He quoted President Obama: “We keep at it, we will persevere, and together with our partners, we will prevail. I’m absolutely confident of that.”
“Now,” Eikenberry concluded, “let me introduce a great friend and our military partner here, General Dave Petraeus, just having arrived in Afghanistan yesterday. Dave, before I turn this podium over to you, I’d like to hand you our very own United States embassy access badge,” Eikenberry said, to tepid laughter. “It lets you know, on behalf of the over one thousand civilians serving here in Kabul and around this great country, our note to you: Welcome aboard. And you’re welcome at this embassy, as we say, twenty-four/seven. We look forward to being your teammates and to our continued combined success. Ladies and gentlemen, General David Petraeus.”
Petraeus had achieved celebrity status by then. He was the most famous man in the military, come to preside over his second surge. I had met him several times during his first one, in Iraq, which started as he stood under Saddam Hussein’s crystal chandeliers and marble columns, now converted into Camp Victory, and spoke in his earnest way about America’s “rucksack of responsibility” in a fight that was “hard but not hopeless.” It had been only three years since then, but Petraeus seemed far older. Although it had been somewhat obscured by his missionary haircut and Princeton-man credentials, the Top Gun–style cockiness would frequently peek through during his Baghdad years. On tours of bases in Baghdad, I’d seen him drop and challenge nineteen-year-old Marines to push-up contests, ripping off dozens or hundreds (I’d lose count) until the kids would fall out one by one, maybe out of deference to the chain of command, and Petraeus would pop up, beaming. He’d expect other generals to brief him while also trying to keep up with him on some grueling five-mile run in the searing Baghdad heat.
He typified for me an attitude that many top officers seemed to share (McChrystal and his one-meal-a-day regimen, with almost no sleep, was another): that an ascetic lifestyle, a punishing physical routine, and a numbingly long workday would translate somehow into a winning war strategy, as if self-denial were a weapon. Or maybe they just felt guilty that they were so far from the combat and didn’t want to appear soft.
The way Petraeus looked—to the audience back home—always seemed so important to him. I’d had colleagues who would do phone interviews with him during which he would speak his punctuation—for example: “The war is hard comma the hardest of my life comma but it is not hopeless period.” He was a good general for the media age: expert at appearances. He’d gotten angry during an interview with me one day when the photographer took a shot of him in his reading glasses as he scrutinized a document to reference some statistic. He said he didn’t want a glasses photo to undercut his image as a tough fighting man, and we all laughed at the joke. But he hadn’t been joking, and his spokesman called later, demanding that the photo be removed immediately from The Washington Post’s website.
In Kabul, he seemed different. Not just older, but slower, less engaged. People always quipped that he was recycling ideas from Iraq—the Afghan Local Police initiative an early and obvious example, hoping to re-create the Sunni Awakening project that helped take Anbar Province back from al-Qaeda (before ISIS then took it)—and how he would confuse place-names from the two countries. Some just assumed that he could tell that the Afghan war wasn’t a winner and he’d rather not have it stick to him too closely.
“Well, good morning to you all, salaam alaikum,” Petraeus said stiffly when he got to the podium. “And thanks, Ambassador. Thanks, Karl. For this wonderful badge. I feel like one of the team now. Persona grata.”
In this same flavor—attentive to appearances, but awkward and forced—the month after his arrival, Petraeus asked Sarah Peck, an elegant auburn-haired diplomat in the rule-of-law office at the American embassy, to join McMaster’s anti-corruption task force as its civilian co-director, on paper the general’s equal. At the time, Peck had a month left on her year-long tour at the embassy. The job offer no doubt surprised her. She had no prior relationship with either Petraeus or McMaster. But she was committed to the cause, both trying to avoid the waste of American tax dollars and improving the Afghan judicial system. The corruption issue had heretofore existed largely out of the military realm. Her job could bridge the civilian and military worlds. Eikenberry gave his grudging approval, although he made it clear that McMaster’s task force was not anywhere among his priorities.
As it turned out, Peck would not be entering the collaborative environment that Eikenberry and Petraeus sought to portray. In his first weeks, McMaster had already managed to infuriate many civilians at the embassy. He had no background in money laundering, organized crime, or state-sponsored corruption. He began recruiting experts he came across in his background reading and other soldiers and civilians he had known from earlier tours. The group was a hodgepodge of specialties: former fighter pilots, Rhodes scholars, counterintelligence officers, and Scotland Yard investigators. There were FBI officers and Treasury Department financial guys, military officers from the prestigious social science program at West Point, itinerant professors and brainy kids fresh out of grad school. The task force worked out of a small windowless double-decker metal shipping container. Peck’s desk was in an area known as “the pit.” Their offices sat close to the ISAF headquarters building, a white-shuttered, yellow concrete lodge at the center of the coalition’s walled-off mini-city in Kabul.
The ISAF HQ had housed an Afghan military officers’ club before the Soviet war; even earlier, the grounds had served a British cantonment from the First Anglo-Afghan War, in 1842. This was the campaign often invoked darkly by coalition soldiers on the base. The British general at the time, William Elphinstone, led an ignominious retreat from the base, a wintertime death march by thousands of troops and families, survived by a lone British army surgeon. When McChrystal took command in Kabul, he placed a replica map of Elphinstone’s route under his dining room table’s Plexiglas top—“to warn against hubris,” he said.
Military brass from forty-two nations traversed the grounds, a clashing coalition in their various epaulets and berets. HQ life was far removed from the rigors of the combat bases out in the field, where soldiers slept on cots, ate MREs encased in plastic, and burned their own feces. At headquarters, soldiers smoked cigars over poker games and wheeled away hours at spinning class. They could pray at morning mass and dance salsa at dusk. The U.S. military couldn’t drink, but the other soldiers could—by one count, fourteen bars could be found on the campus (until McChrystal decided to ban booze on campus, dampening the festivities). But ISAF still had an easy-living feel, with gardens and basketball courts and pine-tree-dappled shade on the gazebos. When you bought your cappuccino at the main base café, they gave you change in euros.
Inside the task force’s trailers, the atmosphere McMaster cultivated was one of desperate urgency. Soldiers usually receive lengthy orientations when they come into a country, a slow-motion weeks-long baton pass from their predecessors known as a “right seat ride.” His team had no such guide. They just had a vague goal: change the behavior of a country that Transparency International was ranking, at the time, as the second most corrupt country on the planet, behind Somalia. (Afghanistan would later fall into a tie for first.) McMaster wanted to understand the extent of the rot within the Afghan government, so his team began a months-long, round-the-clock research binge to write ISAF’s countercorruption strategy. This document would ultimately become codified as a classified annex to the war’s overall campaign plan. Such an intellectual pursuit, in the middle of days packed with appointments, briefings, and meetings, felt, as one participant put it, like “finals on steroids.”
McMaster’s bravado and intensity instilled in the mission a frenetic energy. He maintained the type of punishing pace that was demanded of ambitious generals. He worked seven days a week, often past midnight, racing by helicopter and Humvee from palace briefings to Afghan dinner parties to country team meetings at the U.S. embassy, swapping betwee
n fatigues and business suits. His staff bragged that he slept four hours a night. Even those who hated and feared him regarded him as brilliant. He was gregarious, profane, funny, impatient, and demanding. “He’s not a bull in a china shop,” said Paul Rexton Kan, a professor at the Army War College, whose book on Mexican drug cartels caught McMaster’s attention, and who spent a month in Kabul at his invitation helping to write the anti-corruption strategy. “He’s a bull who picks up the china shop and just smashes it.”
McMaster had a strong appetite for study and set aside time each day for reading. While working out on the elliptical trainer, he would jot notes and highlight magazine or journal articles. He’d then charge back to his office, the pockets of his cargo pants bulging with folded articles, which he’d drop off on his subordinates’ desks, pointing out new thoughts or observations. He loved ten-point lists. He would stay up all night rewriting papers. He would describe a problem and say, “We’re going to crush this.”
“What McMaster articulated was a charge to eradicate corruption in Afghanistan,” one of his team members recalled.
But how to define “corruption”? Which of its many varieties mattered to them, militarily? The way graft seemed to be interwoven in the politics and economy of the country defied easy categorization. Soldiers need an enemy. In this messy new economy overwhelmed with American cash, who was the enemy? Would they go after the people ripping off crates of hand sanitizer and paper plates from NATO cargo containers shipped in from Pakistan? Or Afghan civil servants charging bribes for driver’s licenses? Or couriers shuttling gold bars and bags of cash out of the country on airplane flights? Or policemen demanding roadside “donations”? Or Air Force generals running drugs? Or ministers getting kickbacks? Or Beltway bandits inflating contract costs? Or mercenaries paying off the Taliban? Or palace relatives and cronies? Or President Hamid Karzai himself?
It was the most important question that no one ever quite answered. McMaster had articulated a goal, but what exactly was the mission, and how would they complete it? As the team members sat at their laptops writing and rewriting campaign plan drafts, the scope only widened. Their “lines of effort” branched far afield of traditional soldiering, into economics and development, counternarcotics, civil society, rule of law, in addition to mapping out networks of criminals and reforming the Afghan national security forces. Days dragged into weeks, then months, and the task force still had not finished writing its plan. A Pentagon official flew to Kabul to tell McMaster that he was taking on too much. That the work was straying too far into high-level Afghan politics. That he didn’t have the staff to do a quarter of what he was proposing. His team began to worry about their mission. “The plan was a pig. It had no focus. It was across the entire spectrum,” one team member said. “Is he going after all corruption in Afghanistan? Because, wow.”
When the task force started looking, the stories of graft, greed, and insider deals poured into their offices faster than they could handle them. They selected cases from intelligence reports, detainee interrogation transcripts, newspaper articles, and from tips McMaster was picking up in conversations at the palace and parliament and government ministries around town. The scope of theft, bribery, and graft left them dazzled. An example of their startling conclusions: the rate of money being stolen, siphoned off, or pilfered from U.S. government contracts—what they called “shrinkage”—was as high as 50 percent. They believed that three-quarters of the money, weapons, and other supplies given to the Taliban were moving through official Afghan police checkpoints, rather than the mountain passes, goat trails, or dirt tracks that might be employed to try to avoid the authorities. Even those on the task force who had studied organized crime as academics or practitioners in other third-world countries felt like astronauts bounding on a new planet. “This was so much bigger than we realized,” one of them recalled.
“This was the first live kleptocracy I’d ever actually seen,” another said. “It was amazing what they were doing. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of our dollars just disappearing. It was mind-boggling.”
“I think corruption, broadly defined, was really at the core of why we were failing,” said Timothy Sullivan, a civilian who spent a year working under McMaster in Kabul.
In their early briefings around Kabul, members of Task Force Shafafiyat articulated a vision that declared that not even the petty corruption common in the region, or around the world, could be ignored. Low-level bribery had been “systematized into pyramid networks to prey on Afghans,” they explained at a conference in Kabul in late September 2010, according to the notes of one participant. So the idea of just treating this as petty corruption “would be to misunderstand the problem.” The task force would also attack the “criminal patronage networks” they saw as attempting to monopolize entire sectors of the economy: construction, mining, petroleum, trucking. Their recommendations—stop American aid that worsened corruption; cut off diplomatic support to the criminal networks—seemed to ignore the fact that thousands of new American troops and billions of additional dollars had just come to Afghanistan to fight on behalf of the Karzai government. But the disclaimer at the end of the briefing said a lot: “Beware that there is no example of an outside power ever solving the corruption problem of another country.”
When Peck started working in the pit, she was given no staff to help her. McMaster rarely had time to speak with her. His military staff would not inform her about his meetings or tell her which Afghan officials he was speaking with, or what they had talked about. Peck prepared a list of priorities she believed would narrow the scope of their work: McMaster should focus his reformist zeal on finding the fraud and waste in the money that the U.S. military was spending in Afghanistan. The Afghan military and police force was costing taxpayers more than $10 billion per year, and following that money would be difficult enough.
McMaster and his military aides dismissed her ideas and mocked her behind her back. One of them referred to Peck, a slender woman with reddish hair, as having a “head like a sun-fucked orange,” another task force member wrote in his diary.
(“If you had to go to the men’s room to take a dump, you’d say, ‘I have to go to the embassy to drop off a cable,’ ” Paul Rexton Kan recalled. “That’s how rancorous it was.”)
“HR just ignored her,” one of his team said. “The staff treated her like shit.”
Embassy diplomats started referring to the general as “McMaster-Disaster” and ignored his requests for information. What angered them was not just his rude behavior but also the grandiosity of his vision. He was proposing direct attacks on the government they were supposed to support. He made it clear that locking up corrupt members of President Karzai’s inner circle should be their goal. McMaster told them they were failing. Such bluntness, coming from a general with no experience in the subject, was galling, “a slap in the face,” as one embassy staff member put it.
“McMaster came in guns blazing: ‘We need to take down Karzai’s networks; we need to indict Karzai’s brother,’ ” the staffer recalled. “He had a preconceived notion of how to fight corruption, which was to hit Karzai over the head with a giant hammer.”
One State Department official in town from Washington asked McMaster how he planned to do all of this.
“First we’re going to go after the chumps, then we’re going to go after the pussies,” McMaster shot back. “Any questions?”
—
The idea for Kabul Bank began in the months following the American invasion, when business opportunities, for those undaunted by risk and violence, seemed boundless. Whole industries—telecom, private media, oil and gas, automobiles, construction—that were either undeveloped or nonexistent under the Taliban had to be built anew. Logistics and security firms funded by the American taxpayer were springing up to cater to the arriving foreign troops and their expanding network of bases. Aid money from America and Europe was inventing a new wartime economy. Before businesses could take off, they needed financin
g. In banking, Afghans with free-market plans, a bit of English, and some friends in the right places were discovering that they could become fantastically rich.
“Kabul Bank was my dream business,” Mahmood Karzai told me.
With his gated city under way in Kandahar, Mahmood began looking to extend his empire. Early in the war, he had been named chairman of the newly established Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce, an organization USAID had given $6 million to so that it could expand along with affiliated business groups. Mahmood was a relentless networker and constantly hatching plans for new business deals in Washington and Kabul. He had teamed up with several other Afghan entrepreneurs to start the Afghan Investment Company (AIC), with the intention of buying a cement plant in northern Afghanistan to supply the construction boom he imagined. After his friend Jack Kemp, the former NFL quarterback and U.S. senator, helped arrange some introductions, Mahmood flew to Tokyo to meet with Toyota officials and won the concession to sell Toyotas in Kabul when there were still few cars on the roads. A decade later, the streets would be in perpetual gridlock with Corollas. During one visit to Kabul by U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, Mahmood gave him a presentation on the obstacles to developing the Afghan private sector. There was a shortage of electricity; the few paved roads were potholed and in disrepair. Access to land and capital was difficult, and there was no clear economic vision, Mahmood never failed to mention, from his brother’s government.
Credit 8.2
Brigadier General Herbert R. McMaster, the head of ISAF’s anti-corruption task force, gives a speech at the National Military Academy of Afghanistan on December 8, 2011.
The relationship to wealth, as well as a larger interest in or knowledge of the economy, separated President Karzai from his siblings. While Mahmood was the clearest example, the other brothers, including Ahmed Wali in Kandahar, and Qayum in Baltimore, had a great hunger for wealth and ambitions for business dominance. Part of this seemed to come from their experiences in America, where these men from a distinguished Afghan family had had to gut out years as waiters and busboys in suburban chain-hotel restaurants. Hamid Karzai had had an easier path when it came to money. After college, he’d been welcomed into the fold of one of the political parties in exile in Pakistan, thanks to his father’s connections, and eased into his career as a politician and diplomat. But he had never been particularly interested in wealth or material objects. Many of his childhood friends and acquaintances have remarked on his penchant for giving things away. An old man who’d been a servant for the family in their village of Karz once told me a story about Hamid and his pet horse, Almond Blossom. The servant used to spend hours walking alongside Hamid as he rode down the dirt lanes that wove through the grape orchards. Hamid wanted to repay him for all his time, but he didn’t have any money. Instead, Hamid offered his bicycle. “He told me, ‘Look, I don’t have cash, but I’ll give you this bicycle and you can sell it.’ ” The servant remembered him as unusually generous for a child.
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