No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  The next day, when the man found his phone working as good as new, he was stunned. “You’re a genius!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been everywhere—no one could fix this.”

  Akbar Gul beamed triumphantly.

  Over the next few days, as news of Akbar Gul’s cell phone prowess spread, more villagers showed up with broken phones. With a reputation to uphold, he couldn’t turn them down. He tinkered with each phone until it broke, then drove to Kabul and replaced it with a brand-new one. Within days, he earned renown across Chak as a cell phone wizard. “It wasn’t a very profitable business,” he admitted to me.

  He began avoiding the bazaar. But the customers always found him.

  With each phone he ruined, however, he learned something new about the way they worked. Eventually, he found that he had to rush to Kabul less often. In time he became something of a genuine cell phone expert, or at least more expert than anyone in the nearby countryside. Borrowing money from friends, he erected a stall of his own and began fixing phones.

  Akbar Gul had finally found his métier. He started visiting electronics bazaars in Kabul to study the latest imports. There was so much to discover. In the newest phones, you could store snippets of songs as ringtones. Some could even play video clips. When he introduced these innovations in the village, they proved to be a big hit. People came with their favorite Pashtun tunes and Bollywood numbers, and he installed them for a modest fee.

  By the summer’s end, he had amassed a small fortune by village standards. It had been a year since his arrival in Wardak Province, and Mullah Cable was now known everywhere in Chak as Mobile-Phone Akbar Gul. Even customers from neighboring districts sought him out. He abandoned his plans to run a taxi business and decided that he would branch out into radios and televisions. The latter hadn’t made it into the village yet, but they were spreading rapidly through Kabul, and he knew that it would only be a matter of time.

  * * *

  It was high noon and the earth baked and the bazaar was shutting down for sleep when a pair of men showed up at the shop. They both wore neat blue-gray uniforms, with Afghan flag patches on their lapels. One of them handed a phone to Akbar Gul and ordered him to fix it.

  He had long feared this day would come. These were members of the brand-new Afghan National Police, and they descended like hungry dogs on anyone making good money.

  “You’ll need to pay like everyone else,” Akbar Gul said.

  Soon they were in a shouting match. It ended with the officer raising his hand and striking Akbar Gul, hard. The other one kicked over the stand. Then they walked away, leaving Akbar Gul standing there dazed. He watched them get into their police truck, kick up dust, and drive away.

  That Friday at the mosque after prayers the shopkeepers gathered around bowls of fruit and swapped stories, and Akbar Gul recounted what had happened. The men nodded and told their own tales. Everyone agreed that the police chief and the district council and the governor himself were in on the racket. They traded stories from around the province of police checkpoints that would rob you dry and of officials in Kabul who would do nothing about it. They spoke of the Taliban’s collapse and how locally elected councils had initially functioned as the replacement government until the Northern Alliance marched in and took over. A power struggle had ensued, with the Alliance commanders labeling their opponents as “Taliban” to secure their elimination by the Americans.

  It was common knowledge that the men now controlling Wardak had grisly records. The police chief, for one, was a member of the Sayyaf militia—the same group that had participated in the massacre of Hazaras in Kabul during the civil war. But the most damning fact about the “new” police force, the thing that angered the shopkeepers the most, was that it actually wasn’t new at all. It was simply an amalgamation of old militias and gangs. In Wardak’s multiparty, multiethnic district of Jalrez, for instance, all sixty-five members of the police force hailed from a single pro-Sayyaf village.

  Akbar Gul had heard some of these stories before but had never paid them much attention until now. When the police showed up at the bazaar a few days later asking for a “tax,” he thought back to his friends’ stories and paid without complaint. It was clear that refusing to pay would get him beaten or jailed—or, worse, delivered to the Americans as a member of al-Qaeda. It was not long before the police started showing up at the bazaar every week or so to collect their tax. But even then they were not satisfied. Sometimes they would forcibly enter homes and help themselves to whatever they desired. Once they broke into a house not far from Akbar Gul’s and robbed a newly married couple at gunpoint of the equivalent of $50,000. The precinct headquarters became drug trade central, and most of the time the police themselves seemed high.

  The biggest shock came when the police raided Karla Schefter’s clinic. A sixty-year-old German nurse, Schefter had been running her humanitarian medical facility for more than a decade, to everyone’s approval. The police, however, stormed the clinic in an ostensible search for “criminals” and made off with thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment. “It depressed me,” Akbar Gul recalled. “What did she ever do to anyone? She only helped us.”

  A few weeks later, a female neighbor who left her house without permission was abducted and raped. Although everyone knew that the police were responsible, nothing could be done. The victim later committed suicide to restore her family’s honor. That autumn, the police kidnapped a young boy and took him to the mountains, where they gang-raped him and left him to die.

  It was not long after these incidents that Akbar Gul received a call from Abbas, an old friend from the Taliban days.

  “You know the situation,” Abbas said. “What do you want to do about it?”

  Akbar Gul certainly knew the situation. By now, everyone did. In addition to the news from his district, stories were flooding in from around the country. People were being taken away by helicopters during the night and never seen again, and there was not a law on earth to protect them. Tribal elders were being sent to Guantanamo. Guns and money were ruling the land.

  “Of course I know. But what can I do?”

  “We’ve started work. You interested?”

  Work. So that was what they called it. Around the country, he knew, incidents were cropping up here and there. The odd shooting of a policeman, or a bomb buried in a road detonating when an American vehicle passed over. They were few, but noticeable. Akbar Gul was surprised that his former comrades were actually contemplating fighting. No matter how bad things were getting, he felt in his bones that there had been enough bloodshed. Now it was embarrassing even to admit that he had once been in the Taliban, and friends knew that it was a subject you didn’t bring up in his presence.

  Undeniably, the Americans and the police seemed to be no alternative. But could anyone actually take on the United States? The thought seemed absurd. He would never forget the bombing up in the mountains, or his trek through the forests of Waziristan.

  “No,” Akbar Gul replied. “Look, I’ve got my shop. I have a family.”

  Abbas insisted that the time was now, and Akbar Gul countered that the movement was over and for good reason. “I’m done fighting,” he said. “And I think life will get better. We just need to be patient.”

  * * *

  For many Taliban members who had abandoned the movement, however, life was turning out to be more complicated than anyone anticipated.

  Muhammad Haqqani, a former Taliban deputy minister who fled to Pakistan during the American bombing, later recalled those initial post-Taliban years to a reporter: “When I was visiting my daughter one night, she asked me about our Kabul home, why we didn’t have a car anymore. She complained that it was too hot in the refugee camp, and that she wanted to move back to the cool climate of Kabul. I couldn’t answer her. But she could tell from my eyes how sad I was. I was a wreck—nervous, worried, and almost panic-stricken.” Under such duress, it didn’t take long for Taliban leaders to flock to the proverbial bargaining table, ho
ping to cut deals with the new government.

  It was a replay, in their minds, of their own rise to power, when they had struck accords with anyone willing to submit to their authority. “We expected that if we offered no resistance, they would accept us and we could live in peace,” said former minister of defense Mullah Obaidullah, one of the movement’s most senior figures. Obaidullah, a confidant of supreme leader Mullah Omar, attempted multiple times to engineer deals with the new authorities. In January 2002, he contacted Kandahar governor Gul Agha Sherzai with a compelling offer: in return for amnesty, he would pledge loyalty to the Karzai government, forswear political life, and submit to regular government monitoring. Joining him were six other leading Taliban officials, including the notorious one-eyed, one-legged Mullah Turabi, who as minister of justice and head of the religious police had been a zealot’s zealot, an architect of edicts outlawing everything from kite flying to music. The group now accepted the US-backed government’s legitimacy, and after Sherzai signed off on the deal, retired quietly to their home villages. “They planned to take up a life of preaching, just like they did after the Russians left,” reported Ahmed Shah Achekzai, a lawmaker who visited them at the time.

  The Obaidullah group, and the three top Taliban officials who went to Khas Uruzgan in January 2002 in search of a pact (only to be stymied by the standoff between the district’s competing governors) were far from the only ones looking to make arrangements. In fact, from Washington’s list of the twenty-seven most wanted Taliban, a majority attempted to engineer similar deals. Mullah Abdul Jalil, the deputy foreign minister and one of Mullah Omar’s trusted advisers, drew up a settlement with Uruzgan elders; top Taliban military commander Mullah Qaher surrendered his weapons and pledged support for the new administration; former Taliban spokesman Abdul Hai Mutmain reached an agreement with Kandahari tribal elders—and so on down the line.

  No sooner had the olive branch been extended, however, than it was withdrawn. When news of Sherzai’s deal with Obaidullah and his comrades surfaced, US officials were furious. Responding to Washington’s pressure, Sherzai reversed his position, announcing that all Taliban would be detained and handed over to the Americans. Obaidullah and company fled to Pakistan. The new Afghan system quickly reorganized around the logic of serving up “enemies” to the foreign forces, and one attempted pact after another was thwarted.

  Khairullah Khairkhwa, for instance, a onetime Taliban interior minister, was a Popalzai tribesman like Karzai and had been friendly with the president’s family. In early 2002 he contacted representatives of Ahmed Wali, the president’s brother, in the hopes of securing amnesty and perhaps landing a post with the Karzai administration, and the two sides met in a safe house in the Pakistani border town of Chaman. But Pakistani authorities caught wind of his presence, arrested him, and turned him over to the Americans. He was sent to Guantanamo.

  Ex-Taliban governor Naim Kuchi was a leader of the Kuchis, Pashtun nomads who number in the millions and crisscross the country with the seasons. In 2002 he sided with the Karzai administration and functioned as an access broker for his people. He was en route to a meeting with government officials one day when he was detained by American soldiers, sparking bitter demonstrations across Kabul. He, too, was shipped to Guantanamo.

  Mullah Abdul Razaq, the Taliban minister of commerce, had surrendered to Afghan authorities and retired from political life. Nonetheless, he was arrested by US forces—on Sherzai’s suggestion—and dispatched Guantanamo-ward as well, even though a subsequent military assessment determined that “there was insufficient evidence to connect detainee to any kind of involvement with the al Qaeda terrorist network.” Razaq also faced accusations of being a leader of the “Taliban movement in exile.” In fact, the Americans had confused him with the similarly named Abdul Razak, a former interior minister who indeed was active in the movement. But that Razak, in fact, had also initially sought to reconcile, fleeing to Pakistan only after he was nearly arrested for his efforts. From there he had attempted to broker a deal directly with the CIA, but in this, too, he was unsuccessful.

  By the summer of 2002, nearly the entire senior Taliban had sought refuge in Pakistan, leaving behind only midlevel figures lacking clout in the organization. Occasionally there would be talk of returning home, but the plight of many junior comrades inside the country loomed large over the deliberations. There was, for instance, the case of Mullah Ahmed Shah. When Sherzai’s intelligence agents had come for him, Ahmed Shah was living quietly in his home village in Kandahar, having surrendered his arsenal and retired from life as a minor Taliban commander. Nonetheless, he was accused of harboring weapons; when none were found, he was hauled off to a secret jail in Kandahar city anyway.

  There, Shah found himself in an underground cell crammed with farmers, tribal elders, and ex-Taliban figures, none of whom had seen the light of day for weeks. Despite his Taliban past, Shah was so widely respected in his community for his skills as an arbitrator that tribal elders mobilized for his release. “We met the prisoners in jail and saw that their feet were swollen,” elder Fazel Muhammad recalled. “Their hands and feet had been tied for days.… They also beat them with cables. They were begging us to tell the guards to just kill them so that they could be put out of their misery.”

  Shah was told that if he couldn’t produce weapons he would never step outdoors again, so desperate family members resorted to purchasing arms on the black market. A week after being released, though, he was thrown into the same dungeon on the same charges. By now, everyone understood the game—bribes—so the family pawned their livestock to raise funds for his freedom. As with Sherzai’s egg, however, once cracked you were marked for life. Within weeks, Shah was dragged out of his home yet again. This time his liberty proved too expensive for his penniless family, so tribal elders demonstrated until their protests were heard all the way in Kabul. Shah was let out, but he had been back home for only a few weeks when he caught wind of rumors that they were coming for him yet again. Broken and fearful, he collected his family and fled to Pakistan, where he rekindled contacts with his old comrades. The Taliban, he realized, was where he belonged.

  Not far from Ahmed Shah’s village stands the simple mud house of Feda Muhammad, a former schoolteacher and popular Taliban commander. In 2002, like Shah, he surrendered his weapons and retired to his home to become a respected tribal elder in the community. Not long after, he was turned over to the Americans by Sherzai’s agents. Upon his release, the normally warm and gregarious Muhammad refused to participate in the local village council and rarely left home. An intelligence agent working for the Karzai government, who had maintained a friendship with him, paid Muhammad a visit and tried to coax him out of the house.

  He was “too ashamed to come out and talk to people,” the agent told me. “Finally, I convinced his son to let me see him. He looked like a disaster. He hadn’t been sleeping well. He started to tell his story of how he was humiliated, stripped naked, beaten, and how they put dogs on him when he was in that state. He was crying and asked how he could possibly live in Afghanistan with any dignity.” Not long afterward, Muhammad, too, fled to Pakistan and reconnected with old friends in the Taliban.

  Across the country, in one village after the next, the story repeated itself. In a way, the mood of retribution should have been expected. After all, the Taliban’s human rights record and their sorry attempt at governance inspired no sympathy. The problem was not so much that the Taliban were targeted but that they were uniquely targeted: the men now allied with the United States harbored similarly deplorable records from the civil war era, yet their crimes went unpunished. A true reconciliation process would have required either bringing to justice people from across the entire political spectrum, or else pardoning them all. To the Taliban, justice unequally applied felt like no justice at all.

  For the top Taliban leadership, the apparent inequity of a “war forced upon us,” as Mullah Obaidullah put it, was so great that there seemed no choice but
to organize some sort of resistance. Yet as they regrouped in the Pakistani city of Quetta, there was widespread disagreement about whether anything could actually be done. In late 2002, the leadership met in Karachi and voted in favor of a last-ditch effort to come to an accord with Kabul. Emissaries were sent to meet Karzai’s representatives, but with reconciliation still a toxic idea in Washington and in Northern Alliance circles, the effort fizzled.

  The course now seemed set. Mullah Omar organized a group of about a dozen top Talibs—almost all of whom had attempted to reconcile—as a new leadership body that came to be known as the Quetta Shura. Mullah Obaidullah took on the task of resurrecting dormant Taliban networks in Afghanistan. He and others reached out to communities in places like Jan Muhammad’s Uruzgan and Sherzai’s Kandahar, where resentment was steadily building over the killings, the night raids, the abductions, the torture, the broken alliances, and the fractured hopes. In these communities, the American presence was coming to be seen as an occupation, and Karzai’s government increasingly regarded as Washington’s venal and vicious puppet.

  From this point on, there would be no turning back.

  * * *

  In Wardak Province, the defining event of those days was the defection of Ghulam Muhammad. A hulking man with a shrubby black beard, Muhammad had been a key Taliban provincial commander and an important tribal elder. Akbar Gul had long admired his family, and now that Muhammad was joining Kabul’s side, he hoped that government jobs might open up for people like him. In 2003, Muhammad’s brother Musa Hotak, who had also been a Talib, was elected as one of the delegates to draft Afghanistan’s new constitution. The following year, the two brothers handed over their remaining weapons in a well-publicized ceremony attended by US forces, UN representatives, and the media.

  Unsurprisingly, the move upset the balance of local politics, pushing Northern Alliance figures to view Ghulam Muhammad as a rival. You can undoubtedly guess what happened next: they fed the usual false intelligence to the Americans, who raided Muhammad’s home in July 2004, a mere two months after his weapons surrender.