No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  A not-so-subtle rivalry sprouted between Zarin and Wakil for contracting dollars and American access. With their sizable tribal influence, the two elders might have been a rich source of stability in the new Afghanistan. Wakil, in particular, was a striking image of exactly the type of ally Washington said it sought: reliably anti-Taliban, no trail of human rights abuses, and popular enough to bring America’s message to the hinterlands. But the system in place did not reward stability, legitimacy, or popularity. Instead, it rewarded those who could serve up enemies, and that was Zarin’s game.

  On an August evening in 2002, Wakil hosted a gathering in his home that included the governor of Kunar Province and other key power brokers. The first grumblings of discontent with the Americans were already surfacing: patrolling US troops had twice shot and killed local Afghans carrying Kalashnikovs, mistaking them for enemy fighters. Wakil had convened the meeting to convince the local elite to placate their followers and redouble support for the American troops, who represented, in his words, “Afghanistan’s only hope.” The following day, he went to the nearby American base, asking the soldiers there to cooperate more closely with him to avoid such missteps in the future. As he left, he and his aides were stopped and cuffed. “Nothing made sense,” he said later. “I just couldn’t understand it.”

  In Bagram, following the usual pattern, they were interrogated and abused. Wakil was then shipped to Guantanamo. There, he was accused of supporting the followers of Hekmatyar (who, by 2002, had turned against the Americans)—an allegation ignoring the fact that a large part of the province’s recent history had consisted of a long, bloody campaign against Hekmatyar by Wakil’s party. He was also accused of opposing the Karzai government, of which he was actually a member; of being, on the one hand, a Wahabi, a member of a hard-line Islamic sect associated with the Saudis and al-Qaeda, and yet simultaneously of being part of a secret movement opposing the Wahabis; and of taking, along with his rival Zarin, $12,000 from Pakistani intelligence in order to “finance military operations” against the government and to disrupt the loya jirga, the grand assembly to which he’d been elected and at which he had spoken so stirringly.

  Wakil appeared before a tribunal in Guantanamo to answer these byzantine and bizarre allegations. “If somebody is a leader of a tribe and that person is a bad guy, maybe the tribe would trust him one time. The tribe would not trust him again and again and again,” he said, according to the transcript of his testimony. “I had been representative of my tribe since the Soviet Union left Afghanistan.” He told the panel how he had been elected nearly a dozen times, and how he had worked with the Coalition forces. “I am so upset about the first court,” he said, referring to a previous tribunal at Guantanamo, “because they called me an enemy combatant. I do not accept that. I do not believe that. The court told me that I was a threat to America and that I would remain a detainee. Now I am facing you and I assure you, I give you my word, I have been wrongly judged. I am not an American detainee. I am not an Afghan detainee. I am a detainee because of my personal [rivalries].”

  In the end, the evidence looked so flimsy that even the Guantanamo tribunal members were apparently left bemused. “I just cannot help but ask,” an official said in a hearing, “why are you here?” Nevertheless, Wakil remained in Guantanamo for five years.

  Wakil’s friend and colleague Sabar Lal, who had many brushes with death in the mountains fighting against the Taliban in the 1990s, also found himself in Guantanamo. In a similar tribunal hearing, he noted the paradox of his predicament: “All I can tell you is that I fought for six years against the Taliban. I killed a lot of them.” It was “so ironic that I see a Talib and then I see myself here too. I am in the same spot as a Talib. I see those people on an everyday basis.… They say, ‘See, you got what you deserve, you are here too.’”

  I asked Michael Semple, then a senior United Nations representative for eastern Afghanistan, about Wakil. He replied, “It was utterly preposterous. He was calling us every day giving us intelligence. He was working with us. And all of a sudden he was declared an enemy?” As a UN official, Semple dealt with “delegation after delegation after delegation of people coming to say, ‘Tell us what is Hajji Rohullah’s crime, so we can go home. Otherwise, release him.’ If you really want to get an idea of our powerlessness, and the powerlessness of the host authority”—the Afghan government—“this is a great example. None of us could do anything to get him. He just disappeared into a black hole.”

  During Wakil’s absence, a vital link between his tribal community and the government was severed, the first in a series of steps that pushed them out of the political marketplace. “Wakil’s faction was fully engaged, part of the political process,” Semple told me, “but after he was taken off the scene, his followers all ended up inside the armed resistance.” Within weeks of his arrest, the first rockets started to fall on US outposts in the area. Tit-for-tat shootings between Americans and angry villagers mounted. Then one day, again acting on Zarin’s intelligence, US forces bombed the home of a prominent timber baron in the Korengal Valley, killing his family members. The deaths came just as the Afghan government was starting to clamp down on illegal logging. Soon, one village after another turned to open insurrection.

  Meanwhile the profits continued to pour into Malek Zarin’s coffers, to the point where a US embassy cable could describe him as “one of the wealthiest men in eastern Afghanistan.” In the new Afghanistan, however, war had a way of catching up even with the winners. In 2011, Zarin, by then in his seventies, embraced a guest at a tribal meeting. The man had hidden explosives underneath his waistcoat; the suicide blast killed Zarin instantly.

  Rohullah Wakil was finally freed from Guantanamo in 2008, returning to assume the role of tribal leader and mediating in Kabul on behalf of his constituents. But in 2009, amid debate in Washington over the possible closure of Guantanamo, the Pentagon leaked a report to the New York Times claiming that Wakil was one of seventy-four former inmates suspected of having “returned” to terrorism—even though he was living openly and peacefully in Kabul, advising President Karzai. Leaving nothing to chance, everywhere he goes, Wakil now carries a sheaf of legal documents detailing his innocence. “For six years, I was ready to go to court and defend myself. They should show the world their proof against me,” he told a reporter. “I am ready to answer any question.”

  There was reason enough for him to worry: on a similar Pentagon list were Dr. Hafizullah and Commander Naim, the two wrongfully imprisoned—and subsequently rearrested—Zurmat elders. And then there was the fate of Sabar Lal. Because of Taliban threats, upon his release from Guantanamo he was forced to relocate from Pech to the eastern city of Jalalabad. Whenever I visited him, he spoke ruefully of the years he’d lost to Guantanamo’s island cage and vowed to stay away from public life altogether. Late one night in 2011, however, US soldiers stormed his home and dragged Sabar Lal out of his bedroom. What happened next is unclear. Relatives and the night watchman claim that he was blindfolded and executed, while a Coalition forces spokesman said that he was shot dead because he was carrying a weapon. Afterward, the Coalition announced that a “key affiliate of the al Qaeda network” had been killed. It was a curious charge against a man who had complained often to me about the militants’ threats on his life.

  * * *

  If you were unfortunate enough to get caught up in this universe of rivalry and intrigue and then fall into American hands, you would first find yourself at one of a series of small US military outposts deep in the countryside, known as Field Detention Sites. Interrogators there typically would have a limited grasp of Afghan politics, and intelligence would be poorly shared, so epic confusions usually ensued. The unit apprehending you might have a relationship with one strongman, for instance, while you worked for another strongman tied to a different wing of the US military or the CIA. In this way, hundreds of Afghans working for pro-American commanders wound up ensnared by one of the Coalition’s many tentacles. And once br
anded as a terrorist, no amount of evidence or good sense could save you.

  From the Field Detention Site, you would be shipped to one of the main prisons at either Bagram or Kandahar Airfield. You would then be questioned by a new set of interrogators, who made little attempt to reconcile existing intelligence with any fresh information that they obtained. Your journey would likely end here, locked away for months or even years—unless you were one among the two hundred Afghans destined for Guantanamo. There you would be assessed by officials ever farther removed from the battlefield, with even foggier knowledge of the country’s politics. A result of this cascade of bureaucratic inefficiencies was that only a handful of Guantanamo’s Afghan inmates would turn out to be Taliban members of any import.

  Reading the official list of charges against the rest gives a sense of the farce the system had become. One inmate was accused, among other crimes, of supporting the political organization of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the pro-Western Northern Alliance leader murdered by al-Qaeda. Another was alleged to have been a member of Herakat-i-Inqilabi—an anti-Soviet mujahedeen group, backed by the United States, that had been defunct since the mid-1990s.

  Inmate Muhammad Nasim arrived at Guantanamo accused of working as a deputy to Rashid Dostum, the pro-US warlord and former Gelam Jam militia leader who, prison authorities mistakenly believed, had “defected to the Taliban in 1998”—or so Nasim’s classified file stated. In fact, Dostum had been a member of the Northern Alliance and a staunch anti-Taliban fighter, even winding up on the CIA payroll during the 2001 invasion. Nasim was also accused of being the former Taliban deputy minister of education, even though records indicate there was no person by that name in that position.

  Abdullah Khan found himself in Guantanamo charged with being Khairullah Khairkhwa, the former Taliban minister of the interior, which might have been more plausible—if Khairkhwa had not also been in Guantanamo at the time.

  Swat Khan’s internment stemmed from an accusation that he was a high-ranking member of an “anti-coalition militia” known as the Mujahedeen Union. In reality, at the time of his arrest the union was a collection of pro-US militiamen in the pay of the CIA. “We worked for the Americans,” said Malem Jan, one of Khan’s comrades. “We met them regularly to get instructions and give intelligence.” Khan’s charge sheet also alleged that he worked simultaneously for a pair of commanders who were in fact long-standing rivals. In his initial questioning, Khan was hung by his wrists from the ceiling. Later, in Guantanamo, he attempted suicide. “It’s all there when I close my eyes,” he told me after his release. “The nightmare never leaves me.”

  Hajji Bismillah, the director of transportation for the government of Helmand Province, found himself in Guantanamo because of his close ties to Sher Muhammad Akhundzada—the province’s US-backed governor. According to Bismillah’s classified detainee file, American authorities mistakenly asserted that the governor was “originally the Taliban’s second in command in the Helmand province.” In fact, the Akhundzada family had been the Taliban’s principal enemies in Helmand during the 1990s, precisely the reason why he became governor after their overthrow. This was open, public knowledge, but evidently no one along the chain of detentions from Helmand to Guantanamo bothered to check. Meanwhile, certain US units were detaining scores of Helmand farmers on precisely the contrary charge: opposing Governor Akhundzada, who was working closely with the Americans to consolidate his power. Bismillah’s file stated that his intelligence value came not from any possible details that he could furnish about terrorists but from his knowledge of “biographical data on political figures in the new Afghan government”—just the sort of information that should have saved him from Cuba in the first place.

  Nine Guantanamo inmates claimed the most striking proof of all that they were not Taliban or al-Qaeda: they had passed directly from a Taliban jail to American custody after 2001. Abdul Rahim al-Janko, a Syrian, had arrived in Afghanistan in 2000, fleeing a troubled home. His plan was to claim asylum in a Western country as an Afghan refugee. Being an Arab, he was directed in Afghanistan to an al-Qaeda camp, but, upon showing reluctance to train or fight, he was arrested on the suspicion that he was a Western spy. At the hands of al-Qaeda interrogators he was beaten and electrocuted and nearly drowned in a water tank. Eventually he confessed to plotting to kill Osama bin Laden on the orders of the CIA and the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. This landed him in prison in Kandahar, in a cell not far from Jan Muhammad. Following the US invasion, al-Janko was handed over to US soldiers, who consigned him to Guantanamo. Eventually, a videotape surfaced of his coerced confession under al-Qaeda torture. Yet Attorney General John Ashcroft, eager to demonstrate progress in the war on terror, played an excerpt of the tape to journalists—without audio—as an al-Qaeda martyrdom propaganda video.

  Most Guantanamo Afghans have by now returned home, but some still remain. Perhaps the unluckiest of this lot is Hamidullah, who has been accused of such a litany of misdeeds that you might conclude he is the world’s most dangerous terrorist. American authorities asserted that he was aligned with “extremists” linked to the National Islamic Front—which was, in reality, a moderate pro-US mujahedeen party of the 1980s that counted Hamid Karzai as a member, and which was largely defunct at the time of Hamidullah’s arrest. He was also alleged to have associated with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Taliban leadership, Pakistani intelligence, Iranian intelligence, and al-Qaeda. He was said to harbor ties to Mullah Izzat (a pro-US commander), warlord Samoud Khan (from an entirely different part of the country), and Zulmay Tofan (another pro-US commander). He was accused of supporting the Afghan king, whose very post the Taliban and al-Qaeda strongly opposed; of being linked to warlord Ismail Khan (Karzai’s US-backed electricity minister); and of meeting with Taliban leader Saif ur-Rahman Mansur, who, you may recall, was killed in Operation Anaconda in 2001, two years prior to the alleged encounter.

  The prize for the most outlandish accusation of all, however, should go to the charge that Hamidullah maintained links to a commander named Hajji Almas. This was, in fact, true. But Almas was no terrorist; he was a major US contractor who played a key role in building Bagram Airfield and earned millions in the process. Thus, Hamidullah gained the ironic distinction of having been imprisoned in Bagram in part on charges that he was linked to a man whom Washington had paid to build the very prison in which he was held.

  In Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” a savage tale of detention on a tropical island, the condemned are forced to lie prone on an extravagant execution machine that etches such commandments as “Honor Your Superiors” into their backs. Prisoners are never told the charges against them. “It would be useless to give him that information,” an officer explains. “He experiences it on his own body.”

  The process was no less surreal for Afghans like Mohebullah, a bus driver detained in Uruzgan Province, whose Guantanamo file says:

  Reasons for Transfer to JTF GTMO: To provide information on the following: Detainee’s file does not indicate why he was sent to JTF GTMO.

  In fact, US soldiers had mistaken Mohebullah’s home for that of a Taliban leader. When they stormed it one night, Mohebullah had fired into the darkness, thinking that they were thieves. Nonetheless, his internment remained a continuing mystery to all sides. Appearing before a panel to present his case, he said, “I am very happy to be in the Tribunal, because for the past one-and-a-half years, nobody asked me any questions. My father keeps writing me and asking why I am not coming home. What should I write him?”

  The tribunal president responded: “I’m sure it would be difficult to answer that for you. The people that knew you that could say you weren’t Taliban would not be relevant. Right now we have no accusation against you that says you were Taliban.”

  Mohebullah would remain in Guantanamo for nearly three more years.

  * * *

  In the vagaries of this system, you survived one way and one way only: through the ruthless exploitation of everyone around you
. There was no getting around it. The broken alliances, the faltering hopes, the rude exposure of foreign agendas all dictated a certain logic of duplicity if you planned to remain alive and free. Warlord Hajji Zaman spelled this out for me one evening poolside at the Intercontinental, one of Kabul’s two luxury hotels. He wore rimless gold glasses and sported a pristinely coiffed beard, a look that belied his adventurous past as a commander in eastern Afghanistan. In December 2001, when Osama bin Laden and hundreds of other Arabs fled to the Tora Bora Mountains along the Pakistani border, Zaman had pocketed huge sums of money from the United States for his services in hunting them down.

  “The Americans came to me because they knew only I could get the job done,” he said, raising a glass of scotch to his lips. He sat stiffly straight, a Kalashnikov leaning on one leg. On either side lolled a pair of bodyguards, who seemed to have had a few too many. The tinkling of a piano filled the air, and Western women dangled their feet in the pool. “This whole land,” he said, sweeping his hand across hundreds of tiny house lights studding the mountains around the city, “this whole land is filled with thieves and liars. This is what you Americans have made.” He ordered another round. “I know this game, I know how to survive.” He was slurring his words by now. “I went to the Americans and said, ‘I can find bin Laden.’ I told them, ‘Give me $5 million and I’ll bring you his head.’ So they went and talked to their bosses and arranged it, and I got $5 million. Then, a few days later, I went to al Qaeda and told them, ‘Give me $1 million or I’ll turn you over to the Americans.’ So they gave me $1 million, and I convinced the Americans to stop the bombing for a little while. I told them we could use the time to find Osama, but really it was so those Arab dogs could escape to Pakistan. Then I went to the ISI,” the Pakistani intelligence agency, “and said, ‘Give me $500,000 and I’ll give you al Qaeda.’ They pulled a gun and told me to get out of their face.” Zaman laughed, a long, raspy laugh that pushed his bodyguards into peals of delight. “You see, they don’t play this game. You can’t buy them.”