Adventures in Correspondentland (24 page)

In Afghanistan, deprived of troops and resources, the Bush administration continued to rely heavily on proxies. This meant vesting an inordinate amount of power in the hands of the warlords. In the fight to liberate Kabul, the Americans had relied on the anti-Taliban warlords from the Northern Alliance, whose main commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the famed Lion of Panjshir, had been killed on 9 September 2001 by an al-Qaeda hit team disguised as a television crew. After the fall of the Taliban, Washington called on them to maintain the peace.

Proud of getting good bang for his buck, George W. Bush boasted of the great ‘bargain' in handing out over $70 million in $100 notes to the warlords who headed up the private militias: men such as General Mohammed Fahim, Ustad Atta Mohammad
and Ismail Khan. But it was Faustian in the extreme. Of all the warlords, none was more notorious than General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a formerly pro-Soviet warlord famed for continually switching sides, whose Uzbek militiamen were not averse to dealing with enemies by fastening their heads to their Russian-made tanks then driving them around in circles to crush their skulls. During the war against the Taliban, his men had also been accused of locking up hundreds of captured Taliban fighters in shipping containers then leaving them to asphyxiate.

Investing in these warlords had the effect of devaluing Hamid Karzai. Not only did Karzai have to accommodate them in the first Cabinet – General Dostum served as deputy defence minister – it meant his writ rarely extended beyond the capital.

To get a sense of who was truly in the chair in post-war Afghanistan, all one had to do was spend a morning with the police chief of Mazar-i-Sharif, the major city in the north of the country some 40 miles from the border with Uzbekistan. A heavily bearded man, who looked like the potentate of a small Latin American republic when dressed in his olive-green uniform with its outsized crimson epaulets, Akram Khakrezwal was one of Karzai's close associates. Yet the patronage of the interim president was pretty much worthless across much of the north, which had always been the bailiwick of the Northern Alliance. The new police chief was determined to change this and seized a consignment of illegal opium to mark out his turf.

So furious were the local warlords that they retaliated by effectively keeping him under house arrest for weeks on end. If he ventured outside, they would kill him. And neither the Afghan Government, a nearby contingent of British soldiers nor even the Americans were able to gain his quick release. Eventually,
the warlords relented, but with conditions. Just about the only journey the police chief was allowed to make was from his heavily fortified home to his heavily fortified police compound. Even then, his morning commute became a mad scramble of blaring sirens, screaming tyres and protruding AK-47s, for fear that he might be assassinated en route.

Inside his police headquarters, he showed us where the warlords' gunmen had broken open the locks and seized his investigative files – a raid his officers were powerless to stop. ‘Without disarming the warlords,' he told us, in frustration, ‘we can't have security, legality or a fair and democratic election.'

The following day, we interviewed the man who had effectively kept the police chief imprisoned, the Tajik warlord Ustad Atta Mohammad, who now gloried in the title of the governor of Balkh province. At his plush governor's mansion, Atta seemed to be enjoying the perks of his new office, and as we arrived workers were putting the finishing touches to his swimming pool.

Once inside, after his security guards had checked that our camera had not been booby-trapped with some kind of gun, we were ushered into a gigantic office, which had a small Afghan flag on the coffee table and a much larger one behind the governor's throne-like armchair. Then came Atta himself, a hulking man dressed in a suit and tie, his civvy-street garb.

Interviewing Afghan warlords is always something of a delicate dance. To mildly upset them runs the risk of being ejected. More serious aggravation runs the risk of something altogether worse. So I lobbed up the mandatory softballs about the challenges and progress of reconstruction, before turning to the business at hand: why had he bullied the local police so mercilessly, and why were warlords still acting like gangsters?

Atta looked at me with exquisite disdain and delivered what he thought was a bullet-proof justification. ‘We fought for the freedom of Afghanistan, and our soldiers became heroes,' he growled. ‘They fulfilled their human and Islamic obligation.' He did not have to finish the thought. It was the mantra of triumphant warriors down the ages: to the victor, the spoils. Then, we were shown the door.

After the fall of Kabul, the warlords had entered into a tacit agreement with the Americans: in return for the maintenance of order, the drugs trade could continue and even flourish. All part of the same Faustian deal. By far the country's most profitable business, it was thought to account for 60 per cent of the economy and to employ 2.3 million Afghans. With American efforts focused on preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorists, it was in danger of becoming a narco-state that was a safe haven for drug traffickers. Already, it was the source of 93 per cent of the world's opium, the raw ingredient of heroin. Only when reports emerged that the Taliban was also making more than $100 million a year from narcotics, the profits of which bankrolled the insurgency, did the Americans pay more attention to disrupting the trade.

One of the few genuinely hilarious sights in Afghanistan at the time was the madcap efforts of the US-trained eradication teams who toured the countryside, like marauding armies, scything down the thin stems of the opium poppies. They screamed, laughed and hollered as they sprinted through the fields hurling their wooden batons, as if they themselves were high on drugs. Yet for all the efforts of eradication teams, poppies were being grown in 28 out of the country's 34 provinces.

Certainly, it was doing little to disrupt the supply chain of a
local opium dealer, whose back-street drug den was reached with little effort – a few mobile calls from our local fixer – and minimum subterfuge. Inside, bulging translucent sacks of thick, sticky black-tar heroin awaited shipment to nearby processing plants. If the bags had been full of wheat, they would have been worth about 50 cents each. Stuffed with black-tar heroin, they commanded a price of $800. So uneven were the economics that they made a mockery of one of the central pillars of the eradication program: the promise to farmers of alternative incomes from crops such as pomegranates if they shunned the drug trade. ‘You figure it out,' said the opium dealer, as one of his young charges slowly scraped globules of heroin off his blackened fingers with a blunt knife.

Again, the openness of the operation was astonishing. Often, we agree to hide the identities of interviewees – a technique that involves shooting into a bright light so as to blacken their faces. Here, however, the dealer happily spoke on camera, with his craggy face in open view. He had the backing of the warlords, and the warlords could usually rely on the Americans averting their gaze.

As if to underscore the hazards of conducting a national election in the midst of a civil war, Hamid Karzai's first campaign swing outside of Kabul suddenly became a panicked scramble back to the comparative safety of the capital. With just a couple of weeks to go before polling day, the plan had been for him to address a rally attended by tribesmen and local schoolchildren in Gardez, a town in the south-east of the country. As his American Chinook started to land, however, it came under rocket attack from Taliban insurgents on the ground.

After his chopper banked violently and started its hurried journey homeward, Karzai pleaded with his DynCorp personal-protection detail to allow him to land. But he was no more in charge of the pilot than he was of the country. Thereafter, his electioneering was restricted to one solitary rally outside of Kabul's city limits. Although his American sponsors were determined for him to win the election, their first priority was to keep him alive until polling day. (There was an irony in this. Karzai had almost been killed by a stray American missile on the day in December 2001 when he found out the Bush administration had selected him to become interim president.)

It meant that his first major campaign event outside of the capital, just four days ahead of the poll, also doubled as his last. At a public park in the town of Ghazni, some 5000 of Karzai's fellow Pashtun tribesmen gathered in their turbaned and often toothless glory. With the streets of Ghazni placed in virtual lockdown, truckloads of soldiers were drafted in to provide an outer rim of protection, while everyone was frisked as they entered the park – a novelty for Afghans unused to airline-style security.

Karzai was in irrepressible form and spoke passionately about the possibility of ending decades of war. ‘Brothers and sisters, I ask you to vote for me freely, with no pressure,' he declared. ‘We want a proud Afghanistan, a stable Afghanistan, a peaceful Afghanistan.' Then, bravely, he thrust himself into the front row of the crowd, like an ageing rock star diving into a mosh pit.

Emboldened by the experience, he even felt confident enough to admonish his guards when they manhandled an elderly tribesman who clawed at his clothing. ‘Don't push him! Don't push him!' shouted Karzai, for once dishing out orders to his grim-faced protectors. ‘This is democracy. This is emotion!' The
unscripted drama of the moment provided terrific pictures, which were far superior to what Karzai's media-handlers had laid on. At the climax of the rally, he released a flock of snow-white peace doves into the bracing morning air, but as the cameras followed the birds skywards they captured the American helicopter gunships circling high above. Despite that small snag, the event was deemed a stunning success, if for no other reason than Karzai had escaped without being assassinated.

Already postponed twice because of concerns over security, the official launch of the 2004 presidential campaign had come a few months earlier. In a Soviet-era auditorium in the centre of Kabul, election officials held a raffle-like draw to decide the order on the ballot papers in which the names of the 18 presidential candidates should appear.

Among the candidates plucked from the rolling tombola was a poet, an amateur boxer, a Sufi intellectual, an avowed monarchist who wanted the country to once more become a kingdom, a paediatrician physician and a female doctor, Dr Massouda Jalal, who was the sole woman in the race. Aside from Karzai, the most familiar name in the drum belonged to General Dostum, who was among at least five candidates considered to be a warlord because they controlled their own private armies.

Nobody was in any doubt, however, as to who would win the upcoming election. Karzai, or ‘Uncle Sam's Choice', as he was often known, was such the clear front-runner that it risked discrediting a process designed by the Americans and the United Nations to legitimise his rule. ‘Karzai is an American appointee,' shouted a heckler from the stalls of the auditorium that afternoon. ‘He will be elected with American money.'

Days later, Karzai did little to dispel this widespread
impression when he appeared alongside Donald Rumsfeld at an open-air press conference in the dappled late-afternoon sun of the Arg. Throughout, he looked and sounded very much the junior partner. Fielding questions, he claimed to be untroubled by a new report from the United Nations that showed that nine million people had registered to vote in a country where only 9.5 million were eligible to do so. Given that less than half of the country's women had registered, this meant that significantly more men were now entitled to vote than there were men.

A number of factors explained this incongruity. Some of them were sinister, such as the acquisition of multiple cards by warlords determined to rig the entire ballot. Others were quite charming and brought home the newness of democracy. Each voting card came with a laminated photograph – a prized possession in a country where cameras had up until recently been banned and where the Taliban used to carry out public hangings of television sets and stereo systems. It meant that thousands of voters returned to register several times, keen to maximise their own campaign photo opportunity.

When called upon to ask my question, I wanted to tackle Karzai on these multiple registrations but also to challenge Rumsfeld on a recent statement in which he had likened the level of violence in Afghanistan to crime levels in Berlin. ‘Some six hundred people have been killed since your last visit,' I said, as the defence secretary fixed me with his squinty stare. Then I swivelled to face Karzai. ‘There is clear evidence, President Karzai, of multiple registrations – people registering over and over again out of coercion from the warlords. Given the volatile security situation, given the unchecked power of the warlords, how can these elections be free and fair in any way?'

After a long pause, Rumsfeld replied, and his first words came as a surprise: ‘You're right.' Still, he did not regret drawing parallels with Berlin. ‘In important countries, violence occurs,' he said, in a line that echoed his famed ‘stuff happens' comment after the fall of Baghdad. ‘It occurs in European countries. It appears in western-hemisphere countries and it is occurring in this part of the world.' Normally so unflappable in front of reporters, the defence secretary looked and sounded ruffled, and it produced a definite charge in the air.