No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

“I’m Heela Achekzai,” she said. The man noted it, completed the questionnaire, and led her to a plush antechamber where secretaries and assistants were waiting.

  Senator Heela Achekzai of Uruzgan Province had arrived.

  Epilogue

  On an autumn afternoon in 2010, I met Akbar Gul for our regularly scheduled interview session. Although violence countrywide was at record highs, the United States had announced that it would start withdrawing troops in less than a year. I wondered if it was not too early to begin asking the question: Who won the war? But Akbar Gul, consumed by his troubles in the field, was in no mood to answer. “You can’t trust anyone anymore,” he said. “Those days are gone. We’re just doomed to have a life of problems.” We were at my house in Kabul, seated around a spread of meatballs and Uzbek-style mixed rice. He picked at his food. The many sides of the war had finally blended together into something unmanageable, for him at least, and he could see no way out. “I now understand why people become suicide bombers. What else do you have in this life?”

  I had never seen him in such despair. I wanted to ask him what turn of events had precipitated this bout of self-loathing, but I knew by then to tread carefully when he was emotional. It had taken me more than a year to fully win his trust. He was unfamiliar with Western journalistic standards, so when I first attempted to corroborate his stories by independently contacting those involved, he felt wounded. Later, when he realized that my interest in his story was not an indication that I agreed with his view of the world, he felt betrayed. It was only after he came to see our interview sessions as a form of catharsis, not simply a service to a foreign journalist or even to posterity, that he began to view me in a different light.

  During our meal he received a phone call that appeared to distress him further, but he did not tell me why. After finishing, we walked into the courtyard and I was about to say good-bye when he stopped me. “In our country, you never know when it’s the last time you will ever see someone, so you have to make your good-byes count.” With a warm smile, he held out his hand and gripped mine firmly. I opened the gate and let him out, watching as he headed toward the bazaar, skullcap atop his head, checkered dismaal scarf over his shoulder. I watched as he worked his way through the Friday crowds, past the butcher shop, past the vegetable stands, past the shouting vendors, until he was gone. I would never see him again.

  It was almost a week before I realized that something was amiss. He failed to show up for our next interview session, and, when I tried to call him, all three of his phones were off. One week turned into the next without a sign of him. I contacted fighters under his command and elders in his home village, but they, too, were at a loss. His deputy said that he had gone to meet someone in the Tangi and had never returned. Zubair Babakarkhel, an Afghan journalist and friend who helped me research this book, reached out through intermediaries to Akbar Gul’s wife. She, too, was in the dark, and in great distress.

  There were only two possibilities. Either Akbar Gul had fallen victim to internal Taliban rivalries, or he had wound up in the hands of US soldiers. If the former, I knew that all hope was lost. Cases of Taliban commanders killed by their own comrades, or summoned to Pakistan and never seen again, were popping up with increasing frequency. If he was with the Americans, on the other hand, it was at least possible, in theory, to find him. The Red Cross is able to track down Afghans who have been “disappeared” by the Americans and connect them with their loved ones. I contacted them, and a few days later they returned with the answer: Akbar Gul was in custody in the American prison at Bagram Air Base.

  The reason for his arrest was unclear, but by now I knew that it was also irrelevant. I also knew that, some months before, Akbar Gul had begun working secretly with the Americans, sharing intelligence against those Taliban units he deemed damaging to his country. He was being paid with US taxpayer dollars and armed through the Afghan government. Yet it had soon dawned on him that his Taliban enemies were not necessarily the ones the Americans were interested in, and he was no longer sure what or whom he was fighting for. The lack of purpose ate away at him, and he desperately wanted to extricate himself from the Americans, the Taliban, and the Afghan government—but there seemed to be no way out.

  If Akbar Gul was losing that war, the same could be said for the Taliban as a whole. With a new generation of commanders at the helm, the movement was riven by infighting and behaving more brutally toward civilians than ever. They lacked the military prowess or the popular support to take cities or the largely non-Pashtun north. While they were strong in the deep southern countryside, the prospect of marching through the streets of Kabul and reestablishing a 1990s-style regime seemed remote. Some old-guard Taliban commanders had already grasped this new reality. After one scrape with death too many, Mullah Manan decided that the war was pointless and switched sides, joining an Afghan government reconciliation program. But the promised job and pension never came, so he returned to his village to farm. The village, however, was now under the control of a younger generation of Talibs, who regarded him as a traitor. Manan fled to Pakistan, but the Pakistani intelligence agencies also did not take kindly to Talibs who left the movement, so he was forced to flee again. He now lives in a shantytown in Kandahar, picking up day work from time to time as a bricklayer.

  Not long after my final meeting with Akbar Gul, I moved back home to the United States after being away for three years. As I followed the news of the impending troop withdrawal, it was clear to me that the Americans would not be victors either. The Taliban had not surrendered or been defeated, the Afghan army was weak and unreliable, and the Afghan government was hopelessly corrupt. I began to wonder if the true winners were the commanders whom the US had transformed into the post-2001 power elite, men like Gul Agha Sherzai and Jan Muhammad Khan. Yet starting in 2011, a series of mysterious assassinations around the country knocked off one strongman after another. The victims included Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s powerful brother; Burhanuddin Rabbani, a key Northern Alliance figure; General Daud, an influential northern commander; and many others. It was playing out like a mafia film—except that there seemed to be no Don Corleone standing at the end.

  A few days after Ahmed Wali’s death, I called Jan Muhammad to express my condolences and get his thoughts. “Nowadays Taliban-style thinking is everywhere, even in our government,” he said. “It’s like a disease. People who should be working together are instead killing each other. I don’t even know what to say.” JMK had been in exile from Uruzgan for nearly five years and felt that the time was ripe for his return. He had been lobbying President Karzai to reinstate him as governor because “the current administration are lovers of the Dutch and the Taliban.” His return to Uruzgan would pose awkward challenges, however, as he had long since been eclipsed by his powerful nephew Matiullah. In the past, whenever I had asked about Matiullah, JMK was uncharacteristically circumspect in his phrasing. But on this day he held nothing back. “He has gone mad with power. This is not a democracy, not when one man rules everything.” If he could only return to Uruzgan, he told me, he would save the province from dictatorship.

  JMK asked me when I would visit Afghanistan again and promised that he would treat me to a sumptuous meal upon my return, and I thanked him and said good-bye. Three evenings later, he was at home meeting an Uruzgani parliamentarian. He had sent all but one guard home for the night. At around eight, two men armed with Kalashnikovs and grenades walked up to the compound. JMK was sitting on a couch in his living room when he heard the shots. Moments later, the two men barged into the room, aimed, and shot Jan Muhammad dead.

  * * *

  Not long after, I returned to Afghanistan. President Obama’s plan to withdraw US troops was well under way, with bases closing and equipment being destroyed. Could the war’s true winners be found in what we were leaving behind? I traveled through Uruzgan, and on the Kandahar–Tirin Kot highway I could see Matiullah’s men everywhere, as they had been during my last visit. But the road no
rth of Tirin Kot, heading into Ghilzai country, was now dotted here and there with new militia outposts not adorned with Matiullah’s photo or the Afghan flag. I stopped at one, a small wooden trellis with a canopy of leaves as cover, and met the fighters. They were under the control of a local strongman, who was being paid by a private company to protect a road construction project. Every mile or so I came upon another such militia, each run by a different strongman.

  Later, I arrived at the home of Daud Khan, a leader of the local Barakzai tribe and one of the key militia commanders in the province, perhaps second only to Matiullah himself. He was heavily invested in protecting road construction crews against Taliban attacks, and the impending US withdrawal was hurting his business prospects. “We need money,” he told me. “We need money because life is hard out here. We’ve got a lot of expenses—I need weapons, RPGs, trucks, we want body armor. I keep asking the Americans for body armor but they won’t give it to me. They expect us to fight with nothing.”

  I asked him if he had gotten into firefights with the Taliban recently. He clasped his hands together and laughed. “The Taliban? My mother can fight the Taliban. They just put bombs in the ground. They won’t be a problem after the Americans leave.”

  Then why the need for all the weapons?

  “Matiullah,” he said. “He’s worse than the Taliban. After the Americans leave, we’ll need to protect ourselves.” Tirin Kot was now caught in a cold war between Daud Khan’s and Matiullah’s forces. By my count there were more than thirty pro-American armed groups operating in central Uruzgan alone, some aligned with Matiullah, some against.

  Later that afternoon I visited Daud’s uncle, a militia commander named Shah Muhammad. We sat in a field overlooking his poppy plantation, surrounded by nearly a dozen fighters. “There’s something I want to tell you,” he said, looking at me keenly. “There’s only one force that can save Afghanistan. The Americans. And I want you to know how much I despise the Taliban. Even if my father was a Talib, I’d kill him.” He shifted to sit next to me, nearly whispering in my ear. “I’m in trouble. You’re an American. I need your help. I want to fight the Taliban, I just need contracts. If the Americans give me some contracts, I can bring security. I can turn this war around. I just need money.” He begged me to pass on the message to politicians in Washington.

  Such jockeying for patronage was nothing new. From its earliest days, the Karzai government was tethered to American aid, incapable of surviving on its own. It was reminiscent of the Communist regime of the 1980s, which lived and died by Moscow’s patronage—except that now there was a twist. Of the $557 billion that Washington spent in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011, only 5.4 percent went to development or governance. The rest was mostly military expenditure, a significant chunk of which ended up in the coffers of regional strongmen like Jan Muhammad. In other words, while the United States paid nominal amounts to build the Afghan state, it fostered a stronger and more influential network of power outside the state.

  These were no conditions for nation building. Instead, as journalist Matthieu Aikins has pointed out, a weak Karzai administration found itself competing with strongmen of the countryside for funds. With warlords like JMK developing their own business and patronage relationships with the United States, the tottering government in Kabul had no choice but to enter the game itself. As a result, the state became criminalized, one of the most corrupt in the world, as thoroughly depraved as the warlords it sought to outflank.

  So corrupt, in fact, that nearly every metric that US or Afghan officials pressed into service to show progress unravels upon inspection. “Under Taliban rule, only 1.2 million students were enrolled in schools, with less than 50,000 of them girls,” a US forces press release stated in 2011. “Today, under the government of Afghanistan, there are 8.2 million students, of which nearly 40 percent—or 3.2 million—are girls.” But these were largely phantom figures. In the central province of Ghor, for instance, independent investigators discovered that of the 740 schools listed by the education ministry, 80 percent were “not operating at all.” Nonetheless, over four thousand teachers were on the government payroll. The vast majority of them, investigators found, simply collected paychecks and stayed at home, giving a cut to local officials, who in turn funneled a portion to warlords as a way to purchase influence. The story was similar around the country. Traveling through Wardak Province, I came upon one long-abandoned school after another that was still included on the much-touted government tally.

  Likewise, US officials often stated that in the post-Taliban era, 85 percent of Afghans had access to health care—which would have made Afghanistan the health care capital of the region. Yet that figure turned out to refer only to the fact that 85 percent of districts had at least one health center, which many Afghans could not access due to distance or insecurity. “Essentially,” journalist Aunohita Mojumdar wrote, “that would be akin to saying that just because every state in the US had a hospital, 100 percent of Americans had access to healthcare.” What’s more, many of these district health facilities existed only on paper. As with schools, government officials often purloined health care funds, using them to buy influence with local power brokers.

  Throughout the south, the US military supported showpiece projects—a new well or a refurbished school, in some cases even whole model villages. But if the south was dotted with Potemkin villages, Afghanistan itself had become a Potemkin country, built almost entirely for show. As the situation devolved, President Karzai and top officials began pointing fingers bitterly at the United States. Meanwhile, Washington began to view the corrupt central government as the key roadblock to its mission—even though American patronage was ultimately responsible for the mess. In frustration, US officials redoubled their efforts to circumvent Kabul and deal with local power brokers, unwittingly cultivating a new generation of strongmen.

  So in Matiullah Khan and those like him across the country, the American war regenerated itself. The new class of warlords was more sophisticated than their predecessors. Weaned on the Washington way of doing business, their militias were rebranded and formalized as “private security companies,” chartered through contracts with Western firms or the US military itself. Unsurprisingly, this only unleashed further corruption on a scale that dwarfed that of even the most unscrupulous Afghan government agency.

  To grasp the enormity of the problem, you need only picture the most elementary aspect of the US presence. At the war’s height there were more than four hundred American bases scattered around the country, nestled in craggy valleys and perched on barren hilltops, days apart and reachable only over crumbling, perilous roads like the Uruzgan–Kandahar highway. The United States and other NATO countries contracted out the arduous task of delivering supplies to an array of Western and Afghan companies. The largest of these deals was a $2.16 billion Department of Defense contract called Host Nation Trucking, split among eight multinational firms. Some of these companies fielded their own fleets of trucks, but others did not even have vehicles and subcontracted out the job to Afghan companies. Either way, the trucking companies then hired local warlords to protect their routes. They, in turn, provided militiamen—“private security guards” in the new parlance—for Matiullah-type fees. The warlords had outlays of their own, including bribes to Afghan army and police commanders along the route and protection money to the Taliban, all of which guaranteed unfettered passage for the trucks. Upon learning that US tax dollars were going to support warlordism, racketeering, and the insurgency, Congress launched an inquiry and Pentagon officials promised to reexamine the whole system. But reform was impossible because the new contracting economy was inexorably bound up in the project of counterterrorism. As long as US troops remained on Afghan soil, there was no other option—short of bringing in hundreds of thousands of additional soldiers to take the place of the Western subcontractors, possibly sending the American body count skyrocketing.

  The Soviets, too, had outsourced their war. After their 1989
withdrawal, Moscow funded militias to protect the Kabul government against mujahedeen groups in the pay of the CIA, and for the most part the status quo held even without Russian boots on the ground. The Soviet-backed government clung to the cities, while the insurgents claimed the countryside. But when the two nations cut off funding in 1992, the commanders on both sides—who had men to feed and arm—were forced to “privatize” their activities by robbing homes or setting up checkpoints to shake down travelers. The ensuing turf battles quickly spiraled into all-out civil war.

  The American war has renewed this cycle. In 2013, there were, by some estimates, 60,000 to 80,000 armed private security employees in the country, almost all of them working for Afghan strongmen. Add to this 135,000 Afghan army soldiers, 110,000 police, and tens of thousands of private militiamen working directly for the Afghan government, the US special forces, or the CIA, and you have more than 300,000 armed Afghan men all depending on US patronage. You can’t help but wonder: What happens when the troops leave, the bases close, and the money dries up?

  * * *

  During my most recent visit to Afghanistan I met Senator Heela in the garden of a friend’s home, and for many hours we drank tea and ate raisins and talked about the people we’d known in Uruzgan. If she had learned anything, she said, it was that triumph and fear come together, that all positions and titles were fleeting. She expressed dismay at the impending US withdrawal. We both knew that her life in Kabul depended on the war staying in the countryside, and after 2014 all bets were off. It was a subject better left unspoken, and I steered the conversation away from the conflict. Soon she was telling me of her attempts to fix Omaid’s limp and of her dream to see America.

  The darkness was coming on, and the mountains around the capital were already burning bright. Heela said it was time for her to go, and as she left, I knew I didn’t need to ask her the final question I’d had in mind. The answer was right in front of me. Winning a war such as this was not about planting flags or defending territory or building fancy villas. It was not about titles or promotions or offices. It was not about democracy or jihad, freedom or honor. It was about resisting the categories chosen for you; about stubbornness in the face of grand designs and schemas. About doing what you had to do, whether they called you a terrorist or an infidel. To win a war like this was to master the ephemeral, to plan a future while knowing that it could all be over in an instant. To comfort your children when the air outside throbs in the middle of the night, to squeeze your spouse’s hand tight when your taxi hits a pothole on an open highway, to go to school or the fields or a wedding and return to tell about it. To survive.