be truthful, loyal
Don’t betray each other
And be friends
Like Dostum
Mosquitoes darted in the hot air. Dostum, draped in a traditional Uzbek cape of shiny blue silk, sat on his throne, clutching his Chanel mug. As he watched, his eyes filled with tears.
A FEW MONTHS AFTER I LEFT Dostum’s palace, he stood in a blizzard in Sheberghan, listening to another song. He was attending a game of buzkashi, and before the goat was slaughtered, local musicians broke into a tribute to martyrs in the fight against the Taliban. The lyrics struck a personal chord: A month earlier, the Taliban had ambushed his convoy, injuring him and killing several members of his Junbish militias. In a video of the match, Dostum can be seen on the sidelines, eyes pressed shut, lips trembling, taking silent, heaving sobs. Fat snowflakes swirled as he took out a white handkerchief and wiped both eyes.
As the match began—fifteen horses surging into the fray, the intricate scoring rules passed on from Genghis Khan’s era incomprehensible to any casual observer—another fight broke out in the stands. Dostum swung a punch at a longtime political rival, Ahmad Ischi. It got much worse from there: The vice president toppled Ischi and ground a heel into his neck as more than a thousand attendees watched. “I can kill you right now, and no one will ask,” Ischi later claimed Dostum told him. Witnesses said they saw Dostum’s men drag Ischi’s bloodied body into a truck and drive away with him. Ischi later claimed Dostum and his men held him captive for five days, beating him mercilessly and raping him with a Kalashnikov. Forensic evidence provided to the press seemed to back up Ischi’s claims that he suffered severe internal injuries. General Dostum said the allegations were a conspiracy to remove him from power. He had responded the same way when an eerily similar charge of physical abuse was brought by another political rival eight years earlier.
Dostum’s grip on power had been slipping for some time. Months earlier, he groused to me that “the Doctors”—President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah—ignored him. The year before that, he had burst into tears at a meeting of the Afghan National Security Council. “No one returns my calls!” he howled. The new allegations plunged him into political crisis. “For the Afghan government nobody is above the law. Rule of law and accountability begins in the government itself and we are committed to it,” said a government spokesperson, as they announced a criminal investigation.
A six-month standoff ensued, revealing yet again the perils of installing warlords to senior government posts. At one point, soldiers and policemen surrounded the Vice Presidential Palace, attempting to arrest Dostum and his aides. But Dostum commanded his own independent militia, and so police feared the entire neighborhood in Kabul might turn into a war zone. They left empty-handed. Later, when President Ghani left Afghanistan to attend a security conference in Europe, Dostum and a coterie of armed guards arrived at the presidential compound and unilaterally announced that he was serving as acting president in Ghani’s absence, to the alarm of the international community. Ghani returned before Dostum could act on that threat.
Across Afghanistan in 2017, the wobbly structures of the American-brokered post-9/11 government were straining against the warlords, popping rivets. In Takhar province, a warlord associated with one prominent Islamist party, Commander Bashir Qanet, created his own police state, opening fire on supporters of the central government. In Mazar-i-Sharif, a provincial councilman named Asif Mohmand got into a social-media fight with Atta Mohammed Noor, threatening to “pump 30 bullets into your head and then help myself to you” in a Facebook post. When Atta sent his forces to arrest Mohmand, he found Mohmand had his own militias protecting him. The ensuing firefight killed two and wounded seventeen people and plunged Mazar-i-Sharif International Airport into bloody chaos. The Taliban was in resurgence as well. And its forces were joined by another rising threat still more troubling to the Americans: an ISIL affiliate called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Khorasan Province. The group was smaller than al-Qaeda, but, by 2017, proving similarly resilient in grinding battles of attrition in the Afghan mountains.
Back in America, Donald Trump had, as a candidate, preached the virtues of withdrawal. “We should leave Afghanistan immediately,” he had said. The war was “wasting our money,” “a total and complete disaster.” But, once in office, Donald Trump, and a national security team dominated by generals, pressed for escalation. Richard Holbrooke had spent his final days alarmed at the dominance of generals in Obama’s Afghanistan review, but Trump expanded this phenomenon almost to the point of parody. General Mattis as secretary of defense, General H. R. McMaster as national security advisor, and retired general John F. Kelly formed the backbone of the Trump administration’s Afghanistan review. In front of a room full of servicemen and women at Fort Myer Army Base, in Arlington, Virginia, backed by the flags of the branches of the US military, Trump announced that America would double down in Afghanistan. A month later, General Mattis ordered the first of thousands of new American troops into the country. It was a foregone conclusion: the year before Trump entered office, the military had already begun quietly testing public messaging, informing the public that America would be in Afghanistan for decades, not years. After the announcement, the same language cropped up again, this time from Trump surrogates who compared the commitment not to other counterterrorism operations, but to America’s troop commitments in Korea, Germany, and Japan. “We are with you in this fight,” the top general in Afghanistan, John Nicholson, Jr., told an audience of Afghans. “We will stay with you.”
Where Obama had proposed a “civilian surge” and at least gestured toward the importance of amplifying American di
plomacy in the region, Trump simply acknowledged that the Pentagon would be setting policy. He mentioned negotiation, but more as a distant mirage than a reality. “Someday, after an effective military effort, perhaps it will be possible to have a political settlement that includes elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan,” he told the officers at Fort Myer. “But nobody knows if or when that will ever happen.” In light of the situation at Foggy Bottom—with the office of the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan shuttered, and no permanent assistant secretary for South and Central Asia—this seemed a fair characterization.
Meanwhile, America’s longest war continued without end, without even the hope of an end. I was reminded of something General Dostum had told me, in that grassy hall, under winking Christmas-tree lights, with a tank full of sharks burbling absurdly in the background.
He’d been so rowdy as a small child that his mother, he said, had finally tied a rope to his hand. “Don’t go away,” she admonished him. Dostum had slipped his rope and wandered off almost immediately.
“Are you still hard to control?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Childhood is childhood. But when it comes to reality . . . if something is right, I support. If it’s the right thing, it has logic . . . but if it’s unjust, does not have the logic, if it’s not true, no one can control me.”
He spread his legs wide and thrust his chin forward. “In the end,” he said with an impish smile, like we were both in on the joke, “you should title the book Dostum: He Is Telling the Truth and Discouraging All Lies.” In a way, he was right. Abdul Rashid Dostum and his legacy did reveal hard truths: about the United States, and how it wound up in an infinite war at the ends of the earth.