A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  Allen’s European colleagues tended to view the war with more skepticism. Some indeed saw it as a lost cause. “These are savages,” a French general on Allen’s staff told another of his advisers. Allen, however, couldn’t throw up his hands in defeat. There was no alternative but to see this as yet another manageable crisis. If it was true that Americans could not work safely with Afghans, and the entire American strategy entailed partnering with Afghans to prepare them to handle the conflict themselves, then that strategy was doomed to failure. Allen believed the answer lay in those well-worn tenets of Pashtun culture: hospitality, loyalty, righteousness, bravery, justice. The more distance between American and Afghan soldiers, the more T-walls and razor wire, the more body armor and metal plating, the more the United States sent a signal of distrust that would eviscerate any empty rhetoric about partnership he might issue from Kabul. His only hope was to look at it another way: “The closer you get to the Afghans, the safer you’re going to be.”

  He did not want to curtail patrols the two forces conducted together or otherwise contribute to further separation. He’d faced such risky decisions before. In an earlier tour, he’d been in command in the deserts of western Iraq when insurgents began to swap sides and join the Americans in fighting the more radical members of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Enlisting thousands of former enemies, many with American blood on their hands, was a controversial decision at the time, but it proved to be the most important factor in alleviating the violence in the late years of the Iraq war. In Afghanistan, Allen recognized that the burden of this fratricidal violence was not only falling on foreigners. The killings of Afghan soldiers and policemen by their own comrades was just as common. During one tense meeting with the Afghan cabinet ministers, as Allen demanded again that they must take the insider threat seriously, an Afghan aide entered with a note for the interior minister: in Delaram, a bleak truck-stop town in the south, ten Afghan policemen had just been killed by one of their own.

  The shooting of the French soldiers became a watershed moment in this phase of the war, and in the debate over green on blue, because two things resulted directly from this attack. The French, despite Allen’s attempts to persuade them otherwise, decided to pull their soldiers out early. And the Taliban realized their breakthrough. Allen could read it right off the transcripts of intercepted telephone calls. By sacrificing a few of their faithful on suicide missions inside NATO bases, they could break the coalition wide open.

  The second day of protests against the burning of the Koran—as crowds across Afghanistan torched effigies of President Obama, threw stones, and battled police—happened to fall, on the Afghan calendar, on the third of Hout, 1390. On that day thirty-two years earlier—February 22, 1980—thousands of Kabul residents had climbed to their rooftops and chanted into the night sky as one people, “Allahu akbar.” God is great. That moonlit chorus marked the beginning of the national resistance to the Soviet army, whose tanks had rolled into Afghanistan just two months before. Kawun Kakar was a boy then, but he would always remember watching his father, a famous Afghan historian, shout into the darkness with all those other unseen voices. One aspect of the performance was particularly strange to the boy. His father was not a religious man. So why, Kawun asked him, was he praising God? “This is not about religion,” his father replied. “This is history.”

  The Third of Hout became an Afghan holiday, and Kawun Kakar a foreign policy aide to President Karzai. He mentioned this story from his childhood to me one night during dinner in Kabul. The comparisons between the Soviet presence and the American one were getting harder to ignore. I had spent three years watching the slow-motion collapse of American relations with President Karzai, and Afghans more broadly. Now the unraveling was moving with startling speed. Parliament members had joined the Taliban in calling on Afghans to kill American soldiers. The U.S. embassy had gone on lockdown, preventing staffers from leaving the compound. Obama had sent a three-page letter to Karzai with his apology.

  On the third day of protests, an Afghan soldier wheeled around and killed two American soldiers from a military police battalion who had been living on a remote combat outpost in eastern Afghanistan. These were the first American deaths from the Koran burnings: Corporal Timothy J. Conrad Jr., a twenty-two-year-old from Roanoke, Virginia, who had a seven-month-old baby, and Sergeant Joshua A. Born, three years older and from Niceville, Florida, a lover of Star Wars. When Allen heard about these killings, he flew out to the base with the Afghan army’s chief of staff, General Sher Mohammad Karimi. Allen spoke to American and Afghan soldiers who’d gathered in the fluorescent glare of the base cafeteria.

  “The eyes of all the ISAF countries, all fifty of them, were turned today to this FOB,” he told them. “There will be moments like this when you are searching for the meaning of this loss. There will be moments like this when your emotions are governed by anger and the desire to strike back. These are the moments when you reach down inside and you grip the discipline that makes you a United States soldier, and you gut through the pain, and you gut through the anger, and you remember why we are here. We are here for our friends. We are here for our partners. We’re here for the Afghan people.”

  Standing in front of a wall-mounted American flag, Allen shook his fists, and his voice rose until he was nearly shouting.

  “Now is not the time for revenge. Now is not the time for vengeance. Now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are, and come through this together as a unit. Now is that time. Now is how we show the Afghan people that as bad as that act was at Bagram, it was unintentional, and Americans and ISAF soldiers do not stand for this. We stand for something greater.”

  Karimi followed Allen’s emotional speech with his own remarks about how the soldiers’ sacrifices were not in vain and their cause was a noble one. The remarks of the generals were recorded and appeared later on YouTube. When Karzai heard about them, he dismissed Karimi as an “American dog.”

  Two days later, as a mob was chanting “Death to America” in the western city of Herat, an Afghan police intelligence officer walked into a small room off the National Police Coordination Center, inside the Interior Ministry in Kabul. Two American military advisers sat at their desks with their backs to the door. One was Major Robert J. Marchanti II, a forty-eight-year-old from Baltimore who was a phys ed teacher when he wasn’t serving in the Army National Guard. His job, as a police mentor, was to help the Afghans run the coordination center—similar to what Kotkin or Bruha or Zellem did in Karzai’s palace. It was his first tour in Afghanistan, and he had four children back home. Next to him sat John Darin Loftis, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force from Paducah, Kentucky. He was four years younger than Marchanti but had more experience in Afghanistan, having served two years earlier on the American-run provincial reconstruction team in Zabul Province.

  By chance, I had met Loftis during that first tour. He was a public information officer, which meant part of his job was to meet with reporters when they came to Zabul to work on stories. The place was a backwater: a few American troops, a contingent of Romanians, and a smattering of Afghan soldiers to look after a sparsely populated swath of desert along the Pakistani border. Poor and uneducated even by Afghan standards, and without much development money, Zabul had bad roads, bad schools, and very little hope of improvement. The Taliban used it mostly to get somewhere else.

  Loftis, however, didn’t seem to notice that he had a thankless job. He was both fascinated by and deeply respectful of Afghanistan, in a way that was immediately recognizable because it was so rare among Americans, soldiers or not. He was sensitive and self-effacing and about as un-macho a military man as one could imagine. He claimed to be one of three people in the Air Force who spoke Pashto, and he used that knowledge to memorize the poetry of Rahman Baba, which he recited at readings for Afghans. To his Afghan friends he called himself Ehsaan, a name that means “favor.” “My reasons for going to Afghanistan include
an honorable sense of duty to help others. If I had stayed home and not volunteered to go, I would have always wondered what I could have contributed,” Loftis wrote to his two young daughters before his first deployment. After his tour in Zabul, he volunteered again, as part of the Afghan Hands program, this time with a desk job at the Interior Ministry.

  Five days after the American soldiers had burned the Korans at Bagram, the Afghan police intelligence officer walked up behind Marchanti and Loftis as they sat at their desks and shot them both in the back of the head.

  The shocking killings, inside police headquarters in Kabul by a uniformed member of the force, threatened to shred the last vestiges of the partnership Allen was trying to hold together. He drove across town from ISAF headquarters to the Interior Ministry to inspect the crime scene himself. When he got there, he was greeted by Interior Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi and his deputy, a four-star police general. To show his anger, Allen was wearing his body armor and helmet and carrying his 9mm handgun, something he almost never did among Afghans, as he normally wanted to express that he felt safe in their presence.

  “Where are my men?” he demanded.

  The Afghans showed Allen to the office, where he found the two Americans lying on the floor in pools of their own blood: one on his back, the other facedown. Allen walked around, careful not to disturb any evidence. He glanced at their desks, which faced the wall. Over one of them he saw a child’s drawing. He noticed the words “Best Daddy.” He took his helmet off and knelt next to each soldier, offering his prayers.

  Allen went to Bismillah Khan Mohammadi’s office next. He had never seen the battle-hardened Afghan general so distraught. The two American advisers had been entrusted to the care of the Interior Ministry, to the hospitality of Afghans, and he had not kept them safe. Allen told him that if they didn’t solve this problem, “we will lose the campaign and Afghanistan will burn down.”

  The public rage from the Koran burning—built on years of frustration at the American military presence in Afghanistan—had become a risk not only to the soldiers in combat but to any American at work in the country. Allen’s belief that Afghans and Americans were not fundamentally incompatible as partners, and that closeness and understanding could prevail over religious and cultural differences, had to somehow accommodate the new political reality of these two dead Americans lying in their office. He had to make changes. Allen ordered all American military advisers out of the Afghan ministries. If American advisers were going to be allowed to return to Afghan offices, he later decided, all the doors of their offices had to be equipped with push-button metal Simplex locks. Their desks must now face the door. And their guns had to be placed on their desks, within easy reach.

  At the end of this brutal week, Allen and Crocker met with Karzai in the palace. The discussion quickly turned ugly. Karzai told Allen that his soldiers were worse than the Soviets, as the Soviets hadn’t burned the Islamic holy book. “I wouldn’t blame a lot of Afghan soldiers for wanting to kill American soldiers,” Karzai said.

  Allen’s nerves were already raw following the crisis with the Korans and the deaths of his soldiers. Karzai’s statement, which he saw as intentionally provocative, enraged him. Someone familiar with the exchange said Crocker had to hold Allen back from storming out of Karzai’s office. Allen told Karzai, in effect: “You’re dead wrong. And you know you’re wrong.”

  —

  Less than a month after the Koran burnings, a U.S. Army staff sergeant named Robert Bales walked off his base in Kandahar and murdered, in cold blood, sixteen Afghan villagers, including nine children, who had been asleep in their beds. To President Karzai, it was the “end of the rope.” He flew to Kandahar to meet with the relatives of the massacre victims. That was the point when Karzai, with tears in his eyes, called the Americans demons and prayed to God that Afghanistan could be rescued from their brutalities.

  When the war started, Karzai would send personal notes to a loved one of every foreign soldier who perished in Afghanistan. In one, from April 8, 2002, he wrote to the father of Sergeant Thomas Kochert, a German soldier killed in Kabul, saying that his son’s untimely demise “brought profound sorrow to me. He was here on a mission of peace, a mission to bring safety and security to a beleaguered people. I can assure you that Thomas and his colleagues’ presence on the streets of Kabul brought significant assurances to our people.” The years and the diplomatic fights had since scrubbed away his sympathy for American lives. A massacre by the Taliban could pass without comment from the palace. His own Afghan soldiers and police dying in great numbers wouldn’t merit a mention. But an American air strike that mistakenly killed an Afghan family would receive his full denunciation as president. Part of that looked like genuine frustration and anger and helplessness, but he was also wielding his most potent political weapon. “He never missed the benefit of a good crisis,” Allen said.

  The general grew to understand how to deal with this: “What eventually became clear to me was the way to solve the crisis was less about taking him on frontally. I remember, of course, he’s a tribal leader. He comes from an ancient culture where face, honor, and shame are really important things. And when you take him on frontally in front of his people and prove him to be wrong or the nature of the conversation appears to discredit him, no matter whether you end up winning the conversation or not, you’ve now shamed the man. First of all, it’s not right, and secondly you’ve got to be smart enough to know not to do that to him. I did take him on frontally a couple times, and I regret I did. It ate up a lot of the goodwill I had.”

  Allen wanted an end to the violence and a reconciliation with the Taliban, but Karzai’s ultimate political goal was for Afghan sovereignty. He wanted to be a real president of an independent country. Karzai was terrified that his legacy would be equated with that of Shah Shuja, the nineteenth-century king who was installed by the invading British and who was murdered after their withdrawal. In a country that proudly clung to its reputation for repelling invaders, there was a special pantheon of shame for those who catered to foreigners. The Taliban would mock Karzai as a modern-day Shuja.

  Karzai adopted his nation’s rage for a war’s worth of failures. With each new civilian casualty, he would demand the complete halt of all air strikes and night raids, and gradually he won concessions in the circumstances in which these could be carried out. He demanded full Afghan control over all prisoners and wore down the Americans in months of negotiations. He saw his most important role as wresting control from the United States: to block its military operations, to decide where its money was spent, to eliminate what he termed the foreigners’ “parallel structures” to his rule, to hasten the end of their war he had long since lost any faith in them winning. He was the puppet who wouldn’t dance.

  19

  THE PRIMARY PURPOSE OF ITS EXISTENCE

  FACED WITH WELL-DOCUMENTED accusations of his complicity in a crime, Mahmood Karzai chose to rage. He never accepted the premise that he had done anything wrong in his relationship with Kabul Bank. He blamed the bank’s collapse solely on the former chairman, Sherkhan Farnood, whose $4.7 million Dubai villa Mahmood had been using, and whom he described as “Genghis Khan.” Mahmood insisted he had taken three legal loans from Kabul Bank: $1.2 million for his Toyota business, $2.6 million for the cement factory, and $400,000 for a steel rebar firm. He said he had paid all of them back, with 9 percent interest (albeit after the scandal broke). His argument was that what the management of Kabul Bank did with its loan portfolio was beyond his control and knowledge. He claimed he had been “fraudulently induced” to become a Kabul Bank shareholder, as he’d had no way of knowing that the bank’s books were an elaborate fabrication. “Sherkhan is not only unreliable because he is trying hard to cover up his own misdeeds by shifting responsibility to others,” Mahmood wrote in a letter arguing his innocence, “but he has a particular reason to lie about me since he personally dislikes me and he relishes the chance of creating problems for me.”
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  Mahmood wrote reams of letters making his case: to Kabul Bank investigators and auditors; to the IMF; to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry. He sat with journalists and bloviated for hours. He hired high-priced lawyers and held press conferences and went on TV to defend his name. As investigators and auditors finished their reports on the bank scandal, Mahmood fired off counteraccusations and second-guessed their work. In his hierarchy of blame, Mahmood reserved a special place at the top for Karl Eikenberry. The former U.S. ambassador who had fought President Karzai, supported Central Bank governor Fitrat, and overseen Kirk Meyer’s investigations was, to Mahmood’s eye, the mastermind of his fall to disgrace. “It has come to my attention that in a press conference dated March 17, 2013 you accused me of taking illegal loans,” Mahmood wrote to Drago Kos, the head of the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee, an international body that had produced a lengthy report on the Kabul Bank crisis. “I just hope that you are not influenced by a group of western individuals who I consider to be the cronies of Eikenberry, the former US Ambassador to Afghanistan. Eikenberry lost his credibility for all his unfounded allegations he heaped on me even before the Kabul Bank fiasco, such as my project in Kandahar and the Ghory Cement project.” Eikenberry had by then been gone from Afghanistan for nearly two years. Mahmood could not let him go. “I know that Eikenberry and his cronies are supporting Fitrat who conspired to destroy Kabul Bank and help protect those who cooperated with the conspiracy of Eikenberry.”

  Mahmood argued that he had been singled out because of his last name and that other Afghan business barons had escaped with their reputations intact. He tried to have the attorney general’s office prosecute Kos’s team for its Kabul Bank report. “The outrage on morality that you call Anti-Corruption Monitoring is wicked enough to inflict penalties on truth,” Mahmood wrote. “You accuse me of wrongdoings by your unfounded allegations but yet you are silent on major corruption cases rampant through Afghanistan. Please explain to the Afghan people how [it] is that many politicians have accumulated tens of millions of dollars, some accrued hundreds of millions of dollars, and a few have enve [sic] amassed over a billion dollars. Yet you are silent and for political motives you resolve to defame instead my character with smear tactics.”