by Sarah Chayes
The governor was having his afternoon nap when we arrived.
We returned the next day. Given my mascot status with Shirzai’s nappy fighters, who remembered me from the days of the capture of Kandahar, we were greeted jovially and offered plastic chairs under the crushing sun. But we had to keep the entrance clear: absolutely no one could see the governor till the next day.
“Just ask,” I cajoled, and someone disappeared inside the walls.
We used the wait to drink in the scene: open-backed trucks sporting bunches of rocket launchers in the latest fashion, ranks of soldiers shoving back the flock of petitioners. Despite the mistreatment, that midday crowd never drifted far, swinging as if at anchor and incessantly attracting the wrath of the soldiers. Curses and the butts of Kalashnikovs would keep the people back.
Such soldiers and their ostentatious guns are the unspoken threat that cows Afghans. More than any turban or title, these are the operative marks of power still. And in Afghanistan, the exercise of power remains personal. There are no institutions; there are only powerful men. This is why the aggrieved or the needy—the women in filthy burqas, the befuddled graybeards, the touchy young men—suffered the abuse outside the governor’s residence that day. There is no alternative. There is no institution they can turn to for redress. Village and tribal structures have been neglected or overpowered, and the central government has not stepped in to fill the gap. The people are bound, like subjects rather than citizens, to the person and the caprice of the governor.
Eventually we privileged “guests”—read Americans—were let inside. We stopped at the office of the chief of staff, who had his own press of petitioners. One sinewy old man, trying to lean into his line of sight, was positively begging—kissing his fingertips and touching them to his own eyes in entreaty—saying he had come three days in a row, please give him his opium back. The official snapped, without a glance up from the sheaf of paper he was busying himself with, that opium is illegal.
“Why is it illegal for me and not for Hajji Abdullah?”
Hajji Abdullah was a wealthy businessman reputed at the time to be the biggest opium dealer in the province. He also owned a large money-changing/money-transfer business, and was buying up property in fantastically expensive Kandahar, building houses and selling them.
Hajji Abdullah was at that very moment in a meeting with Governor Shirzai, and would shortly be having lunch with him. Plates and trays of food—rice pilaf adorned with raisins and strips of candied carrots, tomato and okra stew, scallions laid in a row with sliced tomatoes and cucumbers and sprigs of fresh mint and cilantro—began arriving in the air-conditioned private quarters where we were ushered to await Shirzai. Servants silently arrayed them on a table, garishly ornate in a country where most people eat sitting cross-legged on the floor.
We declined an invitation to join the party and waited through lunch outside in the park. It was a cool oasis of green in dust-swept Kandahar. Rows of squat eucalyptus trees shaded the grass. To accent the medieval pageantry of the scene, a small antelope with horns that arched back from its brow in a graceful curve ambled near. Then a soldier struggled up with another in his arms, a young female. The governor of Urozgan Province had brought the pair down as a gift from his mountains to the north.
Sitting there, watching the antelopes explore the park, I felt as though I were merging into a timeless cultural continuum. It was as though I had just stepped into a manuscript commissioned by the Safavi shahs of Persia.
At length, Shirzai’s luncheon guests emerged, led by Hajji Abdullah. He walked at a sedate pace and frowned at our stares. Shirzai welcomed us. He had exchanged his local clothes and turban for Western garb, his thick black locks sticking out from a white bandage wrapped around his head. He had been grazed by a bullet in a recent heart-stopping attempt on President Karzai’s life. Karzai, in town for his brother Ahmad Wali’s wedding, had been riding with Shirzai in a motorcade when one of the governor’s private bodyguards had taken a shot at them. Investigation into the incident had broken down under mysterious circumstances, leaving us all aghast.
After a gush of friendly greetings, I brought up the question of the stone. I launched into an elaborate brief. “At the end of the war, the only thing the people of Kandahar cared about was reconstruction of bomb damage. Remember? Akokolacha is the perfect project to signal the dawn of a new era.”
Shirzai nodded at me kindly, his answer ready:
” We are making a cement factory,” he said. “You cannot have any stone.” He smiled broadly. “Let me give you some advice. Make your foundations from brick, with cement for mortar. It’s much cheaper.”
“But I promised the villagers I would rebuild their houses exactly as they stood before,” I improvised. “And they had stone foundations. I need stone.”
Still the governor refused. Eventually I did wrest a promise from him to send a delegation from his office out with us the next day to find another source of stone. We set the meeting for 8:00 A.M.
Rising to leave—and having learned a little bit about how it’s done by then—I piled on a further dollop of public bonhomie.
“Mr. Governor, it goes without saying how relieved I am that nothing serious happened to you last week…”
Flattered, Shirzai offered me a look at his scar. So suddenly I found myself digging around in Governor Gul Agha Shirzai’s hair and exclaiming at the white line traced across his scalp.
The next morning the soldiers at the governor’s gate were less jovial. Again they refused to admit us. I insisted that we had seen the governor yesterday—
“That was yesterday,” one of them snapped.
—and that we had an appointment this morning, and they were making us late.
It took us fully half an hour to bully our way inside. The chief of staff who had been present at our meeting was sitting behind his formica desk, and he showed no sign of remembering our 8:00 A.M. appointment. He feigned to ignore me, turning his attention to a staff member or the telephone, then standing up and folding a briefcase shut in preparation for leaving.
I did it with a smile, making a joke of it. But, as he rounded his desk to exit the room, I actually stood in front of him, barring his route to the door. “I’m not letting you go till we settle this issue of the stone,” I said. Again the official tried to look the other way, or say something important to someone else. But there was nothing for it. Short of a physical confrontation, there was no way out of the room. Sizing the situation up, he gave in and led us down the hall to another official, the chief administrative officer.
The door to this man’s office, too, was choked with petitioners, Showing rather more courtesy than we had encountered so far, he picked up the phone and called the provincial director of Mines and Industry. After a brief conversation, the administrator penned a note, which we pocketed, then set off to visit Mines and Industry.
That directorate was located across town, up a narrow flight of stairs in the arcade of buildings that line the main road near Mahmad Anwar’s headquarters, affording dignity to the approach into town. We climbed the steps to a small dark room and sat down on some chairs against the wall, across from half a dozen graybeards. I made our case yet again. Leaning forward. Pleading. We are trying to rebuild a village. Winter is coming and the people need their houses. Can you please tell us where we can get some stone? The director of Mines and Industry, dressed in the uniform of the new Afghanistan—Western clothes, his white beard neatly trimmed—told us he would have to see the site before making a decision.
“Zu,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Astonishingly, he agreed. I led the little troop back down the narrow stairs. We climbed into our trucks and headed out the main road toward Akokolacha. Just short of the line of hills that breaks the road, we could see three or four tractors crawling across the desert to our right, small in the distance, but clearly hauling loads of stone. Mines and Industry signaled for us to stop.
“They are breaking the law,” he
said as we alighted. He flagged a tractor down when it drew near.
“Where is this stone from?”
The driver jutted his chin at the hills.
“How did you get it?”
Silence.
“Soldiers weren’t on the road?”
“They wanted money.”
Mines and Industry admonished the man not to bribe the soldiers anymore, then turned to me. “If we let one person take stone, soon everyone will. The law is the law. We need this stone for our stone crusher.”
Our stone crusher?
The line of hills swept back for several miles. I flung my arm out. “All of this?” I asked, playing it up. “You need all of this stone for your stone crusher?”
The official shrugged and climbed back into his car.
Not above a little deception by this point, I had told him that we had in fact obtained Governor Shirzai’s approval to get stone from our friend the quarryman. It was a lie, but I was learning. At the gas station lean-to, the official duly instructed the quarryman to give us the stone.
“But he’s not the problem,” I interrupted. “He wants to sell us stone. It’s Razziq Shirzai and the workers at the quarry.” So we drove back up the sandy track, official in tow, and distributed our ACS business card. “If a tractor driver shows you this card,” the official instructed, “you can give him stone.”
Razziq Shirzai did not give up entirely without a fight. “I don’t know any director of Mines and Industry,” he stormed when he caught our tractor loading up the next day. “I know Gul Agha Shirzai. If they don’t have an order with the governor’s signature on it, they can’t have any stone.”
But it was bluster. He backed down; we got our stone. And Hajji Baba, the infuriatingly hilariously crotchety old geezer at Akokolacha, who had complained about our work every step of the way, got his house. He even liked it. Before the arrival of the first rains in six years, all of the bombed houses at Akokolacha and the village mosque had been replaced. So the story wound its tortuous way to a happy ending.
On our side, that is.
The quarryman landed in jail for a couple of weeks. Governor Shirzai in person, on a trip to Pakistan, halted his convoy at the quarryman’s gas station and ordered his soldiers to take him away. Fortunately, an Amnesty International delegation was passing through at the time, asking a lot of uncomfortable questions about the treatment of prisoners in private jails. We put the quarryman on their list. He was all but pampered, but it easily could have been worse.
The Amnesty team came by for supper at our compound. Over tea, as we relaxed against the cushions on the floor, I asked them to give it to me straight: objectively, just how bad was the situation in this heart of darkness?
“Actually,” countered their willowy team leader, “conditions in Kandahar are surprisingly good.” Her team was having a most productive visit. “In other towns,” she explained, “we haven’t been able to find out anything. It’s like a wall of silence. But the police chief here has been really helpful. He’s amazing. He threw open the doors of his department. He told us quite honestly, ‘I’ve got a problem. My men are fighters, not police officers.’ He knows he’s got human rights abuses, and he asked us for help. I’ve never seen the like in Afghanistan.” She was talking about Akrem.
I took this in, dubiously, not yet willing to put aside my mistrust of the man.
The Akokolacha saga had the effect of confirming for me the value of our maverick style at ACS: our determination to be involved in policy and practice both. It was always a difficult course to try to explain to people, when they asked, predictably, “What do you do?” That simple question never had a satisfactorily simple answer, and I always heaved a sigh before plunging in. And yet Akokolacha seemed to prove the virtue of our approach. As deep as my misgivings about warlord government had been from the moment I had arrived in Kandahar, I never would have understood what it felt like to be subjected to it, I never would have been able to describe it cogently had it not been my tractor that was held up at gunpoint. By the same token, it was impossible for me to live through such events and then shut up about them in the name of maintaining a “positive working relationship” with the provincial authorities in order to win their permission to help the people.
That was the style of most of the other nongovernmental organizations and international agencies: a see-no-evil stance.
A few international actors, like USAID, did take the Afghan political framework into account, though they usually made what was in my view a well-meaning, but crucial, mistake. They thought in institutional terms. Their mission, as some of them understood it, was to cultivate, encourage, and foster the fledgling Afghan government. And for most of them, that meant shoring up its “institutions”: its ministries, its courts, its provincial administrations.
Western political culture prompts us to think this way. Over the past three or four centuries, we in the West have designed and laboriously erected institutions as our bulwark against tyranny. And we have come to revere them, for they have indeed protected us. Westerners, to a degree unique in history, invest their loyalty in institutions, regardless of the individuals who happen to be staffing them at a particular time. The willingness, in 2000, of Americans to obey the ruling of a split Supreme Court in the most closely contested presidential election in their history is a striking example.
Western officials on the ground in Afghanistan were acting instinctively within this conceptual framework. “We’re here to support the government,” I heard again and again. “And Gul Agha Shirzai is the governor. So we’ve got to support him.”
But Afghanistan is not there yet. In Afghanistan, loyalties and allegiances are to individuals. That is the system within which Governor Shirzai was operating, and to which he translated this international support. He applied all of the well-meaning Western aid—lavished on him in his role as a representative of the Afghan government—to the purpose of building up a personal power base. And this was a project that could only conflict with truly nationwide governing institutions for Afghanistan. It was to advance this personal aim, which remained largely invisible to Western eyes, that Gul Agha Shirzai diverted much of the plunder he extracted from his own province, and much of the subsidy he extracted from international representatives. In other words, their contributions were working in opposition to their stated aim.
Whenever I raised these issues with U.S. officials, they countered with a valid objection: What was the alternative? It was not up to them to decide who should hold office in Afghanistan. President Karzai had appointed Shirzai.
There were a number of answers to this argument. One was that it was disingenuous. Washington had played a very active role in the choice of Afghan officials, not the least of whom President Karzai himself. In the case of Shirzai, President Karzai had not in fact appointed him, as I knew perfectly well by then. He had appointed Mullah Naqib. It was the United States that, backing Shirzai with a cohort of Special Forces officers and everything such a show of force implied in an Afghan context, had forced him upon the president.
Setting aside these questions of fact, there was another point I tried to make to U.S. and UN officials. There was a difference, I maintained, between “working with” Gul Agha Shirzai and writing him a blank check. Kandaharis—as they told me during innumerable conversations, both casually and in a study setting—longed for three benefits from the U.S. presence in their town: security, reconstruction, and perhaps most of all, government accountability.
They had had plenty of experience with the abusive, predatory nature of their local strongmen (and even of their technically educated compatriots: the “engineers” who had maneuvered themselves into management positions at all the so-called local NGOs, and were helping themselves to a disproportionate share of foreign subsidy). These people had been artificially strengthened by lavish payments during the Soviet and mujahideen times. They had grown, like cancerous tumors, out of control. And now, with the Taliban gone, they were back i
n power again. Vulnerable Kandaharis were looking to the foreigners for protection against them. They saw us, on the whole, as more scrupulous, fair-minded, and hardworking than their fellow-Afghans.
And we, I believe, could have afforded a measure of that protection. American officials could have held Gul Agha Shirzai up to some kind of standard. They could have made their ongoing financial and moral backing of him contingent on better governance. They could have noticed that he was funneling the vast bulk of their aid to his family and tribesmen. They could have taken steps to spread the wealth. They could have disarmed his private militias. They could have sought out other community leaders and listened to their views.
In other words, even if obliged to work with Gul Agha Shirzai, they could have used their considerable leverage to force him to improve.
Akokolacha, which had brought so much of this into focus for me, became an object lesson. I wrote about it.2 I used it as an example in talks to U.S. audiences and in radio interviews. I told visiting journalists the story, and they wrote about it.3 (On one such occasion, the poor old quarryman wound up in jail again.)
Thus did Akokolacha launch what began to look every bit like a personal feud between the governor of Kandahar Province and me. In fact, there was nothing personal about it. My table manners are hardly faultless either. It was Gul Agha’s system I objected to, the kind of governance he represented—the kind of Afghanistan that would result if his way prevailed.
CHAPTER 16
ZABIT AKREM
NOVEMBER 2002
MY FEUD WITH the governor led to one utterly unexpected consequence: friendship with the man I had studiously kept clear of, Police Chief Zabit Akrem. He was feuding with the governor too, and for the same reasons.
One day in late 2002, our weekly women’s meeting was drawing to its garrulous close, women gathering their bags and draping their burqas like capes from their foreheads—they would leave them open in front so they could keep talking while they made their way downstairs, then flip them down over their faces when they got outside. This was a gathering we hosted at ACS of about a dozen women, several rather prominent, several unknown. One or two were illiterate, in fact, part of our effort to make sure the vast majority of Kandahar women were somehow represented. Our conversations those days were a little unfocused: we would talk about priorities for women in Kandahar, or about setting up an office for the female delegates to the Loya Jirga, the grand tribal council that had met in Kabul the previous June.