No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  “It’s yours now,” he whispered. “Take it.” But he had been spotted. The guards surrounded him, and before he knew it he was thrown against the wall, kicked on the shins, and slapped across the face.

  He was used to such impromptu beatings by now. When he was first brought to this Taliban prison, he had been thrown into a tiny room and shackled to the wall. Then the guards, mere teenagers, had entered with glass-studded belts. They came every day. By the time they left, he could barely stand. Now and then they even forbade him from praying. It was the one thing he couldn’t live without. After fifteen days he was broken, sobbing and begging God to let him die.

  That had been a year ago. Now, on December 5, 2001, his desperate plea was about to be answered. The American invasion was almost two months old, but here in Kandahar the Taliban were still in charge and eager to clear their prison of potential troublemakers.

  Back in his cell, Jan Muhammad paced and prayed and thumbed his worry beads. Then he sat down against the wall, staring at the door. At that moment, his children were probably out working the farm. So, too, were his cousins and friends, except for a few who had most likely fled the country or were hiding in the mountains. He’d had no news from any of them for months. In fact, he’d had no news at all from the outside world. He continued to pray. Hours passed, and then he again heard the crescendo of approaching steps. The door swung open. Jan Muhammad looked at the guards and then stood up and followed them.

  He wanted to be brave, stoic even, so that everyone would know what kind of man he was. So that his family would speak proudly of him for generations. But it was hard. As he was led past the cells of men he’d gotten to know from their time scrubbing jerry cans, he lost control. He found himself shouting, “Don’t leave anything for these dogs!” In response, inmates banged on their doors. A few hollered, “God is great!”

  He stepped outside into an open courtyard, under the blazing Kandahar sun. The fresh air felt pure and clean. From another section of the prison guards brought out Muhammad Nabi, a former enemy. It had been a year since Jan Muhammad had seen him.

  Soon, the warden came out, an old man with flaking skin and a cold stare, surrounded by gun-toting Talibs. He had overseen much torture and humiliation, taking, it seemed, an almost sadistic pleasure in it all. But now he seemed nervous.

  Ten minutes passed. More guards stepped into the sunlight to watch. Jan Muhammad kept his gaze fixed on his feet. Everyone was quiet. The armed guards assembled, and he was pushed, with effort, to the wall.

  * * *

  Once, things had been different. You could have found Jan Muhammad sitting on plush velvet cushions, his arms folded across his massive lap, surrounded by friends, nephews, and hangers-on who listened with admiration to his every word. For many years, he stood at the center of all things political in Uruzgan Province, a mountainous little corner of southern Afghanistan. His had been a rags-to-guns-to-riches tale that could only have happened in this country. A school janitor when the Soviets invaded, Muhammad had joined the mujahedeen, the “holy warriors”—CIA-backed Islamist rebels fighting against the Russians—and quickly rose to commander. In those days, such a climb was possible if you had charisma and political skill, qualities that, it was said, he wielded with particular success. By the early 1990s, with the Soviets gone, he was governing Uruzgan and commanding the loyalty of thousands of men.

  Yet Uruzgan, like much of the country, plunged into civil war after the Soviet withdrawal, and various mujahedeen groups vied to depose him. When the Taliban movement erupted in 1994 and swept through the province, Muhammad was stripped of his post and his weapons. He joined an underground anti-Taliban network that, unlike the Northern Alliance, was cut from the same cloth as the Taliban: ethnic Pashtuns from the deep south.

  This “southern alliance” was headquartered in the Pakistani city of Quetta, where, in a stately home surrounded by bougainvilleas and orchids, there lived a former humanitarian worker named Hamid Karzai. The scion of an elite Kandahar family, Karzai was weaving together a network of tribal elders and former anti-Soviet commanders who shared his driving desire to overthrow the Taliban. “Hamid hated them,” his brother Ahmed Wali told me. “He so badly wanted Afghanistan to join the international community. He didn’t want his country to be a pariah state.”

  The alliance attracted dozens of important figures, but none were more crucial to Karzai than Jan Muhammad, the key node in a prodigious web of contacts throughout the south. The two formed an unlikely pair: a rakish, worldly college graduate and an illiterate, rough-hewn guerrilla. Yet they stood united in their belief in the power of tradition to deliver their country from what they saw as the Taliban’s alien impositions. Hailing from the same Pashtun tribe, the Popalzais, the two carried themselves, in the words of Ahmed Wali, “like brothers.”

  Their bond had been forged on the front lines of the anti-Soviet war. Back then, Karzai, who worked for a Pakistan-based NGO, would slip into Uruzgan to deliver humanitarian assistance under Muhammad’s protection. Once, as they were crossing a mountain defile, a rival mujahedeen group, presumably after the aid themselves, opened fire. While his men fought off the ambush, Muhammad spirited Karzai away to safety. Afterward, Karzai tearfully hugged his friend and swore that he would never forget what he had done.

  Under the Taliban, Muhammad would secretly trek from Uruzgan to Pakistan to meet Karzai and plot the government’s overthrow, slipping past authorities using every bit of ingenuity he could muster. Once, he bribed officials to plant false news of his whereabouts on the radio; another time, he passed off his old Soviet-era war wounds as new injuries, claiming to be heading to Pakistan for treatment. By 1999, however, the Taliban was tightening the clamps on all opposition activity. That year, assassins gunned down Abdul Ahad Karzai, Hamid’s well-known father, for his antigovernment stance. Not long after, Jan Muhammad was arrested in his Uruzgan home and thrown into prison in Kandahar. News of the 9/11 attacks and the American invasion never reached his cell, and in October 2001 he was informed of his scheduled execution.

  * * *

  From the moment his friend had been arrested, Karzai vowed to do whatever it took to save him—and his country—from the Taliban. His plan hinged on a belief in tribal power: the Taliban were uncultured clerics who had upended the social order, but tribal elders, the guardians of tradition, could stir a counterrevolution. So Karzai spent months fostering a network of contacts in the heart of Taliban country, meeting them regularly in Pakistan to earn their trust and win their backing, waiting for the right time to foment an uprising. Now, with the American invasion imminent, he finally saw a chance to put this long-cultivated vision into effect.

  With his urbane, professorial ways, however, Karzai was not a likely man of action. For a generation, the country’s major figures had been fighters—war heroes (or villains, depending on where you stood)—but Karzai’s close call in Uruzgan was one of his few tastes of actual combat. Instead, he had worked in a minor political capacity for the mujahedeen, mainly in Pakistan, which left his name absent from most histories of the Soviet war. Nor did he possess the aristocratic stature of his father, leader of the politically influential Popalzais. Friends knew him to be mercurial, edgy, and, in a pinch, given to tearful outbursts like a “spoiled child,” according to a former aide.

  Still, he could show flashes of brio when it mattered most. After his father’s assassination, for example, he had defied Taliban threats and led a funeral procession into Kandahar. The daring march was something of a political coup, raising his stock in the opposition and prompting his coronation as head of the tribe. In politics as on the battlefield, timing was key. With the American campaign about to kick off, he knew that everything depended on his ability to convince the United States that an uprising was possible. Yet even though Washington was actively seeking a Pashtun counterweight to the Northern Alliance, American officials were skeptical. Karzai had few contacts outside of the CIA, which made him a relative unknown in Washington. I
t would not be easy, especially with Jan Muhammad behind bars. But given his hard-won network of tribal allies on the ground, Karzai was sure the people would be ready. They just needed a leader.

  As the American bombing commenced, Karzai decided to make his move. He would infiltrate Taliban country himself to spark a tribal insurrection—with or without help. Only then did the CIA sign off on his plot, equipping him with satellite phones and bags of cash. “I thought he was mad,” his brother Ahmed Wali recalled. “It was a suicide mission and we begged him not to go. But when Hamid gets an idea in his head, he listens to no one.”

  On a morning in mid-October, Karzai and a few aides, with shaggy beards and large turbans, mounted old motorcycles and slipped across the border into Kandahar Province. Capture meant certain execution. They rode along the cracked highway, past scrubland dotted with ramshackle homes. By lunchtime they had made it to Kandahar city and spent the day there in hiding. The next afternoon, they headed out by car toward the clay-colored cliffs of northern Kandahar. Just beyond lay Uruzgan, home of many Taliban leaders and key to Karzai’s plan. If he could launch a rebellion there, in the Taliban heartland, the regime would never recover.

  Night was drawing near when they saw flashing lights ahead—a Taliban roadblock. Karzai covered his face and sat quietly in the back. A Taliban guard pointed to the large sack on the seat beside him, containing the CIA-supplied satellite phones, and said, “Open that up.”

  They panicked. “There are women’s cosmetics in there,” said Muhammad Shah, Karzai’s security guard, playing on cultural prohibitions against unrelated men handling women’s intimate possessions. The guards looked unconvinced. “I started begging them, negotiating with them, trying everything,” Shah recalled. “I was sweating. It seemed like the end. I was crying and telling them that my family members had been killed in the American bombings.”

  The guard seemed puzzled, and suddenly it dawned on Shah that the soldiers at this isolated outpost had not the slightest idea what was happening on the front lines, where their movement was rapidly crumbling under the power of American bombs. Shah quickly explained that air strikes were flattening military targets in province after province, and that Mullah Omar was nowhere to be found. The guards looked shaken. When Shah began insisting that an air strike could come at any minute, the soldiers waved them on.

  Later that evening the men arrived in Uruzgan, driving with headlights off through the back roads and country lanes. They were guests in the houses of friendly elders and mullahs, sleeping in a different bed every night for security. At each stop, Karzai laid out his plan. The elders listened politely, but it soon became apparent that here, Karzai’s grand vision of a Taliban-free future meant little. Everyone knew what happened if you stood against the Taliban—you swung from a tree. Karzai’s tiny band of insurgents seemed impotent, even pathetic, in the face of such repression. The elders understood what Karzai did not yet seem to grasp: political victories in southern Afghanistan came not to those with the most inspiring ideas or far-reaching programs, but to those with the deepest pockets and biggest guns. And that was something that only the Americans could deliver. “You have a phone,” one of the elders reportedly told Karzai. “Have the Americans bomb the Taliban command here.” Karzai answered that he could not do that. “Then you will never win,” the elder replied.

  Soon word came that the Taliban had learned of their presence, and Karzai’s team fled into the mountains. By the next day the Taliban had surrounded the area and were closing in fast. “It was bleak,” an aide said later. “We were on the verge of a complete disaster.”

  Finally, Karzai switched on his satellite phone and dialed the CIA in Pakistan. Helicopters were rushed in for a nighttime weapons drop, and the freshly armed insurgents managed to fend off the Taliban and escape farther upland. Over the next week they were spirited from one remote safe house to the next, always a village ahead of their pursuers. At each stop, not a single local stepped forward to join them.

  Weary and dejected, the team settled into a remote mountain fastness to regroup. Once more the Taliban caught wind of their location. “We had maybe an hour to live,” Shah recalled. “I was thinking of my family.” Again Karzai dialed the CIA. This time, in the nighttime blackness, he was plucked from the wilderness by a team of Navy SEALs and covertly choppered to a secret US base in Jacobabad, Pakistan.

  The conclusion was unavoidable: Karzai’s plan, two years in the making, had failed. The Taliban maintained their vise-like grip on the south, there was no “southern alliance” to speak of, and Jan Muhammad remained in prison, awaiting his execution.

  * * *

  Years later, in an ill-lit hotel bar in Washington, DC, I met Lieutenant Colonel Jason Amerine, the man who would help turn Karzai’s fortunes around. A Green Beret with the Fifth Special Forces Group, Amerine had an action figure’s contours and boot-camp posture, forged by years of training as a specialist in risky parachute insertions behind enemy lines. His unit had deployed to Jacobabad shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and he first met Karzai on the night of his rescue. “No one really believed in Hamid on our side,” Amerine recalled. “When I was sent down, they said, ‘Have your team see who this guy is, but don’t do anything crazy.’”

  Amerine, however, sensed something exceptional in the guerrilla leader. He wasn’t your typical Afghan warlord, not with his bookish cultivation and soft-spoken mien. “In a word,” said Amerine, “he was a statesman.” And Karzai’s unswerving belief in a tribal uprising, despite his setbacks, was undeniably impressive, even though Amerine knew that the odds weren’t in his favor. Karzai was insisting that the uprising had foundered only because he had failed to demonstrate that American power stood behind him. So he floated an even more daring idea: he would return to Uruzgan, this time with American soldiers by his side. Capturing the province, he promised, would “rip the heart out of the Taliban” and usher in the fall of Kandahar.

  Even with Uruzgan elders clamoring for American support, however, Karzai had an obvious image problem on his hands. Every Afghan leader since the 1970s had lived and died with foreign backing, and many of them had plotted their coups and revolutions from Pakistan. How was he any different? His plan needed a nationalist gloss, a way to maintain the fiction of a homegrown uprising, if it was to have an air of legitimacy in the eyes of the country and the world. Ever the politician, Karzai got on his satellite phone with CNN and the BBC, proclaiming that he was on the run in the Afghan mountains when in fact he was safely ensconced at a CIA airbase in Pakistan.

  Meanwhile, it was becoming clear to Washington that without a Pashtun proxy, the war could take a dangerous turn. With Kabul’s fall imminent, the Northern Alliance was openly hinting that after taking the capital they planned to press south until the whole country was “liberated”—an advance certain to spark a civil war with the Pashtun-dominated south. Karzai’s plot received the green light.

  In the predawn stillness of November 14, five Black Hawk helicopters alighted on a mountaintop in central Uruzgan. Jason Amerine and nine other Green Berets trekked down the slope, bringing with them CIA agents, Delta Force commanders, and Hamid Karzai. They found their way to a small cove, were billeted in the residence of a friendly elder, and waited. They were miles from the nearest town, deep in Taliban country, not far from Mullah Omar’s childhood home. Locals would join them, Karzai promised, so Amerine planned to spend weeks, if not months, training an insurgent force. Through it all, they would have to somehow avoid Taliban detection.

  For two days, farmers came, took weapons, and disappeared into their villages. Most of them never returned. Then Karzai learned that the Taliban mayor of Tirin Kot, Uruzgan’s capital, had either been deposed or had fled, leaving the town in the hands of its residents. It was not what Amerine wanted to hear. He still lacked a fighting force and, without adequate intelligence, heading into Tirin Kot could be a suicide mission. But he was certain that the Taliban would send reinforcements, and without help the town would
be crushed. He’d have to move fast.

  That evening, the Green Berets led Karzai and his smattering of guerrilla fighters in a caravan of pickup trucks, vans, donkeys, and horses on a four-hour journey across Uruzgan’s parched moonscape. Upon arriving at the provincial capital, they found an adobe city, a warren of sienna-hued compounds surrounded by mud walls, each indistinguishable from the next. “Hamid had warned us there would be celebratory fire,” Amerine recalled, “but when we got to town, there was nobody on the streets. It was a ghost town. That’s when I knew it was a precarious situation.”

  The team took over a local residence and set up a command center. Then Amerine left his men and followed the insurgents through the darkened streets, past shuttered one-room shops, until they arrived at a squat concrete building. It was the governor’s mansion. Karzai was already inside, seated with graybeards and stately-looking men in turbans and waistcoats. Some had taken part in whatever machinations had resulted in the mayor’s departure; others had only emerged after the changeover. Some had once been Karzai’s enemies because of his friendship with Jan Muhammad, their rival from the civil war days—but for now, in the shadow of American power, old grudges were overlooked.