A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  Among the staff there were holdovers from earlier administrations and jobs that dated back to the monarchy: one position was that of galam-e makhsus, or “special pen,” a man employed because of his lovely handwriting; his job was to write out decrees in calligraphy. Many of Karzai’s new aides had little experience with either Afghanistan or government. Several of them were friends or acquaintances of the Karzai family who had returned from exile to pitch in. Some had degrees from universities in Europe or America, but others had survived during their exile years on whatever jobs they could find as immigrants. An early legal adviser had worked in the kitchen of Qayum’s Baltimore restaurant. Another adviser would regularly complain that he could make more money pumping gas in San Diego than working for the president.

  “You basically had ice cream dealers, car salesmen running policy in the palace,” recalled one Karzai aide. “People had no credentials.”

  When it came time to train a new presidential guard force, one of the palace aides, Khaleeq Ahmad, supervised a round of tests for a group of one hundred young men brought in from a village in Uruzgan Province. Ahmad passed out pens and watched as the recruits stared helplessly at the quiz. Many got up and handed him blank pages. Others had made random scribbles or had written only their names. “I said, ‘Hey, guys, one person passed, all the others failed. Can we keep this person?’ They went and huddled and came back. ‘Khaleeq Jan, he’s our teacher in the village. If we give him to you, we won’t have anybody to teach our children.’ ”

  During one outdoor meeting between Karzai and the Iranian foreign minister, in a tree-shaded palace courtyard, a loud gunshot shattered the calm. Jawad, the chief of staff, ran off to find the source of the gunfire and discovered a guard on the ground gripping his bloody boot. He had shot himself in the foot.

  Within seven months of moving into the palace, one of Karzai’s vice presidents, Abdul Haji Qadir, a Pashtun from eastern Afghanistan, was shot and killed as he drove through Kabul. The assassination caused enough alarm that General Dan McNeill, the U.S. military commander at Bagram, got ordered by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to visit Karzai late one night to convince him to accept American bodyguards. McNeill felt it would be rude to meet inside Karzai’s home, with his wife, Zeenat, present, so they sat in the yard on the warm July night. They talked about the threats to Karzai’s life and America’s responsibility to protect him. Karzai immediately refused McNeill’s offer, which he found humiliating.

  “He was adamant,” McNeill recalled. “He said, ‘I’ll be perceived as less of a man. I’m a puppet of the United States of America.’ ”

  McNeill prevailed after a couple hours, promising Karzai that the guards would be temporary and unobtrusive. The United States supplied Karzai with a close-protection detail of about fifty special operations troops, who were posted in Karzai’s office and traveled with him everywhere he went. Not long afterward, Karzai went to Kandahar to attend the wedding of his brother Ahmed Wali. The new team of Delta Force security guards trailed him wearing tan vests, khakis, and wraparound shades.

  It was the first time Karzai had returned to his hometown since becoming the country’s leader. Kandaharis came out in enthusiastic greeting, thousands of them lining the streets to watch the president’s motorcade.

  “This was amazing,” Karzai told me years later. “At that time I would move freely through the streets of Kandahar and other Afghan cities. I went in an open-roofed car. What is that called—a convertible?” In fact, it was a gray Lexus SUV with a sunroof, and Karzai sat in the back seat, behind a mustachioed driver with three-starred epaulets on his shoulders. As the convoy crept through town, Karzai stood up through the sunroof and waved at the cheering masses.

  Karzai’s main political rival, the new Kandahar governor Gul Agha Sherzai, had organized the visit, and the entourage stopped at the newly renovated governor’s house before heading to the wedding. Karzai waved his left hand out the open window, his watch glinting in the sun.

  A teenage boy walked up to Karzai’s window as the car inched along. He wore a white skullcap and a tan shalwar kameez. He was smiling. The first two gunshots were fired at that moment, followed quickly by two more. A pause. Five. Six. Then firing everywhere.

  “I had not heard that sound since Vietnam,” wrote Peter Tomsen, a veteran American diplomat who was traveling with Karzai. “I jumped out of the car, as did several Delta commandos. The assassin stood outside Karzai’s window, firing into his car as it inched forward. Sometime between his second and third round, the Delta Force squad went into action. A commando fired right through the front window of his vehicle.”

  At the sound of gunshots, Karzai hunched over in the back seat, sinking his head into his shoulders. The crowd scattered and ran. American bodyguards rattled off rounds, taking aim behind the open doors of trailing cars. A black sedan honked and rear-ended Karzai’s vehicle, pushing it forward, out of the firing zone. A bullet had ripped into the driver’s seat, tearing the tan fabric beneath the headrest. Another hit a window. An eighteen-year-old shopkeeper named Azimulah Khaksar who tried to stop the shooting was killed, as was the would-be assassin. Governor Sherzai, who was sitting next to Karzai, and the president’s Delta Force commander were both grazed with bullets. Karzai was unharmed.

  Afterward, Karzai spoke to a BBC reporter from inside the governor’s compound, where he was collecting himself after the assassination attempt. He seemed unfazed by the chaos.

  “I didn’t even know who was firing where, so…” Karzai said. He shrugged and sort of smiled. He held yellow prayer beads in one hand. “I’m safe and sound.”

  “How do you feel now, a bit shaken?” the reporter asked him.

  “No, I’m fine. I expect things like that to come across the way. I’ve been through it before.”

  After that warm September day in Kandahar, Karzai’s helicopter would be shot at with rocket-propelled grenades, gunmen would ambush a dignitary-filled celebration marking the end of the Soviet war, and a group of Kabul University students and their professor would be arrested for plotting his assassination. “Nothing new for us,” Karzai told me.

  The shooter in Kandahar was named Abdul Rahman; he was of the same tribe, the Barakzais, as Governor Sherzai, and from neighboring Helmand Province. Speculation would always linger that Sherzai was somehow involved in the shooting, but when I asked, Karzai discounted the idea. He told me he had eventually tracked down the family of the shooter. “I sent a note to the parents that I have forgiven their son, that I’m sorry he’s dead,” Karzai said. He later paid for their pilgrimage to Mecca.

  After the Kandahar assassination attempt, the chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Henry J. Hyde, and ranking member Tom Lantos wrote a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about their “grave concern over the safety of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.” They wanted an even larger private security force to guard the president.

  Credit 3.1

  Afghan interim president Hamid Karzai in front of the pool outside his home on the grounds of the presidential palace, July 11, 2003

  “The stability of the Afghan Transitional Government is of paramount importance both to the security and diplomatic interests of the United States,” they wrote. “The linchpin of that stability for the foreseeable future is the safety of President Karzai.”

  In those years, the odds were stacked against Karzai surviving, let alone succeeding, in his job. An American who worked for Lakhdar Brahimi recalled one trip, when they asked an old wizened villager what he thought of Karzai.

  “Hamid is a good boy. He doesn’t kill people. He doesn’t sell drugs. He doesn’t do any of those bad things.” The man paused. “What makes you possibly think he could be president of Afghanistan?”

  4

  JUMP-STARTING A COUNTRY

  Aino. Aino is a woman. She’s very famous in Kandahar. Her tomb is here. You know the person who established Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Durrani
, the king? He came back from India. He had been in India to beat people up and get back the gold that was taken from him. The old ways, eh? Like the pirates. So he came to Afghanistan with a lot of gold. A lot of gold. He and his men stayed outside of Kandahar City to rest and clean themselves so they could see their families the next day. Well, one husband who was newly married, he couldn’t wait. He left the camp and knocked on his wife’s door. He said he just couldn’t stay away, he had been gone so long, “Oh, I miss you so much. Could you open the door?” She stares at him and said: “Where is the king?” He says, “It’s fine, everyone else will come tomorrow.” She says “Go away. Don’t come back without your king.” So when he went back to camp, he was captured by the other soldiers, for being a deserter. He said, “Yes, I left, but I came back.” He was taken to the king. And the king said, “Why did you escape?” He told the story and the king was not happy with him. So the king called the man’s wife before him. He gave her a big piece of land. Land that had water. This land right here. Aino Mena. We named it after her. Because she’s very popular. And she’s buried here. You should thank me that I didn’t name it after myself.

  —Mahmood Karzai, July 13, 2011

  THE SUMMER SUN WAS SETTING, and Mahmood Karzai was feeling expansive.

  “You know where the most beautiful girls in the world are?” he asked me. “China. I swear. For some reason, nobody is overweight. It’s amazing. And, you know, there are two reasons for that. First of all, they don’t eat bread. And there’s no dessert in China. Absolutely none. At the end of every meal, people eat one piece of watermelon. That’s it.”

  Mahmood was driving me around in his Land Cruiser touring Aino Mena, the gated community in Kandahar that he had spent the past eight years building in the middle of a desert war zone. Everything was walled off from the chaos outside, the fertilizer bombs and gunmen on dirt bikes, and it felt wholly foreign to Afghanistan. The first thing I noticed about the place was the trees. The scorched city outside of rickshaws and dirt bikes and mud huts gave way to quiet rows of bushy eucalyptuses casting dappled shade on smoothly paved roads. These were California trees, their seeds hand-carried and planted by the thousands. Water gurgled in prodigal wetness inside Aino Mena. Kids splashed in the canals and danced under a cataract pouring from a car wash. The property was immense, and only about two thousand houses had so far been built on it, a fraction of what Mahmood intended. Much of the land was empty desert, running flat until it ended at some barren foothills in the distance. In the city outside, people fought and died over water; the reservoirs were silted up. But inside Aino Mena, in the empty land far from any of the houses, I once saw a line of seventeen water tankers pumping hoseloads of fresh water into the ground for a row of decorative saplings. On the medians of the split-lane highways, sunflowers and buttercups lazed their yellow heads. The grass on the soccer field was bright green.

  “There’s so many beautiful things around the world,” Mahmood told me. “I’ll show you something I copied from Rome. Let’s see if you recognize it.”

  He turned the wheel, and we started down Fountain Street. As we passed houses, he mentioned that he’d installed polished granite countertops in the kitchens and bathrooms. “I’ve got very good furniture. All American standard. Very good stuff. People have not seen stuff like this. Once you show them the good life, they love it. That’s how you change a society. Not by talk, but by practical steps. See, we’ve already changed the attitude of the people regarding design. They no longer design like Pakistanis.”

  We came upon a double-decker fountain in the middle of a traffic circle. Two young Afghan girls in flower-print shawls were sitting on the rim, watching the water splash down.

  “This one was designed by architect Mahmood Karzai,” he said proudly. “Do you know which one is this?”

  I didn’t.

  “It’s right in front of the Vatican.” He laughed. “I brought a picture of it, and then they made it.”

  He went on: “This is the fountain road. This is our largest road. Part of it is commercial. You go shopping, you come and park here. You walk around, you enjoy yourself, and then you go home.” He sped along the wide lane, ticking off the features of the brilliant future he imagined. “Fountain. Commercial. Fountain. Commercial. Then you have trees, every ten meters. Then we’ll have Christmas lights on all these trees. You know, the white ones.”

  Mahmood slowed for a speed bump, painted with jaunty white and yellow stripes, something I’d never seen in Afghanistan, then sped up again. The road was wide and nearly empty and stretched out far into the desert. “A good road for racing,” he noted. We passed over a canal and through a decorative white fencerow topped by potted plants and thirty-two glass lanterns, then drove out to a large lake in the middle of the property. From the sky, I was told, it resembled the map of Afghanistan. In the middle of the lake he planned to install five more fountains to wow the future crowds. Along the shore he would build a park where families could picnic under tented overhangs.

  At the far end of the property, abutting the rocky foothills that rose from the desert, earthmovers were building a dam. The dam would create a reservoir for the project and another lake, where he planned to build a hotel at the water’s edge. “This will be outside, the patio for the hotel,” he said, pointing at a slope between two barren hills. “You’ll be able to sit by the water and have a nice hamburger.

  “Now, who would criticize something like this?” he asked. “You tell me.”

  Mahmood could be an amusing guy to be around. He was blustery, brash, buffoonish, full of outlandish plots and plans, a man who spoke without filter or seeming regard for the facts—Afghanistan’s version of Donald Trump. The arrival of Hamid Karzai in the palace had transformed the fortunes of the entire family, and no one had benefited as handsomely as Mahmood had. He was perhaps the best example of one of the familiar archetypes of the war: the profiteering capitalist who saw the conflict as a fabulous economic opportunity.

  —

  As the insurgency picked up again, the Bush administration quickly shook off its aversion to nation building and resorted to trying to buy a better Afghanistan. A dirt-poor country where most people lived on a couple of dollars a day had become a petri dish for billion-dollar experiments in American foreign-aid spending—a way for the U.S. government to experiment in remaking Afghanistan in its own image. This type of opportunity brought all sorts of people out of the woodwork. Mahmood’s kind could be found everywhere: private security contractors in khaki vented shirts and American-flag caps swinging open the heavy doors of their armored SUVs; shipping and logistics entrepreneurs sipping tea to a Muzak sound track of Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” in the marble-floored café of Kabul’s Serena Hotel; wealthy sons of Afghan warlords living in quadruple-decker McMansions surrounded by razor wire and surveillance cameras and sandwiched together on streets of mud, because no one paid taxes. When the Taliban gave up their power, the country they bequeathed the Karzais was bankrupt and broken. Whole industries had to be remade: telecom, banking, mining, petroleum. It helped if you happened to know people in the palace. Since the Americans had invaded, Mahmood had used his family connections to hurl himself into all sorts of business schemes: car dealerships, cement factories, apartment buildings, banks. He was, in a way, the American experiment writ small, the apotheosis of all the big U.S. policy goals: development, wealth creation, jobs, peace. The way Hamid Karzai wanted to be remembered as the man who returned Afghanistan to peaceful governance, Mahmood saw himself as the remaker of its private industry. And Aino Mena would be his greatest legacy.

  “I wanted to build a modern city,” he said.

  As was true for many of the Karzai siblings, most of Mahmood’s experience with cities had been in America. In 1976, around the age of twenty, he had said good-bye to his fiancée, Wazhma, and boarded an airplane leaving Kabul. Since then, he had hustled to make a life for himself in the United States. The ouster of King Zahir Shah in 1973 and the rise of the Commun
ists had made things increasingly dangerous for old allies such as the Karzais to live in Afghanistan, and one by one the siblings had fled the country.

  The first to arrive in America had been Qayum, a soft-spoken agriculture student, who in 1969 had been sent to Oklahoma by the Afghan Air Force for pilot training; forced to drop out because of recurring motion sickness, he headed east to Washington, D.C. There he met and married an American woman, Patricia Morgan—her family was from Pittsburgh and her mother was the resident manager of an apartment building on New Hampshire Avenue in northwest D.C., where Qayum was living—and started a career in the restaurant business.

  Mahmood arrived in America several years later, accustomed to living among the elite because of their father’s position. He had been studying medicine at Kabul University and now had to start with almost nothing. Qayum had scraped together his flight school savings to pay $1,000 for a 1957 Chevy to drive himself to Washington. Mahmood began with even less. “I went to the U.S. with twenty dollars in my pocket,” he said.

  Mahmood wanted to work, but he wasn’t interested in joining Qayum, who was employed at the Devil’s Fork, a restaurant inside the Gramercy Inn on Rhode Island Avenue, just off Scott Circle in downtown D.C. It was an upscale but eclectic place; upon its opening, in 1968, it had billed itself as “Washington’s newest luxury restaurant.” The dining room, with its fieldstone walls, was dimly lit; one review described it as a “dark cave that stretches farther than the eye can see.” The Devil’s Fork hosted banquets and office parties for up to two hundred people, and it became a regular dining spot for local politicians. It served Polynesian cocktails in the evening and held a Sunday New Orleans jazz brunch buffet for $4.95, where strolling musicians played Dixieland tunes and diners received a complimentary drink. “The culinary emphasis is on variety—roast beef, chicken livers, eggs, fried chicken, creamed seafood, crepes, quiche, macaroni and cheese, Jell-o molds, fresh fruit cup and considerably more,” The Washington Post wrote in a 1978 review.