The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  Next came the matter of logistics. And suddenly that Afghan fragility resurfaced. I had risked the drive to Kabul half a dozen times by then. But these men were old. Most had not set foot outside Kandahar in years. They were frightened.

  We set about weaving safety nets. The council president got a handheld satellite telephone; we arranged for him to call in along the way. I organized backup from the president’s office for when the group arrived in Kabul.

  They set off. Calls came in from the prearranged places at more or less the right times—I was not really keeping track, but to my elders it was important. They were proud of their achievement, and they needed encouragement. I cheered them on.

  Then, at the Kabul gates, their fears were realized. Northern Alliance fighters looked askance at their dust-daubed cars unencumbered by license plates, at their Pashtun turbans and beards, and listened with revulsion to their soft, southern consonants. The Ghiljais were barred entrance to the city.

  While the old men quietly pulled their cars to the side of the road to wait, I jumped on my cell phone, trying to break through to anyone at the president’s office. Eventually an envoy was sent, and the Ghiljais were escorted into the capital.

  It was a meaningful foul-up. What it signaled to the Ghiljais was that this central government of theirs, this central government that was supposed to be protecting them, was not even accessible without the intercession of a foreign woman. What it signaled to them was that Kabul, the capital of their country, did not belong to them. It did not belong to the Afghan people. It belonged to a clutch of warlords from the Northern Alliance.

  The presidential guesthouse was the venue for the next crisis. It was not ready. There was no electricity or water. Food had not been prepared.

  This lapse was simply unforgivable. I had been planning this visit for weeks. The aim was to improve mutual esteem between President Karzai and a tribal bloc that could anchor support for him in the south. Instead, the elders had been snubbed, in precisely the domain where an Afghan leader’s power is traditionally put on display: his hospitality.

  I could not believe the Palace had let this happen.

  A high-ranking official was at last dispatched. Escorting the Ghiljais to a hotel where they were fed and settled, he saved the day. My elders called me and reported their satisfaction.

  In the end, the visit was a great success. President Karzai’s chief of staff e-mailed his thanks. The elders, he wrote, were of “much higher quality” than most of the president’s callers. They spent nearly two hours at the U.S. embassy. And then, of course, they found their feet. They discovered some other Ghiljais, and they communed. Ministers sent for them. Their visits were covered on TV. My elders stayed in Kabul for two full weeks.

  During that time I drove up to the capital myself, to engage in the most intense period of collaboration ever with my boss, Qayum Karzai.

  Qayum had proved to be an extraordinary inspiration. He could make me literally catch my breath at his penetrating expositions of what was wrong with Afghanistan and why. Much of my thinking about the warlords was rooted in his analyses. Ever vulnerable to sheer brilliance, I was repeatedly swept away.

  By now, though, I had painfully learned that Qayum’s patience for the details of making anything happen lagged far behind his appetite for abstract analysis. He seemed blissfully unconscious of what it took. Some other characteristics had begun to unsettle me as well. There was a secretiveness about him, a cultivated ambiguity, and an excessive disorganization, which was belied by his laser-tuned powers of observation, and his allergy to saying anything of substance on the telephone. Something about him made me uncomfortable. But then that genius of his would sweep me off my feet again. It was very disconcerting.

  Qayum lived in a modest house in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood of Kabul. It was an NGO Row. Everyone’s headquarters was in Wazir Akbar Khan; you could walk from Oxfam to the Red Cross to Germany’s GTZ to the U.S. embassy. Newly minted SUVs, emblazoned with logos or shielding their occupants behind smoked-glass windows, clogged the streets, dominating pedestrians from their tall wheels. The occasional fruit-and-sundries stall, the battered white-and-yellow local taxis, the limbless veterans begging from wheelchairs were dwarfed.

  Qayum’s house had a small patch of garden in front. A sitting room with heavy wooden furniture adjoined the dining room, with a curtain between. Upstairs were three bedrooms occupied by the president’s chief of staff and that man’s young nephew who also worked at the palace, and an older Karzai cousin of some sort, who would turn on his radio while the television was going, prayed for hours, and thought nothing of camping out indefinitely with Qayum and eating his food. In this way did the place remain Afghan, despite the Western-style furniture. My unannounced arrivals always entailed a shift in occupancy: someone ended up on the living room floor. But I was always greeted, no questions asked, with a tall thermos of tea and a dish of nuts and raisins set out on one of the black marble-topped coffee tables. Once, when Ahmad Wali was in town, his retinue of four stayed with us. They slept in their shawls under the stairs, next to the woodstove that had been installed for the winter. Somehow, there was always room. Qayum would pad around quietly like a long-limbed cat that noticed everything, his glasses perched on the polished dome of his forehead.

  Those February days, I established my computer and printer on the end of the dining room table. Qayum’s first priority was to produce a mission statement and an organization chart for a putative upcoming presidential campaign. Such a thing was called for in the blueprint for building Afghan political institutions that had been hammered out in Bonn, Germany, just before the fall of the Taliban. But as yet no date for the election had been set, nor had it even been decided whether other offices would be up for a vote at the same time. The assumption was that the presidency at least would be in play and that Karzai would run, though he had not announced any intention to do so and was certainly not busying himself launching a campaign.

  Nevertheless, we had at an organization chart. The result of our labor was structured and efficient looking—perfectly alien to the Afghan context, not to mention to Qayum’s own impenetrably ambiguous style. Qayum was fantasizing. If his brother did not want to campaign actively for the presidency, as, for whatever reason, he apparently did not, there was no way we were going to force him.

  The next effort edged closer to what I thought was the urgent priority. We developed a long-term—and hopelessly elaborate—strategy for eroding the power of the warlords. It would take years.

  Then it was my turn. “Let’s help the president out,” I said over morning tea, flavored with cardamom. “Let’s give him a plan for firing the warlords.”

  I had raised the warlord issue repeatedly with expatriates over the past six months—U.S. diplomats and army officers, journalists and humanitarian workers—when I met them at Qayum’s house or the U.S. base or the embassy, or when they came to visit me, which was happening more and more frequently. Being one of the few U.S. civilians living in Kandahar proper, and one with a surprising range of Afghan contacts, a person who was willing to voice her opinions to boot, I was becoming something of a tourist attraction. My interlocutors, spooked at the thought of an Afghan conflagration or wanting to advertise their sympathy with President Karzai, had been telling me: “But how can Karzai take on the warlords? He’s got no army.”

  I thought the question was disingenuous, a pretext for inaction. I didn’t think the president needed an army. Neither did the Karzai brothers. We thought the governors were paper tigers, lacking popular support. Without the overt U.S. backing that kept them rampant, they would mew plaintively and crawl away. We were sure of it. Our tuning forks were unequivocal.

  But there was a chicken-and-egg problem. Americans and Afghans each seemed to be waiting for the other to make the first move. American officials would repeat that as long as President Karzai gave these men his confidence, there was nothing the United States could do.

  But we’re t
he ones who brought the warlords back and rammed them down his throat!

  Never mind. I let that piece of recent history go. Instead, I tried to explain how Afghans read body language, not words. “As long as we are visibly supporting these warlords with money, uniforms, and guns, that’s the message President Karzai is going to read, not our verbal assurances of support against them.”

  Then I would shuttle back to the Afghans and explain that President Karzai really had to be decisive about this. He had to take clear and visible action. Then the Americans would follow his lead.

  It felt like hauling on chains, trying to get two wild horses to nuzzle each other.

  But as I told Qayum that morning over tea, we needed to get out of the realm of speculation. If we could just come up with a concrete proposal for how, practically, to eject the warlords, maybe we could break the deadlock. President Karzai, I said, needed a road map, something he could take to the Americans to demonstrate that he was serious.

  “Let’s do it!” Qayum put his teacup down on the marble table. I had piped up at just the right moment. The topic had been dinner fare at the Palace the night before.

  And so we hammered out a document, in eight parts. Qayum, it emerged, could be quite practical when pushed. Here is what we wrote:

  Begin with Gul Agha Shirzai.

  Choose a replacement: Someone with strong administrative skills, integrity, and the stature required to mobilize allegiance.

  Call Gul Agha to Kabul, without telling why. (Note: breach of this plan’s security will allow him and those around him to prepare a riposte, so care should be taken to avoid leaks.) When he gets here, tell him your decision and explain that it is based on continuing governance problems in Kandahar.

  Simultaneously, or slightly prior, you or your envoy should contact the heads of the Kandahar security forces: Zabit Akrem, Khan Mahmad, Mahmad Shah, Amir Lalai…apprise them of your decision. Entrust them with maintaining the public order. Assign the one you most trust to pay special attention to Razziq Shirzai, Gul Agha’s brother. Explain that the integrity of the Afghan nation depends on them.

  Secure Spin Boldak on the border with Pakistan. This is another place where disruptive activity might be launched.

  At the same time as you are meeting with Shirzai, a trusted envoy whose dignity and stature are recognized in Kandahar should gather the main elders of all the Kandahar tribes and explain your decision to them, enlisting their support.

  Maintain all other provincial and municipal officials in their positions, as an incentive not to resist the decision. The new appointee should begin the process of cleaning up his government after a month.

  Consult with key Americans—civil and military—on the elements of this plan. Solicit their input, and request specific support: For example, assistance in securing Boldak and the border area. Or, since Razziq Shirzai’s compound is on the airport grounds, the Americans could be asked to provide a minimal deterring presence, so as to maintain order there and keep him from mobilizing his men to mischief. Or, the State Department representative in Kandahar could be asked to contact Khalid Pashtoon and tell him the U.S. will hold him accountable for any breach of the peace.

  I heaved a sigh of relief. There it was at last: how to fire a warlord, in eight easy steps. But I thought it needed a little something more.

  During my days in the Balkans, I had absorbed some principles of military planning. NATO, I learned then, does not reason in classic best-case/worst-case terms. Its planning is a little more subtle. Officers are called upon to imagine what the most likely scenario will be and plan for that, and then think about what the most dangerous scenario might be and how to protect against it. We should adopt those technical terms, I thought. It might impress the Americans.

  So we added a most likely/most dangerous section to our plan—adulterated, I felt, by Qayum’s tendency to focus on the result he hoped to obtain, rather than the truth. I thought he downplayed the potential dangers a bit too vociferously, instead of simply assessing them.

  Anyhow, I printed the thing out in several copies, Qayum looking on, almost boyishly jubilant. When he left for dinner at the palace that night, he put one in his briefcase.

  For my part, I never went to Kabul anymore without stopping by the U.S. embassy. It had improved a lot since the days of the revolving door. The political affairs desk was in the hands of a savvy and thoughtful young man named Kurt Amend, who had spent time in Pakistan. The ambassador, a bit of an oddball, was a hero in Central Asia for his cultural sensitivity there in the 1990s. Flanking him was a dapper, upbeat, switched-on man named Bill Taylor, of ambassadorial rank, the most impressive diplomat I have ever met.

  So I rushed off to give that chain another yank. I called on Bill Taylor, and I handed him a copy of our eight-point plan.

  But I wasn’t done meddling yet.

  I returned to Kabul in early March for an International Women’s Day conference, and I had to see President Karzai on another matter. Never once had Qayum bothered to invite me to the palace, though he went several times a day. I never did discover why he wouldn’t take me along. That March, I decided to make the move myself.

  After a bit of awkward circling, which finally left me seated in a cavernous waiting room upstairs at the palace, admiring the warm ochers of its two great rugs, I found myself alone with President Karzai, in his private office.

  It was only the second time I had seen him face to face. The first time was at his brother Ahmad Wali’s wedding, when he had narrowly missed being killed.

  “So you’re the one who writes me the letters,” he had said then, stunningly cool and gracious after what had just almost happened to him.

  This time, we sat at his elegant desk in the form of a T, with me along the upright and him at the crossbar. He was as direct, and charismatic, as I had hoped. At one point, he broke off a sentence, stood up, and ambled over to a low table to grab a fistful of raisins from a glass dish, then sat back down, sharing out my half.

  Our other business finished, I ventured: “So, I hear you were looking for a plan for how to get rid of the warlords.”

  I suspected that Qayum had never given our document to his brother after all.

  “I never asked for a plan,” the president denied.

  “Well, I have one.”

  “Let’s see it.” President Karzai smiled indulgently, stretching out a hand. I passed it over. He looked at it, folded it in two, and slipped it into his slim leather briefcase.

  Well. That was that accomplished. I thought all I had to do now was wait a few days.

  CHAPTER 21

  MURDER

  MARCH 2003

  PRESIDENT KARZAI DID need to get a move on. During that spring of 2003, the atmosphere in Kandahar took a distinctly menacing cast.

  One afternoon in late March, in his office at police headquarters, Akrem was taken up in conversation. Sitting not behind his imposing desk, but in a corner, on one of the overstuffed velvet chairs, he was bent toward a man who gave the impression of being out of breath, though he wasn’t literally.

  I could not understand what the man was saying. He and Akrem were conversing quickly and quietly, and I didn’t know Pashtu yet anyway. Nor could I presume to interrupt for a translation. But as soon as the man left, Akrem turned to give me a synopsis.

  The man was one of Akrem’s informants, in from the field where he had been carrying out some surveillance. With a group of former Taliban, he had just crossed over from Pakistan into Afghanistan, on one of the innumerable dirt paths that traverse the vast, lonely frontier. The informant had accompanied the militants all the way to a trackless piece of country in northern Kandahar Province, where they were now arrayed, bunking in the villages or spread out in the hills around. “I never saw so many of them cross at once,” the man said. “There were twenty-five of us, maybe thirty.”

  I took in this information, not immediately registering its significance. The militants, Akrem added, were being paid and trained in Paki
stan. From this man and other informants, he had learned that the orders insurgents like these received were to cross into Afghanistan, to work first in outlying districts, and then move slowly in toward Kandahar, progressively tightening their ring around the city.

  Three days after this conversation, a convoy from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was ambushed, crossing the zone the informant had described. A foreign aid worker was murdered. That incident, more than any other single event, set in motion the gradual but steady withdrawal of international humanitarian and reconstruction agencies from the Afghan south.

  His name was Ricardo Munguia, a hydraulics engineer. He was a man, I am told, who distributed the warmth of his native Latin American sun wherever he went, who had a luminous word for everyone. With three Afghan colleagues, he had driven out along the ghostly trail that can scarcely be called a road, which winds northward from Kandahar to Tirin Kot, the capital of Urozgan Province.

  Urozgan was a complicated place. In the hands of a grizzled governor with one milky eye and the manners of an aging lion, uncouth and rapacious and devoted to President Karzai, it was the base from which Karzai had launched his campaign to pry the hidebound southern Pashtuns away from the Taliban. And yet this same Urozgan was where many of the Taliban had come from. In the conservative south, it was the most isolated and backward province. Hardly any aid organizations worked there.

  The day after Ricardo’s death in that godforsaken place, I had another appointment with Akrem, at his house. I got there just as the U.S. State Department’s representative in Kandahar was arriving. I invited him in with me. He was visibly shaken—he had seen Ricardo’s body, and it had hit home.

  He wanted the police chief’s opinion: Didn’t he think that people loyal to the old extremist Jihad commander Gulbuddin Hikmatyar had done the murder, and wasn’t it likely that…And the rattled U.S. official launched into an involved exposition of his own theories about the event and the light it shed on the nature of what was beginning to be termed the “insurgency.” At last he asked Akrem, “So, what do we do?”