Threats were often as effective as actual violence. The chancellor of Kandahar University, Hazrat Mir Totakhail, once held his Nokia cell phone out to me with a nervous hand. “We’ve warned you many times to stop working with the government,” the text message read. “Just keep counting the days of your life. Your death has been approved.” Of the 120 job slots budgeted for Kandahar’s municipal government, about forty people were willing to show up to work. The governor’s office had a similar shortfall. Even those numbers tended to overstate the staffing, as many of those employees served in menial jobs such as cooks, gardeners, or tea boys. In the four key rural districts around the city—Zhari, Panjwayi, Arghandab, and Dand—the U.S. military had identified forty-four jobs that were necessary to maintain a minimally functional government. Twelve of those positions were filled. Kandahar City had about half a million residents and hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military construction projects, but for months the municipality had a single engineer. The incentives sufficient to entice people to risk working in Kandahar were in other fields. An Afghan in Kandahar working for the U.S. military or an American contracting firm could easily bring home $1,000 a month. At city hall, he would earn $70.
Some of these problems were insurmountable, but Carter wanted at least to staff the local positions with people who wouldn’t fight against the NATO coalition. He also wanted to spread the wealth among tribes, to ease some of the rivalries. Tribes that got excluded from political power or the bounty of ISAF largesse had a greater incentive to fight. (Carter’s intelligence officers estimated that NATO contracting from Kandahar Airfield—the whole avalanche of goods needed for an installation with thirty thousand people—generated about $1 billion a year, 95 percent of which went to two extended families: the Karzais and the Sherzais.) Therefore, the distribution of government appointments—the first step to dipping one’s straw into the aid gusher—should reflect the proportionate tribal makeup in any given area. This made sense as an abstract exercise in fairness (ignoring the fact that it was exactly the kind of gift-giving patronage ISAF was battling with the Karzai administration about).
You could sketch out a rough guide to Kandahar along tribal lines. Achekzais controlled the border out at Spin Boldak. Alokozais ran the Arghandab Valley. Noorzais smuggled whatever they wanted. Barakzais manned the Kandahar airport. Popalzais dominated government. Mohammadzais, the tribe of the governor, boasted royal lineage, education, and bureaucratic standing. Yet dissident factions and cross-tribal allegiances muddied the waters so much that it was dangerous to guide such decisions by tribal maps. And no American on a one-year military tour in Kandahar could know enough about the players and their web of personal histories and back-channel communications to safely assess whether some deputy provincial customs officer Ahmed Wali was nominating would be a service to redistribution and fairness or a lackey to further his empire and enrage his enemies.
The real arrangements existed beyond the knowledge of the American military, in what one Canadian adviser to the Kandahar governor referred to as the “Afghanosphere.” But Americans couldn’t function in that world. So they needed people like Ahmed Wali Karzai. “We unashamedly used him to manipulate the politics of Kandahar to get the right governors in the right places,” one of the people involved said. “Ahmed Wali, throughout that process, could not have been more helpful.”
The commanders liked Ahmed Wali because he could decipher the bewildering array of tribal grudges and allegiances of the most obscure village. The Afghans who worked with the Americans were often embarrassed by how little the Americans actually knew about Afghanistan. The basic intelligence presented as fact was often inaccurate, recalled Abdullah Sharif, an Afghan-American adviser to the State Department in Kandahar. “Just the basic stuff was wrong: tribal affiliations, political alignments.”
Having lived in the United States, Ahmed Wali could see the war with both foreign and domestic eyes. Soldiers found him astute at anticipating their concerns. Stephen Bowes, a Canadian colonel (later a general) who served in Kandahar in 2005, recalled a provincial council meeting where a human rights group presented complaints about the Pashtun custom of arranging marriages for child brides. As another council member started mocking the presenter, Ahmed Wali interjected, trying to assure Bowes about the societal context and his concern over the issue.
“He was exposed to the Western mentality but was also trying to convey to me: We’re living in an area that is very poor and uneducated,” said Bowes. “He was trying to sensitize me to the fact that it would take years to change.”
Ahmed Wali was valuable. The month after the “deep dive” into his dealings, American diplomats presented him with what they called their “red line” plan. There were five main points. He was not to interfere in government appointments (except when asked by ISAF). He was not to block people from attending tribal gatherings. He was not to disrupt “the rule of law.” They wanted him to refrain from taking advantage of Afghan or NATO contracting. And he had to transfer his private militia forces over to the Afghan government. If he violated these rules, ISAF would consider itself justified to act against him. In practice, these rules were vague enough that Ahmed Wali won a free pass to act any way he chose.
Ahmed Wali dispensed advice of all kinds, including where the U.S. military should spend its money. He told a Special Forces commander that townspeople in one village would leave the Taliban once they had jobs. He suggested buying the village five thousand hammers so the men could break rocks into gravel. “I know you need a lot of gravel,” Ahmed Wali told the commander. He failed to mention his family was in the gravel business.
During meetings with U.S. military officers, Ahmed Wali lobbied for what he called the Helmand River Project. He wanted the soldiers to build a massive canal running from the Helmand River through the deserts of Zhari and Maiwand, an infrastructure project that would turn swaths of desert into fertile farmland and ignite the local economy. General Terry’s military intelligence officers later learned that Ahmed Wali had been buying up land along the proposed canal route. If the Americans built the canal that land would instantly become far more valuable. The soldiers declined.
Ahmed Wali found ISAF new district governors in Khakrez, Panjwayi, and Zhari (although two of the three men would get assassinated). He persuaded Governor Wesa to appoint a new police chief for Kandahar City (who would also be killed). He lobbied President Karzai to support American military operations as they prepared to ramp up for an offensive in Kandahar. Karzai felt U.S. military operations were causing too much damage in Pashtun parts of the country, which happened to be where the insurgency was based. Ahmed Wali, at the behest of the U.S. military, pushed to win Kandahar’s tribal support for these operations, and he convinced the president to come to Kandahar and speak to the people directly.
Credit 12.1
Hamid Karzai visits Nawa, in Helmand Province, on January 2, 2010.
Frank Ruggiero, one of the American diplomats who attended this shura gathering, remembered how Ahmed Wali was at his most solicitous during it. Ruggiero had told Ahmed Wali that the gathering was an important gauge of public opinion, and he didn’t want it stage-managed in any way. Ruggiero knew that Ahmed Wali would ultimately decide who attended. But he felt it was important for President Karzai to hear a realistic sample of public opinion, not just canned support. Some fifteen hundred tribal elders from across southern Afghanistan showed up to meet with President Karzai in a sweltering room in the governor’s compound. One after another, the elders spoke about their fears of a U.S. military offensive. They worried about the harm that would come to innocent civilians and the damage to their homes and crops. They didn’t believe the Taliban could be defeated. President Karzai told the crowd that he sympathized with their concerns.
“Afghanistan will be fixed when its people trust that their president is independent and not a puppet,” he said. “We have to demonstrate our sovereignty. We have to demonstrate that we are standing up for our values
.”
Karzai asked the crowd whether they were happy about the upcoming military operation. A loud murmur echoed across the vast meeting room.
“We are worried!” one man shouted at the president.
“Listen to me carefully: until you’re happy and satisfied, we will not conduct this operation,” Karzai said, to loud applause.
For the Americans, the shura was a disaster. The president had distanced himself from their operation. The residents had expressed their anger and bitterness. Once again, the Afghan allies didn’t look much like allies. After the meeting, Ahmed Wali rushed over to Frank Ruggiero, beaming with delight.
“So, did I deliver?” Ahmed Wali asked.
“Did you deliver what?”
“All those messages were really negative, right?”
Ruggiero sighed. “Uh, yeah. It was a great shura.”
A few months after Ahmed Wali’s official ISAF exoneration, a distraught Afghan man walked up to the guards at the gates of Camp Nathan Smith, on the east side of Kandahar City. The man said he needed to speak to the foreigners in private. He was ushered past the dirt-filled barriers and down corridors of chain-link fencing, into a compound that had once been a fruit-canning factory. Inside was an oasis, smaller and more pleasant than Kandahar Airfield, larger and more comfortable than the numerous gravel-and-moon-dust combat outposts farther afield. There were fountains and palm trees in a central courtyard, unlimited mini-cartons of Häagen-Dazs in the cafeteria, evening outdoor movie screenings, and a walled-in swimming pool. The visitor claimed that a relative of his was being held in a secret prison run by Ahmed Wali.
The relative owed Ahmed Wali a debt. He had been captured and was being held in a building east of the city, along the road to the Pakistani border. There were other prisoners, he said. The man was beside himself and needed help. He had nowhere else to turn. The news was not necessarily out of context for the local milieu (“The Sopranos come to Deadwood,” one soldier called Kandahar). A few years earlier, a former provincial governor, Asadullah Khalid, had been accused of running a secret basement torture chamber inside the governor’s mansion. The Afghan mercenaries who guarded Camp Nathan Smith were once led by a man whose nickname was “The Skinner.”
Still, diplomats on the base found the torture allegation startling; the Canadian intelligence analyst who took the man’s statement was “extremely upset,” one of his superiors told me. “He thought we could be accomplices to war crimes.” Word trickled up to Bill Harris, the senior American on base. U.S. soldiers from a military police unit followed up and drove to the location. The MPs found a private house with jail-like fortifications: bars on the windows and heavy metal doors, all locked. The soldiers discovered the man’s relative languishing inside, along with other prisoners. He told them he owed Ahmed Wali money and that he’d been in jail for six weeks. “They were ransoming him against the debt,” Harris said.
The soldiers made another trip to the jail, but that was the extent of it. “The MPs didn’t want any part of it after that,” Harris said. “That would have been something we turn over to the police. We had a report. It’s credible. We’re turning it over to you.”
A Canadian official on the base would remember that episode for a long time. A CIA officer came to interview the Canadian analyst about the man’s visit, but the American spy was inscrutable. The Canadian knew that Ahmed Wali got paid by the CIA. “It was like, ‘Okay, you caught us, you know about it,’ without making any admissions.”
Stories in Afghanistan often didn’t have endings any more satisfying than that. This one was no exception. The secret prison would be another ghostly suggestion of the darker side of the American partnership with Ahmed Wali.
“We found that one,” the Canadian said. “That doesn’t mean there weren’t others.”
—
Four of the U.S. Army’s eight-wheeled eighteen-ton mine-resistant Stryker armored vehicles had just been bombed into submission. They stood immobilized off Highway 1, at the point where an earlier bomb had blown a hole in the asphalt, forcing traffic to detour through the dirt along the shoulder. The U.S. trucks required to haul away the wreckage had arrived. At the same time, Taliban fighters were reeling a wire used to detonate bombs into a mud-walled compound, the sort of trap the American soldiers fighting there had seen before, while U.S. commanders discussed the potential consequences of firing their own explosives to level the Taliban compound. Right at the top of Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey French’s list of concerns that dangerous day, when fourteen bombs either exploded or were found in the same patch of dirt, was the row of Afghan cargo trucks waiting to get past this complicated mess, a line that stretched far into the desert. “I don’t want to be piling up massive amounts of coalition force vehicles,” French radioed to his soldiers before leading his convoy out of the congestion and clearing a path for traffic. “It doesn’t really send a good message.”
For the 5th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, deployed around Kandahar, the mission was not killing insurgents but facilitating what they called “freedom of movement.” By allowing the safe flow of commerce and travelers on the highways—particularly the ring road the U.S. government had helped pay to rebuild earlier in the war—they hoped to fan to life the region’s economic embers. Their mission was central to the overall military strategy for Kandahar. By establishing a cordon of coalition forces around the city, military commanders hoped to encourage people to get on the roads, restoring a semblance of normalcy. One of the biggest obstacles to this mission, French and his subordinates in the thirteen-hundred-man battalion soon realized, were the men hired to protect their supplies. Security guards who traveled with the coalition supply convoys up and down the highways would often fire their guns indiscriminately as they drove through villages. This would provoke the Taliban or the villagers to fire back, frightening people off the roads and adding to the atmosphere of danger and lawlessness.
One of the worst offenders was known to be Watan Risk Management. The company, owned by two Karzai family cousins, Rashed and Rateb Popal, had become one of the most powerful in the world of military contracting. The brothers, who had lived in the States, both had checkered pasts. Rateb Popal had spent nearly a decade in prison in the United States for smuggling heroin. Rashed had also pled guilty to conspiracy to import heroin and received probation. But these blemishes did not dissuade the coalition from rewarding them handsomely. The Canadian government hired the company to provide security on its signature foreign-aid project: the renovations of the Dahla Dam reservoir, outside Kandahar. But the most lucrative contract was known as Host Nation Trucking. Watan was one of eight firms to win a $2.2 billion contract (which amounted to more than 10 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP) to deliver U.S. military supplies to bases across the country. Watan’s role was to provide protection, in the form of heavily armed guards, for the six to eight thousand NATO supply convoys that each month delivered Pop-Tarts, toilet paper, Humvee fuel, Entenmann’s muffins, lobster, sleeping cots, flat-screen televisions, or anything else the two hundred military bases might require.
Credit 12.2
American and Afghan soldiers patrol a portion of Highway 1 outside Kandahar.
One of the company’s leading mercenaries was a man named Ruhullah, a Popalzai who’d grown up in a village next to Karz. He’d been recruited by Ahmed Wali to work with the U.S. Special Forces early in the war and went on to command a private security guard force of some six hundred men. His nickname was “The Butcher.” American soldiers had arrested him for drug trafficking in 2009, after allegedly finding heroin in his house. Both U.S. and Afghan officials told me that Ahmed Wali had persuaded American commanders to free him after less than two weeks in detention. “The Karzais got him out of prison, and the issue was silenced,” a senior Afghan official in Kandahar said. “It was covered up.” Ruhullah admitted, as part of a later lawsuit, that he was released thanks to his relationship with the Karzais (although he claimed he was arrested beca
use of tension between Watan and ISAF, rather than drugs).
Ruhullah claimed to be responsible for guarding thirty-five hundred U.S. supply trucks each month, and he charged as much as $1,500 per truck for his services. His income, in 2009, was $12 million. From his fees, Ruhullah, and mercenary commanders like him, would then pay to ensure safe passage for their convoys. These were not small operations. The average convoy consisted of three hundred trucks, and they would be accompanied by four hundred to five hundred guards in gun-mounted Toyota pickups. These payments went to Afghan police and army officers, intelligence agents, district and provincial governors, and Taliban commanders—anyone who could claim control over any stretch of road. The price tag per policeman was $1,000 to $5,000 per month, Ruhullah said, but he “must pay them. There is no other way.”
In December 2010, after Ruhullah’s statements to congressional investigators about these bribes, the U.S. Army attempted to prohibit Watan from receiving future contracts. In a memo justifying that decision, a lawyer with the procurement fraud branch of the Army’s contract and fiscal law division wrote that on May 14, 2010, the Afghan government had suspended Watan after two incidents when its guards had fired on civilians. “In the immediate aftermath of this suspension, multiple attacks were made on ISAF supply convoys, resulting in the closure of Highway 1 to further resupply convoys. Two weeks later, after approximately 1,000 trucks were stranded on the highway, this suspension was lifted. No further attacks were made on ISAF convoys following the termination of the suspension.”
A Kingdom of Their Own Page 34