The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  “He’s the only one without blood on his hands,” Afghan refugees in Pakistan told me when I asked them about Karzai the day he was designated interim Afghan president. These refugees were still profoundly shaken by the violence they had experienced during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, and also—perhaps more devastatingly—during the civil war that followed it. The memory of those years haunted them. It pervaded their thoughts and words.

  The Soviets finally abandoned Afghanistan and, in the winter of 1989, pulled the last of their troops out in a long and limping line across the great Amu Darya River, Afghanistan’s northern border with the crumbling Soviet Union. In the wake of the breathtaking Afghan victory, it was the former resistance commanders’ claws-bared struggle for power, their barbaric internecine fighting, that bled Afghanistan white and made it ripe for picking by the Taliban.

  “They called themselves religious leaders,” refugees told me. “They would swear on the Qur’an. But they weren’t Muslims. Dogs wouldn’t do what they did.”

  In the scramble to fill the vacuum left by the retreating Soviets, the former resistance commanders did not just kill their countrymen and fellow Muslims. They cooked them alive in cargo containers; they hanged them till their limbs started twitching, then let them down to catch their breath and hoisted them into the air again, and cheered when they finally died.

  This behavior was not prompted merely by some innate evil lodged in those who perpetrated it. The cause also lies in the wounds to the spirit many of these fighters suffered during the prolonged anti-Soviet war—a war that shattered every notion their traditions had bequeathed to them about how honorable war should be fought. It was a war whose primary victims were civilians, women and revered elders and toddlers whom the humiliated fighters were powerless to protect. Now we have put a name to the psychological anguish these fighters suffered afterwards: we call it post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

  Combat veterans afflicted by this psychological aftereffect of the hell they have been through typically remain in “combat mode,” often turning to criminal activity. It is a kind of self-medication. The skills they acquired during wartime find a purpose that way, and the unaccountable rage they experience finds an outlet. Former soldiers caught in this particular trap of PTSD are incapable of achieving what they so desperately desire: a homecoming to peace.2

  But only sophisticated psychological analysis can reveal these underlying explanations of the 1990s mujahideen behavior. For ordinary Afghans who had suffered ten years of Soviet violence, to suffer likewise at the hands of their own Afghan champions was a betrayal beyond words. Even a decade later, in 2001, Afghanistan remained profoundly traumatized. And most Afghans did not want these former resistance commanders rehabilitated; they wanted them tried and executed for war crimes.

  But gentle, conflict-averse Hamid Karzai was different. Not only was he remarkably cultivated, he seemed uniquely devoid of brutality and arrogance. One shrewd former Communist government minister praised his style to me this way: “When he came, he was in our local dress, with a turban. He would introduce himself to the people, saying: ‘I grew up in your land. I am the son of Abd al-Ahad Khan; I am the son of you.’ Because of his dress and his speaking our language, and because he was speaking simply, the people found a place in their hearts for him.”

  In another conversation, an ordinary Kandahari—a small-time opium dealer, in fact—described how Karzai’s radio broadcasts during the U.S. anti-Taliban bombing campaign had helped him process information he had been taking in for years, but had never fully understood. It was as though, during that earsplitting, terrifying month of November 2001, Karzai provided the Kandaharis with a new and wider context in which to place their recent Taliban experience.

  “We saw the Arabs,” the dealer told me, referring to followers of Usama bin Laden. “We saw them even more than the Taliban. Our government was not in the hand of the Taliban as much as it was in the hand of the Arabs. And we were not allowed to be with them in their council meetings. But still we didn’t understand.”

  They did not understand, this dealer was trying to tell me, that their country had been hijacked, wrenched from the grasp of ordinary Afghans and put to ideological purposes beyond their ken. Lapsing into the sort of poetic exaggeration Middle Eastern languages delight in to convey emphasis, he tried to spell it out: “We didn’t know that twelve hundred countries and fifteen hundred countries were interfering in ours. Only now we came to know it. Now we came to know that there were foreigners and terrorists going around. Now we came to know that our country had dark nights.”

  Surely the dealer could not have been so naive. After watching neighboring Pakistan expend itself without counting for two decades to achieve control over Afghanistan, after watching Usama bin Laden cruise the town in a heavily guarded motorcade behind darkened windows, surely this streetwise dealer could not have thought the Taliban were wholly home-grown. His explanation was a self-serving whitewash, more than likely.

  Still, Karzai offered his touchily proud countrymen that: He offered them a face-saving way out.

  Most important, for nearly all the Afghans I interviewed at the time, was Karzai’s emphasis on negotiation. “He was telling the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, to hand over power peacefully and not to destroy the country,” the dealer told me. “From that we came to know he is a good person. By negotiations and by the help of the tribal elders and their councils, he came into Kandahar. With the people’s consent, that’s how he came. He did not enter Kandahar by force.”

  During the days of pandemonium that immediately followed the Taliban flight, with the shoot-out over the cars by the almond merchants’ warehouses, and the tug-of-war for the injured at the hospital, and looting all over town—humanitarian offices turned inside out, cars stolen, papers strewn, furniture carried off—Karzai’s soldiers were praised for their comportment. They acted like public servants, people said, assisting the frightened population, refraining from pillage and theft. They seemed to represent the new Afghanistan the population so fervently desired.

  America’s other group of proxies, by contrast, Gul Agha Shirzai and his gun-slinging acolytes, embodied precisely the kind of violent chaos Afghans dreaded.

  Shirzai was also from a Kandahar family. His father had a reputation across the province as a champion dogfighter. He poured much of his energy into this passion, breeding the barrel-chested fighting dogs local nomads keep, organizing matches, tallying bets. In a country where a man is known by his lineage, by the deeds of his forebears, these were not auspicious roots for Gul Agha Shirzai.

  When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Shirzai’s dog-fighting father also joined the resistance, calling up tribal followers and marshaling them into a rebel force. But according to the word spread by many in Kandahar, the Soviets lured him secretly to their side, and he served as a spy for the occupiers while pretending to fight against them.

  Such betrayals and counterbetrayals were a feature of that bitter war. Pakistan, which had the most to lose from a Soviet victory, according to the Cold War calculus of the day, and invested heavily in the Afghan resistance, wanted the elder Shirzai assassinated, the story goes. He died of sudden, violent stomach cramps.

  Gul Agha Shirzai is a great hairy bear of a man, with legendary rough manners. Stories about his wiping his mouth on his turban, or squatting to pee in the street, abound. Yet these things matter not at all to his constituency. There is a populist charm to him, something refreshing, almost endearing, about his in-your-face directness. And—key attributes—his generosity, his loyalty and kindness to underlings win wistful praise even from the liege men of his opponents.

  It was not until 1992, two and a half years after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, that the holdover Communist governor of Kandahar was finally driven out. He was a member of Gul Agha Shirzai’s tribe, and to ease the transition, Shirzai was invited to take over the reins of the province in a power-sharing deal with Mullah Naqib
and other key leaders. Most Kandaharis remember him as a weak figurehead, presiding over that awful civil war—the goriest, most rapacious, and chaotic period in living memory.

  “He was governor in the governor’s palace,” says Hayatullah, a happy-go-lucky man with a lion’s mane of curly hair, who was a bus driver at the time. “He was governor in the palace, but nowhere else. If you had five men, you were governor on your street corner, and someone else was governor on his street corner. That’s how it was.”

  This early 1990s “mujahideen time” was the incarnation of Afghanistan as Yaghestan, a word that has often been used to caricature it. For centuries, courtly Persian monarchs flung this epithet at the rock-strewn land that lay at the far fringes of their empire. The early Muslim conquerors broke their teeth on the place for decades and never really reduced it. By “yaghestan,” the Persians meant a land of the rebellious, of the incorrigibly ungovernable.

  Reverting to yaghestan served again and again as a fallback position for a people who, every once in a while, did grudgingly gather under one banner into something like a nation. But ties of kin and clan always remained strong. A tribe’s feeling for its ancestral territory ran deeper than its loyalties to the institutions of national government. So when that empire or national government came under attack, Afghans were quick to dissolve it, and run like water between the fingers of their would-be conquerors.3

  The Soviet Union was only the latest predatory empire to be confounded by this trick. “It took the USSR thirty-one years to seize the machinery of the Afghan state,” writes Michael Barry, in a brilliant analysis of Afghan history called Le Royaume de l’Insolence (The Kingdom of Insolence). “The Soviets’ mistake was to assume that controlling the government and army of Afghanistan was enough to place the whole country in their grasp…. Whereas, the real country slipped away from them byresorting, in a desperate lurch, to the yaghestan reflex.”4

  The Soviets, like many predecessors, finally acknowledged the task of controlling Afghanistan beyond them and pulled back across its mountains to their windswept steppes. But what they left behind, after ten years of mortal combat, after countless atrocities and reprisals, and repeated decimation of civilians and their livelihoods—with continued funding afterward from the United States, the USSR, Saudi Arabia, and others, and with neighboring countries egging on the various rival factions—was a yaghestan in its most extreme form.

  All the invisible bonds that weave a country together into a single polity had been dissolved. All the renunciations of personal sovereignty in exchange for the comforts and protections of a joint destiny had been retracted. Anyone claiming the allegiance of a few armed men felt entitled to strike out for himself. Scores of petty commanders fell to preying on their countrymen. This version of yaghestan was a metastasized cancer; it had grown beyond the capacity of traditional tribal structures to contain it.

  In Kandahar, the bloodletting was less systematic than it was in Kabul. With the 1992 defeat of the rump Communists, only one full-blown military campaign remained: for local resistants to rid the countryside of the forces of one of their chief erstwhile allies, and an ominous one, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar. The most radical Islamic fundamentalist among the resistance leaders, Hikmatyar was a precursor of the Taliban.

  In the obsessive Cold War context of the day, the likely consequences of his radicalism were ignored by the foreign countries that supported him: Pakistan and the United States. Indeed, the extremist religious ideology he professed was seen as a spur to resistants whom it might inspire to take up arms against the atheistic Communists.

  The United States had not overlooked the potential impact of the Afghan war in its global contest with the Soviets, a contest that had preoccupied it for more than thirty years. Like Latin America, Afghanistan was seen as a key battleground where the overextended Soviet empire could be bled. From at least 1980, the U.S. Congress was allocating ever-increasing funds to the Afghan rebels. Over the course of a decade, Washington had poured an average of more than a quarter of a billion dollars a year into the Afghan resistance, in perhaps the biggest covert operation in U.S. history. Obsessed by the threat of communism and blind to other dangers, American officials waxed enthusiastic about the potency of religious fervor as an antidote to Communist ideology.5

  But it was Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan, that really drove the policy. In those times, the implications of a direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union were beyond contemplation. So Washington could not be seen to support the Afghan resistance directly. Instead, in a fiction all parties chose to wink at, the United States channeled its support for the Afghan rebels through Pakistan. Thus Pakistan, via its intelligence agency, the ISI, was able to decide how and to whom all that U.S. money would be distributed.

  Pakistani officials harnessed Islamist ideology to further their regional agenda. The U.S. funds were lavished on religious extremists. Hikmatyar alone got more than half the manna.6

  Although Hikmatyar’s faction was the richest, however, it did not enjoy the widest support among the Afghan population. Afghans were seduced neither by its ideology nor its money. Once alerted to Hikmatyar’s designs on their city in 1992, Kandahari forces under the command of Mullah Naqib and Zabit Akrem quickly drove the fundamentalists out.

  This campaign was the last organized fighting in the Kandahar region. But the place was infested with petty commanders and their men, action addicted and armed to the teeth. Conditioned by a decade of war, in which trauma and mutual betrayal had pulverized any sense of right and wrong, these shattered men rushed to fill the power vacuum left by the fighting factions in Kabul and the weak, dull-witted Gul Agha Shirzai in Kandahar. They went back to plying a time-honored local trade: highway robbery.

  Kandahar’s most valuable natural resource, after all, was its road, the obligatory route for trade, travel, and expansionist adventure between Iran or Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. For centuries, Kandaharis had been farmers and herders, true enough, cultivating almonds and pomegranates, drying perfumed grapes into exquisite raisins, stacking stalks of cumin against their compound walls, sending their children out with flocks of sheep and goats. But arable land is scarce on the moonscape around their oasis. Kandaharis’ noblest callings had always been connected with their road. They were raiders, swooping down on India more than half a dozen times in the reign of a single king, the one who is now revered as the father of the Afghan nation. They were traders, dominating the lucrative commerce in horses, for example, between Central Asia and British India. They were tollbooth operators and protection racketeers. And beating their own occasional attempts at a system, they were accomplished smugglers.

  During much of the decade-long war against the Soviets, Kandaharis had been deprived of their road. The resistants had blown its bridges and sowed it with mines to keep the Soviets from possessing it. In turn, the Soviets had planted antipersonnel charges to thwart resupply of the rebels. Once a river, channeling a constant tide of human traffic, this ancient road became a wasteland. The only way to get from Quetta to Kandahar was by tracing a wide loop part way around the city, crossing the Kabul highway to the north and east, then hugging the chain of hills that leads southwest toward Kandahar. Lumbering transport trucks painted with designs in a riot of colors and caparisoned with jingling ornaments struggled and swayed along this route, sometimes bogging down for days in the rainy spring. Tiny village crossroads became bustling bazaars as the traffic of five provinces jostled through.

  As soon as the Communists were defeated in 1992, that road became the top priority of demining agencies. “The very first day the main road to Kandahar was reopened, I drove it,” recalls one Abdullah, an engineer who was working under a UN Development Program contract in Quetta, Pakistan, at the time. It was early 1992. Deminers working furiously from both ends of the road had managed to pry open a narrow channel—three yards wide, marked off on each side by a wobbling line of stones painted red.

  The river in
Arghandab had flooded, and the UN wanted to dispatch a team to take stock. “It was late, after lunch,” Abdullah remembers, “but my supervisors asked me if I could go straight away.” By 8:30 P. M., the team had made the drive from Quetta up the switchbacking road to the border, stopping when they got there to pick up one of Mullah Naqib’s fighters for protection inside Afghanistan.

  Then they entered the gauntlet, easing their white truck inside the double row of red stones. “There were no cars, at all. Then, after maybe half an hour, we saw two headlights, coming toward us.” Nose to nose, the two vehicles came to a stop. “We were like this!” Abdullah raises his hands and lets them tremble in a remembered palsy of fear. “I am too scared of mines.” He told his driver to pull the truck carefully to one side, right up onto the red stones. “We stopped there; we didn’t move.” The other car inched past.

  After that, the only vehicles the team saw were tractors, chugging toward Pakistan in blissful disregard for the mortal danger under their tires. “They were carrying planes. New ones! The jets they used for fighting.” Head tilted and arms akimbo, Abdullah mimics the broken planes, lying like wounded birds on the tractor beds. “They broke them in parts,” he says. The dismembered Communist government MiGs were being carted to Pakistan for sale as scrap metal.

  Once open in that spring of 1992, Kandahar’s road soon regained its status as a main artery linking Iran and Central Asia to Pakistan. And with the Soviets gone, it didn’t take long for the underemployed, overarmed former resistance fighters to set to extracting profit from all the traffic. “There were a hundred hundred chains between Kandahar and the border,” recalls Abdullah. These “chains” were in fact dirty ropes strung across the road, with a tent or mud-brick guardhouse on one side, manned by somebody’s fighters. Ammunition belts slung across their torsos, waving Kalashnikovs they did not hesitate to use, the gunmen shook down every car, truck, or bus that passed by. “Every fifty yards, hundred yards, there was a chain. You had to give them money.” If the fighters were displeased with the take, or if they were just bored or having a bad day, they might drag a passenger out of a vehicle and shoot him, or her. Or rape him first, then shoot him.7