The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  Alongside the thousands of day laborers, bakers, trinket sellers, hustlers, and Taliban recruiting agents who clogged the streets of Quetta’s Pashtunabad neighborhood—the flotsam of Afghanistan’s various wars—a community of Afghan elites had also taken up quarters in the Pakistani town: engineers, many of them, the heads of humanitarian organizations or demining agencies, former officials of political factions, former resistance commanders like Akrem. It was to this community that the U.S. government turned after 9/11 in its search for anti-Taliban proxies to work with.

  Two sharply contrasting candidates quickly emerged: dapper, bald-headed Hamid Karzai, whose father had been speaker of the Afghan National Assembly in the golden age, before a 1970s Communist coup, and Gul Agha Shirzai, an uncouth former Kandahar provincial governor who had presided over unspeakable chaos there in the early 1990s—the same Shirzai who showed up at Akrem’s burial.

  American planners decided to enroll them both. The notion was to mount a pincer operation against the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. Karzai would sneak inside Afghanistan, pass Kandahar, then work his way back down toward it from the north, gathering followers. Gul Agha Shirzai would collect some fighters of his own, and push up toward the city from the south.

  It was Hamid Karzai who first called Akrem and asked him to stop by his house, in a leafy Quetta neighborhood. This was a day or two after U.S. jets had started bombing, in early October.

  “We’re going in,” Karzai told Akrem, as they sat together privately in an upstairs room. “I need you to organize some fighters.” Armies, in Afghanistan, are personal affairs. Each commander brings his own liege men.

  Karzai gave Akrem 300,000 Pakistani rupees, the standard commander’s share. “We’ll talk later,” Karzai assured him breezily. Akrem contained his explosion of energy, focused it down to a burning point, like sunlight through a magnifying glass.

  But suddenly Karzai was gone, vanished inside Afghanistan without warning. Akrem was left behind, frustrated, humiliated again.

  Then Gul Agha Shirzai came to him for help with the other arm of the pincer, the thrust toward Kandahar from the south. Akrem mistrusted the man. They had had some run-ins back when Shirzai was governor; Akrem had reason to doubt his seriousness. “You’re not putting me on?” Akrem challenged, his face like a gathering storm.

  “Not a bit,” the former governor swaggered. “The Americans have promised more than a million dollars for this job. They told me that when we get to the border, every vehicle but ours will be bombed. Only we will be able to move.”

  A “good-looking young American” was sitting in on this meeting, Akrem told me. He was wearing Kandahari clothes, the front of his tunic glistening with intricate local embroidery. The American didn’t interject into the conversation, and Shirzai introduced him with an improbable title, a journalist, or the neighbor of a friend. “From this,” said Akrem, “I knew he was CIA.”

  Despite his misgivings, Akrem was not about to miss this chance to help finish off the Taliban. With Hamid Karzai already deployed, Shirzai’s was the only game in town. Akrem signed on with Gul Agha Shirzai.

  A professional soldier, graduate of the national military academy, a veteran of fighting against both the Soviets and the Taliban, Akrem immediately flipped to combat mode. “We asked Gul Agha Shirzai for details: Who would give us food, who would take our wounded back to Pakistan to the hospital, what was the budget, who was providing the money, what kind of weapons we would have. But he wouldn’t give us anything solid.” Akrem remembered the former governor making two trips to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, during those weeks. A State Department official told me years later that Pakistani intelligence officers introduced Gul Agha Shirzai at the U.S. embassy there, launching his career as an anti-Taliban proxy.

  On October 23, 2001, just before I arrived in Quetta, Shirzai was boasting to the Los Angeles Times that he could raise 5,000 fighters. “We are ready to move to Kandahar and get rid of the evil there,” he told reporter Tyler Marshall. “Our men are inside and ready.” But Shirzai swore he wanted no role in a post-Taliban government. “I don’t have any desire for this,” he insisted. “I want to work for a more national, more liberal, more developed Afghanistan.”1

  Not a week after that article came out, I was checking in at the Serena Hotel to begin covering the drive to oust the Taliban. A reporter’s first imperative upon landing in a beat is to develop “sources.” That means striking up acquaintanceships with people who are part of the story, and who, for whatever reason, wish to talk about it. It took awhile, after I fused into the mass of my colleagues grappling to report the same story, but eventually I found one.

  It was not Akrem. I would not meet him till later. Those early days, my source was a fighter I discovered in a public call office2 in Chaman, the Pakistani border town that rubs up against Afghanistan with the greedy voluptuousness of a spoiled cat. His name is Mahmad Anwar. He was a small-time commander also with Shirzai’s operation, and I relied on him for my account of it. He became a friend.

  He proved to be a very good friend, and I never think of him with anything but gratitude and warmth—even though I discovered later that he had pulled my leg with a charming shamelessness back then, recounting the events not as they had actually transpired, but as Shirzai and his American advisers wished people to think they had. He took a boyish delight in the bright and convincing colors he threaded through the tapestry he wove for me.

  When I asked Mahmad Anwar, months later, to tell me the real story of the move on Kandahar, he agreed with relish. He recalled the excited preparations for the strike against the Taliban capital. “We met secretly at Gul Agha Shirzai’s house,” he recounted. It would have been about October 12, 2001.

  It was a solemn session, as the fighter recalled it. Just three men were there. Taking turns in a tiled bathroom, they accomplished the ablutions Muslims perform before prayer, rinsing their mouths and nostrils and their faces, splashing water with a practiced ritual grace on their arms to the elbows, their hair, their ears, their feet. Next, they took a copy of the Qur’an down from its niche in a wall. Every Afghan house has one, placed aloft, above any other book.

  Shirzai unfolded the cloth that was wrapped around the holy book to protect it from the ever-present dust, touched the volume to his lips, and the three men placed their hands upon it.

  “By God Almighty, we will fight the Taliban to our deaths, if we must. And if, when we defeat them and they are gone, we are still alive, we will turn over the government to educated people. This by God we vow.”

  Mahmad Anwar darted me a look to be sure I grasped the significance: “It was a sacred oath. We swore to surrender our weapons and go home once the Taliban were done for.”

  Such was the mood of self-sacrifice, and the feeling of optimism about the implications of the coming Pax Americana, as many Afghans remember it. In that pregnant moment, they abruptly shed their bitterly earned cynicism. They were electrified by the belief that, with American help, the nightmare was going to end, and they would at last be able to lay the foundations of the kind of Afghan state they dreamed of: one united under a qualified, responsible government.

  Grasping a wad of bills in his left hand, Gul Agha Shirzai licked a finger and paged through them with his right, counting out about $5,000 in Pakistani rupees for Mahmad Anwar, to pay for his men and their supplies. As the meeting wound up, Mahmad Anwar warned Shirzai: “Do not tell Pakistan what we are doing.”

  The role of Pakistan in Afghan affairs is one of the most contentious issues in Kandahar, and indeed throughout much of Afghanistan. After more than two decades in which the Pakistani government has meddled industriously in the destiny of their country, almost all Afghans—even those who might once have benefited—mistrust the motives of their southern neighbor.

  The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. During the savage decade-long war that followed, Pakistan gave aid and shelter to Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet resistance, not to mention to millions o
f Afghan civilians who fled the carnage. Still, most Afghans think that Pakistani officials tried to determine the political results of that war, tried to replace the Soviet puppet at the head of the Afghan state with a puppet of their own. And Afghans resent it. They resent what feels like Pakistan’s effort to run their country’s economy. They breathe on the embers of a boundary dispute, “temporarily” settled more than a century ago, but in their view still legally open. And they resent the swarms of intelligence agents that Pakistan dispatches to Afghanistan in the guise of students, manual laborers, diplomats, and even Afghan officials, won over or bought during years of exile.

  If the Pakistani authorities got mixed up in the anti-Taliban offensive, my border-dwelling friend Mahmad Anwar feared, it would mean danger for him and the rest of the force. For Pakistan had supported the Taliban regime from its very inception. From his vantage point in Chaman, Mahmad Anwar had observed the kind of assistance the Pakistani army and intelligence agency had provided the Taliban over the years. And now, in the wake of 9/11, the Pakistani state apparatus was suddenly turning on its black-turbaned protégés? Converting to the antiterror cause? The switch was suspect in most Afghans’ view. Mahmad Anwar was sure that he and his men would be ambushed and shot to pieces if Pakistani spies found out about their plans. Or even if the fighters did survive, a Pakistani connection with their activities must hide some ulterior motive, Mahmad Anwar believed.

  Shirzai nodded absently at his warning, and the men filed downstairs, where they bumped into a tall Westerner—probably Akrem’s “good-looking young American.” Shirzai introduced him as “an envoy from the forces in the Gulf.” The presence of this man, at such an early stage, indicates how much it was at U.S. bidding that Shirzai rounded up his force at all. On his own, Kandaharis assure me, Shirzai had no followers. Only U.S. dollars, transformed into the grubby bills he had just counted out for Mahmad Anwar, allowed him to buy some.

  About a month after that meeting, on November 12, 2001, a messenger arrived at Mahmad Anwar’s house: one of Gul Agha’s men. The rendezvous is tonight, he told Mahmad Anwar, at the crossroads where the Gulistan road branches off from the blacktop, halfway to the Afghan border. Be there by eleven. And the messenger was gone, off to inform other commanders.

  The dozens of assorted fighters left Quetta a little before 10:00 P. M.—under the noses of more than a hundred foreign journalists, not one of whom got the story. Pulling up at the turnoff, Mahmad Anwar gasped. At the head of a line of vehicles, two Pakistani army trucks were idling.

  “Yeah, sure, we tried to hide from the Pakistanis,” he remarked to his men. “But here they are.”

  It is hard to believe that Mahmad Anwar or anyone else involved really thought it possible to keep this venture secret, given the legendary omniscience of the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, and given the close U.S.–Pakistan cooperation on the anti-Taliban effort. Still, the overt collaboration was a sore point with the numerous Afghans who knew about it at the time.

  Soon, headlights probing, another several dozen trucks drove up—Gul Agha Shirzai’s personal contingent—and the militiamen gunned it for the border, Pakistanis before and behind. The herd of trucks thundered through a half dozen police checkpoints along the rough dirt road, Pakistani escorts signing to their colleagues to lower the ropes. When they reached the border, the Pakistanis stopped and pulled aside.

  The Afghans’ trucks leaped forward, shouldering one another aside on the inky road, passing and being passed in a testosterone-fueled competition. Mahmad Anwar boasts that only he was able to keep up with Shirzai. It was wintertime in the desert night—opposite as negative is to photograph of the withering summer days. “We could hardly move our fingers.” After a while, the former governor stopped and had his men collect some twigs and light a fire. “We didn’t even have any weapons yet,” Mahmad Anwar recalled, still dumbfounded at the memory. What kind of an invasion was this, anyway? “And now the Pakistanis knew all about us. I was terrified. I was sure we’d all be killed.” Furious, he strode over to join Gul Agha.

  “We agreed not to tell Pakistan about our plans. What happened?”

  “We couldn’t cross the border without Pakistan’s permission,” replied Shirzai.

  “We have the Americans with us,” Mahmad Anwar retorted. “What do we need with Pakistan?”

  Looking back, Mahmad Anwar thinks Gul Agha Shirzai was putting his fealty on display. He assumes the Pakistani government must have realized by then that its protégés the Taliban were doomed. And, with characteristic versatility, it was already switching its bets. It was maneuvering to get some trusty of its own placed in charge of strategic Kandahar under the new Afghan regime. Gul Agha Shirzai, it seemed, was the man.

  A few hours later, the ragtag invasion force reached its staging point just inside Afghanistan. “I couldn’t make out what was going on,” Mahmad Anwar remembered. “How could we fight without guns? So I asked Shirzai: ‘Where are we going to get weapons for this fighting?’ Shirzai answered, ‘Maybe the Americans will give us some.’”

  As if on signal, the fighters sighted a ball of dust spinning toward them across the barren landscape in the pale, rising light. It was a truck. When it pulled up and a press of excited men rolled its tarps back, Mahmad Anwar eyeballed some six hundred brand-new Kalashnikovs and machine guns and grenade launchers—straight from Pakistan. He watched his comrades crowd around the truck like starving men at a food distribution. So this was why Shirzai had been so blasé, he thought.

  Throughout the morning, meanwhile, new fighters were drifting in to join the force. Among them was Zabit Akrem.

  A year and a half later, when I was fitting the pieces of this story together, realizing how much of it I had gotten wrong in my reporting at the time, I asked Akrem for his version. “Could I have an interview?” I said, with teasing deference—in other words, not one of our usual comparisons of notes between co-conspirators. He invited me to come by his house around four in the afternoon, when he had some quiet time. It was July, hot beyond imagination. Most of Kandahar was still asleep, the afternoon’s leaden torpor not yet broken. I joined Akrem at his silent house, and, as he spread himself comfortably on his side, leaning one arm on a carpet-covered cushion, I flipped back the cover of a new notebook, bought especially for the purpose.

  Akrem recalled the truckload of weapons that had arrived the same morning he did, confirming Mahmad Anwar’s estimate of six hundred automatic rifles, plus sixty to a hundred rocket launchers. “I asked Gul Agha where he got them; they were not the kind you find in the bazaar. He said the Americans had given them to him.”

  A second weapons delivery came about a week after Akrem joined the force. “They told us to build fires to guide the plane,” he said, grimacing at the strenuous nighttime hike. The airdrop included heavy machine guns, ammunition, and food—cases of standard-issue MREs (meals ready to eat) sealed in heavy, dun-colored plastic. You have to open up the outside envelope, pour about two fingers of water in, and lean it up against a rock to let the chemical heat warm the food. Whether the Afghans figured that out is anyone’s guess.

  In any case, they got a tutorial the next day. Two U.S. helicopters angled noisily at them and, touching down in a blizzard of dust and stones, deposited a half dozen Special Forces soldiers near the Afghan encampment. The Americans set up their sophisticated communications devices on the hoods of some trucks Gul Agha provided, all stems and antennas like a daddy longlegs.

  The next day, this patchwork anti-Taliban force struck out toward the main road to Kandahar. The plan was to cut the Taliban’s supply lines.

  Circling overhead—droning away, then tipping to circle back, in maddening figure eights like flies—two U.S. jets followed the force. The sound reassured the Afghans, with its promise of overpowering backup. But it also emphasized the danger of their position as their convoy picked its way along a stony track.

  “We were really scared.” An unadulterated admission. “We thought the Talib
an would kill us any second.”

  But apart from the noise of the planes—mosquito whines in a lower register—silence. At sundown, a moment of chest-constricting peace in that desert, when the slanting light paints the hills in burnished gold, the militiamen stopped at a stream to wash and pray.

  And then the moment shattered like exploding glass. The stuttering bark of automatic weapons ripped the air, the sound ricocheting against the rocks, amplified a thousand times. The men scattered from the stream. They dove for cover. Stony splinters shot past them; the whine of deflected bullets lanced their ears. And this irreligious attack was not all they had to deal with: another group of Taliban fighters was closing in behind.

  “The American soldiers told us they had heard some phone calls on the Taliban’s satellite, and they were after us,” recalled Akrem. “The Americans said their friends in the planes would try to bomb them.”

  The Special Forces soldiers struggled to bring some order to their proxies’ pell-mell retreat.

  The droning bombers did manage to get a bead; they let loose, blowing up some seven trucks, Akrem estimated. And that settled the fight. The anti-Taliban militia captured a heavy gunand twenty prisoners. But the next day, Shirzai let the Taliban captives go, even giving them some money to speed them on their way. Hamid Karzai did the same thing, say men who were with him on the far side of Kandahar, in the mountains to the north. Asked why, the fighters shrug their shoulders, disapproval manifest, if unspoken.

  Perhaps the leniency was aimed at postwar reconciliation, making a distinction between the Taliban rank and file—conscripted boy soldiers, mostly—and the leaders of the movement. Maybe it indicated that the lines separating the opposing camps were not traced as sharply as they were in the mind’s eye of Western observers.

  The next day, the fighters reached the main road, at a strategic pass. They were alone, unopposed. Celebrating their fortune, they began deploying in the hills above, when a car approached, a single Arab at the wheel. “He thought we were Taliban, and when he realized his mistake, he started shooting,” Akrem recounted. “But we caught him and tied his hands.” Half an hour later, a second vehicle drew up, guns blazing. Its occupants were shot to pieces inside the death trap they were driving.