No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  When it did, he heard footsteps and then a deep, low growl. The dog’s teeth cut into his leg and he tried to cry out, but with his gag he could not. Soon, he was bitten again.

  When he was finally untied and brought down, the blindfold was removed and he blinked at the American soldiers standing around him. They asked about al-Qaeda and the Taliban, about names he’d never heard. They were not at all pleased with his responses.

  Noor Agha was in a quandary. He had served with the Afghan National Police in Gardez, a mud-caked town in the southeastern part of the country, in a unit with a well-known anti-Taliban history. He and his friends had opposed the Taliban during the 1990s, and when the United States invaded he had assured friends that “America will save us.”

  Nonetheless, one summer day in 2003 he had been arrested without explanation. By now, he’d been in captivity at a tiny US base for more than a week. Back in the interrogation room the following day, he found himself kneeling on a long wooden bar with his hands tied to a pulley above. He was then pushed back and forth, the bar rolling across his shins, as the interrogators asked their questions over his screams.

  The following day, he was lying with his back against the wooden floor as soldiers stood over him. His mouth was pried open, and bottle after bottle of water was poured down his throat. He felt as if his stomach were about to burst, and then blacked out. When he awoke, he vomited uncontrollably. The questions continued.

  It took another week for his transfer to the main prison at Bagram where, to his great relief, the interrogators came less frequently. He was never told why he had been detained. One day, just as mysteriously, he was handed a letter acknowledging his wrongful imprisonment and told to go home.

  Noor Agha’s path signaled the moral morass that the American mission was sinking into. At every step the United States may have been the hapless victim of Afghan strongmen, but it was also setting the rules of the game, and then following those rules through to their logical, bloody conclusions. The war on terror had become an end in itself, the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy.

  His story begins in the district of Zurmat, where the highlands of the southeastern Afghan-Pakistani border give way to the broad floodplains of the interior. With its neat bazaars and roadside soda vendors, its rectilinear farming plots and fields of apricot and apple, Zurmat had the look of an ideal summer destination for future Western tourists—had it not also been home to the Shah-i-Kot Valley, a rocky, imposing gorge that offered the perfect redoubt for retreating armies. After the US invasion, a few hundred Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters holed up in its snowy summits under the command of local Taliban leader Saif ur-Rahman Mansur. Far from home and fearful of traveling into Pakistan, the fighters were low on options, so Mansur sent a letter to the Afghan government offering talks to end his “armed defiance of the interim administration.” Secret negotiations were launched, but with Kabul and Washington in no mood for reconciliation, the initiative quickly collapsed. US troops stormed the valley in a campaign dubbed Operation Anaconda, the American military’s largest set-piece battle since the first Gulf War. In a decisive victory, Mansur was killed, along with dozens or perhaps hundreds of enemy fighters. Eight US soldiers, and an unknown number of civilians, also lost their lives.

  After Anaconda, Zurmat was etched into American minds as a Taliban haven. And the small district had indeed produced more Taliban than any other outside the deep south, earning it the sobriquet “Little Kandahar.” But much as in post-2001 Kandahar, the Taliban in Zurmat—with the sole exception of Mansur’s crew—had retired to their homes. The most prominent to abandon the movement was Taliban cleric Khalilullah Firozi, who openly supported Karzai and was entreating others to do likewise. Early on, however, Firozi’s home was raided and he was imprisoned by US forces. It would be the first in a series of raids over the coming year against anyone understood to have been even remotely connected to the ancien régime. American troops invaded the dwelling of a prominent pro-government preacher, Mullah Hayatullah, on the mistaken impression that he opposed Karzai. They stormed the home of Hajji Wodin, a popular philanthropist and comedian. They burst into the residence of well-known Taliban defector Abdul Ghaffar Akhundzada, who, assuming thieves had broken in, scrambled up to the roof and opened fire on the intruders. The Americans returned fire, prompting a neighbor—under the impression that the village was under attack from thieves or a rival clan—to run to the mosque and implore fellow villagers over the loudspeaker to rush to Akhundzada’s defense. Neighbors started shooting from their homes; soon the Americans had a full-fledged battle on their hands. They called in air support, and only then did Akhundzada realize that these were in fact foreign troops. He turned himself in and was sent to Guantanamo Bay.

  Through the decades of war, Afghans had survived by knowing where they stood, by calibrating themselves to power, the only sure bet in the frequent U-turns of Afghan history. In Zurmat, this was now proving impossible. “We didn’t understand this new government or who it supported,” said Aref, a local mullah. “We supported them, but they targeted religious people. No one could understand it. I myself fled to Pakistan. We lived every day in fear.”

  If reconciled Taliban were in the crosshairs, Dr. Hafizullah figured he would fare better. A distinguished tribal elder with a long anti-Taliban track record, Hafizullah had come to prominence during the anti-Russian jihad. Afterward he had established a small pharmacy, which in the education-deprived countryside was enough to earn him the honorific of “doctor.” Under Taliban rule, he had been imprisoned and tortured for refusing to comply with their social edicts. After 2001, he won a tribal election and became Zurmat’s first post-Taliban governor.

  By all accounts a popular and competent official, Hafizullah was nonetheless an early victim of Kabul politicking, and in mid-2002 he was replaced with a Karzai flunky. Under the new administration, crime soared. Rogue police units terrorized the local highways, shaking down motorists and robbing merchants at gunpoint. As the district descended into open banditry, the government formed an emergency task force and called upon Dr. Hafizullah to head it. His commission established a criminal investigations team, the first of its kind in the area, and launched a crackdown against growing antigovernment sentiment, decreeing that anyone caught opposing Kabul would have his house burned down—a local tribal custom—and be fined nearly $50,000.

  These were, to be sure, not the actions of a Taliban supporter—yet this was exactly how Hafizullah would be branded. The criminal investigations had turned over a stone too many to suit the powers that be, and things came to a head when his commission initiated a probe into a reported theft of $3,000 from local shopkeepers. Hafizullah tracked down the getaway car sitting brazenly by the main police station, a facility under the command of Abdullah Mujahed, a key American ally. He confronted the police chief—in public, no less—and forced him to repay the victims. Mujahed swiftly secured his revenge, informing the Americans that Hafizullah was a Taliban double agent. The ex-governor was promptly detained by US troops under accusations of providing “operational and logistical support for al Qaeda operations.” A rash of wild charges followed, including an allegation that the $3,000 that he had recovered had in fact come from terrorists. He was banished to Guantanamo.

  With Dr. Hafizullah out of the picture, Zurmat had lost a key point of state access. Fortunately for the district, another still remained. Commander Naim was an eminent tribal elder who had been elected security chief of Zurmat following the Russian departure, stayed on through the Taliban years, and was reelected in 2002. An ardent supporter of the Americans and one of the most popular figures in Zurmat, he nonetheless discovered one day that some men under his command had been detained by US troops. When Naim showed up to ask why, he, too, was arrested, blindfolded, and handcuffed. “They stripped me naked, out in the open, where everyone could see,” he told a reporter. “I was thinking that these are infidels who have come to a Muslim country to imprison us, just like the Russians.”

>   Taken from one base to the next, Naim eventually found himself shackled in the wire-mesh cages of Kandahar Airfield. “We were without hope because we were innocent,” he recalled. “I was very sad because I could not see my children, family, friends. But what could we do?” Like Hafizullah, he was sent to Guantanamo.

  Naim’s downfall could be traced to Mullah Qassim, a longtime rival and Taliban follower who had reconciled with the new government and passed along the spurious intelligence that Naim was a terrorist. Soon, however, US military officials got wise to Mullah Qassim’s Taliban past and descended upon his village to arrest him. The crafty mullah, however, had already fled to Pakistan. The Americans nonetheless detained a farmer named Qassim, mistaking him for the mullah. He, too, was shipped to Guantanamo.

  With Zurmat’s two most influential pro-government figures, Naim and Hafizullah, out of the way, the road to power was open to anyone who had the Americans’ ear. For a time, Samoud Khan, a small-time commander who led a unit paid for by the US special forces, played this game as well as anyone. He was expert in picking off rivals left and right by branding them as al-Qaeda, while indulging in a variety of unsavory activities, not least his predilection for young boys. (He forcibly kept a pair—“tea boys,” in the local argot—with his unit.) One day, however, he made the mistake of picking a fight with another local strongman who boasted ties of his own with the Americans. Soon, Khan himself was accused of supporting al-Qaeda and, in the usual turn of events, was arrested, beaten, and sent on to Bagram. Eight members of his unit, meanwhile, were rounded up and delivered to Guantanamo. Among them was one of those tea boys, Asadullah. At twelve years old, he became the prison’s youngest inmate.

  The US forces’ conviction that the enemy threat was real—though there were no Taliban or al Qaeda to be found—deepened when Pacha Khan Zadran, an anti-Taliban warlord, turned against the Karzai government. Although he had been financed by US special forces, Zadran rebelled against Kabul when he was not awarded the governorship of three southeastern provinces. Soon his men were getting into skirmishes with US troops, even as he continued to denounce his own enemies as Taliban and al Qaeda. Rocket fire began to rain down upon American camps, and it grew even easier to manipulate US troops with spurious intelligence.

  By the end of 2002, the twisted skein of alliances and betrayals had become impossible to disentangle. Take the case of Commander Parre, an anti-Taliban militiaman who controlled a checkpoint at a mountain pass near Zurmat. Parre cooperated with the Americans but ran afoul of Police Chief Abdullah Mujahed (the official who had stolen $3,000 from Zurmat shopkeepers) and other government figures. In short order, he was tricked into having tea with members of the Alabama National Guard’s Twentieth Special Forces Group, who arrested him along with his entire unit.

  At a nondescript US-run prison, Parre was forced to kneel on stones until he lost all sensation in his legs. At one point, his toenail was ripped off by an interrogator. He and the others were kicked, whipped with cables, and hosed with water. After a week, Parre’s younger brother Jamal Nasir could barely walk. On a cold spring morning, complaining of intense abdominal pain, he asked to go to the bathroom. As two others supported him, Nasir’s body suddenly went limp, and soon afterward his heart stopped. He had been tortured to death.

  After two weeks of abuse, Parre and the others were dropped off at one of Mujahed’s prisons. The police chief had consigned many a soul to American abuse, but the sight of those battered, near-death captives was too much even for him, and he petitioned for their release. In the eyes of the US special forces this constituted a grave betrayal, and a relationship that had already been souring took a dangerous turn. Almost overnight he was recast in the role of a man with questionable loyalties, a government official soft on terrorism. In a meeting attended by Mujahed and UN officials, an American officer threatened to kill him if he sided with those “opposing the Coalition.”

  The very structures that Mujahed had so ruthlessly exploited were about to turn on him. Soon he lost his post as police chief and was reassigned to a sinecure in Kabul. Months later, he was visiting home for a wedding when American soldiers dropped by and invited him to review intelligence at their base. Like so many others, Mujahed fell for the ruse of friendship and soon found himself locked up in a cage in Bagram. “They didn’t allow us to sleep at all for thirteen days,” he recalled. Whenever he dozed off, a guard would strike his legs. Heavy metal music blared through the corridors. In the fleeting moments of silence, he could hear moans and cries but could not see where from.

  One day soldiers appeared at his cage, and he was hauled outside and loaded onto an aircraft. They would not say where he was going. Many hours later the plane landed at another prison, where the air felt thick and wet. Mujahed was led through a row of cages as inmates in white and orange jumpsuits banged on the wire mesh and shouted, “This is Guantanamo! You are in Guantanamo!” In a sort of perverse poetic justice, he wound up in a cell near Dr. Hafizullah’s.

  While seizing Mujahed, the Americans also apprehended a number of his men, including drivers, cooks, and guards. Among them was Noor Agha. Years later, still battling memories of days spent hanging from a prison ceiling, he offered an epitaph for Zurmat and its environs: “There was no one left standing in the end. It was as if the whole system just devoured everyone.”

  Dr. Hafizullah, Zurmat’s first governor, had ended up in Guantanamo because he’d crossed Police Chief Mujahed. Mujahed wound up in Guantanamo because he crossed the Americans. Security chief Naim found himself in Guantanamo because of an old rivalry with Mullah Qassim. Qassim eluded capture, but an unfortunate soul with the same name ended up in Guantanamo in his place. And a subsequent feud left Samoud Khan, another pro-American commander, in Bagram prison, while the boy his men had sexually abused was shipped to Guantanamo.

  No one in this group had been a member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda. Some, like Abdullah Mujahed and Samoud Khan, certainly should have been brought to justice—but that was not Guantanamo’s purpose. Others, like Commander Naim, were precisely the sort of pro-government figures that Washington had wanted to see at the helm of the new Afghanistan. Instead, Zurmat’s mood of hope and reconciliation was rapidly giving way to one of rebellion.

  Years later, Dr. Hafizullah and Commander Naim were finally transferred from Guantanamo to Afghan government custody, and then released following intense tribal pressure. Dr. Hafizullah returned to his pharmacy, while Naim resumed his role as tribal elder and mediator. But one winter night in 2009, the Americans came again for Hafizullah. He was led away in a hood and locked up in Bagram, where he still remains. He faces the usual set of charges, although Afghan officials and even some Western authorities vehemently deny their accuracy. The following year, Naim attended a meeting with the governor to discuss how they could convince insurgents to come in from the cold and support the government. Upon leaving, he was arrested by American special forces. Angry protests swept the province, and merchants carried out a three-day general strike in his support. But Naim, too, remains in Bagram to this day.

  * * *

  Far in the northeast, some 150 miles from Zurmat as the crow flies, in a deep valley of alder and white poplar dotted with small stone-and-timber houses, lies what was for a time one of the most dangerous corners of the planet for an American. The Korengal Valley was Afghanistan’s Fallujah, a crucible for every flavor of radical Islamist the world over, an insurgent stronghold where more American soldiers met their end than almost anywhere outside the deep South. When I first heard about the Korengal I had, like most observers, chalked up the trouble to obdurate mountain folk and their preternatural hostility to foreigners. After all, the people of Pech, the broader valley system in which the Korengal lies, had been among the first to rebel against the Russians. But then I learned that they had resisted the Taliban as well, partly because, in addition to the usual excesses, the Taliban had clamped down on the timber trade, the lifeblood for these logging communities. It turned out, in
fact, that Pech had actually welcomed US forces with open arms and that elders and community leaders had once jostled for access to the Americans.

  When things changed, it began with a single man. The venerable Rohullah Wakil was a tribal leader who followed the ultraconservative strain of Islam found in Saudi Arabia. With sharp, thoughtful eyes, an aquiline nose, and a head of thinning salt-and-pepper hair, Wakil exuded distinction. Indeed, wakil (“lawmaker”) had been appended to his name upon his election to Kunar’s “parliament” in 1993, when the province briefly broke away to form its own ministate. Although he came from a line of fighters—his uncle was a locally renowned mujahed—Wakil had a softer edge, opting for a politician’s life.

  Despite his conservative background, Wakil had fiercely opposed the Taliban and al-Qaeda, in part because his uncle had been assassinated in 1991 by an Arab at the behest, Wakil believed, of Osama bin Laden. (The al-Qaeda leader was at the time friendly with the family’s bitter enemy, radical Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.) When the Taliban swept through the province in the late 1990s, Wakil’s tribesmen were among the first to rally against them, taking to the mountains in a bloody guerrilla campaign. Wakil soon joined the pro-Western Northern Alliance and later took a job with the United Nations. In 2002 he was elected to the loya jirga, where he delivered an impassioned speech in front of thousands championing Karzai and the new government.

  With the Coalition forces on the ground in Pech, the contracting money began to flow in. Wakil drew his share: hundreds of thousands of dollars from the British to help eradicate poppies. With such sums sloshing around, however, entrepreneurs and carpetbaggers of all shapes and sizes soon found their way to the Americans. Among these was Malik Zarin, a timber baron and tribal elder with an eye for whatever the foreign troops happened to be looking for, who quickly maneuvered his way into their good graces. With his starched vests and jet-black, tightly cropped beard, Zarin must have cut an impressively modern figure for the Americans in the backwaters of Pech, an impression no doubt bolstered by his special connection to US troops: his English-speaking sons. In a heartbeat, he became a key supplier of materiel and logistics as the Americans built up their presence in the area.