by Sarah Chayes
And so began the delicate task of prying the Taliban subcommanders—never quite subordinate, always semi-independent—away from their failing leadership. It is the time-honored ritual, another form of customary dispute resolution. It is the process of talking people out of conflict before it ever erupts.
Once, the Taliban defense minister sent a car for Mullah Naqib. The men met secretly in downtown Kandahar. “Don’t fight against Hamid,” Mullah Naqib told the minister. “He won’t do anything bad to you if you surrender.” Not two months after the 9/11 disaster, indeed, there was talk about a “broad-based coalition government for Afghanistan,” which might include top Taliban leadership.1
By late November, Mullah Naqib’s Alokozai tribesmen were itching to attack the spasmodically kicking, but clearly drowning, Taliban. Mullah Naqib sent an envoy to Taliban leader Mullah Omar with a letter: “Surrender by the day after tomorrow, or all Arghandab will take up arms against you.” This was a potent threat, since Mullah Naqib’s Alokozais had never been beaten in a fight. It is accepted truth in Kandahar that the only reason the Taliban were ever able to capture the city in 1994 is because, after those heated arguments with Akrem and like-minded commanders, Mullah Naqib ordered his Alokozais to let them do it.
Mullah Naqib’s ultimatum prompted another meeting in Kandahar, on December 5, 2001. The Taliban officials threatened to go ahead and fight if Mullah Naqib did not agree to their terms for the surrender. “You want to make war on us?” the tribal chief says he challenged. “You want to destroy our homes? Why didn’t you fight in Mazar-i-Sherif, or in Kabul, or in Qunduz?” The Taliban had precipitously abandoned those faraway cities to the Americans’ proxies from the Northern Alliance weeks before. In reply, the Taliban negotiators demanded to speak directly to Hamid Karzai.
“I’m like this with Hamid Karzai!” Mullah Naqib held up his two twined fingers. “My words are his, his words are mine.”
Karzai, just named interim president of the country, was spading his way through a blizzard of tasks: planning the tactics of the final move on Kandahar with his U.S. advisers, receiving local elders, considering the names of potential cabinet ministers, conducting key discussions with the Taliban leadership, sometimes talking on the phone to Mullah Muhammad Omar himself. The group in Mullah Naqib’s house was insisting on a face-to-face meeting at Karzai’s village headquarters a half hour north of town. Mullah Naqib remembers their asking for his satellite phone to try to raise the interim president. But the line kept breaking off and they could not get through.
With good reason. Just hours before, an errant U.S. bomb had almost killed the new president. Three U.S. Special Forces officers were dead in the accident, and twenty Afghans. These were Karzai’s faithful tribesmen who, with that unique blend of unshakable devotion leavened by an irreverent egalitarianism, would have served him down to the bones of their bodies, and did, many of them. One, named Qasim, took days expiring. Both of his arms were torn off, and he begged his friends to finish him off. Finally, he died in the care of U.S. doctors at the desert marine base where they had medevaced him. Needless to say, Karzai’s camp was in an uproar when the Taliban leadership was dialing the number.
Still, the delegation, led by Mullah Naqib, made the trip there across the bald, rock-strewn landscape. At the time, from conversations in Quetta, I was under the impression that the bombing raid was aimed at this very group of ranking Taliban. I was infuriated that U.S. trigger-happiness could have shattered the prospect for a negotiated settlement.
Mullah Naqib may be overstating his role in these eleventh-hour parlays, but he maintains that Karzai, face bandaged where shrapnel had nicked him, did not want to speak with the emissaries, that he, Mullah Naqib, was the one who talked the interim Afghan president into it. “You have to reason with them,” Mullah Naqib admonished. “Because if we fight, there will be blood in the streets of Kandahar, and we will look bad.” Karzai sat down with the Taliban officials, and instructed them to turn over the city to Mullah Naqib.
“But when they got back to Kandahar,” Mullah Naqib pursues, “they changed their minds. They said they wanted to see the president again the next day.”
Again the delegation traveled to the camp. Again the Taliban officials met with Karzai. Again they agreed to surrender Kandahar. They set the deadline for two days later. But once more, their word did not withstand the trip back to town—with significant repercussions for an orderly transfer of power.
“When we reached Kandahar,” recounts Mullah Naqib, “the Taliban declared they were not going to wait two days to pull out, they were going to leave tomorrow. Then, that very same night, they called me on the satellite phone and announced: ‘Our people are going.’ I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have enough men. I spread the forty or fifty fighters I had around town.”
It wasn’t enough. As the Taliban fled that nearly moonless night, Kandahar slid into precisely the kind of pandemonium that Afghan refugees in Pakistan had been nervously predicting to me for days. This was the one thing they feared, they kept saying, when they contemplated an end to the Taliban regime: a return to chaos.
A doctor at the main city hospital lived through a Dantean scene that night. Several hundred wounded Arabs and some Taliban had flooded the leprous hospital grounds—survivors, no doubt, of U.S. bombing at the airport. They were outside, lying scattered about on the ground. “When they brought them here, we were doing triage,” the doctor told me a week later. “It was the last night, when the situation was very bad—the night the Taliban were leaving and they were surrendering power to Mullah Naqib.” The doctors worked furiously to sort and stabilize the patients in the cold and the encroaching dark.
As abruptly as they had first come to drop off the wounded, a fleet of Al-Qaeda pickup trucks roared back to the hospital, and Arabs, shouting at the doctors to stand clear, began pulling the patients from their hands and loading them, with their half-applied bandages and IV tubes, back into the trucks for the headlong flight from Kandahar. “Immediately cars came and took them all, with the Taliban. The cars belonged to the Arabs,” said the doctor.
Just fourteen badly wounded men, including one Australian, were left behind in the hospital, where they were the target of at least two U.S.-led raids, which degenerated into gun battles right on the hospital grounds.
Niyamatullah is the son of a Kandahari almond merchant. He was working with his father at the wholesale almond and dry fruit market those days. Great mounds of almonds of different classes and qualities lie on tarps in the courtyard, men wading in them shin deep, or else weighing them out in sacks on brass balances. Surrounding the courtyard on three sides is a columned arcade, just a shade darker than the almond shells, housing shops and storage cellars for the different merchants.
“Right next to our market is a big mechanics’ yard,” says Niyamatullah. Such auto repair yards are grease-smudged obstacle courses, hidden from the street by the buildings that enclose them, with different mechanics working out of the back of cargo containers, bits and pieces of cars studding the trampled, oil-soaked ground. “There were lots of Taliban vehicles that had been left there for repairing. Suddenly gunmen appeared and snatched all the cars, then another group came and took them away, then the first ones came back. And they fought over the cars. I thought we were back to the civil war before the Taliban time.” Like Wall Street after 9/11, the almond bazaar closed its doors and battened down its hatches for three full days.
The free-for-all that engulfed Kandahar was a repeat of the scene in Kabul three weeks earlier. America’s proxies from the Northern Alliance had ridden rambunctiously into the Afghan capital, after U.S. bombing had emptied it of Taliban. Chaos reigned for days. The same thing would happen a year later, when U.S. soldiers conquered Baghdad in Iraq, and then proved utterly unequipped to deal with the human hurricane that shrieked into the vacuum they had created. It seems that planners underestimate the centrifugal forces that can be unleashed when a regime—no matter how unpopular—is topple
d.
Even so, the transfer of power in Kandahar might have gone differently. Had Zabit Akrem been there, with his instinct for order and his ability to command, he might have been able to rein in the boisterous fighters and save the city two days of looting. But Akrem was still outside town, with Gul Agha Shirzai at the airport. In fact, Akrem was standing next to the former governor when a call came in over the satellite phone.
“President Karzai called Gul Agha. I was there. Mr. Karzai said, ‘You will be the commander of the airbase, and Mullah Naqib will be governor.’”
Botched though the transition in Kandahar may have been, Akrem was saying, the intended division of power was clear. All the eyewitnesses concur with him: President Karzai designated Mullah Naqib to accept the Taliban surrender and take command of the city.
A young fighter from Chaman told me so a day or two after the fact. “The Taliban handed over power to Mullah Naqib,” he said. Niyamatullah the almond seller remembers that “all the Taliban were going to see Mullah Naqib and giving him their weapons.” My Achekzai friend Mahmad Anwar confirms: “It was the Alokozais who cleaned the Taliban out of Kandahar. Mr. Karzai gave Kandahar to Mullah Naqib.” Mullah Naqib himself refers to outside authority for proof: “The BBC broadcast that I was to accept the Taliban surrender and take over the province.”
That is how it was supposed to be. But that is not what happened.
CHAPTER 6
THE ROAD TO KANDAHAR
DECEMBER 11, 2001
“WE ENTERED THE CITY BY FORCE!”
I wonder how many times that has been said about Kandahar.
It is four days later, and I am on my way there. I am riding in our yellow Pakistani taxi, its back window repaired, on my way to Kandahar, at last.
I’ve managed to talk my frightened driver and interpreter into coming with me. This time I did not bother with a visa; I hitched a ride on an Achekzai motorcycle that headed out a desert trail. At the isolated shack that passed for a border post, my escort lifted an arm in greeting; the border guard did the same, and we were across. I rejoined my staff and our taxi on the main road. First stop was a barracks belonging to Mahmad Anwar’s Achekzais. They detailed me a young fighter named Fayda, supposedly as a bodyguard, but in fact to afford the most potent protection of all in these parts: a visible mark of tribal affiliation.
Now we’re on the road. Fayda is sitting in front. Kalashnikov cradled between his knees, he is casting loving glances at his reflection in the side-view mirror, adjusting a lock of hair that lies languidly upon his forehead. Perched on the edge of the backseat, straining forward to hear, I have my microphone out; I’m trying to prop my arm against the driver’s jolting headrest, tilting the mike casually toward Fayda so I can catch his words without its presence distracting him. I know the effort is futile. For broadcast purposes, a microphone has to be within about two inches of the speaker’s mouth—no hope of discretion. Anyway, above the noise of the car engine and the sickening lurches, my recording will be unusable no matter how I hold the mike. Still, I have to try.
I lean forward. “We entered the city by force,” Fayda is exclaiming as we jounce along. He gestures out the window at a stony rise, not far from the Kandahar airport. “We left from here!” Eyes alight, he describes how the motley anti-Taliban fighters in the train of former governor Gul Agha Shirzai stormed the city three days before. Not to rid it of remnants of the Taliban who remained behind after the surrender, or holed-up Al-Qaeda fighters with hand grenades taped to their vitals. The Taliban and all but a handful of Arabs were gone, vanished the night they grabbed their wounded from the hospital four days back. The war was over.
The attack Fayda is describing was part of the quarrel afterward, among the victors for the spoils. Gul Agha Shirzai decided to disobey President Karzai’s order. He decided to wrest control of Kandahar for himself.
This is crucial. I know it. My tuning fork is partly forged, and it is ringing. This incident, I am sure, will be decisive in shaping the character of the “new” Afghanistan. It indicates the kind of Afghan nation that will be built under U.S. aegis—this experiment upon which the world’s eyes are trained.
But I cannot work out the precise meaning of the prophecy. The picture in my mind, from stories I have been hearing for several days, is too blurry, drawn thirdhand. Fayda was there. I pump him for absolutely everything, all the details.
“Speed, speed, we went,” he reaches for one of the English words he knows to stress the excitement of the moment. “Mr. Karzai ordered Gul Agha to stay outside Kandahar, at the airport. But we didn’t accept.”
I am trying to think visually, for the story I will write. I try to picture this impromptu invasion of Kandahar: dozens of battered Toyota pickup trucks, their open backs packed with fighters rank from weeks in the field, signature embroidered shawls crossed tightly over their heads and shoulders against the chill December wind as they streamed across that sullen plain, their mismatched arsenals of Kalashnikovs, Chinese-made machine guns, and the occasional stub-nosed artillery piece bristling like hackles on a mangy dog. And for banners, grenade launchers tied up in bunches to the vertical struts of their trucks.
“No one invited us,” Fayda exclaims defiantly, “so we didn’t fly Afghan flags out the windows of our trucks. We stuck our guns out.”
“What about the Americans,” I ask, working to quell a rising disbelief. “Where were they?”
That U.S. “advice” to this proxy militia included a group of American Special Forces soldiers planted in its midst is hardly a secret by now. I reported their presence days back. Several Afghans saw them and mentioned them to me. Mahmad Anwar boasted about them, with an oblique glance and pantomimed solemnity at conveying the secret news.
“The Americans?” Fayda answers. “They told us to move on Kandahar! All our instructions were given by the Americans.”
I actually gasp. How could that be? When Kandahar was in the hands of the other anti-Taliban militia, advised by its own special forces group, and led by President Karzai?
Karzai’s people held the town by then; even I know that. They moved in quickly to reinforce Mullah Naqib’s Alokozais. Shirzai and his contingent, with Akrem and Mahmad Anwar and this Fayda, were still out by the airport when Karzai’s call came in on the satellite phone, ordering them to stay there. Why, I wonder, aghast, would one set of U.S. advisers tell its protégés to attack Kandahar when the enemy—the Taliban and Al-Qaeda—was beaten and the city was already held by another group of U.S. protégés? Why would U.S. soldiers tell Shirzai to disobey the president? It beggars belief. And yet the bare-faced innocence with which Fayda let this sentence escape, his genuine surprise at my question, are too spontaneous to be feigned. I admonish myself to verify this later on, but, with a stone in my gut, I register that it is probably right.
Foreboding rises in me: The Taliban have scarcely fallen, and already U.S. policy seems at cross-purposes with itself.
Well, what a story, anyway. I can’t wait to reach town and begin writing it up.
We crawl along. The road is in appalling repair. Just inside Afghanistan, the paving disintegrated. First, pieces broke apart like chunks of ice on a melting river, lethal to tires and shock absorbers. Then the asphalt gave way altogether, leaving only the underlying river of iron-hard clay, pitted and rutted and studded with rocks. Drivers are negotiating it like rapids, careening from one side to the other in search of a channel through the hardened chop.
At last, by the airport access on our left, asphalt returns and knits into a decent surface so we can drive properly again. We ascend a rise. It is a saddle, really, with rocky hills stalking away from us on right and left. And suddenly, Kandahar appears, spread out wide in the distance, across our line of sight.
Mountains, glowering masses of cragged rock, tower over it from behind, coloring to a purplish blue as the sun tips toward evening. Dwarfed at their feet, the town is sketched in tawny lines, barely distinguishable from the land around. Between us and
it, nothing. Not a tree, not a river or a road sign, not a patch of grass.
At this juncture, when we catch our first glimpse of it, Kandahar’s reputation could not be worse. It is the Other Ground Zero, the epicenter of the explosive forces the world is suddenly confronting, the place Usama bin Laden made his home as he ratcheted up his campaign against the United States and what he thought it stood for, notch after notch. It is foreboding, glowering, mysterious, defiant. In other words, irresistible.
We cross the plain. The fabled city is finally going to come to life.
But no. As we pass under the arched gateway that marks the entrance, it is as though we are entering a ghost town. There are no cars on the avenue we drive upon, except the occasional pickup truck packed with fighters, speeding past with an urgent pride of place. Rows of mud-brick shops are barred and shuttered. There are no people out walking; there is no sign of joy or emancipation or anticipation, no sign of anything. It is as though we are driving through the corpse of a city, or through a city that has retreated deep behind its walls, to a small dark corner of itself, where it can watch and wait, unseen.
Built out of the living clay of its harsh plateau, of bricks fashioned by hand in wooden molds and hardened in the sun, Kandahar is like some austere sand-fort city. Soviet-era destruction has torn off great chunks of buildings. With time the scars have softened, and the jumbled rubble has been carried off for reuse, or else has melted back into the contours of the earth, as if the sand fort were partially washed away by the sea. Only a few pastel-painted villas stick out. Al-Qaeda Arabs rented them, and several were bombed. The American bomb damage blends in; just the edges of the debris are sharper.
We are looking for a building called the Maymuria. This is where, I was told at the Achekzai barracks on the border, I will find my friend Mahmad Anwar. He’ll fill me in on what is going on.