No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  What if, however, there were no fish to begin with?

  * * *

  The air was cooling down and I knew the sky would darken soon, so it was time to leave Band-i-Timor. Three boys lined up to watch as the truck I was in pulled away, kicking up dust all around. I sat with a tribal elder, my guide, who had fled the area for Kandahar city years before. He pointed out the orchards of his youth, now standing wild and untended. Farther on, the road had disappeared under desert sand. Our truck labored across the gravel hills and onto the highway. We passed an empty police checkpoint, and then an armed man on a motorcycle appeared, his face covered in a bandanna. He gave our truck a friendly wave and rode on toward Band-i-Timor. By nightfall, we had returned safely to Kandahar city.

  I would return frequently to southern Afghanistan, each time discovering new fragments of this lost history. On one trip I found myself in a roomful of tribal elders when a militiaman walked in and sat in the corner. When he learned that I was a foreigner, his face clouded. Throughout dinner, I could feel his eyes on me. Young boys came in to clear the empty plates and the elders walked out into the courtyard to stretch, and then, for a moment, I was alone with him.

  “Tell me something,” he said. “What do you think about Gul Agha Sherzai?”

  Without knowing who the militiaman was or who he was connected to among the panoply of elders here, it was a question to dread.

  “Well,” I said, as diplomatically as I could. “I know he’s a famous man. He’s well known around here.”

  The man broke into a broad grin. “Yes, he’s famous. Everyone loves him. He’s a national hero.”

  It turned out that the man was one of Sherzai’s commanders. He introduced himself as Sher Muhammad and spent the rest of the evening recounting his exploits as a Sherzai hit man, targeting “Taliban and al-Qaeda criminals” side by side with the Americans. Often, he told me, his team wound up arresting the same person again and again, and one day he had suggested to his boss that it might be easier simply to kill their captives.

  “But Sherzai looked at me angrily and called me naive.” Then, he said, Sherzai held up a hard-boiled egg. “You see this? There are two ways to peel this egg. One is to break it open forcefully, but then you make a mess, and you’ll lose some of the yolk. The other way is to do it carefully, a number of small cracks one after the other—and you get as much as you can out of it. That’s why we keep arresting them.”

  Later I mentioned my encounter with Sher Muhammad to Sharafuddin, an old man I had befriended who ran a small bakery in downtown Kandahar, and he replied with a story of his own. A banged-up war hero from the anti-Soviet jihad, Sharafuddin had a bullet still lodged in his arm, shrapnel in his back, and a prosthetic testicle. His mujahedeen unit had contained a number of future Taliban figures, but ever since the Russian withdrawal he had abjured politics, opting instead to tend his bakery. By 2002, deep into his twilight years, he was arising daily at three a.m. to knead dough.

  That year, trucks rolled up to the bakery one morning and men surrounded the building with weapons drawn. Sharafuddin had seen them around town. They were Sherzai’s people. As soon as he stepped out, they were on him. He was thrown into the back of a Toyota, his feet were bound, and the barrel of a gun was thrust at his temple.

  “You’re a terrorist,” one said.

  Sharafuddin was taken to KAF, where American interrogators accused him of being a member of al-Qaeda. When he denied it, telling them that this was all some horrendous mistake, metal hooks were inserted in his mouth. They twisted, and he screamed. Then the soldiers applied electric shocks.

  “But compared to what happened next, this was pleasant,” he told me. “The Americans had treated me like a real guest.” Transferred back to Sherzai’s intelligence team, Sharafuddin was brought to a nondescript government transportation office. In the basement, unknown to the office workers above, was a series of windowless rooms. It was a secret prison. There, his hands and feet were bound and he was hung upside down from the ceiling. “I was dangling like a goat in a butcher shop,” he recalled.

  For the next eighteen days, twenty-three hours a day, he hung there. “I even pissed on myself,” he said. “I tasted my own piss. It tasted like battery acid.” Twice a day the interrogators would enter the room. There were six of them, wearing civilian clothes, and they would take turns striking him. Hanging next to him was Hajji Muhammad, a tribal elder and landlord, who one day was beaten so badly that blood poured from his mouth, dripping down his jowls and into his nose. Through the whole night Sharafuddin listened to him moaning and sobbing. In the morning men came, untied him, and took him away.

  Sharafuddin was accused of conspiring to attack the Americans, but everyone present understood the trumped-up nature of the charges. It took more than two weeks for his relatives to borrow 50,000 rupees—about $800—and buy his release. Upon returning home, Sharafuddin learned that Hajji Muhammad had succumbed to his wounds. He himself could hardly move for weeks. “I felt like my joints were severed,” he recalled. “I felt needles all the time. Even my hands felt heavy.”

  Months went by, and then he was arrested again. The nightmare repeated itself, and again his family scrounged together funds to buy his freedom.

  Over the years, it became a ritual of torture. Sharafuddin began planning for the arrests, putting money away monthly, the way someone might save for a new car.

  Then one day in 2005, the Taliban—by then reconstituted—buried a bomb outside the home of the commander heading Sherzai’s intelligence unit. The blast killed him instantly, and Sharafuddin was never bothered again.

  6

  To Make the Bad Things Good Again

  One morning in early 2002, superintendent Abdul Ali approached the main schoolhouse in Khas Uruzgan. A fresh layer of snow blanketed the street and there was no traffic in sight. The building up ahead stood without commotion, just as it had during the Taliban years.

  He walked up to the front gate and saw that it had been smashed in. The security guards were missing. The place smelled of something acrid, like seared metal. When Ali stepped inside and crossed the parking lot he saw the cars, every one of them torched. They looked as black as burnt bread. Near the door to the main building the soles of his shoes began to squish, and he glanced down and recoiled. It was blood. When he looked up he saw it everywhere, smeared on the walls, puddled on the walkway.

  Carefully, he opened the front door. The building had served as a temporary headquarters for the new government, but now the hallways were empty and silent. He turned the knob of a classroom and stepped inside. There, lying on blood-sodden sleeping mats, were the bodies of Abdul Qudus—a pro-American government official—and his aides. It appeared that most of them had been slaughtered in their beds.

  Feeling sick and unsteady, Ali headed out the back door onto the playground. Splayed out on the snow was another body. It was Shah Muhammad, a government official, a supporter of Hamid Karzai and opponent of the Taliban. A splintered femur protruded from his thigh, and he had a single bullet hole in his back. His hands were bound with plastic cuffs bearing markings that Ali couldn’t understand. They read: “US Pat. No. 5651376. Other Pat. Pending.”

  * * *

  “Justice,” Jan Muhammad told me years later, “justice is the most important thing. You see, without it, you can’t have stability. That was on my mind always—how do I ensure justice? How do I make the bad things good again?” We sat cross-legged on his guest-room floor, sipping green tea, on a warm spring day in 2010. With glass tables and gold-framed portraits of President Karzai, ornate curio pieces and finely crafted porcelain vases, the room was airy and clean—and he was proud of every inch of it. “I earned all of this,” he told me, unprompted, “not like those warlords who steal land. I’m not a thief.” Seated nearby were the hangers-on and acolytes you tend to accrue in Afghanistan when you are a man of means and power: a pair of bodyguards, two or three cousins, a secretary, someone who dealt with guests, and an old man with no
discernible role. There was also a young boy whom Jan Muhammad liked to keep around. “He has beautiful eyes,” he explained.

  Since his release from prison, Jan Muhammad had found a new lease on life. In January 2002, he was appointed by Karzai as governor of Uruzgan—the post he had held before the Taliban days. For friends and supporters it was as if the world had been righted again, as if the Taliban years could be forgotten. But Jan Muhammad discovered that he could not forget. In meetings, at dinner, at night with his family, he found his thoughts wandering back to that darkened cell, to that open latrine. Still, he threw himself into the task of remaking Uruzgan as best he could. Unlike most other governors, he had received special dispensation from Karzai to directly appoint personnel in Uruzgan’s ten districts. Each district had its own governor and police chief, who would answer to Jan Muhammad alone.

  “When I started,” he said, “I tried to fix the nightmare the Taliban had left us. I had fought ten years against the Russians. Nearly died. I lost seven family members, I lost my best friends, my home was bombed. Despite it all, I fought and led our mujahedeen and liberated Uruzgan from the Russians. Then I was forced to hand everything over to the Taliban.” He laughed a breathy, bitter laugh. “The rest of the story you know, the story of our nightmare.”

  As governor, his job was to restore order to the land and return Uruzgan to the simpler times, when rulers cared for their subjects, when duty and honor mattered. He often discussed this vision with Karzai. “We knew we’d have to leave the old way of doing politics behind,” he said. He drew close, garlic and onions on his breath. “The problem, you see, was that the Taliban were clever. Their spies were everywhere. They had supporters. If you took a nap”—he snapped his fingers—“they’d kill you.”

  Jan Muhammad knew that there was only one way to navigate through such intrigue: rely on those he already trusted. His tribesmen, the Popalzais, had stood by his side throughout the Taliban years. Some had been imprisoned simply for knowing him. Some had risked their lives to help spirit him away to Pakistan for his meetings with Karzai or had risked their freedom to smuggle money into prison for him. There is no community like the community of sorrow, and as far as he was concerned none had suffered more under the Taliban than the Popalzais. They had run things in Uruzgan for as long as anyone could remember, at least until the recent wars, and it was time to set things right.

  So in every district Jan Muhammad appointed a Popalzai governor and police chief, or figures from closely related tribes. The trouble was, many of these communities had already chosen their own leaders during the waning days of the Taliban. In Khas Uruzgan, elders had elected as district governor an anti-Taliban personage from the mujahedeen era, a former school janitor named Tawildar Yunis (“Groundskeeper Yunis”). He was working out of the governor’s house, along with a locally elected police chief and other officials, collecting weapons from surrendering Talibs. But they were not Popalzais and, even worse, maintained political links to one of Jan Muhammad’s rivals from the civil war years. So Muhammad appointed a local Popalzai elder and friend of the Karzais, Abdul Qudus, as his governor. But Yunis refused to budge, the imprimatur of Khas Uruzgan elders lending his claims an undeniable air of legitimacy. Unswayed, Abdul Qudus then requisitioned the local school for himself and his coterie of followers, declaring that it was now the rightful governor’s residence and that it was his job to collect Taliban weapons. In response, Yunis appealed to everyone from Gul Agha Sherzai to President Karzai himself, but none were willing to wade into the growing mess. Tensions rose by the day. Jan Muhammad’s side began openly questioning Yunis’s anti-Taliban bona fides, throwing him into fits of rage. He returned the favor by declaring Jan Muhammad’s men soft on the Taliban.

  The actual Taliban were perplexed. During the standoff, a trio of senior Taliban officials made their way to Khas Uruzgan to surrender to the new government: Tayeb Agha, an erudite, well-spoken twentysomething who had served as Mullah Omar’s personal secretary and adviser; former finance minister Agha Jan Mutassim, who had publicly rejected calls from Pakistani clerics to wage jihad against the Americans; and Health Minister Mullah Abbas, the official who had been responsible for recruiting Heela and other women to study as nurses and midwives. All three had been members of the Taliban since the movement’s inception. Their surrender should have been a political coup for the young Karzai government. But surrender to whom? Who was actually in charge?

  * * *

  It was late January 2002, and at the schoolhouse Abdul Qudus and his aides had settled into their rooms for the night. The building had a single narrow hallway with half a dozen dilapidated classrooms, a patio extending into the parking lot, and, as with all southern compounds, a mud-brick wall enclosing the premises. That evening, as an icy wind swept through the hallway, the security guards sat huddled together, wrapped in heavy pattus and dozing off.

  Sometime during the night, a blast shook the front wall and startled them awake. It was a sound unlike any of them had heard before. A sudden white light flooded the compound. Rahim, a guard, ran into the parking lot. When he saw men in black balaclavas and boots, he did what he was paid to do, raising his weapon to fire at the intruders. They returned fire, and soon bullets were zipping past him. Abandoning his gun, Rahim fled through the back.

  Inside the building, Abdul Qudus and the others lay listening in their beds. The voices outside were growing louder. Finally, Shah Muhammad, one of Qudus’s bodyguards, loaded his weapon and stepped into the hallway, firing blindly into the darkness. Shots were returned and he was struck in the leg. Stumbling back into the classroom, he managed to crawl through an open window to the rear playground. Then a second and third Afghan official ventured into the hallway to confront the attackers. The identity of the assailants was still unclear.

  Leading the charge, as it turned out, was Master Sergeant Anthony Pryor, a thirty-nine-year-old Green Beret, a member of an “A-team,” billed in the trade as “door kickers” or “five-minute wonders” for their expertise in storming compounds and close-quarters combat. As Pryor later recounted it to a reporter, he was inching toward a classroom door when an Afghan struck him from behind, dislocating his shoulder and smashing his collarbone. Someone then dug his nails into Pryor’s face, ripping off his night vision goggles. “He started sticking his stinking fingers into my eyeballs,” Pryor said.

  Neither side had the slightest idea who the other was. In the darkness, the Afghan government officials knew only that they were under assault, possibly from the Taliban out for revenge. Master Sergeant Pryor and the other members of the special forces team were convinced that they were up against hardened al-Qaeda fighters.

  In great pain, Pryor was struggling to stand up when an Afghan jumped on him and the pair came crashing to the floor—a blessing for Pryor, since the impact popped his shoulder back into place. A solid man, Pryor had the strength of a horse and was quickly atop his adversary. He broke the Afghan official’s neck and shot him dead with a 9mm pistol.

  Then, crab-walking along the wall, he drew closer to the classroom where Abdul Qudus and other Afghan officials lay cowering in their cots. There are no witnesses to what happened next. Pryor claims that he acted in self-defense, but Khas Uruzgan residents point out that the bodies were found in their beds, handcuffed, and there were no signs of struggle. Either way, every official was killed. In twenty minutes, the violence was over.

  Or so it seemed. A US attack on a group of pro-American officials would have been a shocking turn of events under any circumstances, but things would only get stranger. Down the road from the schoolhouse stood the governor’s compound, a sprawling collection of administrative buildings including a police headquarters, a jail, and a weapons depot. It was home to Yunis and his allies, and their guards were sitting near the main gate when it, too, burst open and shouting men rushed through, the white lights glaring and explosions going off all around. Security guard Abdul Nafeh raised his weapon in defense, but a torrent of bullets cut him
down instantly.

  Inside a single-room police hut, the clamor awoke chief of police Malek Rauf. A large man with a hearty laugh, Rauf had been elected by a tribal council as part of the Yunis administration, a decision spurred in part by his anti-Taliban credentials and his renown from the Soviet days. He recognized the invaders’ shouts as English and realized immediately that these must be Americans. “Don’t worry,” he said to one of his men, “they are our friends.” As the soldiers rushed in, he threw up his hands and shouted in Farsi, “We’re friends! Friends, friends, friends!” But he was seized and hurled to the floor, and boots kicked him hard. He heard his ribs crack.

  Inside the governor’s hut, governor Tawildar Yunis sat listening to the commotion outside. As the shouting drew closer, he squeezed out the back window, climbed over the compound wall, and escaped into the night. Others were attempting to flee as well, but not all were as fortunate. Sixteen-year-old Muhammad Karim was later found with a bullet in his head.

  The survivors of both attacks were rounded up and loaded onto helicopters. As they flew off, AC-130 gunships sprayed the compounds with rockets, sparking an explosion in the weapons cache at the school and engulfing the parking lot in flames. It would be hours before the first villagers ventured into the charred sites. In the governor’s compound, they found that the attackers had left behind a calling card. Emblazoned with the symbol of an American flag, it bore a handwritten message: “Have a nice day. From Damage, Inc.”