No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  Thousands of miles away, in Bonn, Germany, various Afghan political factions were meeting to decide on a post-Taliban government. The Northern Alliance held the majority of delegate seats, followed by an assortment of groups associated with the former king Zahir Shah, in exile since 1973. After much wrangling, Abdul Sattar Sirat, an ethnic Uzbek close to the king, was chosen as the country’s interim president. Hamid Karzai, whose stock had been soaring since the Tirin Kot battle, was awarded the vice presidency.

  The following day, Amerine’s team stopped about fifteen miles north of Kandahar city, at an eerily silent and apparently deserted town. Everything was still, except for the Taliban’s signature white flags flapping atop the buildings. As the team pressed closer, Kalashnikov fire erupted nearby. It was a leftover Taliban contingent, putting up last-ditch resistance. Over fifteen hours, the Green Berets and Afghan insurgents slowly advanced through the wadis and fields, getting into close-range firefights and calling in air strikes. At times, the fighting grew intense—one Green Beret survived a bullet through the neck—but the Americans eventually captured a strategic hill overlooking the main tributary flowing into Kandahar.

  By the next morning the outpost had been transformed into a hub of operations for the insurgency, with local elders streaming in for audiences with Karzai. Around eight thirty a.m., Karzai headed to a command post to meet some newly arrived tribal leaders who had come bearing an important message. Suddenly everything exploded: windows burst, slabs of the ceiling came crashing down, and Karzai was thrown to the ground. When he looked up, he saw smoke and blood and groaning, soot-covered men.

  The Americans had called in an air strike—on themselves. Although threat of a Taliban counterattack had been minimal, American bombing had continued (largely on orders of Amerine’s superior, who had flown in to join the mission). In the process, an errant 2,000-pound satellite-guided bomb struck their own encampment. Miraculously, Karzai escaped with only bruises, but some of his most trusted commanders were killed. In all, five Afghans lost their lives in the blast, along with three American soldiers, and many more were wounded, Amerine among them. He was evacuated from the country.

  Minutes after the blast, Karzai’s satellite phone rang with a call from the BBC’s Lyse Doucet. “What’s your reaction to being named as prime minister?” she asked. It was news to Karzai. Behind the scenes, US officials had been busy reversing the decision that Afghan groups had reached in Germany. The Americans had apparently wanted their own man, a Pashtun, in the presidential palace.

  Moments later, Karzai got another dose of surprising news: the Taliban were sending a delegation to meet him.

  * * *

  After two months in hiding, Mullah Omar was losing his grip. Initially, he had exhorted his senior lieutenants to fight on, assuring them that he was “ready to leave everything, and to believe only in Islam and my Afghan bravery.” But his mettle deserted him after the war’s fateful first night. Since then, he had been hiding in the houses of close friends, emerging only at nightfall. He was suffering from apocalyptic dreams and anguish over his decision not to surrender bin Laden. His moods veered wildly between intense defiance, including pledges to fight to the death, and bouts of boundless terror that brought him close to tears. Even worse, the rest of the Taliban leadership, who had come to see their cause as hopeless, were pressing him to capitulate.

  Two weeks before the battle of Tirin Kot, Omar had ordered an assistant to reach out to Karzai through tribal intermediaries to explore the possibility of surrender. Karzai had received the call on his satellite phone at the airbase in Pakistan, as Jason Amerine sat within earshot, and passed the message to the CIA, who reportedly relayed it all the way up to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The Taliban leader hinted that he was seeking a face-saving abdication of power, which meant an “honorable immunity,” in the words of an associate. Rumsfeld’s response was clear and direct: Washington would accept nothing short of unconditional surrender.

  After the defeat in Tirin Kot, the Taliban leadership gathered secretly at a house in Kandahar city. Throughout the afternoon, an increasingly sullen Omar pleaded with the others to head for the mountains and launch a guerrilla war. But “this wasn’t happening,” a top military commander told me later. “We all knew time was up. Fate laughs at even the best schemes.”

  His back to the wall, Mullah Omar drew up a letter to Hamid Karzai, acknowledging his selection as interim president. The letter also granted Omar’s ministers, deputies, and aides the right to surrender and formalized the handover of his vehicles, books, and other possessions to tribal elders.

  On December 5, a Taliban delegation arrived at the US special forces camp north of Kandahar city to officially relinquish power. According to a participant, Karzai was asked that he allow Mullah Omar to “live in dignity” in exchange for his quiescence. The delegation members, which included Defense Minister Mullah Obaidullah, Omar’s trusted aide Tayeb Agha, and other key leaders, pledged to retire from politics and return to their home villages. Crucially, they also agreed that their movement would surrender arms, effectively ensuring that the Taliban could no longer function as a military entity. There would be no jihad, no resistance from the Taliban to the new order—even as leaders of al-Qaeda were escaping to Pakistan to continue their holy war. The differences between the two groups may have never been so apparent, but as Washington declared victory, they passed largely unnoticed.

  It was December 7, less than two months since the first American bomb had fallen. Across Afghanistan, men and women looked with wondrous anticipation toward the end of twenty-one years of war. In Kandahar, a convoy of Afghan militiamen, Green Berets, and Karzai with his CIA escorts snaked through acres of farmland and approached the dusty outskirts of the city. As they entered the mud-walled maze of narrow streets, they passed a large irrigation tunnel. Inside, Mullah Omar and other senior Taliban leaders were huddled together, fearing that, despite Karzai’s promises, they would be handed over to the Americans.

  Later that evening, as Karzai and the Americans occupied Mullah Omar’s home and announced the official end of the Taliban regime, as crowds celebrated in Kabul and other cities across Afghanistan, as the world heralded the end of one of the most oppressive governments in memory, Mullah Omar stepped out of the tunnel. With the open country before him, he bid farewell to his friends and said that they should attempt to contact him no more. They were now and forever on their own. Then he climbed aboard an old Honda motorcycle, drove out along the highway, and disappeared into the desert.

  * * *

  The day that Karzai survived a US bomb and learned that he had been selected president, a prisoner was walked out of his cell and into the courtyard of a Kandahar prison. The sun weighed down heavily; the guards gathered in the shade. No words were spoken, as dozens of eyes fixed on the condemned.

  Then a door to the courtyard banged open and a man strode in, followed by a group of bodyguards. Jan Muhammad recognized him as a high-ranking Taliban official. He watched as the man whispered something to the warden.

  The pair walked toward Jan Muhammad. The warden reached behind him and slipped a key into his wrist shackles.

  He stared at them. “Is this a joke?” It was all that he could think to say.

  “I hope you’ll forgive us for what we did to you,” the official said. He then undid the cuffs of the other prisoner, Muhammad Nabi. “You are free. A car is waiting outside.”

  Karzai had not forgotten his promise. Upon meeting the Taliban delegation, he’d stated that he would accept their surrender on one condition: the immediate release of his dear friend Jan Muhammad.

  Muhammad was driven to the American camp, and when Karzai first caught sight of him he burst into tears. After they embraced, he took a step back and gasped: his once corpulent friend had shriveled up, skin hanging from his bones.

  Only in Karzai’s camp did Muhammad finally learn about the events of the previous two months, of 9/11, the US invasion, and the Taliban’
s impending demise. He drove home to Uruzgan to see his family and returned the next day with scores of jubilant tribesmen. The following day, the whole group would march with the Americans into Kandahar city, Afghanistan’s political crucible, as men of power.

  When I met him years later, Jan Muhammad’s ample frame had filled out, and he was living once again in a world of supplicants and hangers-on. I had sought out Mullah Cable to understand the US invasion from the perspective of the losers, and now I was meeting Muhammad to explore just what it had meant for the winners—and few had won as much as he. It was a quintessentially Kabul meeting: the cluttered living room with its gaudy leather couches still in their plastic covers, the glass coffee table, the portrait of Karzai hung proudly on the wall, the children peeking in shyly from behind a kitchen door. Jan Muhammad showed me how his body had become a battlefield over the years, bearing the remnants of Soviet slugs and Taliban torture. A coarse gray beard hung wildly from his jowls, and a turban sat so haphazardly atop his head that you had to fight the urge to reach over and straighten it. One eye was damaged and useless; the other squinted at you with a touch of suspicion.

  I asked him what his initial thoughts had been upon his release, and he replied that from his first free step, he was consumed by a single idea. It churned inside him, invaded his dreams, and gripped his imagination. It commandeered his public life, even though he knew it was wrong, and it had destroyed many of his personal relationships. He looked at me, with an unflinching stare, and said: “I wanted revenge.”

  3

  The War from Year Zero

  The old man sat legs folded on the asphalt, facing a bullet-ridden building. Spread out before him were Colgate toothbrushes and colored plastic combs and glossy cigarette packs promising “American flavor.” The building was like a crumbling cave, with its collapsed roof, buckling support beams, and a yawning hole for a front door. He pointed to the structure. “There,” he said, “was once something glorious.”

  He had lived in this sweltering city of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, selling trinkets and toiletries for as long as he could remember—“before the Americans, before the Taliban, before the Russians,” he explained. In the 1970s, the building had served as the Helmand Cinema House, the only movie theater in all of southern Afghanistan. On a Friday afternoon, you could catch double features imported from around the world. One of the most popular was Laila Majnu, a Bollywood take on a classic Arab story of unrealized love. Qays, a farmer, falls hard for a girl named Laila, but her father forbids the marriage and she is given to another man. Despondent, Qays roams the desert for years, earning the sobriquet majnun, madman. Eventually, his body is found next to the grave of his beloved, his final ode to her written in the sand nearby.

  The old man had gone back repeatedly, even though he didn’t understand most of the Hindi spoken, until he had the film memorized. He had grown up in a world segregated by gender, where marriages were arranged, and this was his first love story. “It gave us all hope,” he told me, “that we would find something special in our lives.”

  But one afternoon in 1992, the mujahedeen arrived in town and shut down the theater forever. Later, they rocketed it for good measure. When the Taliban seized power, the building was converted into a state-run radio station. After 2001, under the American-backed regime, the place became an opium den. A whole generation grew up never having seen a film. But the old man still remembered, and he told anyone who would listen about the time when, for two hours a week, a madman and his lover were all that mattered.

  * * *

  The first years after 2001 were like a dream. Society had effectively been on hold for two decades, and now, with the war over, it was as if the very notion of public life had been unearthed from a time capsule. It was a new beginning, a Year Zero. Barbers were among the first to reemerge, unrolling their mats onto busy sidewalks; for a few pennies and a cup of tea you could shave your Taliban-mandated beard, shearing away the weight of the past. Music once again rang out through the streets, and Hollywood and Bollywood DVDs, once traded like samizdat, were selling openly in Kabul.

  Millions of refugees returned after years away. Investment dollars poured in, as television stations and cell phone towers sprouted seemingly overnight. An influx of aid organizations formed part of the broadest international humanitarian initiative in history, and abandoned homes were repurposed into offices for gender experts and development specialists. One result of all the outside attention was the 2004 constitution, drafted with heavy Western input and hailed as one of the world’s most progressive. In addition to protecting basic civil liberties and minority rights, the document guaranteed women 25 percent of parliamentary seats (surpassing the proportion in the US Congress).

  Yet I wondered if all this was enough to erase the memories of the Taliban past. What did it feel like to emerge from those brutal years? One afternoon in 2010 I met a woman, Heela, who would help me understand what the post-Taliban world really meant for civilians. At first, however, she hesitated to talk. “I don’t know anything about these wars,” she told me. “I’m just an ordinary woman.” So ordinary, in fact, that she seemed the very embodiment of Afghanistan—troubled, tried, resilient, and ultimately beholden to a foreign power. She appeared to typify exactly the sort of person the US invasion had saved, and I wondered if perhaps, in her newfound freedom, she would offer a glimpse of the best of American influence.

  Heela, then thirty-seven, was the doyenne of a tiny clan of boys. Walid, the youngest, was a torrent of mischief; Omaid, the oldest, was a pensive teenager with lugubrious eyes. Between them were Nawid and Jamshed, both of whom had a penchant for skipping school and wandering far and wide, but who always came home in time for dinner. Heela lived a life of jangled nerves and frequent distractions; when speaking, she raced ahead breathlessly, hopscotching in her story from one place to another, zigzagging across time and space like some postmodern conversationalist. She stood taller than average, with a youthful smile and large, winter-gray eyes.

  As with Mullah Cable and Jan Muhammad, I was interested in Heela’s experience in the new American-backed order. But to start her story with the US invasion would be like “watching a movie from the middle,” as she put it. In truth, Afghanistan’s real Year Zero was 1979, the year of the Soviet invasion, and nothing—not the Taliban, or the American invasion, or the trajectory of Heela’s life—makes much sense without first coming to terms with the Russian occupation and its aftermath.

  In the veritable Afghan prehistory of peace and anonymity, the era before the Soviets, there lies a world lost and yet to be recovered. In 1972, the year that Heela was born to a family of journalists and professionals, Kabul was a quaint, relaxed mountain town. An important stop on the “hippie trail”—a well-trodden route for Western stoners and flower children often heading to India—the town had reinvented itself in a few short generations. A wave of progressive reforms had rippled through Afghanistan in the 1950s, resulting in a government decree that veiling was optional for women. In 1964, they were granted the franchise. Photographs from the era show besuited men accompanied by women in short skirts and beehive hairdos; there are movie theaters, broad paved roads, and tree-lined sidewalks.

  Out in the heavily tribal Pashtun countryside, however, conservatism still reigned and women lived cloistered in their homes. The state was largely absent, and civil society nonexistent; politics worked through kinship and patronage, leaving clan leaders and landlords to run their own fiefdoms. If you managed to make it out to Kabul and attend university, you came away with a tantalizing taste of what your country could become, and a stark, unremitting sense of the inadequacies of the world you’d left behind. As with so many other developing nations of that era, this disjuncture spawned a crisis of modernity, and the disillusioned urban intelligentsia struggled to articulate a response. Two rival currents emerged: one embracing Communism, which looked to the Soviet Union and third-world liberation movements, and the other, Islamism, which t
ook inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood and related trends in the Arab world.

  For many years these were merely undercurrents, but they rushed to the surface in the late 1970s. Heela was in the third grade when, one afternoon, she happened upon a large demonstration. Throngs of students wearing black headbands were carrying a body and chanting slogans. They had symbolically tied cloths around their own jaws, the way Afghans did with a corpse to prevent its mouth from swinging open. Some were shouting and firing rifles in the air, or waving flags bearing the likenesses of Che Guevara and Karl Marx. It was April 1978, and the Communists were rallying against the government for killing Mir Akbar Khyber, one of their leaders. “This was the first time the Afghan people raised their voices. It was like an earthquake,” she told me. “None of us in my family understood it yet, though. We weren’t political people.”

  The Communists used the killing of their leader as a pretext to launch a coup against dictator Daud Khan. Within days, army units had seized the palace and executed Khan and his family. But the Communists themselves were riven into two feuding factions, which immediately took to conspiring against each other. For the next year, chaos gripped the country, as the Communist leadership pushed through land reform, killed thousands of tribal elders, landlords, and religious figures, and plotted to knock one another off. The government seemed on the verge of devouring itself. On Christmas Eve 1979, the neighboring Soviet Union invaded, ostensibly to end the internecine fighting and put in place a more stable leadership. But their occupation only intensified the bloodshed: in the decadelong war that followed, it is believed that a million Afghans were killed and five million became refugees. Soviet bombers wiped whole villages off the map, while Soviet troops imprisoned and tortured thousands. The decade marked a cataclysmic rupture; nothing for Afghans, or indeed the entire Muslim world, would ever be the same.