The Taliban Shuffle

by Kim Barker

  So I assumed the mechanic would only take half an hour. We sat in the Corolla. As usual, everyone outside the car stared in at me. I had an idea: I slipped on the burqa. The top part grabbed tight around my head. A square of mesh covered my eyes. I was able to breathe through the fabric, so I didn’t hyperventilate on bad air. Oppressive, I thought. But oddly liberating. I stared at the old men in their turbans and the young boys shoving each other in the market, and they didn’t stare back. I was totally invisible.

  We soon drove out of Kabul, and on safe stretches of the road, I pulled my burqa back over my head, as local women did, and with my eyeliner and brown contact lenses and the speed of highway traffic, fooled anyone driving past. We drove south to Kandahar on a highway that the Americans had built in 2003—already, the road was falling apart, and entire chunks had crumbled away, due to poor design, poor execution, and really poor asphalt. The Taliban controlled certain parts of the road, but usually just at night. We were stopped once by the police, and slowed down once, near a U.S. military convoy. The U.S. soldiers didn’t know I was an American, and treated our team just like any other group of Afghans in a Toyota Corolla. Like a threat.

  “You are in the blue prison,” said Farouq, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He had taken a turn driving, flicking his eyes between the rearview mirror and the men on the side of the road.

  Once I stepped out of the car in Kandahar, though, I realized that my prison was far from perfect. Farouq had bought the first burqa he found, but it hit me just below the knee, instead of near the ankle. In the front, the burqa only came to my waist. This two-tiered style was apparently fashionable in Kabul, but not in conservative Kandahar. And it was much too short. I quickly figured out I was wearing the Pashtun equivalent of a miniskirt. I also didn’t walk right. Afghan women took demure steps. I walked like a man. Checking myself out in my hotel-room mirror, I decided to wear the long black abaya inside Kandahar, and the burqa when we traveled in the car outside the city. At least the hotel room was nicer than my first time in Kandahar. The TV had about two hundred channels, most of them porn. I checked the room computer’s Internet history—more porn. That was a good sign, I supposed. Despite the Taliban comeback, Kandahar was still hung up on sex.

  But we had to be careful. Just west of Kandahar, in the district of Panjwai, the Canadians had been fighting actual battles with the Taliban, who had ridden into the district center two months earlier, demanding food and shelter. They had shot down a moderate tribal elder as he shopped for groceries, they had gunned down three police officers on patrol. They were like vampires, disappearing during the day, coming out at night, intimidating everyone. Fearing retribution, no one in the south wanted to look like he supported the government. In neighboring Helmand Province, the Taliban had just ambushed and killed thirty-two people—all relatives and friends of a Helmand parliament member, who would be killed three years later by a roadside bomb. Only four men attended a funeral for a pro-government cleric near Kandahar—and two were gravediggers. The Taliban had taken over several remote districts, such as Chora in Uruzgan, where police had only assault rifles and six rockets when the Taliban showed up with mortars and machine guns.

  This was still not Iraq, but the insurgency here had finally registered on the international jihadi network. Al-Qaeda’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, would soon call for all Afghans to rise up against foreign forces. The Taliban and their allies were mimicking tactics used in Iraq—more suicide attacks, more sophisticated bombs, more slick propaganda, more beheadings of reconstruction workers. The insurgents here were also smart, winning popularity points with reports of Islamic courts in rural districts that delivered swift justice. These judges contrasted vividly with government judges, who often demanded bribes or took forever to decide a case.

  We drove to Panjwai, fully disguised, with an escort provided by tribal elders. We sat with a few elders on cushions on the floor of a community center. They were scared, and they carried pistols. But they liked my new look.

  “We like your burqa very much, but only if you wear it in America too,” one said.

  “It’s very short,” added another, looking unsure. “Is that what they wear in Kabul?”

  We stayed for less than an hour, incredibly rude in Afghanistan. But Farouq feared that word would spread that foreigners were in town.

  “We have to go, Kim,” Farouq said. Tom and I wanted to stay longer. “Now,” Farouq said. Farouq and Tom made a brief foray into the market, and we drove back to Kandahar without incident.

  We then went to see Mohammed Akbar Khakrizwal, a tribal elder who lived in a town just outside Kandahar. The area was not safe; I again wore my burqa. He was the former provincial intelligence chief, and the brother of the former police chief in both Kandahar and Kabul, who had been killed in a bombing at a Kandahar mosque the year before. When Khakrizwal saw me, he laughed.

  “Oh, what have you done to yourself?” said Khakrizwal, who, like most tribal leaders I knew, sported a bushy dyed black beard the color of shoe polish, a turban, and a tan salwar kameez. “For one hundred years, no one will recognize you like this. No one will touch you.”

  He invited us to lunch the next day, along with elders from his Pashtun tribe, the Alikozais, known for their dissatisfaction with both the Afghan government and the Taliban. The Alikozais helped illustrate the complexities of the Pashtun tribal system. Khakrizwal repeatedly explained the Pashtuns to us, helping us draw flowcharts with as many caveats as NATO troops. The Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan were divided into two main branches—the Durranis and the Ghilzais. For most of Afghanistan’s history as a sovereign nation, when the country was run by a monarchy, some member of the Durranis had ruled. The Taliban, however, had originally derived most support from the Ghilzais—despite being a larger group, they were always less powerful than the Durranis and not necessarily happy about it.

  (A caveat: That is a huge oversimplification. It doesn’t account for the fact that the Ghilzais were concentrated in the rural areas, where they had little access to the urban power centers and were therefore susceptible to rebellion. It doesn’t account for the fluidity of Afghan tribes, for all the clans and tribes that just seemed to go their own way. Plus, decades of war had chewed up a lot of formerly solid tribal markers and pushed out the onetime leaders.)

  The Durranis were then divided into two major branches—the dominant Ziraks and the marginal Panjpais, who had typically been seen as troublemakers and who were sometimes even carved out of the Durrani-Ghilzai split. Many Pashtuns in Kandahar were growing upset at the fact that all contracts and money seemed to be funneled through the two most influential clans of the Zirak branch, which together had controlled the monarchy that led Afghanistan for about two hundred and fifty years—the Popalzais, Karzai’s clan, and the Barakzais, their sometime allies. The have-nots resented the power of Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who allegedly ran most business dealings in the south, including drugs. Even though the Alikozais also belonged to the Zirak branch and theoretically backed Karzai’s government, they had seen little benefit from the regime, marginalized and removed from key security positions.

  Anger over tribal favoritism and corruption by government leaders and power brokers likely fueled the insurgency, causing some frustrated and jobless young men from the Alikozais, from another Zirak tribe called the Achakzais, and from the major Panjpai tribe of the Noorzais to sign up with the Taliban. Some of the Ghilzais, meanwhile, had turned back to the Taliban in Kandahar, but the Durranis also now played a major leadership role in the Taliban. (The Taliban seemed to recognize more than the government how important it was to treat all the prickly Pashtun divisions equally, or, more accurately, that it was important to simply ignore them. It was unclear how long the insurgent rainbow alliance could last—the Achakzais hated the Noorzais, and vice versa, even in the Taliban—but their collective hatred of the foreign troops and the Afghan government probably overrode their own Hatfield-and-McCoy disputes.)

/>   Even then, it was not that simple. Making things more headache-inducing, about half the Popalzais and Barakzais were also supporting the Taliban, Khakrizwal said, part of the endless attempts to hedge bets and exact varieties of payback. (Some of the Barakzais were still upset about the removal of a previous governor, a Barakzai. And the pro-Taliban Popalzais? Who knows. Maybe drugs, maybe a bad kebab.) Being a member of the same tribe also didn’t guarantee loyalty. For instance, the Kandahar governor was a Ghilzai—but everyone in Kandahar saw him as an outsider from Ghazni Province, two provinces away, practically a foreign country. And the tribes could be flexible based on self-interest. Some Noorzais supported Karzai; some were major drug traffickers allied with the Taliban; some were Taliban; some were everything. (The Taliban had banned poppies while in power, but had now started charging drug traffickers to transport drugs, which helped fund jihad, sow instability, and win the support of Afghans who depended on the drug economy for their livelihood.)

  So how much did all the Pashtun tribal alliances and divisions matter? A lot—unless something else mattered more.

  The Taliban didn’t just gain strength because they understood this, or because they exploited tribal jealousies, disillusionment with the local government, and the rising drug trade. Pakistan’s top spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), had also recruited for the Taliban, Khakrizwal insisted, in the endless ISI attempt to control Afghanistan. Ever since ISI leaders joined the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s, they had been reluctant to let go of Afghanistan. The spy agency had continued to meddle, largely to try to create some semblance of a stable, pro-Pakistan government as a hedge against rival India. That’s why Pakistan supported the formation of the Taliban in the 1990s, and why many Afghans believed Pakistan was now playing a double game, pretending to support the West in the war against terrorism by rounding up Al-Qaeda leaders, but allowing and helping the Afghan Taliban to regroup, even permitting training camps along the border. Every Afghan official had mentioned this repeatedly and publicly, even Karzai, who most recently had leveled the accusation the month before. Khakrizwal believed that his brother was killed because he didn’t listen to ISI warnings that he was too friendly with India. He even had the name of the ISI man who allegedly sanctioned his brother’s killing. (Other Afghans believed that Akbar Khakrizwal was killed because he opposed Karzai’s brother or because he opposed the drug trade. Or both.)

  After Khakrizwal explained this to us as if we were small children, repeatedly and carefully, he complained that he had tried to explain this to the American soldiers and diplomats, repeatedly and carefully, while he was the provincial intelligence chief. He talked about how key ISI men had mastered the Pashtun rivalries and complexities long ago—and how even though some had retired or quit the ISI since the 1980s, they were still involved in manipulating what was happening in Afghanistan. Khakrizwal knew the key Pakistani spies and named them. He had known them for years.

  “The main mistake made by the Americans is this—an American general comes here for six months. Then he’s replaced,” Khakrizwal said. “For four years, I was the head of intelligence in Kandahar. For six months, I’d work on an American—explaining who are friends, who are enemies—then that person was replaced by another American. Finally, my patience was over. I was tired of giving them advice.”

  For lunch, we met various Alikozai tribal elders, sat on cushions on Khakrizwal’s floor, and ate a salad of cucumbers and radishes, a dish of rice mixed with raisins, carrots, and mystery meat, various meat dishes, and okra in oil. Each elder had lost family members in recent months, each feared the Taliban was winning. One elder described vividly how his two sons had been killed eighteen days earlier in a Taliban ambush. Tom and I looked at each other.

  “That’s an incredibly sad story,” Tom said.

  “I can’t even imagine,” I replied.

  Khakrizwal soon gave us a challenge.

  “Write down this date,” he said. “In one year, the situation will be worse than it is today. I’m telling Americans, if they do not bring changes in their policies, they will say, ‘My God, Iraq is a heaven compared to here.’ ”

  It was June 13, 2006.

  After we finished several rounds of tea, the elders walked us out into the courtyard to say goodbye. I stood in my short burqa, with it pulled back over my head so my face showed. The elder who just lost two sons looked at me strangely and said something in Pashto. The elders cracked up, as did Farouq.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “Tell you later,” said Farouq, still laughing.

  We climbed into the Toyota Corolla and waved goodbye.

  “Come on Farouq, tell me, what did he say?”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way—it’s Kandahar,” Farouq said. “He said, ‘If you put a turban on that one, she would be a handsome boy.’ ”

  In Kandahar, I could only take that one way.

  Two and a half years later, almost everyone we met on this trip would be dead. Khakrizwal would be shot outside the home where he served us lunch. Many other Alikozai leaders would be killed or die, including the tribal chief, who suffered a heart attack shortly after being hit by a roadside bomb. A female supercop, one of the only women in Kandahar who defied the Taliban, would be gunned down as she left for work with her son. The lone survivor: Karzai’s brother, the alleged drug trafficker and power broker, who had denied any wrongdoing, saying that the allegations were simply an attempt to discredit his brother. “I am sick and tired of the drug accusation,” Ahmed Wali Karzai told me. “It’s the same old story. It’s to get to the president.” But over the years, the allegations would only gain credibility, with various Western officials talking about them like fact. For whatever reason, almost any Afghan who dared to speak publicly about them would mysteriously end up dead.

  We soon drove back to Kabul, accomplishing all but one goal. We failed to meet with the Taliban commander from Helmand. Farouq refused to take me out of Kandahar to meet any Taliban officials in the field because he didn’t trust them. The Helmand commander said he could not drive to Kandahar to meet us because the Americans had launched a new operation, aimed at flushing out the insurgents. Operation Mountain Thrust featured more than ten thousand international and Afghan troops, the largest operation since the fall of the Taliban. With a name like that, I knew I had to get some.

  CHAPTER 10

  HELL YES

  Sure, Operation Mountain Thrust may have sounded like a porno—English-speakers in the country milked it all they could, drawing out the pronunciation into “mount-and-thrust”—but at least it wasn’t Operation Turtle, the even more ridiculously named operation nearby. This mission was seen as crucial, aimed at securing dangerous areas in the south before the United States officially handed them over to various NATO countries, especially since the Taliban was trying to take advantage of that handover. In many cases, the troops were moving into areas they had never before entered, undoubtedly a bit late, almost five years into the war, but who was counting? The war would be won or lost here, in the dangerous and so-far-untamed south. The Canadians had taken over in Kandahar. The British were taking the lead in Helmand, the southern province that bordered Kandahar on the west. The Dutch—the Dutch?—would take Uruzgan, the small province just to the north of Kandahar and east of Helmand. The Romanians would take the lead in Zabul, east of Kandahar and Uruzgan. The United States would shift its primary mission to eastern Afghanistan, but really, it seemed like the Americans hoped to tiptoe out of Afghanistan altogether.

  After signing up for another embed, I found myself earmarked for Helmand, ground zero of everything bad in Afghanistan, the heart of both the Taliban and the poppy trade. It hadn’t always been this way. Helmand was once the country’s breadbasket. The United States had spent so much development money here in the 1960s and 1970s that part of Helmand was dubbed “Little America.” But development stalled during the country’s wars, and farmers fell back on the region’s longtime
favorite cash crop, a flower that grew well during droughts and earned top dollar, the poppy, the raw material for opium and heroin. While in power, the Taliban regime had briefly banned farmers from growing poppies—largely to win international recognition, rather than for religious reasons. But in the years since the Taliban fled, poppies had returned to much of Helmand, because even though the government had banned the plant, it had not enforced that ban, and many influential Afghans here profited from the trade. Afghanistan now produced more heroin and opium than anywhere else in the world, and Helmand was the epicenter. Consequently, Helmand was one of the prettiest provinces in Afghanistan. During the spring, fields were splashes of brilliant red, orange, and purple.

  Neither NATO nor the United States seemed quite sure how to tackle the drug trade. Allow the opium and heroin to flow, and watch the region sink further into lawlessness. Crack down on the opium farmers, and risk driving them into the arms of the Taliban, now protecting and encouraging the trade.

  Until now, few of the international forces had spent much time in Helmand—there were simply not enough troops in the country to adequately cover the south. The major exception was the U.S.-led antiterrorist squad, mostly composed of U.S. special operations forces—the men with beards from elite parts of the military whom we were never supposed to refer to nor talk to while on embeds—and the men with beards from government agencies referred to as “other government agencies,” a term that typically included the CIA and other spook-like groups. These men had been operating in Helmand since the beginning of the war, hunting Al-Qaeda and other top terrorists, or so we were told.