A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  Even one of Hashmat’s allies told me that Hashmat had confessed to the killing, and that it was not a mistake or a failed attempt to kill Yar Mohammed. “He told me, ‘I want to show Yar Mohammed the way my grandmother felt.’ He wanted to break him physically and spiritually and mentally.”

  I eventually found Yar Mohammed’s own written statement about the attack. It confirmed this account. In his letter to Hamdullah Nazziq, the district governor of Dand—the area surrounding Karz—Yar Mohammed wrote that he had been sleeping in the next room that night when he heard screaming and shouting. “And I immediately grabbed my weapon to kill the armed men inside my house. When I fired at them, the murderers escaped.”

  “Eyewitnesses,” he wrote, “had seen two Surf SUVs—one brown and one blue—in the village many times before the incident, and which belonged to Hashmat Karzai, son of Khalil Khan Karzai. According to Waheed himself, who told his relatives at the hospital that one of the killers who had entered his room was a well-built, tall man in white clothes, whose name is Hashmat Karzai, who is the eldest son of late Khalil Khan Karzai. I am submitting this complaint letter and I am hopeful that you arrest the killer Hashmat Karzai, son of Khalil Khan Karzai, who killed my son and who fired at my son that night. His accomplices should be arrested too and should be tried in accordance with the Islamic sharia and should be punished for the crime and sin that they have committed.”

  10

  WHO’S RUNNING THIS PLACE?

  MAJOR JEREMY KOTKIN and Lieutenant Colonel Jim Bruha, two mid-level Army officers, were known as “Afghan hands.” The program they were a part of had been hatched at the Pentagon as a plug for the leak of institutional memory that was an annual rite of the Afghan war. It had become one of the more tired bromides of the war: American soldiers had not been fighting the Taliban for ten years, as calendars would attest, but instead had waged ten one-year wars, this seasonal wheel reinvention due to troop rotations, embassy summertime turnover, swapped-out ambassadors and commanders. Each year it seemed like the whole American enterprise would revert to learning the names of the provinces or that “afghani” meant the currency, not the people. The idea of the Afghan Hands program was to develop experts that stayed around. Modeled on the U.S. military’s China Hands project of the 1930s, the program committed several hundred soldiers to five-year terms. They studied Dari or Pashtu, as well as Afghan history and culture, and they alternated stints in-country with jobs back home that dealt with Afghanistan. The program was also intended to build the sense of commitment to Afghanistan among the officer corps, to underline the idea that this was a long-term problem and fixing it would require patience.

  Bruha and Kotkin were in the first class to sign up. Both were career Army planners. Bruha, forty-seven years old, had spent the last few years at Centcom in Tampa. Kotkin, younger and one rank below, felt it was his duty as an American to offer himself for such a long-term commitment. They touched down in Kabul on April 24, 2010, and found their bunks in a trailer on Camp Eggers, a downtown base used by ISAF soldiers who trained the Afghan army. Kotkin arrived believing he would be an adviser for the training command. Bruha expected to sit across town in the headquarters of U.S. Forces Afghanistan. Someone above them in the chain of command had different plans. A colonel informed them that their billets had changed, and they would be working at ISAF headquarters for the deputy chief of staff for stability, who, in customary NATO fashion, had no idea they were coming and passed them off to the deputy chief of staff for strategic partnership, an Australian two-star general named Ash Power. Three weeks passed before Bruha and Kotkin had their first meeting with the general, who correctly pointed out that they had been “thrown to the wind.”

  ISAF needed help in the palace. Less than a mile separated Karzai’s swivel chair from the flat-screen panels inside ISAF’s Situational Awareness Room, but as far as perspective went, the two places had almost nothing in common. What was to the military a successful kinetic operation to eliminate a high-value target was to Karzai the murder of an innocent Afghan farmer. Close-air support on an enemy compound meant firebombing someone’s home. The anti-corruption task forces and financial investigations looked to Afghan politicians like nonviolent weapons for sabotaging the president.

  The ISAF generals were frustrated with the public relations dissonance between their headquarters and the palace—two supposed allies in a state of divorce court disagreement—but their concerns went beyond that. The United States saw its mission as remaking Afghan institutions into something recognizable to the Western world. The way President Karzai did business—long phone calls about tiny matters, endless rambling chats with whatever bumpkin wandered into the palace, meetings unshackled by agendas or decisions—did not seem to them very efficient or presidential. Karzai’s political style was adopted from Afghan customs and the tribal conventions learned at the foot of his father, but it looked to the United States a lot like dysfunction. Karzai’s National Security Council, an institution created with coalition funding to mimic its White House counterpart as a coordinating body for wartime decision making, never seemed to coordinate anything. Karzai made his decisions without PowerPoint briefings or position papers, and when they were made, often nobody followed up. Each afternoon, his NSC staff would provide him with a document outlining the number of insurgent, Afghan, and coalition casualties that day, but he hated receiving it and often chose to ignore the report.

  As Karzai grew more embattled in his job, the flow of information and advice reaching him began constricting. Even staffers at the palace complained that it was getting harder to see him, as his inner circle shielded him from other views. Karzai was a “lonely and alone man,” one of the palace staffers informed the U.S. embassy. He was becoming convinced that everyone was “out to get him.” Karzai’s deputy chief of staff, Homayra Etemadi, had warned the embassy to be careful about what information they shared with her boss, because he might pass it along to Iran.

  The palace had become a web of hidden allegiances and concealed treacheries. “His methodology was consensus,” Robert Finn, the first post-Taliban U.S. ambassador to Kabul, told me. “So everything took forever to do, and decisions were often not made. He spent a zillion hours talking about something, he’d get it all decided, and then the next day he’d start it off as if he never had talked about it before. That’s not the best management style. It could be any issue—that was just the way things were, the way he ran his government. It was like a late-night TV show. You come in and sit in the chair next to him. You get your fifteen minutes. Then you move over to the couch and someone else comes in. Then you move down one and someone else comes in. By the end of the day, half the government is sitting in the president’s office. You know, who’s running this place if we’re all in here having tea?”

  ISAF decided that Kotkin and Bruha would be the ones to help. So the two Army planners ditched their fatigues, bought ill-fitting Afghan business suits, and, on a sunny Saturday in early June, walked under the watchtower and through the ancient fortress walls to go help President Karzai fight the Taliban. “As good Army field grade officers, we attacked our new billets with energy and passion,” Bruha would later write to his boss.

  “It was a great job,” Kotkin said. “On paper.”

  The National Security Council operated out of a two-story yellow concrete building adjacent to Karzai’s office in the Flower House. The Afghan NSC was intended to be Karzai’s inner circle, the body that would formulate foreign policy—the issues most important to Karzai—and buffer him against the powerful departments of defense, interior, and intelligence, which were controlled by his ethnic rivals. The Americans and Brits paid for the office and the refurbishment of its decrepit building. At the beginning, what the Afghans lost in sovereignty, they made up in protection. “We were looking for a framework. But we wanted things in return,” Daud Yaqub, one of the first members of the National Security Council, said of that early period. “We accepted the American presence. We knew there we
re liabilities. But our goal was to get American leverage against our archnemesis, which was Pakistan. We didn’t realize from the beginning that the United States didn’t see it that way. I hate to use [former CIA director George] Tenet’s words, but we thought the NSC in Kabul was a slam dunk. Given our stance against extremists, and Pakistan’s double-dealing with the United States, we thought we could replace Pakistan in the region, and America would be happy for us to do that.”

  In early bilateral arrangements, Karzai’s government agreed to pretty much all American demands. There was a notorious 2003 agreement between the two countries that gave free rein to American soldiers and civilians operating in Afghanistan, including immunity from prosecution and tax exemption for private contractors, that Afghans spent many years regretting. The American abandonment after the Soviet withdrawal coursed through the Afghan political fabric. Nobody in the palace, least of all Karzai, suspected that the United States would stay one day longer than its own self-interest deemed necessary. “Not in a million years I would have advised Karzai to sign the [agreement] if I had seen it; it was way too imbalanced,” one of the National Security Council staff members recalled.

  Before an early visit to Kabul by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Enayat Qasimi, a legal adviser in the palace, talked with Karzai about the prospects of formalizing a strategic partnership with the United States, to try to ensure that if they were going to have America as the benefactor and protector, it would be for many years to come. Qasimi researched the diplomatic arrangements America kept with its allies, such as Israel and NATO, and wrote up his concept in a brief memo in English. The policy in the early years of the Bush administration was minimalist: few troops, no nation building, ignore the nefarious characters; there wasn’t appetite yet for spending billions of dollars in Afghanistan. After Karzai read it, he told Qasimi he should rip up the memo and delete it from his computer. “It was too sensitive at the time,” Qasimi said. “He was not an elected president, he was still in the transition. But he was one hundred percent in favor of it. He would tell me all the time, ‘The survival of this country depends on what kind of relationship we can forge with the United States.’ ”

  By the time Kotkin and Bruha arrived, the mood in the palace toward Americans had changed dramatically. The two soldiers had been assigned to work with Mohammad Daud Yaar, who ran the policy and oversight department, one of seven departments in the National Security Council. Yaar was a former Kabul University professor and a Pashtun of royalist tribal lineage. He had escaped Kabul at a time when the Soviets had imprisoned several of his colleagues—a grudge some held against him—and he had been close with Ahmed Wali and other Karzai siblings during their restaurant years in Chicago. Yaar spoke English, and unlike many Afghans in Karzai’s entourage, he didn’t mind having two American soldiers roaming around inside the palace gates. “He’s as American as you or I. His wife was in California,” Bruha told me. Yaar had told their superiors, “If you send a couple of Americans over here, as long as they’re not in uniform, I can put them to work.”

  The office in the palace, along a polished marble hallway, had the veneer of officialdom, but it didn’t take them long to realize that very little was happening. The formal roster of the NSC listed more than one hundred employees—their salaries paid by the Americans and Brits—but only a third to half that number seemed to be showing up. Those who came to work didn’t appear to be approaching it with as much urgency as Kotkin and Bruha had expected. The layers of protocols and security and compartmentalized information that one could find in the White House hadn’t reached Kabul. The most sensitive Afghan government secrets were discussed over Nokia cell phones and between Yahoo e-mail addresses. Palace televisions were tuned to Bollywood soap operas. The power would go out for hours at a time.

  The Americans tried to be helpful. Bruha scavenged five computers from Camp Eggers to add to the NSC’s meager supply. He and Kotkin helped write the policy on transition to Afghan security control that got presented at a major conference in London that summer. They attended working groups on countering roadside bombs, fighting corruption, and controlling narcotics, and they helped write Afghanistan’s national security policy, a fifty-five-page document that detailed several sobering data points, including that the number of “terrorist incidents” for the year, 7,865, was nearly double that of two years prior, and that despite full-bore military operations, the ranks of the Taliban had reached 38,680 men (subdivided into 2,246 insurgent cells), up 32 percent over the previous year.

  Communications didn’t move through the bureaucracy as they had hoped. For instance, Yaar had approved Kotkin and Bruha to work in the palace, but his boss, the national security adviser, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, had not. That made things uncomfortable from the start. Each morning, palace guards would block the Americans’ entry, submitting them to endless pat-downs and body scans, despite their official badges. Carrying their weapons inside was prohibited, but so was carrying food, pens, aspirin, or lip balm (Bruha resorted to smearing a dollop behind his ear each morning, so that he had a supply throughout the day). One palace aide felt sorry for how they had to wait so long each morning just to get to their office. The aide told the guards to hurry them along, that the two Americans shouldn’t be forced to wait outside the gates. Only later did Kotkin learn that he was Mohammed Zia Salehi, the man arrested on corruption charges, then freed by President Karzai. “He was the nicest guy we knew in the NSC,” Kotkin said.

  “By the time Jeremy and I showed up, there was a real palpable sense of wanting us away from the palace,” Bruha said. “It was like, Who are these palefaces?”

  To help the skeptical Afghans, ISAF had designed elaborate charts brimming with acronyms that mapped out how Karzai’s palace ought to arrive at its decisions. The Office of the National Security Council (ONSC) was supposed to function as a “hierarchy of committees,” according to an ISAF terms of reference (TOR) paper describing the envisioned work flow. This included the Principals Committee (PC), the Deputies Committee (DC), and its subordinate the Security Operations Group (SOG), all meshing to “ensure that national security policy issues are properly analyzed and prepared for presentation to the NSC for consideration.” The DC, with a meeting every second Saturday, was supposed to study all Afghan policies related to national security and review the work of all interagency policy working groups (IPWGs), with the final agenda item of any DC meeting reserved for a backbrief by the SOG chair. The SOG, meeting on the fourth floor of the Ministry of Defense every Wednesday, would monitor the IPWGs and recommend “courses of action” to the DC. Then there was the DC/SOG Secretariat, the “organizing forum” for the above committees, whose duties included proposing agendas for DC and SOG meetings, drafting preparatory paperwork—“PowerPoint briefings, information papers, and reports”—at least two days prior to said meetings, arranging for simultaneous translation (Dari to English), and deciding if any new IPWGs should be created, all while ensuring “appropriate linkages, both higher to lower and vice versa” within the overall ONSC. After their meetings, occurring each Monday morning at ten-thirty a.m. in the small conference room, the chair of the DC/SOG Secretariat must then “back-brief the SOG and DC Chairs to ensure they concur with the agreed upon agenda and work plan.” And then each year these Terms of Reference would be reviewed and reinvented, “or at any time that DC/SOG Secretariat members deem appropriate.”

  As one might expect, almost none of this happened. NSC staffers regularly skipped meetings or disregarded the agendas ISAF helped them write. The SOG meetings would routinely go so poorly and be so mind-bendingly dull that Kotkin and Bruha would draw straws to see who got to skip them. The deputy national security adviser, Shaida Mohammad Abdali, would occasionally conduct the deputies’ committee meeting by telling the group members to talk among themselves.

  Rangin Dadfar Spanta, the national security adviser and top boss, was rarely seen by the Americans. He had a complicated reputation among the foreign diplomatic core. He was
friendly and avuncular, with his unruly Einstein hair and bushy mustache. In a game where American diplomats chose animals to describe prominent Afghan officials, he got pegged as a koala. Spanta had been a professor in Germany during his exile years. He sympathized with many of the American goals in Afghanistan, particularly taking on government corruption. And privately he could be one of the most cutting critics of Karzai’s administration. One evening we sat on the porch of his Kabul home, as we drank whiskey and he smoked a cigar, and he lamented that fate had placed him in Hamid Karzai’s government. He told me he was desperate to resign and would do so any day.

  Spanta never left the palace. His colleagues there would say that his image as a thoughtful, pro-Western academic belied a much harsher view of America’s project in Afghanistan. Kotkin and Bruha, who were supposed to be working for him, hardly ever saw him. Spanta spent far more time sitting by Karzai’s side than managing his national security staff. “As far as being hands-off, he was the chief of hands-off,” Kotkin said.

  —

  That lack of involvement struck Kotkin and Bruha as the norm. Many staffers didn’t seem to be spending much time on their official duties. Kotkin and Bruha had a running joke about one NSC employee who seemed to have no assignment at all. “He just sat in his office. Never attended a meeting,” Kotkin said. “He was a nice little guy. He just wanted to learn English.”