A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  He believed that Karzai was misjudging America. Karzai’s conspiratorial view of American plans readily assumed there were ulterior motives beyond the Taliban, that the United States wanted to use Afghanistan as a base for operations against Iran, Pakistan, China, and the wider region. Eikenberry also didn’t like how Karzai would regularly tell visiting high-level American delegations that the United States had “failed” in Afghanistan. Eikenberry felt this “blame America” tactic was just Karzai’s way of deflecting responsibility from his own government.

  At President Obama’s request, in November 2009 Eikenberry had written a cable expressing his candid views about the prospect of more troops. His reservations centered on Karzai, that he was “not an adequate strategic partner.” The troop buildup, Eikenberry wrote, would cement Afghanistan’s dependence on American money and protection, and it would delay the day when Afghans fought and governed for themselves. Karzai “continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden,” Eikenberry said, “whether defense, governance or development. He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending ‘war on terror’ and for military bases to use against surrounding powers.” Eikenberry believed that a surge in troops would only accomplish prolonging a corrupt administration that has “few indigenous sources of revenue, few means to distribute services to its citizens, and most important, little to no political will or capacity to carry out basic tasks of governance.”

  The day that cable was leaked to The New York Times, Eikenberry’s job as ambassador dropped a notch, from difficult to almost futile. I saw him that morning, November 12, 2009, and followed him on his scheduled trip to Bagram Airfield to give a speech at a naturalization ceremony for soldiers receiving U.S. citizenship (joining the military offered a fast track to citizenship) and a routine meeting with military commanders. He was grim the whole day. He would neither confirm nor deny that he had written the cable, a position he would not deviate from in the years that followed. In the cramped military conference room, Eikenberry had to swallow his true feelings. He told the Regional Command East commanders that there was a “consensus” about the need for more troops and that his relationship with McChrystal was “extraordinarily good.” His concerns about Karzai represent a “difference of nuance and perspective,” he told the room, adding that “it’s not a black-and-white divide.”

  The reality was far different. Eikenberry and McChrystal were fighting over a litany of issues, including the creation of village militias and the military’s plan to buy generators and diesel fuel for Kandahar, and the two men didn’t get along. McChrystal felt blindsided by Eikenberry’s cable. Eikenberry believed he’d made his feelings well known in the weeks prior. “My analysis was not going to change his mind,” Eikenberry said. “His mind was made up.” McChrystal told me he considered Karzai a “great partner” who has been “absolutely straightforward with me and been reliable.”

  Credit 6.1

  Hamid Karzai talks with U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta during a lunch at the Pentagon on January 10, 2013.

  Karzai was traveling in Istanbul when the cable was leaked. When Karzai returned, he met Eikenberry in the palace. Karzai shrugged off the criticisms in the leaked cable, saying he was used to these things now. Karzai himself was a political animal; these types of bureaucratic knife fights were familiar. Eikenberry told me later that Karzai’s reaction was that of a seasoned survivalist. At one point, Karzai looked at him closely.

  “Well, Ambassador,” Karzai said. “My conclusion is: you have an enemy.”

  —

  To inaugurate President Obama’s troop surge, the commander of coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, Major General Nick Carter, a garrulous, confident Brit, had orchestrated months of military maneuvers across the opium tracts of the Helmand River Valley, a crescendo of preparations that reached their climax on the evening of February 12, 2010. That afternoon, Carter sat surrounded by his top NATO and Afghan officers inside a command center at Camp Bastion, a military base in Helmand Province, waiting for approval from Kabul. On airstrips and gravel lots across the province, thousands of U.S. Marines and Afghan soldiers waited in anticipation to board their CH-53E Super Stallion transport helicopters for the largest military operation of the war, an assault on the small farming hamlet of Marja. The first waves of airborne troops would be followed by more moving overland, laying down mobile bridges to ford irrigation canals that had become defensive moats of a Taliban fortress. Predator drones and Apache attack helicopters would prowl the moonless night from above. Hulking bomb-sweeping armored vehicles would blast paths through the minefields. One hundred and fifty-five square miles of farmland, and the Taliban foot soldiers who lived there, would witness the full fury of American war power at the apex of its empire. If Hamid Karzai would say yes, that is.

  In reality, Marja was an obscure, no-name, dirt-poor village of only marginal importance to the Taliban or the overall conflict. The location had been chosen mostly because the Marines already happened to be stationed nearby. But the troop “surge,” as its name implied, needed a fresh boost, a new publicity campaign for a tired old war. Marja was designed to be the first victory in America’s comeback win, a momentum builder and propaganda coup, counterinsurgency theory laid down with overwhelming force. There was a waiting list for reporters to cover it; many journalists had flown in from Washington for the show. After the Taliban were blown away, McChrystal assured the world, a “government in a box” would spring forth. Marja would set the tone, and the whole thing needed to look right. McChrystal wanted Karzai’s approval. He was the commander in chief, after all.

  Credit 6.2

  Marine commanders take a tour of the town of Marja, in Helmand Province.

  Since he’d arrived, McChrystal had been making deference to Karzai central to his political approach. The first time they met, on June 14, 2009, McChrystal ditched his usual fatigues and wore his green army dress uniform, to show respect. He took Karzai’s complaints seriously. “No more civilian casualties” became his mantra. When an American F-15 fighter jet bombed two fuel trucks in Kunduz Province, killing more than ninety villagers who were gathered around them siphoning off the gas, McChrystal borrowed his executive officer’s cell phone to call Karzai and apologize. “As I promised you when I arrived, I am working to prevent this kind of loss. I’ll redouble that effort,” he said. After another fatal mistake, McChrystal slammed his hand down on the table and cursed his subordinates. “What is it that we don’t understand? We’re going to lose this fucking war if we don’t stop killing civilians.”

  Karzai’s ego allowed him to appreciate McChrystal’s solicitousness, but that wasn’t enough to change his opinion about the U.S. military.

  “By that time, the president’s view on the whole war on terror had shifted,” Waheed Omar, Karzai’s spokesman, told me. “He was not in favor of more war and fighting. He was very skeptical of the Americans. He was not very keen. One of the reasons the president didn’t react too forcefully to it was because of McChrystal’s relationship with the president. He liked McChrystal, so he didn’t really resist.”

  By the evening of February 12, some 3,500 Marines, soldiers, and airmen and 1,500 Afghan infantrymen, plus thousands more in support roles, were waiting for the order to attack Marja. But Karzai still had not blessed the operation. After seven p.m., McChrystal drove to the president’s home, tucked behind his office across a wall from the Chinese embassy. The two-story residence had a circular driveway with a swimming pool and tennis court in back (Karzai’s preferred exercise was forty-five minutes on the elliptical trainer, three times a week). The home was a boxy, gray concrete structure that McChrystal said “had the feel of a prosperous but not wealthy American home, circa 1964.” Another writer described it as “graceless.” The president’s wife lived as a virtual prisoner there, rarely venturing outside. Her days as a practicing gynecologist were long gone
. She kept purdah, as Muslims call the practice of female seclusion, and avoided the many male guests, relatives, friends, and advisers who sat with the president until late in the evening.

  That night, Hamid Karzai had a cold. This was not uncommon. Karzai was constantly beleaguered by some ailment—coughs, sore throats, fevers. He had a well-scrutinized eye twitch whose intensity seemed to ebb and flow in parallel to the state of relations with America: easing at the calmer moments, then tweaking into furious spasms during crises. He loved effervescent vitamin C tablets. Ambassador Eikenberry’s wife had given him Chinese ginseng root powder as an herbal remedy for his illnesses. A palace doctor confided to me that five people were employed to taste the president’s food as a test for poison. “He is a hypochondriac,” one European ambassador told me. “He’s always talking about his health.”

  McChrystal waited in the downstairs living room, with its floral print furniture and wood-paneled walls, along with Karzai’s security ministers. When the president arrived, he listened to McChrystal’s spiel. Karzai was “resistant,” recalled Amrullah Saleh, the nation’s spy chief, who was at the residence that night. “He was against the use of airpower and was puzzled why nearly thirty thousand people had assembled to attack such a little area.”

  One of Karzai’s servants overheard McChrystal’s war plan and rushed back to the kitchen in alarm: The Americans are planning to invade the United Arab Emirates! He thought McChrystal had said “Sharjah,” meaning a city near Dubai. The name Marja meant nothing to him. (“We still call the guy Sharjah,” one of Karzai’s aides told me years later.)

  Down at his Camp Bastion command post, Nick Carter sat in a frustrated heap. Earlier that week, he had told a reporter that “the Afghan government is fully behind this operation.” This giant kickoff offensive had been named “Moshtarak,” which meant “together.” This was bluster. The regional commander of the Afghan police, Mirwais Noorzai, had an idea. Maybe his sister’s husband could help? He was referring to Ahmed Wali Karzai. If anyone could change the president’s mind, it would be his half brother. This sounded like a good idea to Carter. Noorzai dialed his number and passed the cell phone to Carter, who told Ahmed Wali they had to launch the operation that day or it might get pushed back for a month. Could he help?

  Ahmed Wali called the palace and talked it over with the president.

  By nine p.m., word had filtered to the southern commanders.

  “President Karzai agreed to the operation,” Brigadier General Lawrence D. Nicholson, commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, told his senior staff. “We’re a go.”

  Karzai had agreed to the mission reluctantly. He wasn’t happy about the prospect of more fighting, but what were his alternatives? “In his mind they were going to do an operation with or without his permission, and they were just trying to drag him into it,” a palace aide said.

  “He had no other option,” Amrullah Saleh noted. “It was the beginning of the surge.”

  Yet even in this moment of weakness, Karzai was not completely without options. Always attentive to his political leverage, he took advantage of the momentary rise in bargaining power. The day after McChrystal’s visit, Karzai’s cabinet voted to “nationalize” the Electoral Complaints Commission, booting the foreigners from the watchdog panel. It was another slap in the face to the partners.

  American priorities, at the moment, were elsewhere. The U.S. could withdraw funding for the upcoming parliamentary elections, they speculated in an embassy cable, but the way money was allocated, this would mean cutting support to the United Nations. “Ever the agile tactician, Karzai appears to have timed the decision to nationalize the ECC to coincide” with the Marja offensive, an embassy staffer wrote, “likely calculating that we would not wish to challenge him at this crucial juncture.”

  McChrystal’s aides would later boast of his political savvy for soliciting Karzai’s buy-in.

  “To this day,” Carter said, “I suspect Stan McChrystal doesn’t know it was actually Ahmed Wali Karzai who got this done.”

  7

  AN ORDINARY AFGHAN

  THERE WERE TIMES, as I landed in Kandahar, when I couldn’t distinguish the ground from the sky. Until you felt the jolt, there was nothing to orient you within the monochrome ochre, the layer of haze and hot dust that flared out in all directions, a stratum you dropped into with the feeling of a deep-sea diver leaving the rail. When you stepped out of the plane, the air was scalding and smelled like burned hair. Then you went into the city, in a whine of dirt bikes and clattering cargo trucks, along a thread of desert road under brown crags that looked like rotted teeth. The landscape had been scavenged and exhausted: evaporated riverbeds, baked and desiccated plains, gravel lots commandeered so that car parts and bright plastics could be sold out of the back of sawed-off shipping containers. During the day, the U.S. military’s surveillance blimps hung like low planets tethered over bases surrounded by razor wire. At night, you could listen to distant concussions and then watch the slow yellow drift of the illumination flares, leaving tails of white smoke against the dark sky. Everything about the city felt like a higher-proof distillation of the Afghanistan I had come to know in Kabul: more closed off, conservative, inscrutable, violent; more foreign in custom, and more brutal and unforgiving in its daily tournament for survival.

  The ruler of that city was Ahmed Wali Karzai. His men addressed him as Agha Mama, or “Father Uncle.” He lived in downtown Kandahar City in a concrete house on a barricaded street, guarded by Afghan police and his large retinue of bodyguards. Every day in the foyer of his home you could see hundreds of shoes, normally sandals of dirty plastic or dusty leather, discarded by the dozens of supplicants who crossed his threshold to seek his favor or to get one. The old and young men in turbans sat on the floor along the walls and in hallways, waiting for their chance to scale the stairs to the carpeted room on the second floor, ringed with red couches and hung with rose-print drapes, where he would be fingering a string of yellow prayer beads. He often wore a dark vest over a white tunic and usually went barefoot. The group that cycled before him represented a diverse cross section of Kandahar society: elders from tiny villages, gaunt farmers, policemen, parliamentarians. Whenever a new person entered the room, he would kneel before Ahmed Wali or kiss his hand. During the course of these rolling discussions, he would take calls on his multiple cell phones every few minutes, without the slightest regard to interrupting the speaker addressing him, and he conversed in Pashto, Dari, and English with equal ease. I once saw a man hand him a note; he read it quickly, then tore it into shreds.

  Ahmed Wali Karzai often gave one the impression of grim and harried impatience, a man who had too much to do, very little of it pleasant. His stubble had gone gray, and his mouth was pinched into a dour scowl. His foot tapped incessantly. He wore a pistol in a shoulder holster.

  He had many decisions to make, and he did not belabor them. One morning at his house, I watched him deal with the needs of seventy-three people in two hours. One group of men came to ask for a police checkpoint in their village; they were followed by another group who requested that their checkpoint be removed. Nine tribal elders needed his approval for the guest list of an important assembly. A young truck driver begged for a job recommendation—“if you’ll just sign this letter”—while an old man pleaded for his son’s release from American custody.

  “Is he in the Taliban?” Ahmed Wali asked.

  “Yes,” the old man said.

  “I cannot do anything now. Come on Saturday and we will talk.”

  His phone calls were brief. “I’m too busy,” he told a caller who wanted an invitation to an upcoming peace and reconciliation conference in Kabul. “Call me tomorrow at nine-fifteen and then we can figure out something and we’ll meet. What? Again you are removed from the list? Okay, I already talked to Wardak [the defense minister] about that. You will be on the list.”

  To the two women from Zabul Province who wanted his blessing to run for parliament, h
e immediately decided yes, but on one condition. “Please do not mention my name,” he told them. “There are many people who want my support.”

  He greeted everyone with the customary Pashtun greeting, stere meshe. Its meaning seemed particularly apt coming from him: “never be tired.”

  King Abdur Rahman, a nineteenth-century ruler of Afghanistan, once said that “the kingdom of Kabul, without Kandahar, was like a head without a nose, or a fort without any gate.” The city and the surrounding region of Pashtun tribes were central to the fortunes of anyone attempting to govern the country, which in the past couple of thousand years has tended to be done with a light touch. Afghanistan has rarely had anything resembling a strong central government. The British writer William Dalrymple described Afghanistan as less a state than “a kaleidoscope of competing tribal principalities governed through maliks or vakils, in each of which allegiance was entirely personal, to be negotiated and won over rather than taken for granted. The tribes’ traditions were egalitarian and independent, and they had only ever submitted to authority on their own terms.” He noted the Afghan proverb Pusht-e har teppe, yek padishah neshast: “Behind every hillock, there sits an emperor.”

  These mini-emperors, who came to be called warlords, tended to expect that whatever government was “in power” in Kabul would respect their authority and pay them for their loyalty and good behavior. Dealing with these men—modern-day examples were Ismail Khan in the western city of Herat or Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Muhammad Noor in the north—had been a central challenge for Karzai’s government. These people had initially been paid by the CIA to rally their militias to drive out the Taliban, then pushed by the Bush administration to demobilize their troops and turn in their large caches of artillery and other heavy weapons. When asked about Hamid Karzai’s greatest failures, critics within his government would often point to his coddling of these types of men.