A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  The death also got mixed up with the politics of the war. After the murder, Ahmad Shuja Pasha, director general of Pakistan’s ISI, met with President Karzai in his palace office in Kabul and told him that the CIA had killed Ahmed Wali, according to Rahmatullah Nabil, the Afghan spy chief at the time, who was present in the meeting. That would have been an intriguing thing to hear for a president as angry at the Americans as Karzai was by that time. When I asked Nabil if Karzai believed Pasha, he lit his cigarette, then slowly exhaled. “I think to some extent he believed him.”

  Given the close association between the CIA, Ahmed Wali, and his circle in Kandahar, the allegation struck me as unlikely. When I visited Sardar Mohammad’s home, his relatives proudly showed me their badges from the Kandahar Strike Force, the CIA-run paramilitary group that Ahmed Wali helped recruit. He was one of theirs. And Ahmed Wali’s cronies unanimously rejected this notion, as did Nabil. The CIA had always been Ahmed Wali’s patron and protector in the bureaucratic turf wars. “That doesn’t have a basis. It doesn’t make any sense,” Fazel Mohammed, his security chief, told me. “Why would the CIA kill Ahmed Wali when he was acting as their eyes and ears in this region?”

  Whatever the motive, the established order had been overturned. As a U.S. ambassador put it, the man who had been built into a “ten-foot giant,” as much by outmaneuvering his Afghan rivals as by his cunning manipulation of American military power, had fallen. Some great structure had burned down. And once again we were all too late, left to step through its ashes, looking for something to salvage.

  16

  I HATE POLITICS

  A LOT THAT HAD BEEN held together by Ahmed Wali Karzai fell apart when he died. Maybe the most important thing was a sense of joint purpose among the family members. There had never been unity; the worst things I ever heard about the Karzais came from other Karzais. But the notion that they were in this together, as somewhat unlikely rulers of Afghanistan, no longer felt as true. Ahmed Wali’s death opened holes in the fortress wall, and people immediately started shooting through. Rivals rose to challenge Karzai business interests; the siblings turned against one another in a nastier way. President Karzai’s anger at America morphed into something that now looked more like hate. At the same time, several soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division in Kandahar were devastated by the news. The military intelligence chief Ketti Davison called it “the lowest point in our tour.”

  Ahmed Wali wasn’t soon forgotten. Kandahar became one giant shrine to him. On billboards across town, his grim, bestubbled face peered down on his former subjects. “A true servant and the leader of the Pashtun tribe,” read one of them, over a photograph of Ahmed Wali giving a TV interview in a plush, thronelike chair. “Make sure you write on my forehead that I cut his throat because he refused to bow his head,” another proclaimed, as Ahmed Wali gestured with yellow prayer beads in his hand. Photo after photo: Ahmed Wali receiving a reverent greeting from a police officer; talking on his cell phone; leaning into a microphone; holding his palms cupped for prayer. His face was embedded in the marble tower in the middle of the traffic roundabout at Martyrs’ Square. It was pasted to car windows and all over the guard booths at the entrance to Aino Mena. “The hero martyr of beloved Afghanistan and the great leader of the Pashtun tribe,” the messages went. “The one who took the desire for a green and prosperous Afghanistan to his grave.”

  The man left to replace him was Shah Wali Karzai, his brother. He was older, but he looked younger, and less substantial. He had a lean, angular face. Around the temples, his short hair had gone white. When I met him, not long after Ahmed Wali’s death, his face was etched with strain and worry. He looked malnourished. It was a Sunday, his chosen day off, but there was still a crowd gathered in the foyer of his house in Aino Mena, and people sitting on the floor around the perimeter of a large entry room, all waiting for him. His thin shoulders slumped when he came out of a meeting and saw the acres of turban cloth and miles of beards awaiting him. People with gnarled toenails and hennaed hair reached for him. There was the musk of the not-enough washed. He pushed through the crowd, the poor and grasping with their never-ending needs and wants. He stole my land. My brother’s in prison. Help me.

  Couldn’t they solve these things themselves?

  Shah Wali felt unprepared for all of this. He had been trained as an engineer at the University of Maryland. He loved basketball. He wasn’t a tribal leader. For several years he’d worked in happy obscurity as a project manager on the Aino Mena construction site, content to worry about solving problems like wastewater treatment and trash collection. He was quiet and self-effacing, uncomfortable as the center of attention. American military experts in the war hadn’t even heard of him. But with Ahmed Wali’s sudden assassination, President Karzai convened the elders and wrapped a ceremonial turban around Shah Wali’s head, anointing him the leader of the most powerful tribe in Afghanistan. On top of those new responsibilities, he had to deal with his slain brother’s shadowy business empire, the liaisons with the CIA and the U.S. military, and somehow keep the family hold on Pashtun politics across the south. He was fifty-two years old, and he was miserable.

  “I don’t want this,” Shah Wali told me one day during Ramadan, his house overflowing with guests. “See, I don’t have ambition. I’m just here because I have to be. I cannot fill Ahmed Wali’s shoes. But I’m here. I have no choice. I don’t want to be governor. I don’t want to be minister. I don’t want to be a district governor. I hate politics. But I’m stuck with it.”

  The problems placed at his feet every day seemed insurmountable: fathers begging for their Taliban sons to be released from prison; mothers demanding justice for their martyred children; a young man asking for a job on the election commission; a man who built a shop on another man’s land. All Shah Wali could do was worry. Afghan authorities were warning him of new threats now aimed at him. A car bomb had exploded inside Aino Mena next to a picnic area one day, killing eleven people. “The scale has tipped,” he said. “If they can kill Ahmed Wali, they can do anything.”

  Credit 16.1

  Shah Wali Karzai stands inside his house in Aino Mena.

  Shah Wali had been born in the Panjwayi district of Kandahar, when his father served there as district governor. When the family moved to Kabul, he was still a young boy. After high school, he studied medicine for two years at Kabul University, until the Soviet invasion intervened. He and his youngest brother, Abdul Wali, were among the last of the siblings to leave Afghanistan, fleeing on buses south to the Pakistani border, past Soviet checkpoints. Because Germany wasn’t requiring Afghan visas at the time, the two brothers flew from Karachi to Frankfurt. Shah Wali considered staying, and he had an opportunity to pursue his medical studies, but he ended up moving on to the Washington, D.C., suburbs, where his older brothers lived. He was twenty-two years old.

  Shah Wali settled into a familiar family routine. Over four years, beginning in the fall of 1981, he took English, math, and science courses at Montgomery College, while working at the Bethesda Marriott restaurant along with Qayum and other relatives, and then at the Helmand in Baltimore when that opened. He didn’t feel he could afford to go to medical school, so he enrolled in engineering courses at the University of Maryland at College Park. He graduated with two bachelor’s degrees, in civil and mechanical engineering.

  He ended up occasionally traveling back to Quetta: when his father had a heart attack, then after his murder several years later. He was there attending Ahmed Wali’s wedding when the twin towers fell. Shah Wali spent the first eight months of Hamid Karzai’s tenure alongside his brother in the palace. When he left, there were different rumors as to why: that he had taken money from the palace slush fund, that he hadn’t received a senior appointment in the interim administration, that he was too far from his mother and his new bride. In his words, he got “bored.”

  “You know the president. He was not allowing us to get involved in government. He says, It’s going to be nepotism and a
ll this. I said, It doesn’t mean nepotism if you’re qualified and educated. He said no. So I came to Kandahar to stay with Ahmed Wali.”

  Shah Wali dedicated himself to Aino Mena. Much of the early construction work had been organized by Hamid Helmandi, the Afghan developer who was living in San Francisco. Helmandi treated Aino Mena like his child. He’d hand-carried seeds from California and established a tree nursery in Hyderabad, Pakistan. He planted eucalyptuses, palo verdes, crepe myrtles, and when the first one hundred thousand saplings were more than a foot tall, he trucked them across the border to Kandahar so that Aino Mena would have rows of trees and dappled shade. He traveled across Texas and Arizona buying up used construction equipment—graders, pavers, front-end loaders—and had them disassembled in California and shipped by container to Afghanistan. In his designs, he chose cavity walls around the perimeter of the houses, to help with heat transfer, and double-paned windows, uncommon in Afghanistan, to preserve energy. He installed solar panels on some of the roofs. He hired and trained the construction workers. “This was nothing like back home,” Helmandi told me, “how you put an ad in the paper and the next day twenty people show up. Here there was nothing. I had to pick up a guy off the street and teach him how to do credit and debit. Or with sewer lines, I had to train people how to put a pipe together. Train electricians, plumbers.” Instead of cranes, they rigged up chains and motors to hoist equipment.

  Helmandi’s father had been in the grape business in Kandahar and had moved to Fresno, California, in the mid-1960s to open a raisin-processing facility. The family’s raisins were first exported regionally, to Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, before they opened an office in London and started supplying Europe with raisins. When he was older, Helmandi got involved in construction and built houses in Simi Valley and elsewhere. He considered himself an experienced, talented developer, but he had not anticipated the difficulty working in his hometown. “I didn’t know that the construction was going to be so hard. It was so easy back in the U.S. If you need anything, you go online and order it and they drop it off. Here I had to walk shop to shop to find the proper nail or hinge.”

  But he found the work as rewarding. “We were trying to create hope, that was our goal. And provide affordable houses,” Helmandi said. “We were not even making money on it. We were barely breaking even. We were trying to achieve that goal: provide shelter, create employment.”

  When Shah Wali joined the project, he saw things differently.

  “Aino Mena was close to bankruptcy,” he said. The project owed several million dollars to local contractors and still had to pay off a loan. “When I came, there was nothing, nothing,” he said. “They only had one tractor. Not even one kilometer of road was paved. After the six years I worked here, there was $65 million in the bank.”

  Shah Wali and Helmandi disagreed about many aspects of their project. Shah Wali believed that the project was being mismanaged and that Helmandi had misspent funds. Helmandi believed that he was being pushed out just when things were getting lucrative. He felt threatened: “Shah Wali and the rest of the crooks here smelled money. I got scared. I thought maybe I was going to get killed. So I just left.”

  Under Shah Wali, the business strategy of Aino Mena went in a new direction. The owners shifted from selling completed houses to plots of land. There turned out to be far greater demand for empty land inside the gates, with the freedom to build houses as people saw fit, than following the American-inspired suburban design that Mahmood had first envisioned. Some of the U.S.-style houses had lower walls than Kandaharis were accustomed to, and others had no guest room, making it more difficult to sequester the women from strangers. Home owners felt exposed.

  In an unexpected way, the forces contorting Kandahar’s economy soon began to benefit Aino Mena. The Taliban were growing stronger, the surrounding city more dangerous. At the same time, elite Kandaharis were getting wealthier from the flood of foreign aid and military contracting. Real estate prices inside Aino Mena spiked. The bakery where Niaz Mohammed made bread had been the first in Aino Mena. Within four years, he said, there were more than ten competitors. He earned twice as much working inside Aino Mena than at his earlier shop, but the salary still wasn’t sufficient for him to afford one of the houses inside the gates. The people who lived inside Aino Mena tended to have some connection to the American military. They worked as translators for soldiers or defense contractors, earning inflated salaries, or were businessmen who won logistics contracts themselves. Some were government employees with salaries topped up by NATO forces to try to entice people to take those dangerous jobs. Mohammed, who was thirty-four years old, lived in Panjwayi, a violent district the Taliban sought to control year after year, and commuted across town by motorcycle. He was careful not to let his neighbors know where he worked. “The Taliban hate Aino Mena,” he told me one morning as he slid loaves of bread into an oven. “I don’t even tell my brothers I work here.”

  Investors started buying up lots and flipping them for several times their purchase price. During his time as project manager, Shah Wali said, they paved seventy-five miles of roads and built sidewalks, sewers, and power lines. There were more than three thousand structures—houses, restaurants, bakeries, and banks. The neighborhood had a medical school for women. “We were doing all these things by ourselves,” he said.

  Shah Wali felt he had salvaged the project just as Helmandi had retreated to the safety of California. For a few years, they didn’t see each other. As Shah Wali saw it: “Then when the company was successful, the loan was paid off, then he came back.”

  —

  The intensity of the disputes between partners and the value of the property had risen in tandem. The Aino Mena partners suspected that Shah Wali was overcharging Mahmood’s company, AFCO, for gravel and earning millions, something he denied. These fights over money, and the claims by the Afghan military of their rightful ownership, soured the Americans on a project they had initially championed. In the late fall of 2009, the U.S. embassy described the project as “an ostentatious Karzai property development for Afghan elites east of Kandahar City, built on land obtained from the government at rock bottom prices, with financing guaranteed by OPIC,” the U.S. government agency that gave Mahmood the initial $3 million loan. One of the new partners, Haji Mohammad Jan, who had bought a 20 percent stake from Larry Doll, the Virginia developer, was the same man who’d been investigated by Kirk Meyer for his New Ansari hawala dealings and carting planeloads of cash out of the country. On February 18, 2011, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control also designated him as a narcotics trafficker under the Kingpin Act. As part of its economic sanctions program, OFAC informed the AFCO partners—those who were U.S. or dual citizens—that they could not have any association with him; if they did, they would face violations punishable by up to thirty years in prison and $10 million in fines. “I’m a U.S. citizen,” Helmandi told me. “Every time I go somewhere and he’s present, I run away. I don’t want to break the law.”

  The U.S. military, by the summer of 2011, had banned AFCO from receiving government contracts (apparently the company had won a small contract at Kandahar Airfield to install plumbing fixtures). A memorandum outlining the decision argued that the AFCO had “engaged in criminal misconduct with regard to illicit real estate activities and profiteering from a major privately owned Afghan lender.”

  The Afghan Defense Ministry, meanwhile, was now openly accusing the Karzais of stealing government land to build their gated neighborhood; at various times, it sent soldiers to order the workers to stop building. Now riding the downslope of U.S. military presence, the wartime economy was slowing, and investors were pulling their money from Kandahar. Ahmed Wali’s death had caused so much worry and uncertainty that it was affecting the economy, many Kandahar merchants insisted, and construction was one of the industries hardest hit. Home values started plummeting: prices as high as $70 per square meter fell to about $20. Partners were trying to recoup thei
r money while they could. Investors complained to Shah Wali that AFCO was misspending its money and that promised infrastructure was not being built. “We wrote an official letter to Shah Wali asking him to freeze the money because we didn’t trust these people,” said Shirin Agha, one of the leaders of the investors’ union. “They stopped working on the project, or most of it. They also fired a lot of people. But they were still taking out a lot of money. So we thought at one point if we don’t take any decisive action, then one day all the money will be spent and there will just be a piece of brown land.”

  “It was my responsibility,” Shah Wali told me. “They were trying to transfer money from my account to Dubai. I tried to stop it.”

  So without informing the other partners, Shah Wali decided to create a new company and transfer AFCO’s assets to that account, even though he technically wasn’t an owner of AFCO, just one of the employees. The partners whose money had suddenly vanished, including Mahmood, were not particularly pleased. “When we discovered it, we all got mad and started jumping around and saying, ‘What the heck, this is illegal, why the hell did you transfer the money to your own company account?’ ” Helmandi said. Abdullah Nadi, another original partner, believed that Shah Wali had forged his signature to transfer the money. By the partners’ calculations, as much as $77 million was missing. As Mahmood Karzai wrote in an e-mail to Helmandi, “This is not fare.”

  —

  By the time Ahmed Wali died, many American soldiers considered him one of their most loyal comrades in the faltering battle with the Taliban. When Major General Carter left Kandahar, he had grown genuinely fond of him. At a farewell party hosted at the provincial council, Ahmed Wali had given Carter a jersey, scarf, and hat from the Chelsea Football Club, Ahmed Wali’s favorite, and told him how eager he was to visit London and watch a game.