No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  It was summer 2010 and Manan now commanded nearly a hundred men, a stature he hadn’t experienced since his defeat by Jason Amerine. Yet he sat before me in nothing more than an old pattu and frayed sandals, carrying the Afghan equivalent of a few dollars. Money, in fact, was the abiding challenge. Scrounging together funds for ammunition or weapons had become part of life’s daily struggle, and as his unit grew the problem was only getting worse.

  “In the beginning, we had nothing,” he said. “It was hard for us to even get batteries for our walkie-talkies. No one was helping us, just occasionally some rich people from the village, who gave us donations. When we went on raids, we divided the spoils and I told my men, ‘Here, these are your expenses for the month. Use it to survive.’ We never called it a salary.”

  As the insurgency grew, funds began to trickle in to the Quetta-based Taliban leadership from private donors in the Gulf and merchants in Pakistan. Some of them were shunted to the movement’s so-called district governors, who took a cut and disbursed what was left to field commanders like Manan. “They would tell us, ‘This money is just for weapons, just for walkie-talkies and daily expenses. It’s not for personal use,’” he recalled.

  While Karzai and the Americans could peddle influence through patronage—that is, by spending large sums of money—the Taliban was left to corral support mainly through sheer force. You stood in their way at your peril. Once, Manan’s unit came into the possession of a list of NGOs operating in the area and the amount of aid they were receiving for various projects. Manan noticed that, not far from his home, a businessman had obtained funds to repair a small community bridge.

  “So we warned him,” he recalled. “We used a trusted elder from the area. We did this so that if we acted, the elders wouldn’t blame us. We told the elder to order the businessman to surrender his money to us and halt construction of the bridge.” If villagers wanted a bridge, Manan said, he’d use his money to build it. He simply couldn’t allow the government, or Jan Muhammad, to take credit—not after everything that had happened, everything he’d been through. It would be the Taliban’s way, or none at all.

  In this developing system, Manan and other commanders would issue a warning to anyone caught working for the government or handling government money, a category that included aid workers, police officers, and, most frequently of all, schoolteachers. Schools that had reopened their doors after 2001 were now again forced shut. Sometimes they were burned to the ground. Bridges, culverts, and irrigation ditches went unrepaired.

  “Those who were warned and did not quit, we arrested,” he said.

  I asked what became of those he arrested.

  “We had no option but the sword,” he answered.

  It occurred often enough, but it was the first time that he’d never forget. The man’s name was Sidiqullah and he had taken a job running a government checkpoint on the highway. Manan issued a warning, but Sidiqullah ignored it. With jobs scarce and families to feed, such defiance was not uncommon. Manan waited a few weeks and then showed up at Sidiqullah’s doorstep with dozens of men.

  “Sidiqullah, son of Akram,” he said in his wispy voice. “You’ve been told by our religious leaders to stop working for the government. Now you have no right to complain.”

  Sidiqullah started pleading. The men forced him into their jeep and drove out of the village. At a grassy escarpment, with the mountains looming, they ordered him out.

  Manan wanted it done quickly, before elders or family members had a chance to intervene. Once they became involved, things would get difficult.

  They made Sidiqullah sit by the stump of a large tree, and, when he struggled, two of the men placed their weight on his arms and body and tied his hands behind his back. He began to scream, a deep madman’s scream, and the Talibs looked on and waited. One of them lowered a butcher’s knife onto Sidiqullah’s neck, as if measuring, and began to cut. It surprised Manan how long it took, how much work it was, to decapitate a man. Afterward, when they tossed the head aside, it looked to him like a deflated balloon.

  I asked Manan if he’d ever done such a thing again.

  He looked at nothing in particular and appeared to think this over, as if it were some technical question or some subject that he had not considered until then, and answered in his shy and quiet voice: “We were doing this two, maybe three times a month.”

  * * *

  One night, Akbar Gul again awoke to a loud rumble. The sky outside was flashing white. Stepping into the street, he could smell burning rubber and smoke. He’d been staying with a friend, and the smoke appeared to be coming from the far side of the village, over by the mosque—not far from the direction of his house. He ran as fast as he could. His fears were quickly confirmed: a sizzling pit had swallowed his home’s mud wall. The front yard was smoldering. His wife and daughter were inside. Please, God, he said to himself, please, God. The door had been locked from the inside. He kicked with all his might, kicked again, and finally it succumbed. He called out their names and they came running, terrified but unharmed.

  After sunrise, he inspected the blast site. It betrayed all the telltale signs of explosives: an epicenter, a radial discharge of some sort, concentric circles of damage. The Americans had combed through the village only days earlier—he had been away on a mission—and he was sure that this was their doing. But how had they known which house was his?

  He spent the day investigating and came up empty. The only lead he had was a list of names of those seen chatting with soldiers on their patrol, which he’d collected from his scouts. Akbar Gul couldn’t prove it, but he felt in his bones that one of the people on the list, a neighbor named Raqib, was the culprit. He had never liked Raqib, who was always making excuses for not donating to the cause.

  The next morning he showed up at Raqib’s house with his men. “You’re coming with me,” he ordered.

  “Why? What did I do?”

  “This is over,” he said, pointing to his damaged house down the street. “My wife and child were in there.”

  “What does this have to do with me?”

  Akbar Gul said nothing and the others forced Raqib into their truck. As they drove up the mountainside, Raqib started wailing. He had a wife and children at home, he pleaded. Akbar Gul ordered him out of the truck, put his Kalashnikov to Raqib’s temple, and shot him dead.

  In general, informants were rare, although he’d heard stories of spies in other villages. Sometimes, when he drove his motorcycle along the rutted mountainside trails behind those villages, he came upon corpses dangling from trees. He tried not to think too much about them, instead spending his time dreaming up schemes to get himself funded. Those plans would get hashed out in his guest room, where he passed long hours with friends and fellow commanders sipping cardamom tea and hacking into a spittoon. It was a room no simpler or grander than any other, with toshaks on the floor for sitting and an old tea-stained rug in the center. On the wall hung a picture, cut out from a magazine, of a crystal blue wave crashing onto a beach, and another of a giant red rose. Like many Pashtun men, Akbar Gul adored roses, their reds and pinks burning in a dun-colored world.

  When he wasn’t working, he and his comrades would watch films of Taliban attacks on their cell phones and, when bored of those, clips of Bollywood movies. The Taliban’s old injunctions against television and music had more or less fallen by the wayside. Back in the 1990s, Akbar Gul had embraced the puritanism with fervor—he’d been Mullah Cable, after all, enforcing the rules with his whip—because in a world turned upside down by civil war, where women could be dragged out of a home and dishonored in the open street, it seemed that the best medicine was to boil things down to their bare Islamic essentials. Anything that left the door open to sin was banned; television, as a possible venue for pornography, had been high on that list. Now, looking back, Akbar Gul could hardly recognize his old self or his old group. The commanders he knew in Wardak wore beards of differing lengths. Some, to avoid detection, even went clea
n shaven. Nearly everyone he knew listened to music and traded cell phone video clips. And activities that he would have found abhorrent before, such as suicide bombing, now seemed a logical expression of religious faith and patriotic duty.

  Sometimes, when the group tired of watching movies, Syed Muhammad, the only one among them with a religious education, would start up with his impromptu sermonizing. He would remind them that the Americans were on Afghan soil to convert the population to Christianity, to eradicate their way of life. To those present in the room, this explanation made perfect sense: they had all heard stories of the proliferation of brothels in Kabul, of US soldiers flushing Korans down the toilet. Syed Muhammad was also an accomplished poet. Often, he would conjure up verses on the spot—of unrequited love, of forbidden romance, of friendship, or of fear, the kind of fear that weighs upon you the first time you leave home to fight.

  Even on those slow afternoons, money was never far from Akbar Gul’s thoughts. Fund-raising proved to be a challenge no matter how well they did on the battlefield, so he began to diversify his approach. About a third of his operating expenses now came from donations, another third from various forms of coercion such as the “taxation” of local construction firms, and the rest from Quetta. By 2008 he had also expanded into heroin trafficking, with policemen and government employees as his biggest customers.

  Through it all, Akbar Gul built himself the village equivalent of a mini-empire. Still, something was missing—it didn’t feel like enough. For one thing, there was Ghulam Ali, the other top commander in Chak, who owned the only gas station for miles around. That brought in a steady revenue with which he attracted fighters and purchased weapons. One success begat another, and soon Ali was fielding one of the most formidable forces in the province, a development the Quetta leadership was quick to notice. He was appointed as Chak’s “district governor,” usurping Akbar Gul, who was then awarded the sinecure of “police chief.” Akbar Gul never complained, but it ate away at him. He was sure that if he could command Ali-like profits, he’d run the Americans out of Wardak in no time. If anyone should be governor, it was he.

  Matters came to a head one afternoon in 2009, when he learned that Ghulam Ali was demanding that villagers stop paying taxes to the government for the operation of a community power station and instead hand the money over to the Taliban—specifically, to him. In a meeting with graybeards and elders, Akbar Gul listened as they complained bitterly about the new policy. Then he asked them, “Under what authority does Ali want to take this money?”

  “He says he wants it for jihad, for the sake of God.”

  “God?” he responded. “If you are fighting for God, God will provide everything for you.” The men nodded in agreement. “If Ali really wants the money, will he guarantee that the power station stays working? Will he pay the electricians to maintain it? Will he pay the station’s staff? Will he supply fuel for the generators? Where will he get that from? His mother?”

  The men laughed. “If the harvest is bad one year, will he keep the thing running like the government would?” Akbar Gul was hardly one to defend the government under normal circumstances, but the idea of Ali lording it over his district was too much to bear.

  “But there’s nothing we can do,” an elder replied. “You know he’ll beat us if we refuse. Everyone is afraid of him.”

  Akbar Gul flashed with anger. “No—he’s a dog. Ignore him. If he gives you any trouble, you tell me. I’m the commander here.”

  Emboldened, the elders went to Ghulam Ali and announced that Akbar Gul had ordered them not to pay the tax. In a rage, Ali demanded a meeting, to which Akbar Gul immediately agreed.

  The elders were seated in a circle the next day, with Taliban commanders from around the district in attendance, when Akbar Gul strode in with his fighters. Ali was sitting with a few of his fighters, who wore bandannas to cover their faces.

  “Are we meeting thieves or the Taliban?” Akbar Gul asked as he sat down.

  “What is your problem?” Ghulam Ali snarled.

  “You act like you’re the king of Chak. Look at these poor people,” he said, pointing to the elders. “You’re making problems for them.”

  “You’re making problems for my people,” Ali snapped back. “You’re telling these people to oppose my orders.” Since when, he asked, did a Taliban commander direct people to pay the government? “Maybe you love the Americans, maybe you want to see the Taliban fail.”

  This was more than Akbar Gul could bear. “No, I just want to fuck your wife,” he said.

  Ghulam Ali leapt up. “Who do you think you are?”

  “Who do you think you are?” Akbar Gul shot back.

  “I’m the district governor of Chak, appointed by our leaders.”

  “I don’t care if Mullah Omar himself appointed you. If you ever set foot in my village, I’ll make you my bitch.”

  “Now let’s see what happens,” Ghulam Ali shouted back, pounding a number into his phone and placing it on speaker. It was Mufti Abdul Latif, their immediate superior, speaking from his home in Peshawar, Pakistan. He was saying something, but Akbar Gul, clouded over with rage, could not stand to listen and stormed out.

  Later that evening he received a phone call from Mufti Latif. He was to report to Peshawar immediately.

  * * *

  The dust kicking up from Peshawar’s streets seemed thicker than usual, made all the worse by the humid summer air. It reminded Akbar Gul of just how much he despised Pakistan, particularly its weather. A war was raging here now between militants—who also called themselves “Taliban,” though they had little to do with his movement—and the Pakistani government. He wondered how anyone could actually fight in such wet heat.

  It had taken him almost two days to reach the city, as he’d used a circuitous route in order to avoid the main highway. As soon as he arrived, he borrowed a cell phone from a pedestrian and dialed Mullah Latif, who dispatched a car to pick him up. He stood on the street watching autorickshaws and motorbikes scoot by, some of them carrying women in burqas, in headscarves, and a few even with their hair as naked as when they’d risen that morning.

  A black Land Cruiser pulled up. A man leaned out the window. “Are you Akbar Gul?”

  He nodded and climbed into the backseat, where two others were already seated. Another man sitting in the front turned to greet him and then held up a black hood. “I’m sorry, but rules are rules,” he said.

  Before Akbar Gul could react, a hood was forced onto his head and he felt the weight of two men on top of him. When he tried to cry out, his voice was muffled. He couldn’t believe this was happening. He lay struggling for air, cursing himself for his bravado, bargaining with God that he’d change his ways.

  No one spoke, and he could hear horns and street vendors outside. After some time, those, too, faded away. The car was moving fast now, very fast. Out on the open highway somewhere.

  An hour passed. He felt the vehicle turn and halt. A horn blared. Something, maybe a gate, squeaked open. Then a handler removed his hood and he sat there, gasping for air and looking around. He was in the driveway of a large country house, surrounded by towering cement walls. Mountains were peeking over in the distance.

  He was led into the compound. Standing in the hallway, arms folded, was Mufti Abdul Latif. For a moment everyone was silent. Then Latif broke into a wide grin. “You crazy troublemaker! What kind of problems are you making for us out there?” He laughed and embraced his old friend.

  The two sat down to dinner, talking about their families and the latest news of the war. Afterward, Latif suggested that Akbar Gul catch some rest.

  Around one in the morning, Latif woke him up. “Time to go. Everyone is waiting.” A white Toyota TownAce minivan stood outside in the darkness, curtains drawn over its side windows. Latif motioned Akbar Gul to climb into the tiny space behind the back window and the rearmost seats.

  No one spoke during the journey. After about thirty minutes, they arrived at a house even large
r than the previous one and made their way down to a long, brightly lit hall, finally entering a room near the end. There was no furniture or even rugs, only a glaring white fluorescent light set in the ceiling.

  After a few minutes another door swung open, and Taliban commanders whom Akbar Gul recognized from Wardak streamed in. Sometime later, religious clerics entered. Then Ghulam Ali himself strode in. They all sat wordlessly, sipping tea and playing with their phones. Akbar Gul realized that they were waiting for someone.

  Nearly an hour had gone by when he appeared. He wore a crisp, cream-colored salwar, more perfectly tailored than any Akbar Gul had ever laid eyes on. He had large, tired, puffy eyes and was beardless, with a close-cropped mustache and a crew cut.

  Akbar Gul knew immediately that he was in the presence of Pakistani intelligence. So this is what they look like, he thought to himself. Growing up in Afghanistan, you’d hear about the shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, spoken of the way people spoke of malevolent jinns, omnipresent and responsible for the ills of the world. Few had ever seen an operative in the flesh.

  “We have a problem in Wardak,” the man began, “and we’re here to solve it.” He looked around the room. “We need to appoint some new people. So which one of you is Akbar Gul?”

  He raised his hand.

  “Ah, I should have guessed. You look like the kind of guy that likes to argue.”

  Akbar Gul smiled his most disarming smile, and said, “No, I’m not like that.”

  “So tell me, why do you create problems for Ghulam Ali? Why don’t you let him do his job, and you do yours?”

  Akbar Gul resented this tone. Who was he, hundreds of miles from the battlefield, to question him?

  “Let me ask you something first, if you don’t mind,” Akbar Gul said, as Mufti Latif pinched his leg. “Why do you help America? You take their money and work with them, then you work with us as well. What kind of business is this?”

  Everyone was quiet. Finally, the ISI officer said, “Go on, I’m listening.”