by Sarah Chayes
Such a speech could only draw the most general kind of response, and Akrem obliged—keeping close to the terms of the question he had been asked out of native caution. The presence of the official’s interpreter, a Shirzai crony, hardly encouraged frank discussion either. Akrem laid out the elements necessary in his view for the proper governance of the Afghan south: clear job descriptions for administrative departments and security forces, direct supervision by the central government, fair distribution of employment and reconstruction benefits across the various tribes, and so on. It was a policy speech, and it was sensible; it seemed to satisfy the State Department official, who left in a rather distracted rush. He might have been bucked up by these abstractions, I realized as he made his way out, but he had not learned anything very concrete.
A reporter’s habits come in handy: my questions formed themselves. How many cars? What terrain? How many fighters? Who were they? And the picture took shape under the precise brushstrokes of Akrem’s answers.
Insurgents had trickled across the border in groups—taking ancient footpaths across the deserted frontier, or walking brazenly through at Chaman, where complicit Pakistani guards waved them past—then gathering, maybe more than a hundred strong, in northern Kandahar Province. Ambush sites are abundant there, and the assassins had selected a good one. At the very fringes of the jurisdictions of Kandahar and Urozgan, a place where patrols are rare, the road wedges its way between two towering chunks of rock. The Taliban deployed above, some forty fighters on each side of the road. They only had to put two men down there, aiming guns at drivers.
The fighters stopped several local cars and ordered them aside. Then a two-vehicle convoy appeared—white late-model Toyota Land Cruisers, the ICRC logo painted on in red, oversized antennas flexing skyward from the prow of each. Ricardo and three “local national” staff members were aboard.
Akrem recited witnesses’ descriptions: how one of the militants had stepped away with his satellite phone. “We have three Afghans, one foreigner,” he was heard to ask. “Do you want four bodies or one?” The answer came back. He smacked the fat antenna back into his sat-phone with the palm of his hand, and signed to his men to stand Ricardo up against the side of his car and shoot him. When the Taliban set the car ablaze, the ICRC’s Afghan staff begged to be allowed to take the body out of reach. No wonder the sight of it had unsettled that State Department guy.
By the time I left Akrem’s house a half hour later, I had details down to the names of the two villages where the Taliban had spent the night. And I was angry, because this thing could have been prevented.
Ricardo’s execution was no vague hint, like those harmless explosions we had become used to. The killers were notorious former Taliban. They had deployed into the area in insolent platoons. They had selected Ricardo, the first foreigner to arrive, ignoring other potential victims. They had pushed him up against his car and emptied their guns into him, and they had let his body burn.
The impact on Kandahar’s small international community was like an electric shock. After drawing together for a moment to grieve, lining their cars up in a cortege to bear Ricardo’s body to the airport, the foreigners sent up a yell. More offices closed, agencies “suspended operations”; employees were evacuated to Kabul.
I felt at the time—and I still do, to some degree—that the clamor was a bit excessive. An objective comparison of conditions in Afghanistan with those in any other recent conflict or postconflict situation came out in Afghanistan’s favor. I remember trading assessments with a former member of the British Special Air Service, converted in his retirement to protection work for war correspondents. Bosnia in 1996 was far more dangerous than Afghanistan was now, he judged (and then treated me to the details of his only bit of real work so far: patching up a hole in the BBC crew’s cook, who had been stabbed by a jealous colleague).
I had to agree. It is not that I deliberately discounted the value of Ricardo’s life. Had I known him personally, had he been my friend, I might well have felt differently. But I did not know him, and I was left with the bare count. In more than a year, in the place whose very name had become a synonym for anti-Western fanaticism, one single foreigner was dead.
So why such panic? The international humanitarian organizations, I concluded, were committing an amalgam. They were harnessing the issue of security to another debate entirely.
That debate had to do with the way the United States was behaving abroad. Most foreign humanitarian workers in Afghanistan were not American. Most of them came from countries and segments of the population that were, rightly or wrongly, furious at America’s foreign policy. It was not just the recent invasion of Iraq, which drew unanimous—and, as it proved, well-founded—criticism from every country on earth, but what had come before Iraq as well. The Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the U.S. attitude amounted to saying, “Because we do not wish to reduce our standard of living, you will breathe polluted air.” The Land Mine Treaty, which had helped reap a Nobel Peace Prize and which the United States refused to consider ratifying. The International Criminal Court, aimed at curbing war crimes, which the United States had sought to undermine. The United States seemed to be sticking out its tongue at the rest of the world, and the rest of the world had no leverage to respond.
September 11 had prompted people all across Europe to drop these concerns in sympathy. And now it seemed that the United States was taking advantage of that sympathy to push its agenda down their throats. For international aid workers in Afghanistan, the only available target upon which to vent their frustration was the U.S. presence there.
And so humanitarian workers, Europeans as well as many Americans, opposed this presence far more vocally than Afghans did. They said it was the U.S. troops who endangered their lives, since the U.S. troops were doing reconstruction, and “insurgents” could not distinguish between soldiers and aid workers. In the context of an argument that was really over U.S. policy and the U.S. presence in Afghanistan as a political issue, inflating the danger to aid workers was a way of reinforcing their case.
I think my colleagues’ arguments were wrong. I think the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan made all of us safer. The expatriates, I believe, misunderstood the nature of violence in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a place where mutually assured destruction remains a viable doctrine. It is a culture of retribution. I learned this back when I was reporting, and I sensed the importance of having that young fighter with me on the road to Kandahar. Not because he could actively protect me with the Kalashnikov he held between his knees, but because his presence silently threatened the vengeance of his tribe should any harm befall me. Walls and barbed wire, I had learned, are not all that significant in Afghanistan, when it comes down to it. Preventing your own murder—once someone has resolved to commit it—would be almost impossible. But if you are seen to belong to a recognized group, a family or tribe that might retaliate, your chances of survival increase. The way to stay safe in Kandahar was to suggest the certainty of violent revenge should you be killed or dishonored, so as to deter attack before it is undertaken.
That is, to advertise your affiliations.
For this reason I felt, in my own case certainly and to some degree for the rest of the foreigners, that being confused in Afghans’ minds with the Americans actually improved our chances of survival. I took some elementary precautions: I kept a Kalashnikov beside my bed. I varied my times and my routes, and I rolled up my windows. But I was not troubled that Afghans saw me driving on and off the U.S. base.
There was something deeper to the humanitarians’ confusion, however.
I am beginning to believe that the international humanitarian community failed to perceive a transformation that was taking place in the world around it, which profoundly altered its status.
Aid workers took their own good intentions for granted, and were used to beneficiaries doing the same, more or less. Arriving on the heels of an earthquake or a tidal wave with their stretchers and rehydration
salts and their kits for putting up temporary shelter, or spending a year in an African village improving an irrigation system, they were siphoning off some of their rich countries’ surplus to alleviate pain in the Third World. They could count on gratitude, even if it was grudging or muddied by cynicism.
In the internal conflicts that shaped humanitarian action in the 1990s—Somalia, the Balkans, Rwanda—the aid workers’ very outsider status, and their neutralist credo, was their force. Only a foreigner, it seemed, could be trusted by the different parties. Only a foreigner could shuttle between the factions, ministering to victims on all sides. And so the aid workers flaunted their foreignness, and clung to their neutrality—in spite of its moral ambiguity in some contexts. This neutrality was both their power and their safe-conduct across the front lines. Aid workers were harassed; occasionally they were used as bargaining chips. But when they got killed, it was usually by accident: they had misjudged the direction of an offensive and been caught in the shelling.
This self-image still dominates in the international humanitarian community. Aid workers have trouble accepting that they are now in the crosshairs themselves. When one of them is killed deliberately, the loss sparks shocked hurt feelings as well as grief. For the unconscious belief persists: If humanitarian workers are being targeted, there must be some mistake.
Afghanistan, regarded through the old prism, would seem to be a conflict between the United States on the one hand and some constellation of Muslim groups on the other. In line with their traditional role, aid workers wanted their neutrality recognized so they could cross the front lines as usual. But it wasn’t working. Something was wrong. Ricardo had been killed.
What must be confusing things, the humanitarians decided, was the behavior of the Americans. It was muddying aid workers’white-painted neutrality. In other words, if Ricardo was killed, it must be because he was mistaken, in some way, for an American.
I think this analysis is wrong. I believe this conflict is different. This is a struggle between parties—on both sides—working to precipitate that “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West. To Muslim parties to this conflict—Al-Qaeda or a few leading Taliban—there is no difference between an American soldier and Ricardo. No matter how nuanced the aid workers’ specific views might be, no matter how opposed to U.S. policy, they cannot be outside this conflict.
If anything, they are more threatening to Al-Qaeda’s goals than Washington hard-liners. For Western crusaders and their with-us-or-against-us rhetoric force Muslims to choose sides, and most choose the opposing camp—just what Al-Qaeda wants. A Ricardo, by contrast, with his hand out like a bridge, increases understanding, believes in coexistence, offers human dignities to the people he helps without stripping others away. He appeals to the Muslims he is assisting in ways that allow them to approach and consider. Ricardo’s death was no mistake. He was the militants’ principal foe.
My reasoning has been confirmed to some degree by the fact that the attacks against foreign civilians were not visited disproportionately upon Americans. On the contrary, those organizations that made the most elaborate show of their neutrality and their opposition to the U.S. government, like Ricardo’s International Committee of the Red Cross or Paris-based Doctors Without Borders, seemed to be taking the worst hits.
By pulling out when struck, groups like this relinquish the new and vital role that is beckoning—to take on the belligerents on both sides, by obstinately forging links, eroding ignorance, rebuilding bridges.
This is a combat, I believe, that is worth taking risks for.
Ricardo’s murder did not make me panic; it made me mad. The inquiries into its circumstances that Akrem and I conducted in tandem proved more than anything to date the cynicism of Governor Shirzai. He was playing for the new Afghanistan, getting plenty of money for it, and playing against it too.
The militants who killed Ricardo, according to Akrem’s information, included some of his own Alokozai tribesmen—that is how he had managed to land an informant. But they were mostly Barakzais, members of the governor’s tribe. Natives of the villages up there by the Urozgan Province line, they had run to Pakistan with the fleeing Taliban. This was their first time back.
It is not that I suspected Governor Shirzai of active collaboration in the killing just because the perpetrators were Barakzais. It was that it simply did not seem possible for him to be unaware that some kind of attack was coming and, the way it looked to me, he chose not to thwart it.
Contrary to popular assumption in the West, the very loneliness of the Afghan countryside makes it harder, not easier, to hide in its wilds: navigable trails across the cragged wasteland are scarce and locals know them intimately, lovingly. No stranger can pass unseen, unknown, unbidden, unprotected. Given the tribal affiliations with Shirzai’s Barakzais, the size of the infiltration, and given the efficient Afghan grapevine, Shirzai must have been alerted to the militants’ arrival. Even I knew about the infiltration, in a way, since I had heard about their presence that afternoon in Akrem’s office.
I soon found out my hunch was right. An army officer loyal to the Karzais had received a call from a colleague up in that wild district, saying that a large group of armed men had moved in. The Karzai loyalist had taken the information to Governor Shirzai, urging action. “We’ll see about it next week,” the governor had replied.
But next week was too late.
Shirzai’s behavior after Ricardo’s execution rang an equally false note against the tuning fork tempering inside me. He took to the airwaves denouncing the insurgents, swearing he would root out all Taliban from government office—as though the personal rivals he was referring to had anything to do with this event. But it was not till the next day that he moved an armed force to the zone, less than three hours’ drive from Kandahar. In Afghanistan, that kind of body language signified safe conduct for the insurgents.
U.S. officials, meanwhile, snatched at the declarations Shirzai pronounced for their benefit, parsing them for meaning like a poem in school, but never holding them up for comparison with his actions. Through several discussions at the airport and with contacts in Kabul, I learned what the State Department representative was writing to his hierarchy; I fired off a note of my own to counter his. To me, the event and the governor’s handling of it were the clearest proof to date that Shirzai was working for—and satisfying—two masters with contradictory agendas: the United States and Pakistan. He was a man with two kites in the air.
I was at a loss to understand why U.S. officials could not see this. More broadly, I was at a loss to understand why American decision makers could not see how suicidally contradictory their alliance with Pakistan was.
To us on the ground, it was obvious that the resurgent Taliban who had killed Ricardo, these “insurgents” whom U.S. soldiers were fighting and getting killed by, did not represent an indigenous Afghan movement rooted in local ideology. Afghans, for one thing, were vaccinated against ideology by now, having lived through three ideologically inspired revolutions and a civil war in twenty-five years, and having had untold suffering inflicted on them at each turn. Afghans, according to every one of them I had spoken with in town or in the countryside, wanted a government that functioned, whatever its stripes.
And so, in the sense of a popular indigenous movement of opposition to the new government in Afghanistan, the “insurgency” was not one. It was a nuisance deliberately stirred up across the border. This was evident to us in Kandahar because no effort was made to hide the fact in Pakistan. Taliban, advertising their affiliation by way of their dress or their explicit self-identification, were given privileged treatment at the border in Chaman; they paraded around Quetta; they carried guns and weapons-authorization cards issued by the Pakistani government; their offices and lodgings were located in a well-known Quetta neighborhood, previously provided to the anti-Soviet mujahideen. These insurgents were not squirreling themselves away in warrens in Afghan mountains or the supposedly uncontrolled tr
ibal areas of northern Pakistan, as the Pakistani government artfully persuaded the West. They were manufactured and maintained, housed, trained, and equipped by stubborn, shortsighted officials in that very Pakistani government. Our allies.
By so doing, these Pakistani officials were merely persevering in an established policy. For the past three decades, Pakistan had been manipulating religious extremism to further its regional agenda in south Asia. During the Soviet invasion, the Pakistani government cultivated the most ideologically extremist Afghan faction, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar’s group.1 When it failed to gain control of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, the Pakistani government largely ginned up the Taliban “movement,” pressing into service ambitious petty commanders from the anti-Soviet period and uprooted, madrassa-inculcated youth from the refugee camps.
Similar factions had been employed to keep alive Pakistani claims to Kashmir, a paradise in the Himalayan Mountains over which India and Pakistan were in a custody dispute: four wars since independence from the British in 1947. Pakistani troops, under the man who now ran the country, General Pervez Musharraf, had mixed with and even dressed up as fundamentalist militants to launch an attack on Indian territory in Kashmir in 1999.2
However, there is an important distinction that I began to discern as I pored over this issue during those early months of 2003. It is a distinction between global agendas and local ones. Pakistani officials’ support for and manipulation of extremist factions seemed to be essentially local and tactical—the manipulation of religious ideology for ends that were not fundamentally ideological. Some of these officials must have been moved on a personal level by international holy war convictions. The government certainly tapped into the vocabulary of those convictions in order to win recruits. But in substance, it did not appear to me that Islamabad was embarked on an Al-Qaeda–style global jihadi movement. Pakistani officials’ aim was not to bring the world under an Islamist government or even to cut ties with the West; rather, their goals were consistently regional and temporal—maintaining an upper hand in the regional balance of power, especially vis-à-vis India. Unfortunately, the Pakistani people were paying for these goals with their long-term futures, for, by instrumentalizing Islamist extremism, their government was deliberately wallowing in the forces of violence and regression.