A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  “My sense is that the President and AWK were threatened by the following Hashmat has in the south,” he said. “Hence they tried several times to undermine him politically.”

  The decision infuriated Hashmat. He appealed to the president, the interior minister, and other high-ranking officials to reverse the decision. Some private security companies remained in operation, including those linked to relatives of senior Afghan officials, but Hashmat’s failed. “Why mine?” he asked me. “Because I’m a Karzai? Because I created two thousand jobs for Pashtuns? We were told, ‘We’re shutting you down because you are relatives. You are high-ranking people.’ What? So if I know somebody in my family or somebody, I can’t have a job? That doesn’t make sense. That is basically a crap.”

  Hashmat’s exclusion from the inner circles of Karzai power ate at him. He had risen in a few short years from the loan department at a suburban Virginia car dealership to become a wealthy Afghan baron living in a castle and running a private army. But he hadn’t won respect. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “Why they think of me as an outsider? My grandfather started this, what do you call it, dynasty. And it has been passed down over generations. So why suddenly I’m an outsider?”

  —

  After his brother died, Farid Karzai dreaded living in Karz. He assumed that his father had been the intended target. Since he had survived, what would stop them from coming back? Staying in Karz, you could not miss the billboard of Khalil Karzai or the ominous walls of Hashmat’s castle. To protect them, Ahmed Wali, who was Hashmat’s rival in Kandahar, gave Yar Mohammed four Kalashnikovs and two policemen as bodyguards. The policemen, Khairullah and Atta Jan, were known to the family and lived in the village. They would come to the house each night, sleep on the roof, and depart in the morning. Yar Mohammed remained wary. He never went anywhere without a gun, and he started sleeping with a Kalashnikov under his mattress and a pistol under his pillow. He would sometimes wake during the night and shine his flashlight through the window at the gray metal gate to make sure it remained closed and locked.

  On the evening of March 9, 2011, a year and a half after Waheed’s death, Yar Mohammed was asleep in one room while Farid, his mother, and Sonia slept in another. Neighbors would later report hearing helicopters flying low over the village. But this wasn’t unusual anywhere in Kandahar, and the rotor blades didn’t wake the family. Only then Farid and his mother heard what sounded like a burst of gunfire. They sat up and looked at each other. It was sometime after one a.m.

  “Did you hear that?” Farid asked his mother in the darkness.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “There was a shooting. Do not go outside.”

  Farid ignored his mother and swung his legs down from the bed. The night was warm, and he wore only thin cotton pants, with no shirt. He stepped out onto the concrete patio outside the bedroom door. He saw a silhouetted figure in the darkness on top of the wall that encircled the property. The man shouted at him and raised a rifle. The green dot of a laser pointer danced on Farid’s bare chest.

  “Stop where you are! Don’t move!” someone shouted in Pashto, with a Kandahari accent.

  Farid darted back into his room. He grabbed his cell phone and called one of his cousins, Zalal, who told him he’d also heard gunfire. “Don’t go outside or do anything stupid,” Zalal warned him. Farid threw on a shirt and asked Sonia to peek through the window. She pulled the curtain aside and pressed her face close to the glass.

  “It’s the Americans,” she said. “There are a lot of lights.”

  Farid could see them now, too. There appeared to be several American and Afghan soldiers standing on the mud wall and the roofs of neighboring houses. They looked to Farid like sci-fi monsters bristling with weapons and antennae. The night-vision scopes affixed to their helmets obscured their faces. The soldiers had thrown glow sticks into the yard, which cast them in an eerie green gleam. The Afghan interpreter with the soldiers continued to shout orders while the family cowered in the bedroom: Your house has been surrounded by the National Army. Everyone must come outside, including women and children. Keep your hands in the air.

  Farid looked at his mother and sister. The room was tiny, and there was no other exit except the front door, which opened into the front yard. His mother stepped out first, and Farid and Sonia followed. Sonia carried a Koran. The soldiers ordered her to drop it to the ground. The women were not wearing shoes, and their heads were uncovered. From their position on top of the wall, the soldiers ordered the women to one side of the yard, toward a group of glow sticks. Several feet away, a circle of red light appeared in the dirt. The interpreter ordered Farid to walk toward the red. They told him to look up. And then look down. To turn around in a circle. To take off his shirt and roll up his pants. To sit down on the ground. Farid could feel his heart beating. The red light began to move. It inched over the gravel and dirt, tracing slowly across the open yard toward the locked gate, about thirty yards away. Farid could see the gray door topped with pointed spikes that Yar Mohammed checked with such diligence each night. He wondered where his father was now. The soldiers told Farid to stand up and follow the light. When he got to the door, an American soldier standing on the wall ordered, through an interpreter, that Farid open it. He said he didn’t have the key and asked if he could go back into his father’s room to get it. The soldier told Farid to stay where he was and ordered Sonia to get the key. She ran into Yar Mohammed’s room, picked up the key, and came to the door.

  “Did you see Dad?” Farid asked Sonia.

  “I didn’t see anybody,” she replied.

  The soldier ordered Farid to open the lock while keeping one hand on his head. Farid fumbled with the key, unable to do what he was asked with only one hand and a mind scrambled with fear. He asked for permission to use both hands. The American soldier agreed. Farid opened the lock and the door swung into the yard. The soldier ordered him to put his face against the door and his hands behind his back. Someone came around and cinched his wrists with plastic cuffs. Then they pulled a hood over his head and tied another blindfold over that and walked him through the door and into the alley. The path was rutted and narrow—the rough brick wall on Farid’s right was separated by only a few feet from the smooth dirt wall on his left—and difficult to manage blind.

  As other soldiers went inside the house, the soldier guiding Farid stopped him in the alley and started asking questions. Blindfolded and hooded, Farid could see nothing, but he heard Sonia crying. “Look, these are women. You have to have some respect for them,” he told the interpreter. “Please send them to one of our neighbors’ houses. You’re free to go and search the house as long as you want.”

  An American soldier shouted at him to shut up.

  Farid was asked who lived in his house. He mentioned his relatives and the two guards who slept on the roof. The American soldier told the translator to bring the guards down. They asked more questions, including one Farid remembers clearly.

  “They asked me, ‘Was it your brother that they killed last year?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ”

  Someone grabbed Farid’s shoulder and pushed him up against a wall. He was made to sit in the dirt. He could feel the barrel of a gun on the back of his neck. It was hard for him to tell what was going on, but he could hear what sounded like the soldiers breaking the lock on a neighbor’s door, then his mother and sister being led into that room. One of the soldiers grabbed his shoulder and stood him up and ordered him to walk down the muddy path. Farid tripped on a thin rut that carried a rivulet of foul-smelling water down the middle of the alley. An American soldier grabbed him by the collarbone to keep him from falling. Then he removed the hood, and Farid looked around. He could see the collapsible ladders the soldiers had used to scale the wall.

  At that point, the soldiers decided to put him inside a room in the neighbor’s house. They ordered the family out of the house and led Farid, his wrists still bound behind his back, into a room and sat him against a wall. They put the hood back o
n and cinched the blindfold over it. Khairullah and Atta Jan, the two police guards from his house, soon joined him on the floor. “I could not see anything; it was pitch-black in front of my eyes,” Farid recalled. “But I could feel that they were taking my fingerprints while my hands were tied behind me. They were taking my fingerprints and they were taking pictures.”

  One of the guards complained that the hood had something in it and his eyes were burning. Farid was having the same problem. “I told him my eyes were burning as well and I could not control my tears,” he said. As soon as he finished saying that, someone slapped him across the left side of his face.

  A few minutes passed. Someone came inside and asked Farid where they’d gotten the Kalashnikovs.

  “We got them from Ahmed Wali Karzai,” Farid said. “We have four of them. We used to keep three in our house and one in my cousin’s house.” Farid added that the registration documents were in his dad’s room.

  “Where is my dad?” Farid asked one of the soldiers standing in the room.

  “He’s sitting a few yards away from you,” a soldier replied.

  Hours passed. Farid was unsure how many. He could see only blackness, but he knew it was dawn when he heard the village imam’s call to prayer. The familiar words arose slow and mournful from the mosque loudspeaker. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he had last heard from an American soldier. He wondered if they would just leave him like this, bound and blind.

  Then the interpreter returned. He wanted to know about the red Toyota Corolla parked in the yard. Farid said the car was his. The interpreter left. Farid heard other sounds he could not understand. He heard the rising thud of rotor blades as the helicopter came to life, the muffled static of radio talk, curt and coded. He heard the rustle of limbs, of disentanglement, as his fellow captives were freed of hoods and cuffs. The long night seemed to be over. A few minutes later, his hood was lifted.

  “I opened my eyes and an American was right here,” Farid recalled, holding his palm up to his face. The man had a red beard, white skin, blue eyes. “He was looking into my eyes. He looked into my eyes for a few seconds. Then he took out a knife. And he cut my plastic cuffs. He was the only American in the room. The last person to leave. He walked toward the door, walking backward, his gun pointed toward us. Once he stepped out of the house, they disappeared.”

  Farid wanted to return to his home immediately to see what had happened, but his neighbors told him to wait to be certain the Americans were gone. After a few minutes, he couldn’t restrain himself and ran home. He met his cousin Zalal in the yard, and they searched the rooms. He found his bedroom in disarray, scattered with clothes and blankets. Blood and what looked like bits of flesh had spattered the white walls of his father’s room. In one corner, the cousins found a bundle of blankets. They unwrapped it and saw Yar Mohammed.

  “They had shot him right in the forehead,” Farid recalled. “He was already dead. He was lying on his back, and the blood was streaming from his head onto the floor. Three-quarters of his head was gone, and only one of his eyes was there. The rest of his head was missing. When I saw my dad’s body, I screamed.”

  Farid and his neighbors pulled Yar Mohammed’s body out into the yard and laid him on a cot. Farid searched his pockets and found his painkillers. Many of the family’s belongings were gone: Farid’s car registration, driver’s license, and camera; papers pertaining to their house and land; his mother’s small collection of jewelry; the few thousand dollars that constituted the family’s life savings. The village mullah arrived and decided that since Yar Mohammed had been martyred, they did not need to wash his entire body but could bury him in his clothes. The neighbors began digging a grave at the family cemetery, in a plot next to his son’s.

  That afternoon, a Thursday, Ahmed Wali Karzai came to the house during the burial preparations. Farid sat with him in one of the guest rooms. Farid recounted what had happened the previous evening. After listening to the story, Ahmed Wali shook his head.

  “May God bless his soul,” he said. Then he stood up and walked out.

  —

  The raid that night on Yar Mohammed Karzai’s home had been conducted by a team of U.S. special operations soldiers. On the day of the killing, March 10, ISAF headquarters in Kabul released its account of the raid in its “morning operational update.” These types of statements came coded in military jargon and often existed in an alternate reality. This one was no different. The U.S. military claimed to have “captured a Taliban leader, killed one armed individual and detained several suspected insurgents.” The “leader” had been “responsible for the distribution of vehicle borne improvised explosive devices to fighters throughout Kandahar City. He also coordinated the receipt of weapons and materials from associates outside of Afghanistan, and distributed them to various Taliban members in the province.” The security forces, ISAF claimed, “advanced to the targeted compound where they called for all occupants to exit the building peacefully before conducting searches. A member observed an armed individual with an AK-47 in an adjacent building within the same compound. The security force assessed the male as an immediate threat to the security force, and engaged him. The individual killed was the father of the targeted individual.”

  Nothing about the statement made sense. Karz wasn’t a village known for Taliban activity. By Kandahar standards, it was almost completely peaceful. It was unclear who this captured “Taliban leader” might be. The only person killed had been Yar Mohammed. In that case, the Taliban target ISAF was referring to had to be Farid, his only living son.

  If it had been any other Afghan family involved, the ISAF statement might have stood as the official and only record of the incident—an unnamed man dying in what seemed to be a legitimate and justified military operation. But this turned out to be the family of the president. Later in the day, ISAF issued an “update” to its earlier report: “Coalition forces are aware of conflicting reports about the identities of those involved, and have initiated an inquiry to determine the facts.” The results of that inquiry, if indeed one took place, were never made public.

  Farid and his relatives later came to the conclusion that Yar Mohammed had approached his bedroom window at the sound of the helicopter and shined his flashlight at the gate, as he did on many nights. He would have been carrying his Kalashnikov, but they believe he never took a shot, and no one in the military has alleged he did. The bullets that killed him broke through his bedroom window and struck him while he crouched inside his room.

  The president kept his personal views on Yar Mohammed’s killing by the Americans private. His spokesman, Waheed Omar, said that “this was the result of an irresponsible night raid and like any other case of civilian casualties, the president was very sorry to hear about it. We’ve called for a stop of the night raids, which often cause a loss of life and are against the culture and the Islamic values of the Afghan people.”

  The revenge fantasy that Hashmat Karzai had nurtured for more than a quarter century had finally been fulfilled. But was he somehow responsible? Because of his long-held grudge against Yar Mohammed, within the Karzai family suspicion immediately turned toward him. Mahmood Karzai told The Guardian newspaper that he smelled a “very deep conspiracy” in the killing. “If this is a deliberate setup where the US military is being given false information to settle a personal vendetta then this is very serious,” he said. “Karz is our stronghold, there are absolutely no Taliban there and there never will be.”

  Did Hashmat, or someone close to him, have the wherewithal to plant bad intelligence with a U.S. special operations team and sit back while the target was destroyed? By that time, his brother, Hekmat, was running a think tank in Kabul that received U.S. government funding and gave occasional briefings to Centcom and the Pentagon. He would later be chosen as deputy foreign minister. Both brothers denied any involvement in Yar Mohammed’s death. Several family members openly blamed them, just the same. Noor Ahmad Karzai, a cousin of Farid’s who live
d in Silver Spring, was convinced they were somehow involved. “Hashmat is a snake,” he told me over the phone. “In Afghanistan, if you have the mighty dollar in your pocket, you can do anything. So Hashmat is the guy with a U.S. contract worth a million dollars. He could have done anything. You see a guy from welfare, and he’s building a mansion in Karz. That guy was on welfare when he was here. He was part-time taking care of his grandmother and getting a check from the government.” Noor Ahmad claimed to know “for a fact” that Hekmat had passed the bad intelligence. “I want the whole world to know. I know from the inside. I don’t want to name the interpreter, but they told me Hekmat told the U.S. to make a raid in that house. Common sense will tell you,” he said. “I want the whole world to know that their taxpayer dollars, their Marines, were there just to do a Karzai family feud. This is shameful, for a superpower.

  “It’s just the Afghan thing. The word in Pashtu is turbur. Your cousin is always your rival. Turbur. Turbur is the biggest rival in Afghan history.”

  Hashmat waved away this talk.

  “We both know the Americans. Do you think I have that much power to get the Special Forces to go raid Yar Mohammed’s house and do the killing?” he asked me. “The president looks at Hekmat and told Hekmat straight to his face, ‘If you guys were killing the father, why did you kill the son?’ Hekmat said, ‘What are you talking about, Mr. President? You know the Special Forces were raiding the place.’ He told Hekmat, ‘I don’t know who’s telling me the truth, you or the Americans. Both of you are lying to me.’ The president still thinks until this day that I have a hand in it.