No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  14

  The Leader

  As the car drove slowly through Touri, men and boys came out to watch. The driver rolled down the window and asked after Ruhollah, but no one knew his whereabouts. They peered at the sobbing woman in the back and asked what the matter was and when the driver told them they shook their heads in pity.

  Heading back to town, Heela hated herself. These things did not happen to good women, to good Muslims. It was her fault. There could be no other explanation for how two tragedies had befallen a single family. She should never have left the children under Omaid’s care—he wasn’t like other teenagers. She watched the cornfields and the poppies pass. Night was drawing in from the east and soon darkness would fall, leaving Nawid in some back room or garden house unknown to the world. Just him and that man.

  They went by her house and picked up Omaid and then the car went down street after street, Heela looking at every passing child. They drove to Jan Muhammad’s old compound, with its towering stucco mud walls and armed guards. The master was in Kabul, she was told. No, they didn’t know when he would return, and no, they didn’t have his number.

  She tried the Americans again. No luck. Same with Hajji Akhund. Finally, the driver declared the search useless and dropped them off at the house and left.

  Heela sat in the living room surrounded by the boys, the Koran on her lap. No one spoke. Outside, she could hear the arrhythmic clinking of goat bells and the faraway beeping of motorbikes.

  And then she heard tires on gravel. Quickly donning her burqa, she went outside. A pair of green Toyota pickups were approaching in a storm of dust and pebbles, and Nawid was in the back of one of them, smiling.

  He jumped down and Heela praised God and hugged him and looked him over. A pair of Kalashnikov-toting men stepped off the truck. They told her not to worry, the boy was unharmed.

  Heela asked what had happened.

  The meshr, they replied. The leader. The leader had saved him.

  “The meshr?” Heela asked.

  He had heard about the abduction, they said, and immediately sent them to retrieve her son and take Ruhollah into custody.

  Heela didn’t understand.

  They pointed to a color computer printout pasted to the side of one of the pickups. It showed a thirtysomething man with a long face and an enormous wedge of a nose, a man strikingly handsome by Afghan tastes. His image was superimposed on a dreamlike background of fluffy clouds and snowcapped peaks.

  Matiullah Khan. Heela had heard of him. She’d seen his men around town. He was a nephew of Jan Muhammad Khan.

  The two men told her that after capturing Ruhollah and his accomplice, they’d brought them to Matiullah’s compound. Upon seeing the meshr, the captives had fallen to their knees and begged for absolution. Ruhollah pleaded that Nawid was “like a brother” to him and that he’d only wanted to take the boy to “see the sights.” The meshr was unmoved. He told his men to make Ruhollah “dance,” and they began firing at his feet. Ruhollah was then stripped naked and locked up.

  Some days later, the militiamen returned and gave Heela Matiullah Khan’s phone number. “The meshr says hello,” one told her, “and wants you to know that you can call him anytime if anyone bothers you.” It was the first time anyone had openly backed her in Tirin Kot. Heela couldn’t understand why. As she asked around, she learned that everyone held Matiullah in a mixture of awe and terror. There were stories bouncing around the bazaar: how he once tied a man down and drove over him. How he once broke a man’s legs in a fit of rage. How he once severed all of a man’s fingers.

  It was not long after this that Heela caught Dr. Ishan leering at her. He lived two houses down, and one night as she was preparing for bed she spotted him watching her from atop her house’s outer wall. She called Omaid to chase him away, but he returned a few nights later, and again after that. Neighbors took note. In the mouths of street vendors and housewives the story morphed, as stories do, until it was said that Heela and Dr. Ishan were involved. The children were teased about it at school, and the gossip even spread to Heela’s office.

  Only then did her thoughts turn back to the meshr. She would have to call him. It didn’t matter what people said about him. They were saying things about her, too, and they’d keep at it. She shuffled through her diary and found the number.

  Matiullah’s secretary picked up. Her heart pounding, Heela described the problem. The secretary listened and promised to relay the message to his boss. The next day, the meshr’s gunmen showed up at the house and assured her that they had taken care of the issue. They’d locked up Dr. Ishan in a tiny cage and threatened to shoot him in the head. When they brought him to Matiullah, he had burst into tears and fallen at the meshr’s feet. Matiullah had looked him over and then released him, warning him that next time he would hang.

  From that day on, Dr. Ishan never bothered Heela again.

  * * *

  In rural Afghanistan, people discuss roads the way we discuss the weather—before they head out for work or at the mosque or in the market. On any given day, highways are prone to sudden tempests of violence between the warring sides. They can be rendered impassable by roadside bombs, or impromptu insurgent checkpoints, or trigger-happy American convoys. (“We’ve shot an amazing number of people,” US war commander General Stanley McChrystal commented in 2010, “and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat.”) Next week’s travel can be as unpredictable as next week’s skies.

  If the roads attracted so much violence, it was because without them there could be no resupplying of American bases, and therefore no American mission. And with no American mission, there would have been no Matiullah Khan, no meshr. But what exactly was he the leader of? By 2009, he had become the most powerful person in Uruzgan Province and one of Washington’s closest allies—all without holding a government position.

  In the summer of 2011, I rented a car in Kandahar city and set out for Uruzgan to learn who exactly Matiullah was. I started on the city’s outskirts, in a mud-sodden field filled with eighteen-wheelers, sixteen-wheelers, cabs with two trailers, Indian-made trucks festooned with ruby-colored mirrors and dangling metallic tassels—all of them bearing fuel or other crucial cargo for US troops, and all waiting to travel the eighty treacherous miles north to Tirin Kot. Just a few years earlier, the truckers told me, such a trip would have been a probable death sentence. The route was then under Taliban control, so trucks often ended up as charred heaps, dotting the roadside like signposts in some ravaged alien land. Drivers were losing their heads and the American base in Tirin Kot was being starved of supplies. “If you ask me what I worry about at night,” said American general Duncan J. McNabb, “it is the fact that our supply chain is always under attack.” As the insurgency grew stronger in 2006–7, and the Americans sent in more troops, requiring more supplies, the problem only multiplied. The Kandahar–Tirin Kot road became one of the most dangerous highways in the world. But everything changed in 2008, when an illiterate militiaman began organizing his cousins and friends to protect the trucks. His name was Matiullah.

  He was a man of humble origins who, unlike Jan Muhammad and other Soviet-era mujahedeen warlords, made himself entirely in the shadow of twenty-first-century American power. In the 1990s, he was operating a taxi on the Kandahar–Tirin Kot highway, occasionally moonlighting as a driver for Taliban commanders. He may have been poor, unschooled, and seemingly without political ambition, but as a member of the Popalzai tribe and a nephew of JMK, a world of opportunities opened up for him in the wake of the US invasion. He joined Karzai’s 2001 campaign to capture Uruzgan, and by the following year he had worked his way into his uncle’s militia, commanding an elite Taliban-hunting unit. With no actual Taliban around, however, this effectively meant life as a hit man knocking off JMK’s rivals. Soon he was providing security for the perimeter of the main US base in Tirin Kot and accompanying American special forces missions. In 2007, he was appointed to head a short-lived highway police force,
and when it was disbanded a few months later, he appropriated its guns and trucks and continued to patrol the Kandahar–Tirin Kot highway on a fee-for-service basis. In no time, he was supplying heavily armed men—most of them relatives or fellow tribesmen—to protect trucks hauling American supplies into Tirin Kot. The Taliban proved no match.

  It was noon at the truck depot when we spotted the seemingly unending stream of desert beige Ford pickups heading toward us, Afghan flags whipping in the wind. Some had Matiullah’s image pasted decal-style to their cab windows, but most were unmarked. The supply trucks fell into place behind them, and we were off. The convoy drove along a canal as wide as the highway itself, its waters shimmering a brilliant cerulean blue against the dull brown scrubland rolling away into the distance. An hour into the trip, we passed through the shadow of a massive concrete dam. It was here that Jason Amerine’s unit had called in the wrong coordinates almost ten years earlier, bombing themselves and nearly killing Karzai.

  Farther north, the mud houses and rutted dirt paths by the roadside disappeared and we were in open country, with barren slopes and a naked, treeless horizon. Perched here and there on the slopes were small teams of Matiullah’s gunmen, part of a private army thousands strong financed through his contracting business. For every truck escorted, he charged the Americans $1,000 to $2,000. With hundreds of trucks heading for the US base in Tirin Kot weekly, he was pulling in millions of dollars a month—in a country where the average income is a few hundred dollars a year. You could not move a truck into Uruzgan without his permission. “No one leaves without paying,” said Rashid Popal, another trucking contractor. “Matiullah will kill anyone on this highway, Taliban or not.” When another private security company, the Australian firm Compass, once attempted to escort US supplies up the highway, they were met by a hundred or so of Matiullah’s heavily armed men, who demanded $2,000 to $3,000 per truck for “passing rights.” The exchange grew so heated that the US military was called in. Eventually a settlement was negotiated and the trucks were allowed to pass, but the message was clear enough: Matiullah Khan owned the highway.

  Our convoy passed through a defile that opened onto the earthen bowl where Mullah Manan’s forces had battled Jason Amerine’s Green Berets for control of Uruzgan. We arrived in Tirin Kot as dusk fell, without a shot fired en route, without encountering a single roadside bomb or illegal checkpoint. American officials believe that Matiullah’s success hinges in part on a protection racket, in which he pays off certain Taliban commanders not to disturb his convoys—meaning that the United States, by hiring Matiullah, is indirectly paying its enemies.

  Under Matiullah Khan, Tirin Kot was a changed town. Using his windfall funds he gobbled up real estate, elbowing aside his exiled uncle as the major landowner in the area. He leased bases to the Americans and financed bazaar shops. Soon, just about every business transaction of note in the city required his imprimatur. “Nothing happens in Tirin Kot without him,” Hajji Shirin Dil, a wholesaler from Kabul, told me. “You can’t make a single dollar without his permission, without giving him a cut.”

  With Jan Muhammad in Kabul, Matiullah quickly monopolized the political scene as well. Yet he was eager to distance himself from his uncle’s ruinous regime. JMK’s excesses had eventually turned the Dutch and other NATO allies against him, and Matiullah was keen to keep in the foreigners’ good graces. He built schools, established radio stations, erected mosques, sent poor children to university in Kabul, settled land disputes, and protected widows like Heela. Through his militias and construction companies, he also provided jobs for thousands.

  As with his uncle, however, governance was a sideline to Matiullah’s principal occupation: fighting “terror,” with no holds barred. When a roadside bomb once went off near his convoy, killing one of his men, Matiullah leapt out of his vehicle in a rage and grabbed a bystander—a shopkeeper in the wrong place at the wrong time. Matiullah tied him to the rear bumper of his pickup truck and drove around town. When the body was returned to the family, it was barely recognizable. In another village, Matiullah captured a suspected Talib (who, locals claim, was actually just a poor farmer) and took an already radical measure of emasculation—chopping off his beard—a step farther: he smashed the man’s chin. And in yet another incident, Matiullah’s men attacked a madrassa suspected of being a center of Taliban influence. Dozens were taken hostage and executed, most of them young boys.

  * * *

  In the town that had become Matiullah’s, new offices opened almost monthly. The summer of 2008 saw an aid organization with foreign ties set up shop down the road from Heela’s house. Not long after, a Western woman from the agency showed up at Heela’s office and asked if she would help deliver medicines to the countryside. It had been years since Heela had set foot in a district outside of Tirin Kot, but she felt ready for the challenge. Through Hajji Akhund, she recruited one of Musqinyar’s old friends, a doctor working for the government hospital. He, in turn, contacted a friend in an outlying village—and so it began. In no time, medicines were beginning to reach needy women outside of the capital in a regular fashion, and soon Heela was devoting much of her energy to this new project. But as quickly as the opportunity materialized, it vanished. The foreign-linked NGO closed down, and weeks later so did the Afghan organization that was her main employer.

  Heela did not remain out of work for long. One of her colleagues from the Afghan NGO had moved on to work at the local hajj department, which coordinated travel for pilgrims to the Muslim holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. His office had no means of processing the handful of requests that came in from female pilgrims, though, so he brought Heela aboard to help. Unlike her previous workplace, this office was all-male, so she wore her burqa eight hours a day. At first she was placed in a back room, helping to fill out paperwork for female applicants. But there were, in fact, so few of them that she spent her days largely idle at her desk, her restless mind spinning. Before long, she was helping illiterate farmers complete their applications, and not once did she request a bribe. It was only a matter of time before she became the most popular bureaucrat there, more so than any male counterpart.

  Heela wished that Musqinyar could see her now, climbing from nothing to make a life in this town. In fact, she sensed that he could see, that he was watching. In some of her dreams she worked with him in a clean white office, with dozens of employees under them. It was a reminder of her days teaching in Kabul, university degree in hand. A reminder that she had been destined for so much more. The men around her at the hajj office, good souls all, had never been anywhere near a place of higher learning. Most of them had not finished high school. Even her supervisor could read only haltingly. She felt that, as a woman, she wasn’t fit to run an office full of men, but still she wondered if she could do more. One afternoon, impulsively, she decided to sit for the certification exam for hajj instructors. She would teach pilgrims the basics of the travel process.

  The exam was given a month before the start of the pilgrimage season, and Heela studied day and night to pass. A few weeks later, having received her certificate, she found herself in front of a roomful of farmers and tribal elders, chalk in hand. All those men, all those eyes watching her. Not since her wedding had she stood in front of so many people. Her words came out weak and soft, but the men said nothing and listened attentively. She continued to speak and no one laughed or scolded her, they just sat listening. It was hard for her to believe. After the class was over, they thanked her and called her “daughter” or “sister.” One elder told her that while this type of work wasn’t good for “our women, in the villages,” it was fitting for “educated women like you.”

  She was working late at the office one day when she received an unexpected visitor: Musqinyar’s uncle, who had come to apply for hajj. She hadn’t seen him since leaving Khas Uruzgan, and there was so much she wanted to know. What had happened to her house, her property? What was Shaysta up to? They talked for hours. Commander Zahir, she learned, had f
allen out of favor with JMK some years before, supposedly over opium profits. In the end, JMK had reported Zahir to the Americans as a Taliban agent, and, in a twist of fate, the police chief was now sitting in Bagram. In the meantime, nearly the entire district had fallen to the Taliban, with government-controlled territory whittled down to a mile or so around the governor’s house.

  They continued talking into the evening, and then the uncle looked at her and asked: “Would you like to come with me? To do hajj?”

  The thought had never occurred to her. The very idea seemed wild, impossible—to go all the way to Saudi Arabia, when she could hardly walk to the bazaar?

  “If you take me, you will do a great thing,” she replied.

  * * *

  Heela sat in a window seat and fiddled with the emergency card in the pocket in front of her. It was her first flight since being ferried to Kandahar to see Omaid. Through her burqa netting she could see the Tirin Kot mountains, far off the runway’s edge. She was the only woman on the plane. Her uncle sat beside her. She glued her face to the window and watched the honeycomb of mud-walled houses recede from sight.

  During the layover in Kabul she explored the airport, which had barely existed during her last visit to her home city. She changed from her burqa to a headscarf, and hours later they were in Mecca. She’d never seen a place so organized, so clean, so metallic. The roads were pitch-black, wide and unblemished, not a crater in sight. Buildings towered over her, blotting out the sky like so many human-made mountains. A model of efficiency, the Saudis had already erected a tent city for the pilgrims, each tent containing the machines for blowing cold air that she had first seen on US military bases.

  On her return home, she was addressed as hajjanay. Men spoke to her with the deference accorded to the elderly. But her success inspired jealousy among neighborhood women, who spoke among themselves of how she was too familiar, too comfortable, with the men in her office. More than once, rocks rained down on her windows. She decided that it was time for a change, and with the money she’d saved up over the years she moved to a larger house, not far from Matiullah’s compound. Now, with the hajj season drawing to a close, she turned her attention to finding a new job.