by Sarah Chayes
When, on occasion, my Afghan friends wanted to offer up some praise for the latest “revolution,” as they still called the U.S.-backed regime, there was a phrase they were always using. Afghans, they told me, weren’t fighting with guns so much anymore. They were fighting with the pen.
Well, I was trying.
We did not have an Internet connection at ACS yet. An Internet café had opened in town, its computers blanketed behind heavy velvet curtains in private booths. You wanted to wash your hands after touching the keys. This revolting place adjoined the office of the governor’s hachet man, Khalid Pashtoon, and was run, quite manifestly, by the Pakistani intelligence agency. The look and behavior of the Pakistanis who staffed it made that much clear. As did corroboration I received later from the Indian consul, who, to his horror, had had some e-mails read. I did not care to offer up this particular missive to its scrutiny, so I asked a friend out at the U.S. base if he could send it to Qayum and my sister Eve in the Boston office, as well as to the trusted diplomat Bill Taylor at the U.S. embassy in Kabul. He said he’d be glad to.
First thing in the morning, two days later, my cell phone fluted out its ring, a long note then descending minor thirds. It was my friend on the base.
“Sarah,” he chirped gaily. “You need to come to the base.” I tried to find out why, but he wasn’t telling. Belying the sunny tone he had adopted for the benefit of any third parties on the line, he insisted: “You just need to get out here, right away.”
I clambered into the black Land Cruiser. He met me at Gate 2. For once he was right on time. To my surprise, we weren’t going to his office or his messy hooch. We were going to drive around the base for a while, crawling at the ten-mile-per-hour speed limit so he could explain in private.
Even so, his voice was hushed. My missive, the one he just sent out for me, had been intercepted.
I should have known. Electronic surveillance is activated by keywords. If one or more preset word is detected in a communication, it triggers closer inspection. My Letter to Washington, as another officer joked to me later, contained about nine keywords a line. The whole thing had been pulled down verbatim.
Well, that’s not so terrible, is it?
I had written the thing with the hope that U.S. policy makers would see it and take it to heart. I supposed this was as good a way as any to get their attention.
But my friend wasn’t done yet.
The signals intelligence people, he told me, had photocopied my letter and passed a copy over to the Special Forces shop. An officer there had dropped it off on the desk of the man assigned to liaison with Governor Shirzai’s brother Razziq. The SF trooper was to show my letter to Razziq Shirzai, discuss it, and find out who had written it.
I blenched. That, in this region, could be a death sentence.
But my friend, bless him, had thrown himself into the line of fire. He just happened to know the SF officer in question. He just happened to have overheard.
“You can’t do that!” he had cut in. “You can’t go over there with that letter. That’s an American citizen. She could get killed if you show that thing to Shirzai.” Argument had ensued. The intelligence people had claimed they’d obtained the letter from an open source. My friend knew otherwise. He informed me that no document obtained by means of electronic interception may be reproduced on an open copying machine, or left out on a desk in everyone’s line of sight. It is automatically classified. The breach was pretty serious.
A storm front had rolled through Kandahar Airfield’s high command. Arguments and recriminations were hurled about all day, my friend told me, though eventually his point was taken. Still, he had made the extra effort to join the Special Forces trooper at dinner at Shirzai’s compound that night. He wanted to ensure that, under the influence of ready alcohol and hail good-fellowship, the SF guy did not come across with my letter after all.
I was stunned. Not just at the danger I had narrowly escaped, but at the U.S. Army’s rank stupidity. I simply could not believe they would be so cavalier with another American’s safety or so wasteful of potential resources in an environment where they had so few to draw upon. Surely an American citizen who lived in Kandahar, was conversant with its culture and cast of characters, and was willing to talk about them—unlike any other aid worker there—had to be worth something. I was aware that the conclusions I drew were not to everyone’s taste. But why recklessly jeopardize a potential source?
My friend suggested I meet the trooper who had been ordered to show Razziq Shirzai my letter.
So the next day I found myself near the traffic island between Razziq’s compound and Gate 2, in the shade of the one scraggly tree in sight, sitting on a slanted chunk of cement with a rusted metal eye sticking up from its surface, beside a heavy-set, sandy-haired member of the U.S. Special Forces.
I fell instinctively into another habit from my reporting days: don’t contradict the man; let him say it all the way out; be shocked on your own time, not in his face. Because what the trooper was telling me surpassed my worst nightmares about how entangled the U.S. Army was in Shirzai’s web.
“The military is very pleased with him,” the officer was saying. Personally, he found him “the most helpful governor in Afghanistan.” His dealings with Shirzai were nothing but positive: every time he’d “asked for stuff, it’s happened.”
The officer described a friendship that was thickened over frequent dinners at Razziq’s compound, where the Afghan and American comrades in arms would sprawl out in front of DVDs, beers in hand. (This in Afghanistan, where alcohol is not just illegal but severely taboo.) Ahmad Wali Karzai, by contrast, with his formal elegance, irritated the officer. He was too “stuck up.”
That such an exclusive relationship with a single local player, in treacherous Afghanistan, makes the army vulnerable to manipulation apparently never crossed this officer’s mind. It seemed to be with pride that he confirmed the extent of Shirzai’s monopoly: “everything that happens in this province goes through the governor,” he proclaimed. “We don’t trust the others.”
I was stunned. And I shakily tried to convince myself this was just an SF view, particular to that very particular unit in the U.S. Army, or maybe just to this individual officer.
I glanced up. One of the fighters in Shirzai’s unit was eyeing us curiously, but did not dare approach. Abdullah had the front seat tipped back and was dozing, or seeming to. What a wild combination of casual and cloak-and-dagger this is, I caught myself smiling—the latter sensation intensifying when I noticed a white UN vehicle idling on the far side of the traffic island. Inside was Talatbeg Mazadykov, head of the UN mission in Kandahar, and the image of a former KGB agent if there ever was one, with his perfect Pashtu acquired by way of a PhD in Pashtu literature, no less, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and his frequent visits to the Taliban leadership in Pakistan. He was observing us: the unclassifiable American female and a Special Forces officer, heads bent in quiet conversation in a spot where no one could get near them to eavesdrop.
The officer and I began discussing the recent murder of two of his Special Forces comrades in Helmand Province, to the west of Kandahar. Coming on the heels of the ICRC execution, this brazen ambush of a U.S. military convoy had added to everyone’s conviction about a growing and increasingly lethal insurgency in southern Afghanistan.
The SF officer was fighting mad about it. He and his buddies were positive the governor of Helmand Province was behind the attack. They had asked permission from their hierarchy to take the governor out, but they hadn’t gotten the green light yet. “Pretty much all the bad stuff that happens here is coming in from Helmand,” the officer assured me.
My breath came short. Is coming in from Helmand? That backwater? What about Pakistan?
The notion that Helmand governor Shir Mahmad killed the U.S. soldiers was preposterous. Smooth Shir Mahmad, with his weirdly sexy kohl-lined eyes and his Taliban turban, the son of a mullah (the man who had introduced wide-scale opium cult
ivation into southern Afghanistan), was reputedly a drug dealer and certainly nobody’s saint. But he was a Karzai ally and would not raise a finger against a U.S. soldier.
“Really?” I asked the SF officer, willing my eyes to look interested and impressed, nothing more. “How do you guys know?”
“We’ve got some intercepts,” he confided. “The governor giving the order.”
I visualized telephone protocol in Afghanistan. No important person ever carries his own phone. A trusty holds it, or, in the case of the foldout satellite phones the size of a laptop computer, rushes over to pick up incoming calls. And possibly, if he is alone, makes a few calls of his own. Even if Special Forces had a telltale call coming from the governor’s phone, that did not necessarily mean the governor made it.
“So, um, what kind of a voiceprint can you guys get for a satellite call?”
“Well, actually,” the officer conceded with a little grin, “our voice-prints are more like three guys sitting around a room saying, ‘Yep, that sounds like him.’”
My heart skipped another beat. On the basis of “yep, that sounds like him,” these men wanted to assassinate the governor of Helmand Province?
I thought back to the amazing piece of information Akrem had shared with me over the plates of pomegranate seeds at our very first meeting in my compound: that U.S. Special Forces in Helmand were bunking with a well-known acolyte of the extremist faction leader Gulbuddin Hikmatyar. Hikmatyar himself was in hiding, but his people had stepped up their activity again, in loose alliance with former Taliban. On an introduction made by Shirzai, the Special Forces had bedded down with a Hikmatyar loyalist.
It seemed unnecessary to look much further for the people who might have arranged the killing of the two officers than the Americans’own hosts.
“So where are you guys getting most of your intelligence from?” I asked.
“It’s almost all from Shirzai. He’s great. He’s got sources everywhere.”
I’ll bet he does. And he was currently feuding with the neighboring governors because he was trying to set himself up as a kind of superprefect, or overlord of the whole south.
With little exertion, I grasped, Shirzai had, with his carefully planted “information,” wound the U.S. Special Forces right around his finger. By blaming Helmand governor Shir Mahmad for insurgent activities in the region, he was achieving two objectives at once: shielding his patron Pakistan and channeling U.S. wrath against his rival.
But the kicker was still to come.
“He really dictates to President Karzai,” the officer was saying. “In fact, if Karzai doesn’t win the election next year, the U.S. military won’t be that sorry. A lot of us would be happy to see Shirzai as president instead.”
For the first time since my arrival in Afghanistan, an icy surge of panic spiked through me. My racing mind tried to imagine the scenario. What would it mean for the province, the country? What it would mean for me, personally? Surely this could not be right. Surely this guy was speaking for himself. Because if this represented the position of the U.S. military, then the entire Afghan equation was disastrously transformed. Somehow, I had to find out.
I spent the next couple of days in shock. A call came from Bill Taylor, the dapper diplomat at the U.S. embassy.
Bill was technically in charge of donor assistance to Afghanistan, but his conversations with me would invariably stray wide of that patch. We would sit at the end of a long, dour table in a 1960s conference room behind a combination-lock door on the embassy’s second floor, and plunge right in: How can we get more Pashtuns to enlist in the national army? Can I think of any candidates for the job of corps commander? (I suggested Akrem. President Karzai offered him the job, but he refused as long as Shirzai remained in Kandahar.) Did I think the election scheduled for June 2004 should be delayed? Should it be organized as a Western-style one-man, one-vote contest or more like the Loya Jirga? I relished these chats, the substantiveness of them, the sense that my reflections might actually be folded into whatever mix it was that produced U.S. policy. Slender, well-turned-out Bill was an unwaveringly charming workaholic; unflappable, enthusiastic, and engaged, his oddly stubby fingers reaching for a minuscule notebook to jot down our thoughts when we got into the thick of things. His rank was ambassadorial, and I always thought of him as a coambassador, standing shoulder to shoulder with Ambassador Robert Finn. Instinctively, I trusted Bill enough to forward him my Letters to Washington unexpurgated, in the same batch that went out to Qayum for comment or censorship.
“I read your Letter,” Bill told me on the phone. “It was great.”
“Oh, good,” I answered. “Did you hear what happened to it?”
He had not, and I told him the whole story.
There is something else that having this team at the embassy meant to me on a personal level. For a brief moment, they made me feel part of the American family. I felt that someone was there, that someone cared enough to watch out for me, in case I did manage to get into a serious bind. Bill’s reaction to my tale cemented that feeling. As soon as he hung up, he convened a crisis meeting with the ambassador, the chargé d’affaires, and the political affairs first secretary to discuss the unbelievable cock-up on the base. Bill called me back shortly afterward and told me they wanted me to go up to Kabul and camp out at the embassy for a while, because it was just too dangerous for me in Kandahar.
There was no way to convey to him, in mere words, my gratitude.
It was not that I lived in any real consciousness of fear in Kandahar. And Lord knows my mother’s worry, and my sister Eve’s worry, which would flare up like a sunburst in response to nothing more or less concrete than her own urgent intuition, was enough worry to have to keep at bay. In Kandahar, I had Ahmad Wali Karzai. It was largely thanks to him, I knew, that I stayed safe. If I wanted guards, I could ask him for them; I could sleep in his house if I needed to; I knew that. Even more powerful was the invisible force field of deterrence flung about me by the public notoriety of his protection, as well as the suggested protection of the Americans. And yet I wasn’t a Karzai, either. I never knew what Ahmad Wali really thought of me, who he thought I was.
Perhaps it came down to this: a feeling of belonging that a part of me hungered for. Ten years reporting from Paris, accepted by the French, though frequently the target of jibes, never denying my Americaness but distancing myself at every opportunity from U.S. policies and attitudes that, viewed from across the Atlantic, were next to inexplicable; coming over time to understand that I would never again reside in the country of my birth; not becoming French, of course—you can’t—but not really American anymore, either. And then in Kandahar, even worse: not being part of the community of foreign humanitarian workers because their careerism and disdain for Afghanistan, their Thursday night drinking parties with no Afghans allowed, repelled me, and because I, too close to the Afghans and too close to the U.S. military, repelled them; held at arm’s length by that same military because I was a former-reporter and a humanitarian worker; and not, of course, being Afghan, viewed by Afghans as a curiosity for my maverick style, but mostly as a potential, and temporary, source of material gain, nothing more human.
In other words, I was alone, fighting a war of my own invention, for what sometimes felt like the future of the world.
My boss, Qayum, the closest I thought I had to a comrade in arms, the man, if there was one, to whom I had utterly devoted myself, hurt me more than I knew in his absentminded indifference to my welfare. The fact was, whether I experienced the emotion of fear or not, Kandahar was a dangerous place. And I was very exposed. Qayum, bounced around like a badminton birdie among the exigencies of his three restaurants in Baltimore, the momentous requirements of governing the newly fledged Afghanistan alongside his kid brother the president, the sunroom he wanted to build onto the side of his house in the suburbs, and the silent rage of his beloved daughter at his extended absences, stayed up there in the ether, where he was most comfortable. He lived,
for someone of his rank, an extraordinarily austere life. Still, he rarely made it down to Kandahar, and he never made it down to the Kandahar I inhabited. I remember pulling up to his Kabul house one night around nine-thirty, close to curfew, after more than fifteen hours on that appalling road. It was a trip, so far as I knew, that no other foreigner had ever taken. Qayum looked up from CNN on his satellite TV: “Hello!” he said warmly. “Did you come alone?” Alone? Are you kidding? The risks I took just never registered.
All of this was why Bill Taylor’s invitation to stay at the embassy moved me more than he would ever know.
“Thank you so much, Bill,” I answered him, from my perch on the back steps where cell phone reception was good, and I could watch the cows at tether and the antics of Wooly the Sheep. “But I think I’m OK. The letter never did get to Razziq Shirzai. An alert lieutenant kept that from happening.”
“Oh, I see,” Bill said. “All right…”
I assured him I was on my way up to Kabul before long anyway, and not to worry.
“Listen, Sarah,” Bill pursued. “Would you mind if I passed your letter along to General McNeill, the” Dan Mc-Neill, Bill thought, ought to hear what had happened on the base, and maybe the whole flap could provide an opening to transmit some of my views. For, mirroring the great divide between the two bureaucracies in Washington, a chasm had opened up between U.S. civilian and military leadership in Afghanistan. Bill accorded McNeill a pinch of praise to reassure me. He’d talked to him a few times, he said, and McNeill did not seem “too unreasonable.”
For me, the sentence—and the tone in which it was uttered—served as an abrupt initiation into the devastating rift between the Defense Department and the State Department in their supposedly joint conduct of U.S. foreign policy—far more telling than what was filtering out to me from media coverage back in the States. Bill Taylor was equivalent to the highest-ranking U.S. official in Afghanistan. And he had only spoken to the general in command of U.S. troops “a few times”? Bill’s tone of voice was just as eloquent as his words. It assumed a kind of comradeship between us—fellow humans, the implication was—as we contemplated the specimen of some other species. State Department civilians found McNeill almost impossible to work with. They said he ran his show in Afghanistan as though they did not exist.