No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  “Well, let me start with a joke. People talk about overpopulation on Earth, about having too many people. But I don’t see the big problem.” He paused. “You see, some people are actually just jackasses.” He pointed at Ghulam Ali. “And we don’t have to worry about including donkeys in the count.”

  The agent burst out laughing. A few of the others giggled.

  “Look, in my area, I have support. I don’t want this power plant to become useless. That’s what this is all about.”

  The agent turned to Ghulam Ali. “Let’s say the Americans are on patrol and you want to plan an ambush. What do you do?”

  Ghulam Ali thought about it and then answered, “I just grab my guys, however many I need, and we attack. We’re brave.”

  The agent turned to Akbar Gul. “And you?”

  “Well, first I’ll watch them, the Americans. I’ll position my guys ahead of them, between them and their base. We’ll watch sometimes for an hour. Sometimes we’ll mine their escape route. And when I feel the time is right, and I’m sure that my guys can escape alive, I’ll order them to fire.”

  The agent nodded and stood up. “Thanks for your time. We’re done here.” He turned to Akbar Gul. “I don’t have answers to your questions right now, but I’ll send them to you.”

  Mufti Latif and Akbar Gul were escorted back to their vehicle. The sun was breaking through the morning fog and they could hear the call to prayer. They were blindfolded and driven back to Peshawar.

  The following day, Akbar Gul returned to Afghanistan to learn that Ghulam Ali had been ordered to abandon his power plant scheme. Mufti Latif also passed along the message that Akbar Gul was expected to be more of a team player, to not lose sight of the mission.

  He never did receive those answers, however.

  * * *

  Akbar Gul knew that this was how things worked in his country. Pakistan had long been the éminence grise of Afghan politics, stemming from a generations-old rivalry between the two neighbors. Tensions had reached a fevered pitch in the 1970s when Afghan dictator Daud Khan attempted to whip up nationalist fervor among millions of Pashtuns living in Pakistan for a united “Pashtunistan,” a Pashtun homeland that would straddle both sides of the border and necessarily implied the breakup of Pakistan. Khan also harbored separatist insurgents looking to make the Pakistani province of Baluchistan into an independent state. Islamabad had retaliated in kind, supporting Islamist rebels—precursors to the mujahedeen—in Afghanistan.

  It might have remained little more than a simmering neighborhood rivalry if not for the Soviet invasion and the US proxy war, which, through billions of dollars in aid and military equipment, helped assure the rise of the ISI as a formidable player in regional politics. In the 1990s the Pakistanis had backed the Taliban, only to abandon them after the US invasion, appearing ready to at least tolerate a new Afghan order. It was soon clear, however, that Karzai and the Northern Alliance were too closely linked to India for Pakistan’s comfort. When the Taliban revived itself, the ISI threw its support behind the insurgency—even as it publicly proclaimed support for the US mission.

  Pakistan could bring pressure to bear on the Taliban at any moment. In 2010, for example, it arrested a number of leading Taliban figures on suspicion that they had contacted the Afghan government to explore possible future peace talks. To Akbar Gul, it all seemed like a big, scandalous game. One group of Taliban commanders in Wardak were known ISI favorites, regularly reporting to their handlers in Pakistan. A second group maintained subterranean links with the Afghan government, an insurance policy if the going got too tough. The unfortunate ones—and he counted himself in this last category—floated between these two poles, working for whoever could keep the guns and money flowing.

  Through it all, Ghulam Ali’s stature continued to grow. Akbar Gul watched as, over the months, alliances shifted and three of Chak’s top seven commanders fell under Ali’s influence. He complained to Mufti Latif, but there was little that Latif or the ISI could do, for Ali was undeniably effective and had the ear of top figures in Quetta. So Akbar Gul requested a meeting with the leadership. Connecting with a member of the so-called Quetta Shura face-to-face was difficult, if not impossible, without access—and there were no Wardakis on the grand council. Still, Akbar Gul knew of a Quetta-based Talib named Rehmatullah who hailed from Chak and had some links to the senior leadership, so he decided to make the trip to Pakistan to see him.

  He set out in a shared minivan taxi, stopping overnight at a hotel in Ghazni city, where he spent a sleepless night thinking about Hajji Mullah—a Taliban commander he knew who had upset the leadership and simply disappeared after a Quetta meeting. The following day, he arrived in the border town of Chaman and hopped into another shared taxi. He was about an hour into Pakistan when they encountered a checkpoint. A Pakistani policeman peered through the window and motioned for him to step out. They spent twenty minutes there at the roadside negotiating the bribe. It was early evening when he arrived in a Pashtun quarter of Quetta, filled with men in turbans and beards like his own, some carrying walkie-talkies and others driving brand new SUVs and still others loitering outside mosques, talking. He dialed Rehmatullah.

  Late that night he was brought by rickshaw to a small house and led to an underground bunker of some sort. Opening the door, he found six or seven men seated on toshaks. He greeted Rehmatullah and then the others in turn; two of them he recognized as commanders from his province but the others he could not place, though judging by their accents they hailed from Kandahar or Chaman. Rehmatullah did most of the talking while the Kandaharis sat watching. Finally one of them, the most heavy-set, disheveled-looking of the lot, spoke up.

  “Tell me, are you in this for jihad, or for your country? Do you love all Muslims, or just your people in Wardak or in Afghanistan?”

  It seemed like a trick question to Akbar Gul. He was there to complain about Ghulam Ali, but somehow this had become about him.

  “I love jihad and my people. It’s the same.”

  The Kandahari continued to grill him with such logical puzzles and riddles. “Do you believe that educated people or uneducated people know best?”

  “Educated, of course. I’m illiterate and you are educated. That’s why I’ve come to you.”

  “And if I ordered you to do something you disagreed with, what would you do?”

  Akbar Gul squirmed and gave a halfhearted answer, and the interrogation continued. He desperately wanted out. Finally, he offered a compromise:

  “If you want me to work with Ghulam Ali, I’ll do it. Just please don’t ask me to work under him. We’re more effective together, as one.”

  The men nodded and seemed pleased. Eventually, food arrived. It was the most sumptuous meal he’d had in some time, plate after plate of meatballs, and sweet rice pudding for dessert. They sat and talked long into the night, about war and friendship and poetry. They spoke of the good things in life and how those things were gone forever. They talked until dawn, and when the men rose to leave, Akbar Gul embraced each of them in turn. He told them, “I’m a loyal guy. I’ll do whatever it takes. If you want me to put a bomb in a crowded market, if you say that’s the right thing to do, I’ll do it.”

  He spent the next day touring the Taliban infrastructure in Quetta with Rehmatullah, visiting mosques to speak with scholars and bazaars to speak with important benefactors of the movement. In the evening he was taken to one of Rehmatullah’s madrassas, where hundreds of skullcapped boys sat in a chain of rooms reciting from the Koran and writing on the chalkboards. “These are my little warriors,” Rehmatullah said proudly.

  Akbar Gul could hardly believe what he was seeing, but he told Rehmatullah that it was good these boys were being taught to fight for their country and their religion. Rehmatullah smiled and replied that it was difficult to raise them this way, but necessary. Before Akbar Gul boarded a taxi back to the Afghan border, Rehmatullah promised him that he’d keep an eye on Ghulam Ali and see that he didn’t grow too st
rong—and that he’d talk to the leadership about finding Akbar Gul more funds.

  * * *

  The summer of 2009 saw an increase in infighting among Wardak’s Taliban, and growing tensions with their co-insurgent allies in Hekmatyar’s faction. At the same time, because the Taliban leadership paid units a “bonus” for outstanding attacks, the number of fake assaults, staged for video, surged. Akbar Gul played the game as well as anyone, but as the days went on he slid into despair. He hated those men in Quetta, he hated the ISI, and, most of all, he hated Ghulam Ali and his success. But he kept it all to himself. It was a dangerous new world, and you couldn’t trust anyone, even your own allies.

  Countrywide, his movement was losing steam. The Taliban were now responsible for more civilian deaths than were the Americans. In some communities, roadside bombs, assassinations, and summary executions had come to take their place alongside Guantanamo and the door-kicking night raids of US troops in the pantheon of fears that kept villagers awake at night. Meanwhile, the insurgency was spreading from marginalized, cut-off communities into those that had fared better in the post-2001 years, whether it was welcome there or not.

  In Chak, many of the commanders Akbar Gul knew had been killed in night raids, leaving Ghulam Ali’s crew and a smattering of independents, most younger than he, with no memories of the old Taliban days. It became increasingly difficult to defend their actions—which included, in one case, beheading a schoolteacher—to the village elders. He turned inward, planning operations on his own, without other commanders, and keeping away from Pakistan. Then, one day, he received a surprising phone call. It was the government’s new chief of police for Chak, an old war buddy from his Hizb-i-Islami days. They had ended up on opposite sides through chance more than anything else. The man spoke of a government program that invited fighters to switch sides in return for money and a guaranteed job. Akbar Gul listened and wondered where such a program had been years earlier, when he would have given anything for a normal life. But things were different now, more complicated. He realized that it had been a long while since the Taliban meant anything to him. But he couldn’t imagine himself openly joining forces with the government either. In fact, he knew that friends who’d gone down that route were languishing in a dangerous political no-man’s-land: Karzai’s government had not fulfilled its promises, and for the Taliban they were now marked men.

  “What are you fighting for? The Americans are going to leave anyway,” the police chief said. “We are building Afghanistan.” The Taliban, he added, were terrorists, enemies of the country, stooges of Pakistan.

  Akbar Gul was unmoved. “There are no good men among the living, and no bad ones among the dead,” he replied, reiterating one of his favorite Pashtun proverbs. This war had left no group, Afghan or foreign, with clean hands. You had to be careful to survive. Today, the government said the Taliban were terrorists—but what about tomorrow? Would the Taliban be venerated, as the mujahedeen were now venerated? Would the Americans change their allegiances, as it seemed they had done after the 1980s, and brand the Karzai government as their enemy? It was too much for Akbar Gul to grapple with just then. He knew only that to trust the categories put forth by the Americans or the government was to go down the road to ruin.

  He told the police chief that he wasn’t interested. He said he was satisfied with his life as it was, thanked him for his call, and hung up.

  The next morning, with new presidential elections looming, with American patrols crawling here and there, with Taliban groups erecting their usual checkpoints to hunt for spies and possible kidnap targets, he hopped on his motorcycle, headed for the low hills behind the village, and began another day of work.

  PART FIVE

  13

  Stepping Out

  Home had never felt so strange. Heela’s apartment was on the first floor of a house on the edge of Kandahar city, and when she stood by the compound wall in the backyard, she could sometimes hear the laughter of young men as their hashish smoke drifted over. It wasn’t long before she avoided that side of the house altogether. But the front wall proved no better. There, she could hear men arguing and laughing and spitting onto the sidewalk, and they sounded like police but she had no way of knowing. It wasn’t long before she started avoiding the front wall, too. She tried befriending the widow upstairs, who worked as a cook for an NGO. With the month drawing to a close and rent looming, Heela asked her about finding a job. As it happened, the cook said she knew of the perfect one—working with the director of the Kandahar government’s Department of Youth Affairs.

  “How much does it pay?” Heela asked.

  “Oh, that doesn’t matter! He’ll help you, I promise,” she replied.

  “What do I do?”

  “This isn’t a regular job. Just go whenever he calls you, whenever he needs you, and he’ll pay you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The cook blushed and laughed giddily. “You’ll enjoy the work.”

  From that moment, Heela avoided her, too.

  It was early winter 2005. Nearly three months had passed since Musqinyar’s murder, and in that period she had been moved three times without ever quite fitting in anywhere. First, there had been the American camp in Tirin Kot, where she’d been brought by helicopter from Khas Uruzgan. At the camp she was housed in a small tent and nearly starved herself because she wasn’t convinced the food was halal. For days on end, it was only fruits and chocolate, delivered by friendly soldiers. She kept herself inside, with her two boys, living a waking dream, never quite sure just what had happened to her. The days were long and quiet, until one afternoon she was brought to an office in town and told to wait in the courtyard. After some time she noticed the faint, distant chug of a car. It grew louder and stronger, and soon it was right outside. The gate opened. Standing there on crutches, in bandages, was nine-year-old Jamshed, her second child. She ran out and pulled him in tight. They both wept.

  He asked, “Where is Baba?”

  She looked him over. “Father is injured. He’s in Kandahar.”

  “No,” answered Jamshed. “No—I know what happened. There were so many shots.”

  Heela said nothing.

  “Just tell me the truth,” he said.

  She held him close and sobbed.

  Some weeks later she and the boys were moved to Kandahar Airfield. The prefab container serving as their home there was the cleanest space she’d ever seen. Too clean, in fact, leaving her little to do but count the daylight hours and think back over choices made and those made for her. Finally, she was brought to Omaid. That a boy of eleven could take four bullets and still hold on to life was miraculous—though that miracle would have been inconceivable without the heroic work of US soldiers and the doctors at KAF. When he saw his mother, Omaid sat up and held her hand, and she spoke to him words of comfort.

  He was soon transferred to the Kandahar city hospital, and it was there that Heela had her first stroke of luck. A doctor took pity on the family and gave her about fifty dollars’ worth of Afghan currency, which she used to find herself a small apartment in the city.

  It was as far removed from the countryside as you could get. There were no courtyards or stand-alone guest rooms or gardens out back, just tightly packed mud and cement houses, clotheslines and electrical wires webbed between them. She could hear a television playing from the apartment of a family upstairs and she was eager to see it herself, but she did not go up to meet them.

  The first days had been the hardest. The morning light, the first notes of the muezzin’s call, the growing clamor of the street—to Heela, these were rude interruptions of the few hours that still belonged entirely to her, the few hours when her life seemed whole again. She no longer had Musqinyar in the flesh, but he still dutifully visited in dreams, where everything was as it had always been. He spoke to her and walked with her and they went to all the places they were meant to go until the night was over, and they started again the next night. It took great effort to mana
ge the tyranny of daylight, and some days she failed. In time, she began to see that each visit of his was a message, a map, charting her life ahead.

  The immediate challenge was finding work. Without stepping outdoors, this was no easy task. Even though there was no one to restrict her movements, she felt it simply wasn’t proper to move about without a mahrem. She swore to herself that she wouldn’t become one of those widows one occasionally heard about, the sort who cavorted with unrelated men and went wherever they pleased. So she relied instead on an acquaintance of Musqinyar’s, who came every so often to check on her and bring naan for the family. Once, an aid worker showed up with blankets, two spoons, a bowl, and a mattress. Heela would cut bread into strips and portion them out during the day, and if they grew stale she would soak them in the bowl with green tea. When Walid woke up crying with hunger, she would rub his belly and rock him back to sleep.

  By the end of her first month, she was out of options. Some days they survived only on green tea. Some nights she would think back to her Kabul days and remember the burqa-shrouded widows sitting cross-legged on the sidewalks, children by their side, begging for change. Alone in the world, forgotten. Unaccounted for.

  It was a Friday, the day of mosque-going and shopping. One more day and the landlord would show up. She stood watching the children. Omaid had her eyes but he had his father’s smile. It was impossible to ignore that something within him and the others had altered, maybe forever. She urged Omaid to go out and explore, but he would have none of it. Instead, he spent whole afternoons in a corner, staring off into space. He would not say a word to anyone.

  The muezzin called for the Friday prayers, and she caught herself counting the hours till sundown. The landlord had said that he would come by first thing in the morning.

  Heela decided that this could not continue. She retrieved her burqa and held it aloft, studying it. She stood thinking a long while about Musqinyar and Khas Uruzgan. Then she fit herself into the burqa, opened the gate, and stepped out into the open city. For the first time in ten years she was in the streets without a mahrem. She wasn’t sure what had gotten into her, but she wasn’t going to turn back. She headed down the lane onto a broad dirt road. It led her to a crowded neighborhood, and she could hear scooters and autorickshaws and vendors shouting prices. There were men in pattus and swirled turbans standing around pushcarts heaped with vegetables. There was a man in a police uniform, and another on a bicycle, and another selling music CDs. Then she saw the women. There were women begging and women speaking to shopkeepers. They wore powder blue and pistachio green burqas, walking here and there with children and men—or, in some cases, by themselves. On their own, she realized. Heela felt as if she had walked into a different country.