No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  “I still get flashbacks,” Musa Hotak recalled to a reporter. “They broke down doors, smashed every window. I was clubbed and bitten by dogs. My sons and nephews were hooded and shackled. My aged father was dragged out. No human being would do the things those animals did.”

  Ghulam Muhammad was taken to Bagram prison. When Akbar Gul heard the news, he simply could not understand why the Americans would do such a thing to their own ally. He started to wonder aloud whether the foreigners were in fact bent on “colonizing us, like the British.”

  That summer, a police truck drove up to his cell phone stall. Two officers got out with drawn Kalashnikovs and ordered Akbar Gul to lie flat on the dirt. He was kicked in the head and jabbed in the small of his back, and he could hear them rummaging through his stall. As he was forced into the back of the jeep, the policemen informed him that he was in arrears on his car payments and that there was no bribe or elder that could save him. The jeep headed down the open highway in the direction of Kabul.

  An officer turned and looked at him. “When we get there,” he said, “we’ll put heavy stones on your back. We’ll keep adding them until you pay what you owe.” When Akbar Gul protested that he owed nothing, they jabbed him again with their rifles. The jeep drove on, and the policemen wagered among themselves how many stones it would take to break him. It was then that he blurted out that he had savings. The jeep turned around. When they arrived at his home, Akbar Gul went into a closet, fished out a small cash box, and returned to show it to them. The men helped themselves and then said he was free to leave.

  He went back to his shop in the afternoon, two years’ worth of labor gone. He worked diligently that summer, long into the night, fixing phones and radios. He traveled to other districts for business. He had not made up even a fraction of his savings by autumn, but he had money to eat, and that was enough.

  Then one day he saw the police truck driving up the street, sending him indoors into a friend’s shop. Through the window slats, he watched as the policemen approached his stall. They milled around it, talking to each other, gesturing at the cell phones. One reached over and collected them and his tools. Then another raised a foot and kicked the stall hard. A third took his turn. Blow by blow they continued, until only wood shards were left. They returned to their vehicles and drove away.

  Akbar Gul stood staring for a long while. A fellow shopkeeper came to console him, but Akbar Gul did not say anything. After some time, he went home.

  Akbar Gul knew certain things: that Afghanistan wasn’t a normal country, that to survive you should expect to exert yourself harder than anywhere else he could imagine, and that even then everything could vanish in a moment. He had gone from fearing the new order to embracing it. That, he understood, was how history moved. All ideas had their time; whatever life had been like before, under the new order everything would be different. “I believed it,” he said. “No one could have convinced me otherwise. I believed it in my heart.”

  Now, he realized that things were different—but in all the wrong ways. Whenever he turned on the radio it was all hope and anticipation, but more and more that seemed like a cruel joke. The truth was, something appeared to be happening right there, in Chak District of Wardak Province. He noticed it in the way that people spoke about the future, about their children. Everyone seemed to be waiting for some sign that change of another sort was on its way.

  To Akbar Gul, there could be only one explanation for what the Americans had wrought. They were the world’s sole superpower, capable of toppling the Taliban government in two months with their fantastically sophisticated technology. If they were now siding with the Northern Alliance, arresting the wrong people, unleashing a predatory police force on his people, it could not have been by accident. No, he reasoned—it was by design. In the mosque on Friday, he would listen to sermons explaining that the Americans were bent on colonizing his country and converting the whole population to Christianity—just as the Russians had attempted to enforce Communism.

  One day, Akbar Gul received another phone call from Abbas. “Business is good,” he said. “We’ve been back to work. What about you? What do you think?”

  This time, the answer seemed obvious. Or, as he explained to me years later, the answer had already been decided for him. And so it was that on that winter day in early 2005, Akbar Gul decided it was time to go back to work.

  11

  The Tangi

  Spring had come early to the Tangi. The landscape was lush with wild almond and blooming acacias and flowering privet, and the fields were a brilliant green. Wheat fields and fruit orchards crisscrossed the narrow watershed basin between the two mountain chains that formed the valley’s walls, no more than half a mile apart at their widest. Those mountains rose thousands of feet, dense and interlocking, a rock fortress. During the 1980s, the Soviets could never bring the Tangi to heel. Now, in 2005, it would prove the perfect place for a nascent Taliban insurgency to germinate.

  It had been nearly a month since Akbar Gul had spoken to Abbas, and on a warm March day he had received a second call, with instructions to head to the Tangi. Early the next morning he drove his station wagon through the valley basin into a green thicket, pulling up to a house standing alone among the trees. The wall enclosure had partially crumbled away, exposing the yard. Weeds had edged over the walkway leading to the guesthouse, and trash was strewn everywhere. The windows were fractured, the walls pitted with the marks of some forgotten battle. No one was at home, so he let himself in.

  The guest-room carpet smelled of onions and was imprinted here and there with boot tracks. Soiled linens were heaped in a pile. In one corner, he noticed a brand-new Panasonic TV and DVD player. He settled down and waited. More than an hour passed, and then Abbas walked in, followed soon after by a pair of armed men and a large gentleman with a well-manicured beard wearing a stately black turban. Akbar Gul recognized him at once as Mufti Abdul Latif, an old friend from the Taliban days. They exchanged greetings and sat down for tea.

  “We aren’t rich people,” Abdul Latif explained. “We have nothing. We live by the grace of God. We’d like you to work with us.”

  “I’m ready,” Akbar Gul replied. But he had many questions. “Where is Mullah Omar? Is he alive?”

  “Praise God, Mullah Omar is alive and safe. He’s in Pakistan.”

  “And everyone else?”

  “They are all in Pakistan. They’re busy working.”

  “Who is funding us?”

  “We’re getting money from Saudi Arabia, from Pakistan, from al-Qaeda.”

  “Where is al-Qaeda? Bin Laden?”

  “No one knows. But their friends give us money sometimes.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Abdul Latif knew Akbar Gul well. He also had an eye for human weakness, for pride in particular. He said, “I want you to be governor of Chak District. You’ll be responsible for all of it.”

  Governor. Akbar Gul liked the sound of that. It was something he could get behind, put his efforts into. He wasn’t the lowlife that the police had treated him as—he was smarter, more talented than almost anyone he knew in the village. A man of his caliber was destined to lead. He would be governor of Chak.

  Of course, he knew that Chak District had a Karzai-appointed, US-backed governor. But it was clear to him that the new Taliban were already thinking of themselves as a government-in-waiting. And he wasn’t about to be left behind.

  Mufti Latif handed him a Kalashnikov and about $330 in Afghan currency. “Everything else,” he said, “is up to you and God.” Akbar Gul would be responsible for fund-raising, recruiting men to fight under him, arming them—all on his own. Luckily for him, resourcefulness was his strong suit.

  He carefully wrapped the Kalashnikov in a flour bag and tied it to the underside of his car. As the sun grew faint, he drove out of the valley onto the highway, passing police checkpoints, and arrived home in the darkness. He hid the weapon in an old outdoor tandoor and went in for dinne
r.

  Later that night he phoned his village friends. By midnight, eleven of them had assembled at his house. Young and unemployed, they had found little to savor in the post-2001 world. “It was good to put these sorts of people to work,” Akbar Gul said.

  There was Yunis, his closest friend, who had lent him money to set up his cell phone shop and had grown so fed up with the police that he was ready for anything. Habib Rahman was a driver who, when he did find work, was regularly shaken down by the police for bribes. Walid was unemployed and looking for money and excitement. Sayed Muhammad, the most religious among them, was also out of work and looking to make ends meet. Hamidullah toiled over a small plot of poor soil, frustrated by just about everything from the police to his lazy cousins. A couple of friends had shown up because Taliban from other villages were harassing them and they were looking for a group of their own for protection. Everyone shared an intense disgust with what the Americans had done to their country, their tribal elders, and their customs.

  Akbar Gul addressed the room. “I don’t want to be like other Taliban groups. We aren’t going to do hit-and-run attacks and spend our days in the mountains. I want us to be strong and open. Out there. I want to control the roads and attack them in broad daylight.” People sat listening in admiration. “We’re all afraid of the enemy nowadays. My goal is to change that. I want to make the enemy afraid of us.”

  He divided up the $330 among the men. “God is merciful,” he said. For the moment, at least, he knew he had their loyalty. And for the first time in years, he felt like himself again. To hold court, to fill men’s minds with visions of your own, to matter—that was what he’d been missing.

  Just one issue remained: weapons.

  * * *

  A year earlier, halfway across the country in Uruzgan Province, a similar story had unfolded for Mullah Manan. It began one morning during harvest season, when, as always, he was in the fields before dawn. Under the sun, poppy sap was too dry, too crusted, doubling or tripling his work. And the labor was hard enough as it was. That day he was on his knees, lancing the bulbs and watching the sap dribble out, then lancing them again and a third time, the sap richer with every cut. It was good work. Ever since Manan’s defeat in 2001 at the battle of Tirin Kot, opium had been his provider. It paid for his sister’s salwars, for his nephews’ school supplies, for their daily naan. The Taliban’s collapse, it turned out, had been a great boon for the village: everyone was able to get back to growing the stuff, which was hardier than wheat or corn and had two harvest seasons to boot. In fact, poppy cultivation was flourishing province-wide, and everyone from tribal elders to government functionaries to Jan Muhammad himself had a hand in it.

  With the sun high he went inside, his muscles burning, his knees tender. In the early days after the invasion, Manan had listened to the hand-cranked radio on his breaks. The BBC would discuss President Karzai and the international donors helping to develop the country, and Manan felt that, despite the ignominy of his defeat, it was a great thing the Americans were doing. Nowadays, however, he wasn’t so sure.

  In the afternoon, when the air cooled, he returned to the field and crawled from bulb to bulb, collecting sap. In a few weeks brokers would arrive and pay good money for it, then carry it off to other countries for processing. For a kilo of sap, he could get almost double compared to potatoes or wheat.

  He was scraping the bulbs when he looked up to see plumes of smoke rising from a neighbor’s plot. He went over to take a look. The farmer was frantically hacking down his own poppy field, like a man possessed. Flames danced and leapt from one patch to the next.

  The farmer saw Manan and shouted, “Jan Muhammad is coming!”

  Manan raced back to his field. He knew that the government did not look kindly on people like him growing poppies. But they had never bothered him before.

  He saw a group of vehicles nearby with American Humvees idling behind them. Four Afghans, wearing bandoliers and salwars, ran toward him with weapons raised. He threw his hands up and soon they were on him, shouting, “Get down, you dirty Talib! Get down, you dog!” In a moment he was lying facedown in the dirt, being kicked and jabbed in the ribs with the barrel of a gun. He was dragged to a jeep and tossed into the backseat. The militiamen returned to the fields and retrieved other farmers, and soon the jeep was bursting with bruised and bewildered men. The Americans stood in the distance, watching.

  As the jeep pulled away, he looked back and saw the militiamen setting his field aflame.

  In prison, Manan discovered that he’d been rounded up as part of an American program to eradicate poppy cultivation, conducted with the help of JMK, who was seemingly using the program to wipe out Ghilzai competition and keep prices high. For twelve days, he and the other farmers were kept in a claustrophobic cell. Freedom was reserved for those who could pay, so he passed word to his family to auction off their livestock.

  When he returned home, he walked out onto the field and looked over what had become of his livelihood. The soil was ashen, covered with rotting opium paste. The bulbs had charred to nubs. Even part of the mud-walled enclosure was torn down. He wanted only one thing, to walk into the governor’s mansion and shoot the man himself. Or onto an American base and gun down the whole lot of them. But what could he do? There was no one to complain to, no advocate for his village. His best hope, the Ghilzai elder Muhammad Nabi, had disappeared after repeated American arrests.

  Every Friday, the ruined farmers gathered at the local mosque after prayers to discuss the situation. Among them was the charismatic Mullah Dil Agha, an ex-Taliban commander who had sworn off politics and taken to a life of quiet preaching. Now, seething with anger at what was happening to his village and to Ghilzai elders across Uruzgan, he did most of the talking. Manan was happy to listen because Dil Agha had the gift of a silver tongue. Manan had assumed that the campaign of persecution was just one in a long line of injustices, stretching back to the civil war, that people of his lot were destined to suffer forever. This was how things were and how they would always be. Dil Agha begged to differ. This abuse, he said, felt more immediate, more personal. Their community was being targeted simply because they were from the Ghilzai tribe—and it did not stop there. Their Pashtun ethnicity was similarly in the crosshairs, for it was clear that Hazaras were escaping the worst of this. And with the American raids, with the assassinations and disappearances of their elders, their very way of life as Afghans and Muslims was under threat.

  Mullah Dil Agha would repeat that phrase often: “our way of life.” The Americans, he explained, invaded because they hated the Afghan way of life. It was not long before Manan finally asked Dil Agha how they could sit idly by while this was going on.

  “In Kandahar people have already started work,” he replied. “They are brave and they are doing something about it.”

  It seemed to Manan that it would be an impossible task to stand up to the likes of JMK and the Americans. Dil Agha reminded him that their fathers had thought the same of the Russians. “If it’s in your heart,” he said, “if you love your country and your religion, that’s what matters.”

  Then he cited a Pashtun proverb: “A dog curls his tail, but a man fights.”

  Later that summer, his field unsown, his relatives idle indoors, his household finances stretched to the breaking point, Mullah Manan, too, went back to work.

  * * *

  For a week, Akbar Gul had been mulling over the question of weapons. From his initial meeting of eleven, eight had pledged to fight under him, eight men to be fed and armed and led as well as he could. One day, a potential solution suddenly came to him. It depended on a friendship he had made with a man named Pir Mohmand a decade earlier on the front lines of the civil war. Mohmand hailed from Akbar Gul’s neighborhood in Kabul and had fought with him in Hizb-i-Islami and then the Taliban. Now he worked for the US special forces as a member of a private militia operating outside government jurisdiction. His job was to transport fuel from Kabul along hundreds
of highway miles to American bases near the Pakistani border. The pay for the lonely six-hour haul was modest, and Akbar Gul wondered whether he could entice Mohmand with the promise of something better.

  The plan went like this: during an early-morning delivery, Mohmand would hand over a full tanker of fuel to Akbar Gul and go into hiding for a few days. He would then claim that he had been kidnapped and the fuel stolen at gunpoint. Akbar Gul would sell the fuel on the black market and the pair would split the profits. Mohmand spent some days mulling it over, then called to say he was in.

  It was long before dawn when Akbar Gul set out again for the Tangi Valley. He drove through the night, the spur of the mountains ahead lying dark against the sky. Crossing the valley floor, the gravel road banked up and hugged the northern slope. He passed some mud villages and some made of stone, and he saw in the valley below him the darkened minaret of the Tangi mosque. Farther on the valley widened and the road sloped down into it, and the valley basin gave way to a broad piedmont plain marking the beginning of Logar Province. He drove on, and there was not a house in sight.

  The gravel road crossed the plain to meet with another, which had once been asphalted and now lay fractured. He looked to the direction of Kabul, an hour off, and saw only darkness. In the other direction, the road ran to the far horizon, where it was swallowed by a mountain range beyond which lay the provinces bordering Pakistan. At the intersection of the two roads stood the broken remains of a mud village wiped away by some battle or some neglect of which he did not know.

  He turned off the engine and waited. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear the first strains of the morning’s call to prayer. The roads were empty and still.

  The sky began to pale. It was possible that Mohmand had lost his nerve or, worse, had tipped someone off. He sat in the dawn light thinking about all the things that could go wrong or probably had gone wrong and the trouble he’d find himself in when a police truck rolled up to ask what business he had out here. It was arrogance to have assumed that he could pull this off. He would get what he deserved.