The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  Our new pump.

  The Kabul to Kandahar road. For fifteen hours.

  CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Men at work: bringing fodder home, Helmand Province.

  Selling pomegranates, Tirin Kot, Urozgan Province.

  Baking bread, downtown Kandahar.

  Spinning silk, Herat.

  CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Spinning silk, Herat.

  Threshing, Urozgan.

  Casting brass spoons, Kandahar.

  Feeding a wedding party at the house in the graveyard.

  CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: A village council meeting, Arghandab.

  Settling a dispute before the district council, Khakrez.

  A nosegay, Tirin Kot, Urozgan Province.

  A village elder in Helmand, explaining that water from the canal no longer reaches the village.

  CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Bringing fodder home, Helmand.

  A young shepherd, Arghandab.

  Despite occasional intimidation, girls attend school.

  A boy who just delivered milk to a collection point, Arghandab.

  CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Cleaning an air filter on the Kabul to Kandahar road.

  A nomad boy on the move, Helmand Province.

  Three girls at a gas station on the Kabul to Kandahar road.

  A young shepherd across the street from the Arghand workshop in Kandahar.

  President Hamid Karzai (right) and Gul Agha Shirzai.

  (AP I MAGES)

  OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: A village woman, Akokolacha.

  Three women who administer vaccines in Kandahar. When they saw me with a camera they came over, flipped up their burqas, and demanded that I take their picture. “Take it to America!” they cried. A revolutionary gesture.

  Women from the nomadic Kuchi tribe (here, in Helmand Province) are far less confined than their urban sisters.

  Sadiqa, one of the women who work with me at the Arghand cooperative, shucking pomegranates.

  Muhammad Akrem Khakrezwal in July 2003.

  I later learned Civil Affairs had been told that the army did not like ACS’s views, and they were not to have anything to do with us. Then when the units rotated and the base came under new command, I was issued a pass and could drive on and off unchallenged. Such was the bewildering lack of system that seemed to characterize much of the army’s activities in Kandahar. Apparently, each incoming captain liked to leave his mark by making a new set of rules. Sort of like a dog peeing on a post.

  At the gate, the one constant was Shirzai’s insolent young men with their dark glasses and newly minted pickup trucks roaring through.

  When President Karzai gave command of the provincial security forces to Mullah Naqib and Akrem’s Alokozais as a check on Shirzai’s power, one obvious move remained to Shirzai on the Kandahar chessboard, and he made it. He formed his own personal security forces. Thanks to funding provided by the U.S. army, Shirzai—who before the war had had to scrounge for followers—was able to recruit and deploy two extralegal military units. Nazmi Khass, or the Special Force, was housed in palatial new barracks on the main road into town. This was the unit that competed with Akrem’s police inside Kandahar proper, setting up its own checkpoints around town and coming to blows with the legitimate police. The second group of fighters was stationed out at the airport under the command of Gul Agha’s brother Razziq. They continued to serve as U.S. proxies in the ongoing “war on terror.”

  Technically, their role was a military one. They were charged with providing outer rim security for the U.S. base and with joining U.S. troops on missions—both combat and assessment visits—around the countryside. In practice, just the way engineer Abdullah made himself indispensable to me, Razziq and his colleagues saw to the grateful Americans’ every need. And before long, the U.S. forces were helplessly wrapped inside the Shirzais’ friendly bear hug.

  The troops needed pickup trucks? Shirzai provided them, on lease, at rates so high the army could have paid for the truck outright within five or six months. The base needed gravel? Shirzai crushed it at his new facility or bought it from our friend the quarryman at $8 a tractor load and charged the U.S. Army $100. The Americans wanted to make a contribution to the local economy by hiring local labor for menial work around the base? The Shirzais provided the workers, then extorted a quarter of their daily wage in kickbacks. A thousand laborers on base racked up $2,000 a day for the Shirzais. And the employees, grateful anyway, were almost all Shirzai’s Barakzais. In assorted contracts with the two commanders of this militia, the United States paid out almost $100,000 to each per month. And that’s without the perks: the free cases of soft drinks, the PX privileges—or the inestimable power and prestige this relationship with the Great Power of the day afforded these gunmen on the local scene.1

  The outcome of most contests is determined by terrain, and the Americans had surrendered a choice position to Gul Agha Shirzai. “Outer rim security” meant manning Gate 1, the gate between the golf balls, behind the grinning MiG. By controlling the outer gate, Shirzai’s men in effect controlled access to the base. No competitor could even approach the Americans to offer a better deal on goods or services. The consequences of this monopoly were not restricted to the waste of taxpayer money. The damage went to the core of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

  When U.S. Army Civil Affairs bid out contracts for a reconstruction project—a village well or school, for example—the bidders’ conferences were held at Razziq Shirzai’s compound. Few who were not Razziq’s friends got inside the gate. That meant the local contractors being subsidized in the interests of capacity and relationship building were all in Shirzai’s orbit. Since the governor’s suggestions for reconstruction projects were also largely followed, it seemed to most Kandaharis that the primary mission of U.S. troops in Kandahar was to service Gul Agha Shirzai and his Barakzai tribe.

  During one of our chats in his cozy receiving room, Akrem put it to me this way: “The other tribes are frustrated, and they’re starting to pull away.” We were discussing some intensive political activity Shirzai had been engaging in, calling tribal elders to meet with him, giving them gifts of ceremonial turbans or rugs. Akrem could not understand why the U.S. forces seemed to be helping Shirzai so assiduously. “The Americans do everything for Gul Agha and Khalid Pashtoon,” he remarked with wonderment. “The schools, the wells, all are for the Barakzais. But it’s only a small tribe. Gul Agha doesn’t even need this American money; he’s got the customs revenues.” Kandahar customs officials were all Shirzai’s Barakzais, and so far, not a penny of the estimated $5 to $8 million dollars a month that was being collected at the gates of Kandahar was making it to central government coffers in Kabul.

  The impression of American favoritism was exacerbated by Shirzai’s fighters’ wardrobe. Both Nazmi Khass and the militia at the base had been issued U.S. Army fatigues. U.S. soldiers wearing that uniform are subject to U.S. discipline and supervision. The Afghan fighters were not. And they interpreted the formidable shield afforded by their friendship with the U.S. troops as a blank check.

  When idle conversations with Kandaharis veered to the subject of security, as they often did, I would keep count. Every time I heard of an ugly incident—a boy being shot in the leg by a soldier who wanted his bicycle, the driver of a wedding procession being shot because he refused to give a soldier some candy, a house being looted on the pretext that the soldiers were looking for opium—I asked what uniform the perpetrators were wearing. Almost every time, the witness would describe the particolorU.S. camouflage worn by Shirzai’s gunmen.

  What were Kandaharis to conclude except that Shirzai’s men were operating under U.S. command, that they and their actions were part of U.S. policy?

  In other words, much of the expenditure in effort and treasure that was aimed at building bridges and gaining friends in Kandahar did the reverse. It built a growing feeling of resentment against the U.S. troops.

  Shirzai’s gunmen gained a further benefit from their ownership of the airfield’s outer p
erimeter: a chunk of territory that was free from scrutiny. The distance from Gate 1, the outside gate manned by the Afghans, to Gate 2, the inner gate guarded by U.S. troops, was about half a mile. That half mile, ringed all the way around the base, was a no-man’s land, protected and peopled by Shirzai’s henchmen. For a time, they were taking advantage of this privacy to load marijuana shipments for transport to Pakistan.

  The racket, as I understood it, went like this: Among his other contracts, Razziq Shirzai had won the exclusive right to supply the U.S. base with diesel fuel. Tanker trucks would drive up from Pakistan or across from Iran and onto base, empty their contents into great rubber pouches like giant water beds partially sunk into the ground. Then, in at least one case, after an empty tanker had exited the base proper and entered the zone between the perimeters, Shirzai’s men loaded it up with dope and sent it back toward Pakistan.

  That particular truck was captured by Afghan frontier guards in March 2003. The chief of the border police at the time was one of my Achekzai friends—the commander who had detailed the young bodyguard to me on my first drive into Kandahar. That spring of 2003, I was on my way to Chaman to visit Mahmad Anwar, and I stopped at the border police headquarters for a motorcycle ride into Pakistan. Over the obligatory glass of tea, the commander told me how he had captured a tanker truck full of dope a few days back. He reached into his breast pocket for some papers that the driver had been carrying.

  The border police chief unfolded one. What I saw first, inked in green across the top of the slip of paper, was the official letterhead of the Provincial Government of Kandahar. The note was signed Bacha Shirzai, the governor’s other brother. It read: “The carrier of this letter is my man; he is doing my business. Please provide him with all necessary assistance.” It amounted to safe conduct through every checkpoint from Kandahar to the Pakistani border and beyond.

  The second piece of paper was a cryptic list: some names with numbers next to them, about forty in all: “Ata Jan 7,” for example. “Najibullah4.” (I’m remembering the names. They may not be accurate.) It had to be a kind of cargo invoice, listing each drug trafficker and the weight of the shipment he had placed aboard the tanker truck. A man, the common unit of weight in Kandahar, equals appoximately four and a half kilos, or almost ten pounds. “Ata Jan” would have been shipping nearly seventy pounds of pot to Pakistan. A rough addition of the numbers on the list put the tanker’s total cargo at around nine hundred kilos, or just short of two thousand pounds.

  And the Shirzais, doubtless for a price, were apparently providing a safe place on the U.S. base to load this cargo, and then protection for it on the road to Pakistan.

  There was another drug scam on base, involving U.S. soldiers this time. Shirzai’s men would run marijuana into the base, for use by U.S. soldiers. The pot came with the tanker loads of fuel the Afghans were delivering. In payment, the soldiers would falsify the delivery records, signing in a full tanker of diesel when in fact the load was short.

  These transactions were eventually discovered and the U.S. soldiers discreetly punished. But the Shirzais never suffered any consequences.

  In both cases, the integrity of the U.S. mission was compromised because U.S. troops either appeared to be or actually were participating in the very drug trade they were theoretically supposed to interdict.

  But to my mind, the very worst breach of U.S. security lay with the interpretation and translation services the troops relied upon for all their interactions with the Afghans around them. I can remember only one soldier who spoke Pashtu. Local interpreters were required for the army’s every move. And those interpreters were provided, again, by Razziq Shirzai. They did not even receive their pay directly from U.S. personnel, though one Civil Affairs sergeant almost gave herself an ulcer trying to get the procedure changed. But she was ordered to keep giving the money to Razziq, and to let him pay the interpreters. They lived in his compound in the noman’s-land. In the Afghan context, this made the interpreters beholden not to the Americans, but to Razziq Shirzai. Whether by inclination or—as was often the case—by force, with physical abuse driving home the facts, the interpreters were Razziq’s men, under his orders.

  The result was a severely distorted picture of the situation in the Afghan south and nearly unintelligible interactions between Americans and Afghans. The information U.S. forces were receiving was frequently inaccurate or deliberately misrepresented. The messages U.S. officers were trying to communicate to locals were either not getting through at all, or were, time and again, twisted to suit the Shirzais’ends. Complaints and suggestions that some courageous Afghans—like Akrem—might step forward to offer U.S. forces were similarly bent and deformed.

  It was on the basis of a picture this flawed that U.S. commanders were reaching their combat and reconstruction decisions in Kandahar. It made me want to weep with frustration.

  CHAPTER 18

  SECURITY

  DECEMBER 2001–FEBRUARY 2003

  IN THE BEGINNING, given U.S. forces’ stated mission in Afghanistan—fighting Al-Qaeda—their lack of communication with the Afghans around them arguably did not matter very much. For at first, there was not much Al-Qaeda to fight. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were gone.

  For about six months, there was a period of grace when those who were battling for the future of Afghanistan only had to battle the past’s inert wreckage, not its resurrected ghosts. Even Kandahar, which separated from its Taliban affliction with care and some cynicism, was released for a moment. For a time, no alternative to the new U.S.-led experiment stalked. Kandaharis could give themselves up to the promise they perceived in it without a glance over their shoulders.

  A trip to the bazaar drew a crowd, unsettling in its immobility, its insatiable, unsmiling stare, but nothing worse. A petulant clot of traffic blocking an unpaved street was just a frustration, not something that required the calculation of risk. I could drive across Kandahar without nervously eyeing the motorcycle that drew alongside me, or thinking to roll up my windows in case of grenades.

  When the first signs came, we did not see them as portents, for they were silent—harmless, we thought—and they came not to Afghanistan but to neighboring Pakistan.

  It was like some grotesque courtship ritual. Men, dressed in immaculate white or glowering black, their beards carefully frayed to untrimmed wisps at the edges, their heads wrapped in the loopy, outsized turban the Taliban had made their trademark, would appear on their doorsteps and stand for a while. Or they would collect in relaxed groups on street corners in the busy Pashtunabad bazaar, the Afghan neighborhood in Quetta. Like peacocks before a prospective mate, they were on display. Except it was hardly the rare burka-clad female whose attention they desired. The show was for their rival; they wished to gauge his reaction.

  That rival, in the form of the new Afghan government and the Americans protecting it, did not react. And so the way was open for the next phase.

  That was the “night letters” and the threats. A folded slip of paper tucked into a crack in the door of the mosque or passed around by a friend, declaring that the new Afghan government had rejected Islam and combating it was holy war.

  This message began to lace the sermons delivered in the white-painted mosques of Quetta, with their quiet, arcaded courtyards, havens from the sooty chaos outside. Soon the imams added the obligation and the threat: anyone collaborating with the apostate government in Afghanistan could be—should be—killed.

  A word about courage. Afghans are famous for it. They are legendary spillers of blood. Afghan songs and poetry are full of merciless exhortations to ferocity. Few Westerners recall the Afghans’ successful resistance to the Arab invaders who tried to reduce their rocky land thirteen hundred years ago. But the Afghans do, and with pride, despite their fierce conversion later to the Islam those Arabs were carrying. The Afghans’ rout of the British army in 1842—that massacre of the Army of the Indus down to one last man who was allowed to live so he could describe the horror of it—has
haunted the imaginations of all foreigners who have even thought about spending time in Afghanistan ever since. It doesn’t matter if they don’t know the historical details of that butchery. The shadow of it haunts them.

  Of course, a closer look at the historical details uncovers a good deal of shrewdness mixed in with Afghan courage. Afghan fighters know how to turn terrain, timing, and temporary alliances to advantage so as to reduce the actual spillage of their blood. Those Redcoats in 1842 were shot up in a canyon, with straight rock walls that rise almost to blot out the sky. The Afghans were ranged above, shooting down at the beefy English officers and their cold and homesick Indian troops, thinned out along the road like blood cells in a capillary. The slaughter of those men had more to do with the blind arrogance and incompetence of their generals than the Afghans’ profligate courage. Sometimes the fighting of Afghans resembles a kind of stylized theater, a performance designed to bring the probable winner to light so that the terms of his acceptance can be negotiated.

  The most egregious recent exception to this rule came during the 1980s Soviet invasion, when Afghans leading mules and carrying bolt-action rifles took on the Red Army. Even that was a guerrilla war, not one marked by pitched battles. The Afghan fighters allied themselves once more with their unfriendly landscape. They renewed their everlasting covenant with the treacherous rocks and the rough footpaths across them, and kept on shooting.

  One man who fought the length of this war, Tor, a lanky man, inhabited by a miraculous innocence despite his haunted eyes, can even think back on his time in the mountains with some fondness. He remembers his horse—white, of all the nontactical colors—which would carry him all day, then munch down a handful of cookies dug out of a sack, and be eager to set off again. Tor’s eyes glint like a boy’s with a bicycle when he talks about that horse.