by Sarah Chayes
That afternoon, as I was waiting to walk the women downstairs, Mami Jan came up to me. Loud, big-hearted, melodramatic Mami Jan, was one of the Loya Jirga delegates, and administered a medical clinic for women.
“Comandan Saab wants to see you,” she said, casually.
“Comandan Saab?” It means “Mr. Commander.” I thought I knew who she was talking about.
“Zabit Akrem,” she confirmed.
Nothing had happened to change my opinion of the man since that second nasty meeting in his office eight months before about my living in the house in the graveyard. Still, other westerners, like the Amnesty International team, were unanimous in their praise of him, something I did point out when people asked me.
His roundabout approach was enough to intrigue me: he could have sent a soldier with a summons, and I would have been obliged to appear before him. That he did not—that he chose a mutual friend as a go-between instead, and a female one at that—was obviously meant to signal a reduction in hostilities. I had no hesitation about going to see what he wanted.
Police headquarters featured a press of people hardly second to the one on hand at the governor’s palace. So we arranged for him to come by my house that evening after dinner.
I remember scurrying to prepare dishes of nuts and raisins to serve with tea. I even persuaded a neighbor to contribute two plates of shucked pomegranate seeds, mounded and glistening like rubies. On that occasion and the countless times Akrem and I got together afterward, I felt keenly self-conscious about my awkward hosting skills. The size of him, both physically and in his rank and local stature, always made the space I occupied seem inadequate. I did not have a retinue, or a late-model SUV with an armed driver, or any of the other marks of power that do, in the end, matter in Kandahar. He wielded these things with grace—not because he coveted them inordinately for their own sake, but because he knew the value of their symbolism.
At that first meeting, I could see him taking stock of our spare compound and wondering if he had made the right move. I was always more comfortable at his house, on a private street behind police headquarters. We would sit in his snug receiving room, on floor cushions covered with tasteful but unostentatious rugs. A curly-haired bodyguard would appear unbidden with a dish of grapes or cans of soda on glass saucers lined with paper napkins. A new little daughter called Asma would clamber all over him when he allowed her in, tweaking his beard with bright-eyed, fearless devotion, till at last he would shoo her out of the room. And still, I cringed more than once when my incorrigible informality, the directness that I can’t keep from tipping into impertinence, grated against the decorum of his flawless manners.
I seated him in a corner of our receiving room, furnished Afghan style with a rug on the floor and velvet-covered mattresses around the walls with matching cushions for backrests. In a niche I had placed two beautiful old brass water pipes that I had picked up for the equivalent of a couple of dollars on that street by the ancient mud-plaster mosque, where rags-and-bones men set out used goods on squares of dirty cloth.
As we talked, it slowly dawned on me that Akrem was scared. Physically afraid.
He was telling me a story that was having the strangest effect on me. It was utterly incredible, and yet it was confirming a lot of things I had begun to suspect.
An informant of his, someone who worked on Governor Shirzai’s staff, had been reporting back about weapons deliveries—guns and equipment coming from Pakistan and unloaded directly at the governor’s residence. On one occasion, Akrem said, a car had arrived with pistols and sophisticated walkie-talkies and some sort of motion detectors. “Where’s the good stuff?” Governor Shirzai had demand, as he looked over the hardware.
“The car with the radar is following right behind us,” the driver had answered, according to Akrem’s mole.
Some of these arms, it seemed, were being transshipped out of Kandahar to a nearby battleground. Six days ago, Akrem continued, his mole had observed several vehicles setting out from the governor’s residence, Kalashnikovs hidden under a mess of plastic water bottles. The convoy, said Akrem, was headed for Shindand, a town halfway up that seamed cement road that leads out of Kandahar, past the turnoff to Khakrez, and on northwestward to Herat.
Shindand was a hot spot, for it marked the dividing line between the Pashtuns to the south and the Persian-speaking Tajiks to the north. Herat, that former center of Persian culture that had become the stronghold of the Abdali Pashtuns just before the birth of Afghanistan, was back in the Persian orbit. It was ruled by a powerful Persian-speaking Tajik warlord named Isma’il Khan. He had been huffing and puffing against the southern Pashtuns since the anti-Taliban war a year before. While the Kandahar elders were negotiating the Taliban surrender in November of 2001, Isma’il Khan was stamping his foot with impatience, vowing he would take Kandahar by force. That would have really sparked civil war. The whole Afghan south would have risen up against him. As it was, several nasty firefights had broken out recently between Isma’il Khan and a Pashtun commander at Shindand who was defying him.
This, Akrem was telling me, was precisely the kind of ethnic conflict the Pakistani government was trying to foment, using Governor Gul Agha Shirzai as a stalking horse. The Pakistanis wanted to set Gul Agha up as the champion of downtrodden Pashtuns in Herat, and get him to lead a military expedition there in order to keep Afghanistan volatile and unstable—America’s yaghestan.
“Oh,” I twigged. “So all those declarations of Gul Agha’s on the radio recently, about human rights abuses against Pashtuns in Herat…?”
“Exactly,” Akrem answered.
Then just yesterday, Akrem’s mole had come to him with another story. At 9:00 P. M. the night before, the man had been in the governor’s office. Two Pakistani army officers were there, berating the governor. “You’re too slow. What’s the problem?” Shirzai was not working quickly enough to ignite the hostilities with Herat, the Pakistanis charged. According to the mole, the governor had put the blame on two big problems he was confronting. One was Kabul. President Karzai would not have any patience for ethnic strife in the new Afghanistan. The other was Zabit Akrem. “He’s blocking things on this end,” the governor complained. “Every time I call a security meeting and propose some action, he speaks up against me. He’s keeping me from rallying commanders to the anti-Herat cause.”
“Zabit Akrem is making problems for you?” the Pakistani officers retorted. “Then make problems for him. Kill him.”
So this explained the occasional clashes on the streets of Kandahar between Akrem’s police and Shirzai’s private thugs, I thought. There had been that shoot-out right in front of the old mud-plaster mosque, in the middle of the bazaar. Was a rocket launcher fired? I tried to remember. In any case, someone had been killed, I was sure of that.
From the way Akrem was talking, it was clear that he took this threat from Pakistan very seriously indeed.
I leaned forward. Did he mind if I took some notes? I flipped open the orange cover of one of the pocket-sized pads I had used for reporting. Did he have the sense that Pakistani intelligence agents were planted here? Akrem reeled off half a dozen: Seyyid Karim Agha, who used to be at army headquarters; right now he was in Islamabad. Ayyub Palawan, on the border, and Hajji Niyamat Nurzai. The list went on. We talked about the militia commander’s hosting a U.S. Special Forces group in Helmand Province to the west of us. He was a loyalist of the fundamentalist resistance leader who had preceded the Taliban as Pakistan’s protégé. The fundamentalist faction was back in business these days, and by working with one of its members, the Special Forces troopers might as well have staked their tent right inside the lion’s den. I asked Akrem about the private prison supposedly run by Governor Shirzai’s hatchet man, Khalid Pashtoon. It was behind the old governor’s palace, Akrem confirmed. He named the two men in charge. If I wanted, he could get me together with some people who had been held there. He told me about a Pakistani-infiltrated gang of fighters posted on the U.S. air
base; they were working as American proxies by day and shelling the American positions by night. We discussed the attempted assassination of President Karzai that summer. Akrem shook his head at the lack of a serious investigation. He told me how the key witness had died while in the custody of Gul Agha’s men at the U.S. airfield.
The picture he painted for me of the streets of Kandahar left me agape. With U.S. dollars, Governor Shirzai had constituted his own private militia. And—better armed and better paid—that militia was competing with Akrem’s police force. He started naming checkpoints around town that Shirzai’s “Special Force” had taken over. And I realized that Akrem’s men, the legitimate police of Kandahar province, had been pushed back into a little corner of the city. The police patrolled just a few streets, commanded two or three of the precinct houses. Everywhere else were Shirzai’s thugs.
I looked up, reconsidering this embattled man.
We talked deep into the night, while Akrem’s bodyguards waited hours for him, leaning on his shiny forest green Land Cruiser, fraternizing with my staff. Akrem’s answers to my volley of questions were considered, astute, constructive. It was a tone that never wavered through two and a half years of conversations.
We fell into a loose routine. We would rarely let more than a week go by without an exchange of phone calls or a visit. Something would come up that I wanted his take on, or he would have a piece of information to pass along. Or I would simply notice I hadn’t heard from Comandan Saab in a while, and I would call him up to see how he was doing.
Zabit Akrem proved to be the most sophisticated political thinker I encountered in Afghanistan. The fact seemed somehow incongruous, beside the rough-hewn nature of the man.
CHAPTER 17
MILITARY MATTERS
2002-2004
PART OF WHAT prompted Akrem to break the ice between us was that he possessed information vital to the American mission in Afghanistan, and he wanted to communicate it. But the Americans were swaddled in their alliance with Gul Agha Shirzai. With Shirzai’s eyes and ears hemming them in, the U.S. troops were unapproachable. Akrem had pegged me for a back channel.
He got the reasons for it wrong—my contacts with American officials were due to fluke and longevity, not professional affiliation—but in substance, he was right. I did turn out to be a back channel to army officers, among others.
The entrance to the airport, where the U.S. military established its base, has been gussied up a bit since Al-Qaeda’s last stand there. A Soviet MIG that miraculously escaped being sold for scrap, painted with new camouflage and a menacing grin, guards the turnoff. Behind it, great metal gates with a plaque inscribed in honor of Gul Agha Shirzai bar the road. Spherical marble guardhouses, like big golf balls, flank the gates, and a matching marble-clad barracks has reared up just inside. It is for Shirzai’s fighters, who secure—and control—the outer perimeter.
It was no mean prize President Karzai offered Gul Agha Shirzai when he told him to hold the airport as the Taliban regime was collapsing. Shirzai defied the president and took the governorship, and he kept the airport too.
Despite the visible expense, there is something desultory about his efforts at embellishment. Beyond the gate and its gaudy new protuberances, the road stretches for half a mile across the sun-baked, dust-swept emptiness to another set of gates. Tall, lopsided pine trees that once studded the grounds were mostly cut down by the U.S. troops in order to deny potential enemies cover. The rest, untended, have developed sickly, brownish-yellow blemishes on their drooping needles. For a time the earth was pocked with foxholes where the U.S. Marines were hunkered down that first Christmas, but gradually the holes were filled in and the soldiers moved to tents; then the tents gained plywood floors set up off the ground. Now most of the buildings on base are made of wood.
I dreaded going out there, because of the time it always took. You would park your truck at the far side of a kind of traffic island—without the traffic—then walk a hundred yards to a rust-brown iron bar slung across the road with a hinge at one end and a piece of rope at the other for hoisting it up and down. This was Gate 2. When the military police officer spied you through the slit in a sandbagged bunker set back about thirty yards behind it, he would amble over, his pace designed to not jack up his body heat, as he sweltered inside full combat gear: helmet, long-sleeved desert camouflage, twenty pounds of bulletproof plate inside his vest, ankle-high boots, magazines at his belt, black M-16 slung over his shoulder. He would inspect your ID, then walk back to the bunker and call in your details and the name of the person you wanted to see.
Then you would wait anywhere from one to three hours, in the scorched, dust-filled wind, for an escort to arrive.
Various things struck me about this process. The extremely rudimentary nature of the communications systems in use, for one. There was no way to reach a person on base from outside if you wanted to make an appointment, for example, to cut down the wait. Internet, which the soldiers relied on, was nonexistent in Kandahar. A few U.S. officers obtained handheld satellite telephones, like old-fashioned walkie-talkies with fat antennas that you have to struggle to get pointed in the right direction, whirling around while you’re talking or leaning over to get the angle right. But they were of the U.S.-owned Iridium variety, incompatible with the Thurayas used in Kandahar.
The consequence was an impregnability—not just of the physical barriers made of sand bags and cement tank traps and loops of concertina wire, but the barriers to any form of communication between the Americans and people of the land in which they were operating.
Within the army, communications were just as bad. It took more than a year for the MPs manning the gate to get handheld walkie-talkies so they would not have to keep trudging back and forth, bunker to gate, gate to bunker. The walkie-talkies, I later learned, were not even issued by the U.S. government. The soldiers had bought them with their own money. Worse was the link back to the base proper, a few hundred yards inside the gate. To call in your details, the MP would unclamp the receiver from a heavy military telephone set and connect to something called the TOC, or Tactical Operations Center. The soldier who picked up there would then make a similar call over to Civil Affairs or whichever unit you needed to reach. And that is where things broke down. It never took less than half an hour for that connection to be made, let alone for Civil Affairs to send someone out to the gate.
The thought of relying on such haphazard links in an emergency did not fill me with confidence. Early on, I made a mental note that should disaster strike, ACS would forget about the U.S. Army and throw itself at the SAS, the highly capable British Special Air Service team right in town.
What also baffled me about getting on base were the constantly changing rules. Inefficiency might be par for the course, but I had always thought the army stuck to ironclad procedures. Not at Kandahar Airfield. Each visit brought new variations on the theme. Usually I was searched going in, but often I wasn’t. One MP team might invite us to have a seat in their bunker while we waited, passing us cold bottles of Gatorade and allowing us to make conversation. Another group might stare at us stonily, ordering us back from the iron bar to await our escort at the traffic island. Most Civil Affairs teams were happy to see us any time. But one rotation told us we could only come on Fridays.
For a few months—on the Shirzais’ say-so—I became persona non grata and could not get on base at all. Various excuses would be made when I pulled up after the half hour drive from town: there was a security alert, no one was allowed on, or no escort was available. I would watch people I knew were working for Pakistani intelligence get waved on base, while I, a born and bred American, was left with my ruffled feathers in the dust.
The BBC’s Adam Brookes and me, guests of the Taliban, applying moisturizer under the rather unnerving stares of Spin Boldak folk, perched on the walls of our compound in late November 2001.
(RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
My Achekzai friends from the barracks at the borde
r, showing off the haul from a drug bust, March 2002.
OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Flirtatious Guldani is peeping from behind the window curtain.
Nissar Ahmad embossing panels for embellishing the trucks.
The littlest kids bringing my books and magazines through the corridor joining the “mealmastun” to the private part of the house.
An in-law helping at the brothers’ body shop.
BOTTOM ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT:
Money changers at Chahar Sou.
The dry-goods street on the edge of the old bazaar in Kandahar.
A rickshaw.
LEFT: View of Kandahar from the saddle in the road where the stone quarry is located, 1897.
TOP ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Rebuilding Akokolacha, summer 2002: the doorway of one of the bombed-out houses.
The master mason working on a mud-brick wall.
Brian Knappenberger behind the camera, filming his documentary,
Life After War (Sundance) / A House for Hajji Baba (Frontline). Me with kids. (EVE LYMAN) BOTTOM ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Akokolacha children loaded up with bricks.