by Anand Gopal
The toll from the two attacks: twenty-one pro-American leaders and their employees dead, twenty-six taken prisoner, and a few who could not be accounted for. Not one member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda was among the victims. Instead, in a single thirty-minute stretch the United States had managed to eradicate both of Khas Uruzgan’s potential governments, the core of any future anti-Taliban leadership—stalwarts who had outlasted the Russian invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban years but would not survive their own allies. People in Khas Uruzgan felt what Americans might if, in a single night, masked gunmen had wiped out the entire city council, mayor’s office, and police department of a small suburban town: shock, grief, and rage.
* * *
Once again Police Chief Malek Rauf was forced to the ground. Looking up he could see bright lights and cages, men shouting from inside the cages, and American soldiers shouting back. Every few moments he was hit with something stiff, maybe a belt, and kicked with steel-toed boots. His friends were lying prone beside him, crying out, “We’re Karzai’s people!” as they were beaten.
They were in a hangar at Kandahar Airfield. Many hours had passed since the raids. Their hands and feet were shackled, each prisoner chained to the next. Soldiers “were walking on our backs like we were stones,” Rauf later recalled. Another captive said, “I was so afraid, I did not expect to remain alive and see my family again.”
When news of the massacre reached Jan Muhammad’s ears, he could hardly believe it. Someone had falsely tipped off the special forces that Abdul Qudus and the others at the school building were Taliban fighters, pointing to their large weapons stores and the three high-ranking Talibs in the neighborhood. The Americans “know who is responsible,” he fumed to a reporter. “People have died. Whoever is responsible should be executed.” Muhammad couldn’t prove it, but he was sure that it was Yunis and his cronies, looking to eliminate their rivals, who had tipped off the Americans. Yet someone else had also cast Yunis as a Talib, pointing to his large weapons stores and reports of high-ranking Talibs in the area. Muhammad swore for days afterward that his hands were clean, but elders in Khas Uruzgan who had backed Yunis believed differently.
What neither side could understand was how the two sets of allegations had made it to the Americans unreconciled. In fact, both pieces of intelligence from the rival camps had climbed all the way up to CENTCOM, the United States Central Command in Tampa, Florida. Specialists there had analyzed photos of the two sites and concluded that both were likely “al Qaeda compounds.” CENTCOM had then issued an order to KAF-based Special Operations Forces to raid the two rival sites, a mission designated as AQ-048. In the weeks before the attacks a reconnaissance team had attempted site surveillance three times, in each instance being thwarted by equipment malfunction or inclement weather. But despite never having laid eyes on the sites, CENTCOM ordered the mission to proceed. Companies with the First Battalion, Fifth Special Forces Group, took the job, splitting into two teams for the twin nighttime assaults and bringing with them a New Zealand unit as well as FBI agents to interrogate suspects.
The only sign that something might have gone terribly wrong came after the killings, when troops discovered flags of the new Afghan government in both compounds. CENTCOM in Florida was radioed, and the troops were assured that “no, there are no friendlies at the site.”
It took weeks for the Americans to admit any error, at which point Malek Rauf and the others were released from KAF—which American soldiers had dubbed “Camp Slappy”—with an apology. The sixty-year-old Rauf could not stand for weeks, and his skin bore the welts of torture. To soothe tempers, he was reinstated as the district’s official police chief. Then, not missing a beat, Jan Muhammad maneuvered to install one of his own allies, Qudus Khan—no relation to Abdul Qudus—as the Khas Uruzgan district governor. (Half a year later, Qudus Khan would come knocking on Heela’s door to ask her about overseeing the vocational training center.) Tawildar Yunis, meanwhile, fled town, never to be seen again. The trio of top Taliban officials who had been trying to surrender saw that they would be marked men regardless of their intentions and left for Pakistan, where in coming years they would play a prominent role in the anti-American insurgency. A year after the raid, despite Washington’s admission that it had killed only pro-American civilians, seven soldiers involved in the attacks received a Bronze Star for valor. Master Sergeant Anthony Pryor, for his part, was awarded a Silver Star.
* * *
“The greatest thing that ever happened to this country,” Jan Muhammad told me, “was the coming of the Americans. They’re true friends.” From the beginning, he had reason enough to be grateful. The United States had brought the business of counterterrorism to the Tirin Kot desert, and Jan Muhammad would be just the man to oversee the new venture. Like Sherzai in Kandahar, he leased land—which wasn’t his—to the US military for a base and supplied fellow tribesmen as construction workers. The instant profits were reinvested in the buildup of a private army, another Afghan Blackwater, a force under his control but rented out to the US military. He diversified his portfolio to include development work and trucking and, like any good Uruzgani landowner, opium. Soon he had reclaimed his pre-Taliban honorific khan, the suffix of the rich and powerful. To the Americans, he became simply JMK.
By midmorning, the courtyard of the governor’s mansion would fill with hundreds of turbaned men squatting ears to knees, waiting their turn for an audience. Many of them were tribal elders and district officials looking to petition JMK for funds and services. If you were a poor, sunburned farmer living where the soil was bone dry and you wanted the village to fix your irrigation ditch, you’d ask your malek, or village headman, for assistance. But the malek would have no discretionary funds of his own because local officials lacked the ability to collect taxes. So he would request aid from the district governor or other such authority, who, in turn, would appeal to the provincial governor or regional strongman, who ultimately sourced his wealth from the Americans.
The politician is a particular type of creature never found far from money, but in most societies he or she usually also bears the burden of legitimacy, of winning votes by articulating a program and selling visions of a better life. In Afghanistan, however, government budgets have long rested on the rickety edifice of international aid, so power has depended solely on one’s proximity to that aid. For that poor, sunburned farmer, repairs for his irrigation ditch hinged entirely on whether his malek had the necessary connections in Tirin Kot and Kabul, the right access. There was no commodity more precious. Access meant the difference between breathing in gravel dust on broken macadam roads and coasting along a paved highway. It meant the difference between gainful employment at a construction project and watching the work from afar. Between having a clinic nearby and dying at home.
In this pyramid of patronage the access brokers, from JMK on down to district-level officials, were the true political elites. If you did not belong to their networks, through tribe or clan or friendship, you were out of luck. In Uruzgan, this meant that an expanding web of Popalzai tribal officials was effectively cutting off other communities—in particular, the Ghilzai tribes—from access. For many in the Ghilzai elite, the only solution was to try cultivating the Americans on their own.
* * *
It was so hot that Aziz Mansour was staying indoors, but even from there he could smell the stench. He left his shop and walked out onto the dirt lane past the market stalls, others soon joining him. The odor was overwhelming and it was everywhere. As he walked to the central roundabout, the heart of Tirin Kot, where the main avenues converged and the shops pressed tightly together, he saw that there were no cars and no donkeys, just a gathering crowd. It was a good minute before he pushed his way through and saw it: dead bodies piled in a heap, many stripped naked. Flies everywhere. One head had been mashed to a pulp. He could not bring himself to look at the others.
When people stepped forward to remove the bodies, a man with a Kalashnikov slung across his
shoulder approached and asked, “Are you their friends?” They stepped back. A jeep arrived with more armed men, who shouted and kicked people and pointed their guns until the crowd dispersed. The bodies lay decomposing for two days.
The previous evening, JMK’s militia had shown up at the house of an influential Ghilzai elder named Pai Muhammad. He and some relatives were ordered outside, shackled, and forced to lie in the dirt. A commander then called someone on his satellite phone. “We’ve got him. What do you want us to do?”
On the other end of the line was JMK himself. He wanted the issue of Pai Muhammad resolved once and for all. Although Pai Muhammad had briefly allied with the Taliban in the 1990s, after the invasion he had thrown his support behind the Karzai government. In JMK’s drive to “make the bad things good again,” however, such a change of heart mattered little, and he had taken to angrily, frequently, and publicly denouncing the wave of Taliban surrenders. Like the Americans, he found the notion of a Taliban pardon abhorrent. It was about justice—not just for him, but for all those who had been wronged.
Unsurprisingly, Pai Muhammad saw things differently and had gone to JMK to plead his case. Rebuffed, he had then collected weapons from ex-Talibs and delivered them to the governor as a sign of their sincerity. But JMK was unswayed. The need for revenge had consumed him so thoroughly, and the imperatives of power had shaped him so perfectly, that he could not accept the surrenders as real. In his mind, the “Taliban” had become a fixed and timeless category of people, not an ephemeral political allegiance like all the others in his country. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” he had said.
That morning, as the men lay prone, the commander listened to JMK’s reply and said, “Hold on.” He raised his weapon and shot Pai Muhammad in the head, then turned back to the phone. “Did you hear that?”
The others on the ground began shouting and struggling. Almost at once the militiamen were upon them, and soon the captives lay bloodied on the ground. Some had their clothes ripped off. One of the men was taken aside. Then a soldier climbed into his jeep, turned on the ignition, maneuvered the vehicle around to face the other captives, and drove over them. And then back again. The lifeless bodies were tossed into the back of the jeep, driven to the town center, and dumped at the roundabout, where they would lie for all to see and learn from. The survivor was released to “warn others what happens when you support the Taliban.” It was early 2002, and throughout Uruzgan people understood: there was a new sheriff in town.
The killings shook the Ghilzai community. “Pai Muhammad was beloved,” said Abdul Matin of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. “You can make one hundred faces recoil with just one slap. Every Ghilzai knew that his tribe was under attack.” When Mullah Manan, who had been living a quiet life on his farm since the battle of Tirin Kot, heard the news he felt sick. Worried Ghilzai elders convened a grand council and concluded that they should redouble their efforts to demonstrate loyalty to the new government and the Americans.
Key to this campaign was a bespectacled ex-mujahedeen commander named Muhammad Nabi. Unlike many Ghilzai elders, he had openly defied the Taliban—which had landed him in the same prison as JMK, until both men were saved by Karzai. Upon his release, Nabi had publicly endorsed Karzai and the Americans. Still, that did not stop US forces from raiding his home some months later, breaking his windows, destroying his car, and tossing his clothes about. Supposedly the issue was a set of weapons from the 1980s. Nabi turned them over immediately. A week later the troops returned, this time accompanied by JMK’s men. Nabi pleaded that he had surrendered everything, but they ransacked the house again, and, when nothing was found, he was arrested anyway and locked up in the governor’s private prison.
A man of means and influence, a key access broker for thousands of Ghilzais, Nabi reacted like an aristocrat mistakenly accused of petty theft. “It was a disgrace,” he recalled. “In the old days no one would treat an elder that way.” He was grilled by JMK’s interrogators about hidden weapons, and, when he continued to deny their existence, they threatened to send him to Guantanamo. “I love Cuba!” he answered back sarcastically. “Better there than this hell.”
It took the intercession of Karzai himself for Nabi to regain his freedom. Ten days later, a sharecropper was laboring in the cherry orchards of the Nabi estate when he spotted something odd in the distance, atop a hill overlooking the fields. He crept close to see. Giant wheels. Wires and guns and men. It was the Americans again.
He hurried back to warn Nabi. The old man had had enough. He called some friends, who showed up armed. “I decided,” he said, “that they wouldn’t take me alive.”
Crouching amid the apple trees, he watched as a column of US troops made their way through his orchard. Then a farmhand arrived to tell him that JMK’s forces were moving in from a different direction. The Americans drew closer. “Muhammad Nabi of the Tokhis, please surrender yourself,” their megaphone blared, referring to his subtribe of the Ghilzais.
Just then, Nabi saw JMK’s plainclothes agents stumble into the Americans’ path. In the confusion, he made a break for it. By sunset he was in the mountains overlooking Tirin Kot, the same peaks he’d retreated to twenty years earlier to fight the Soviets.
Nabi’s family members were arrested and yet again the house was ransacked, but no weapons were found. This time, however, Nabi chose not to return. He fled to Pakistan with his closest followers. Thousands of Ghilzais lost their broker, their point of access to Kabul and the Americans.
One by one, other Ghilzai elders also began decamping for Pakistan. Those who remained made a last-ditch effort to connect with the Americans. Ghulam Nabi (no relation to Muhammad) was a well-regarded elder who had been harassed by JMK’s men so frequently that one day he showed up at a US special forces base to plead for protection. Unsure what to do, the soldiers called JMK for advice. He promptly accused Nabi of being an insurgent mastermind, and the Americans shipped him off to their new detention facility at Bagram Airfield. Eventually released through President Karzai’s intervention, Ghulam Nabi swore revenge and slipped away from home one night, never to be seen again.
By the end of that summer of 2002, Ghilzais across Uruzgan had been effectively squeezed out of access. “We never even spoke to Ghilzais in those days,” recalled Dan Green, who worked for a US military Provincial Reconstruction Team in Uruzgan tasked with bringing development and aid to the province. “We had no contacts. We did everything through JMK and the big non-Ghilzai tribes.”
Even as the Ghilzai elders were being rounded up, there was still no armed resistance to speak of. As in Kandahar, in Uruzgan the Taliban had surrendered and al-Qaeda had fled, leaving the Americans without an enemy to fight. Nonetheless, with JMK at the helm, targets were never in short supply.
When the Taliban had chased Karzai during his abortive 2001 uprising, he had taken shelter with an Uruzgani named Muhammad Lal. Karzai never forgot the kindness, and after winning the presidency he gifted him a model of an Air China 757. Months later, Lal openly criticized JMK, and without missing a beat US forces raided his home. Lal wasn’t present, but they found the model airplane—proof enough for them of an al-Qaeda presence. “Two of the four aircraft commandeered by terrorists for last year’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were 757s,” the State Department noted. In the subsequent months, Lal’s home was subjected to repeated raids, until he fled to Kabul for safety.
As winter settled across Uruzgan and people marked the first full year since the Taliban’s downfall, tit-for-tat killings and feuds over access to the Americans continued. But a new political order was slowly, undeniably crystallizing, unwittingly enforced by American forces.
Away from the Pashtun south, the story was different. In the northern province of Balkh, for example, two warlords—Rashid Dostum and Muhammad Atta—jockeyed for control, leading to multiple small-scale skirmishes. The possibility of open warfare seemed all too real, but things never came to a head. Instead, Un
ited Nations negotiators were able to preserve the peace, as Atta accepted a governorship and Dostum a post in Kabul. I asked Eckart Schiewek, then a political advisor with the UN mission to Afghanistan, why the outcome was so different, why the southern pattern of killings had never taken hold. “There were no American troops,” he replied, pointing out that almost the entire US military presence was concentrated in the Pashtun south and east near the Pakistani border. “You couldn’t call on soldiers to settle your feuds.”
Anthropologist Noah Coburn found a similar dynamic in his study of Istaliff, a district near Kabul similar in size to Khas Uruzgan but with no regular US troop presence. “International military forces,” he wrote, had “little interest in involving themselves in local politics” in Istaliff. Because none of the various Afghan factions competing for power enjoyed privileged access to foreign troops, no group could outmuscle the other, and no one “seriously considered trying to establish hegemonic control over town politics.” The result was a tenuous, fragile stability—but stability nonetheless. No communities were severed from state access, nor were there cycles of bloody revenge. And, to this day in Istaliff, there is no anti-American insurgency.
In southern Afghanistan, the mix of American boots on the ground and strongmen itching to outflank their rivals prevented such détentes. Day by day, marginalized southern communities from one valley to the next were slipping out of the government’s orbit. The Americans were beginning to wear out their welcome—and it was only going to get worse.
7
Black Holes
Noor Agha could feel the shackles digging into his wrists. First one arm was yanked upward, then the other. Blindfolded, he still knew what was coming. It was a familiar script. A nightmarish play. Arms reached around his waist, hoisted him up, and then released him. He dropped down until the dangling ceiling chains caught and he was left there hanging, waiting for the door to open again.