A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  “That was always a big debate: Should we include them?” recalled Said Tayeb Jawad, one of Karzai’s early chiefs of staff. “Karzai insisted that we had to include them and they had to be part of the system. That was a source of some frustration among the more idealistic people who were around him. In his calculation, there was really no force to confront these people.”

  Jawad remembered that Karzai set this tone at the emergency loya jirga in June 2002, the gathering of some fifteen hundred Afghan delegates to choose their transitional government. Jawad had worked on the seating chart for the event and had agreed with the international community that Afghans who had attended the Bonn conference would sit in the front row, facing the stage. At the opening of the event, Karzai noticed that old jihadi commanders like Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Burhanuddin Rabbani were sitting farther back. From the podium, he called out to them and told them to move up to the front row, forcing newly selected cabinet ministers to move back. “A minister stands up and vacates his seat for someone who has no role in the government?” Jawad recalled years later, still incredulous. “This was a small gesture, but of great symbolic significance.”

  Instead of sidelining or even arresting the warlords, Karzai brokered deals that gave them governorships and cabinet posts, where they could siphon customs revenue from border crossings or divert funds from ministry budgets for personal use. Karzai saw it as a necessary sacrifice for national unity and to prevent further civil war. He also had few other options at his disposal. Karzai never had much leverage of his own, apart from the implicit military backing of the United States, and that support tended to be unreliable. In the early years of his presidency, the United States had Karzai on what one military commander called a “dual-key system.” The United States did not allow Karzai to deploy Afghan forces anywhere without American approval. But his accommodation of the warlords sent the message that nearly any crime was acceptable as long as the criminals were not openly fighting his government.

  “A lot of people who are now significant players in Afghan politics and the parliament, we were thinking they’d end up in Guantánamo Bay,” Jawad said. “But instead what took place was to allow them to loot half of the national resources, the lands, the government resources. That was the mistake.”

  By the time the Obama administration came to power, Ahmed Wali Karzai was the preeminent warlord in Kandahar, fully sanctioned by his brother’s government. On paper, his job was chairman of the Kandahar Provincial Council, but his duties far surpassed that humble position. On one level, he served as a bridge between the new government—a democratic experiment obviously funded and largely designed by the Western coalition—and the older ways of the Pashtun tribes. It was his duty to extend the feeble writ of that government to Kandahar and the southern region by whatever means required, including coercion or bribery or threat. He faced the task of ensuring that his Popalzai tribe was satisfied with its share of U.S. military contracts, the primary spoils of war available for Afghans. There was also the job of keeping other tribes subservient but not so disenfranchised that they would defect to the Taliban. In addition, he had to supply American soldiers and diplomats with whatever favors they demanded. He was always pragmatic and unsentimental in these duties.

  All of this played out in the daily procession to his well-fortified door. In the meetings I saw, Ahmed Wali often made a perfunctory attempt to refer people to the official channels—the governor, the police chief, the intelligence service—but most of them took such suggestions as little more than a polite gesture. Even the illiterate peasants knew that very little got accomplished at the governor’s mansion. Kandahar’s governor, Toryalai Wesa, who has dual Canadian-Afghan citizenship, would spend months debating with his coalition advisers all sorts of barely relevant minutiae: whether solar-powered streetlights were a good idea and, if so, what the proper voltage would be; whether Wesa should have his own newspaper, as he wanted, or if print media was passé. Nothing ever seemed to get done. “You’re the only real man in the government,” one of the villagers told Ahmed Wali one day while I was visiting. “You have the power. I’ll always keep coming to you.”

  Just like his siblings, Ahmed Wali had lived in America and had gotten his start in the restaurant business. In Kandahar, he loved to host lavish feasts for hundreds of people. He would personally make sure that everyone had been served before he sat down and picked up a plate. He embodied the Pashto adage “There is no khan without the tablecloth.” Even at his most powerful, there was something of the caterer about him.

  One hot day in the summer of 2010, I spent the morning at his house, watching as he catered to people with a wide range of problems. After a few hours, he paused and looked at his Rolex. It was noon. He stood up, hurried downstairs, and slipped into the back seat of a white armored Land Cruiser. I sat next to him. One AK-47 was propped between us; another rested on his far side. He had to be careful wherever he went. There had already been several attempts on his life, including attacks on his house and ambushes on his convoy. “The seventh bomb to target me was so big that hundreds of cats fed on human flesh for days afterward,” he once said.

  Ahmed Wali didn’t like to make well-publicized appointments or telegraph his movements. He varied the routes on which he was driven and always had plenty of security. I looked behind and saw that three trucks filled with armed guards were following us. “I’m the most wanted person by the enemy,” he said.

  As we drove, Ahmed Wali indulged in a moment of self-pity. He was forty-nine years old and felt underappreciated. He saw himself as a selfless public servant, “the Nancy Pelosi of Afghanistan,” as he’d once told me. “All I try to do is help people. I gain nothing from this,” he said. “I feel responsible for the people, you know. This is our society. Our society is not an educated society. People are still living in a very old traditional way. They think I am the president’s brother, I can deliver. They come to me, and it’s good. I talk to the police, I talk to the governor, to help.”

  “I know how to talk to the people,” he said. “I know how to deal with these tribes. I know what their needs are. I know how to address their needs. This is the skill I have learned.”

  He told a story about when he’d lived in Chicago, as a younger man. He had sent in his green card to apply for a U.S. passport, and it disappeared. He tried calling the appropriate agencies and couldn’t get a straight answer. “I would be on hold for twenty minutes, and it was a long-distance call,” he said. So he looked up the name of his local congressman and called his office. “I called his staff and said, Look, I voted for him, and now this is a problem.” He got the name of an immigration official to call and soon had his green card and passport back. The moral of his story was that politics involved a social contract. “They give you something and you have to return it. This is how it is,” he said. “You have to return the favor.”

  A few minutes later, we pulled in to the Mandigak Palace, where the provincial council held its meetings. A week earlier, Ahmed Wali had unilaterally declared that the council was on strike after the Defense Ministry had angered him by accusing him and his brother Mahmood of illegally confiscating government land for Aino Mena. The attorney general had subsequently agreed to lead an investigation into the issue, which satisfied Ahmed Wali, who believed the inquiry would clear his name. So he’d come to announce that the provincial council was now open for business. He adjourned into a back room with the governor and other top officials, then emerged an hour later and stepped up to a bank of microphones. “In front of the media I want to say that if I have ever confiscated one handful of land, I am ready to be brought to justice,” he stated. “The authorities should treat me like an ordinary Afghan.”

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  By this time, Ahmed Wali’s behavior had made him a painful dilemma for the United States. On one hand, he was consistently helpful to the American, British, and Canadian soldiers who sought his assistance, as well as the CIA and MI6 officers who had been paying him a salary since t
he early days of the war. And yet years of accumulated stories etched a portrait into the popular culture of a power-mad politician who traded on the family name to dominate the business life of Kandahar: opium, private mercenaries, NATO development contracts, transit trade, cross-border smuggling, used-car sales, real estate, arms trafficking—anything southern Afghanistan had to offer. When you met Afghans in Kandahar in those days, it was common to hear Ahmed Wali blamed for extortion, kidnappings, political assassinations, and drug trafficking, as well as manipulating army, police, and civil service appointments and demanding cuts of foreign military contracts. He was the most dangerous man in the country’s most dangerous town. American soldiers referred to him as the “Godfather”; Afghan newspapers, as “Little President.”

  Kandahar was not just the most valuable prize in the war against the Taliban; it was also to be a model for local government serving the people, which made such arrangements of convenience with questionable allies like Ahmed Wali harder to justify. Even as the fighting in Helmand trudged on, U.S. military planners were looking past it, toward a summertime offensive in Kandahar, where they felt the war would be won or lost. If the Americans were going to beat the insurgents in Kandahar, it would mean coming to terms with Ahmed Wali. The strategy of McChrystal and his aides didn’t allow for people like him, though; as they saw it, the Afghan government had become so painful to the common man, so accustomed to bribery and extortion, so ineffectual at solving crime, adjudicating property claims, supplying electricity or clean water, fielding an impartial, or even sober, police force, doing anything that a government might be expected to do, that scores of the young and unemployed were taking to the hills with their Kalashnikovs to join the Taliban. The Kandahar offensive would be more than foot patrols and house searches. The goal looked more like a reinvention of Afghan society.

  I had traveled with State Department officers as they counted the men showing up at village councils and calculated how many from each tribe should be attending in order to have a representative sample based on area population estimates. In air-conditioned offices at Kandahar Airfield, U.S. military contracting officers scrolled through their road-building and ditch-digging contract spreadsheets to find out how many dollars were going to each tribe and who was going without. They wanted a new democracy that would be inclusive and responsive and provide services—power, water, health care, justice—to people who had none. Many people trying to defeat the Taliban in Kandahar felt that none of their efforts would be credible if they allowed a mafia boss like Ahmed Wali to run the town.

  When Bill Harris arrived in late November 2009 as the senior American diplomat in Kandahar, he was eager to take Ahmed Wali on. Harris was sixty years old, balding, with the amiable gruffness of a man happy to be out of a cubicle and on the front lines. He’d spent most of his career in Latin America but was familiar with Afghanistan; in 2002, he’d spent a few months as political adviser to General Dan McNeill, then the top military commander. Harris’s roommates at Bagram Airfield had happened to be the guys running the war nearly a decade later: Stanley McChrystal, Nick Carter, the military intelligence officer Mike Flynn. Harris had since retired and was living in Colorado Springs, but he’d quickly agreed to another tour when the Kandahar job had come open. In his pre-deployment briefings at the State Department and elsewhere in Washington, Harris had sensed a confrontational mood. “There was kind of an appetite for, you know, ‘We didn’t get Hamid in the election. We missed. It was not the head shot we were looking for. So what we’re going to do is teach them a lesson. Teach them to heel. And the way we’re going to do that and help ourselves at the same time is to get rid of this pesky brother, so that we can have good governance in the south.’ ”

  “I was ready to do battle with AWK,” Harris said.

  One of the ways he planned to do that was to freeze out Ahmed Wali and throw American support fully behind Toryalai Wesa, the appointed governor. The operating theory was that insurgents were fighting because there was a weak government, and if Wesa could make it stronger and create a connection between the people and their government, that would dry up the insurgency. The problem with that theory was that many Kandaharis considered Wesa a carpetbagger and a foreign stooge. The son of a newspaper editor, Wesa had founded Kandahar University, then immigrated with his wife to Canada in 1991. In his years abroad, he got his doctorate in agricultural economics and taught at the University of British Columbia. He was squat and placid, tortoise-like in demeanor. He cared about agriculture and education but had little flair for the combat of tribal politics. Unlike Ahmed Wali’s home, an incessant hive of commotion, the governor’s mansion was a tranquil backwater, an eddy of inactivity.

  “Wesa was a wet fish,” one of the American generals in Kandahar told me.

  Wesa got his job because of his friendship with the Karzai family and served at their pleasure. His “service,” however, left both Afghans and Americans unenthralled. He had scant backing from any of the Kandahar tribes. He sat under chandeliers in his wood-paneled office, books about agricultural extension on his desk, treated largely as a token to America’s democratic experiment. His weakness meant he rarely challenged Ahmed Wali, who was dismissive of the governor in his discussions with the U.S. military, on different occasions calling him “half Canadian” and saying that “he does not act like a leader in Kandahar should act.”

  “Whenever Wesa received instructions from the Karzai brothers, he never objected to that, even if it was sacking department heads,” said Hameed Wafa, who worked with Wesa in his office for three years as a translator and cultural adviser for the U.S. military. “He was basically an assistant for Ahmed Wali Karzai.”

  Ahmed Wali would regularly attend the meetings at the governor’s palace, and his word, everyone acknowledged, was last and final. Everyone, including Wesa, owed their jobs to him. Across the province, he could choose or fire local officials, police chiefs, prison directors, intelligence operatives. Kandahar had 110 local water representatives, one for each of the canals that thread through the province, and they regularly met to divvy up the supply of water, the region’s scarcest and most valuable resource. For most of the war, these meetings took place in Ahmed Wali’s house.

  “People did defer to him, even people who came down from Kabul, it was quite evident,” said Neil Clegg, a Canadian diplomat who served as Wesa’s adviser.

  Hamid Karzai had removed Gul Agha Sherzai from his governorship in Kandahar in 2003—far later than Ahmed Wali wanted—and summoned him to Kabul. Sherzai’s new position, minister of public works, was the equivalent of exile. He was eventually granted another lucrative governorship in Nangarhar Province, which he held for years, but his family’s contest for the spoils of Kandahar never ceased. Before Sherzai’s departure, “Wali Karzai was not a factor” in national politics, recalled Amrullah Saleh. “He became a factor after President Karzai pushed Gul Agha out.”

  Subsequent governors who didn’t serve at the pleasure of Ahmed Wali weren’t in their jobs for long. As a young man, Rahmatullah Raufi had served in the military forces under Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum and worked in a Kazakh meat factory cleaning sheep intestines. He rose through the ranks of the Afghan army and became a general in the mid-1980s, and later a corps commander in Kandahar and the deputy head of operations in the Ministry of Defense. He had a regal bearing and a bushy black mustache. He had resigned after disagreements with the minister, and he was taken aback when President Karzai summoned him to the palace to offer him his first civilian post, as governor of Kandahar.

  “It was really surprising for me, but I think the reason they decided to send me to Kandahar was that I had experience working there before, and I believe they thought I would say yes to whatever they would tell me, and they expected me to be part of their corruption,” he told me in his modest home on a hillside in Kabul. He took office in August 2008, and shortly thereafter “some sticking points started appearing between me and Ahmed Wali Karzai.”

  T
hey disagreed on personnel decisions within the local government. For example, Raufi did not support Ahmed Wali’s representative to lead the education ministry, a man he believed was uneducated and had forged his résumé. Ahmed Wali, as Raufi recalled, had a “long hand” and would appoint district governors and police chiefs—often fellow Popalzais—some of whom Raufi approved; others he tried to fight. Through the Ministry of Information and Culture, Ahmed Wali could censor local newspapers, radio, and television broadcasts, give speeches, and issue decrees. He would send letters to the local judiciary, the police, and customs officials with personal instructions. He would call Raufi on his cell phone and issue orders. “I told him, ‘Look, I am the representative of President Karzai and I report to President Karzai himself. You are the head of the provincial council. You have a certain job, I have my own certain job. If you want to cooperate with me, you’re welcome, and if you need my help, I’m more than happy to offer it, but I don’t want to work under a second authority.’ By the time I was appointed governor, Ahmed Wali Karzai was so powerful, and he had been controlling all of my predecessors. And he expected me to obey him and work under him.”

  Raufi’s salary was $700 a month. He believed it was unfair that Kandahar’s mayor, Ghulam Haider Hamidi, a lifelong friend of the Karzai family, earned several times more. As governor, he ordered Hamidi’s salary frozen for three months, until repeated pressure from Qayum Karzai and others changed his mind. Raufi further provoked the ruling family when he arranged to have a large shura gathering of Pashtun tribesmen and refused Ahmed Wali’s request to chair the meeting.