The Punishment of Virtue (31 page)

“Let's do it!” Qayum put his teacup down on the marble table. I had piped up at just the right moment. The topic had been dinner fare at the Palace the night before.

And so we hammered out a document, in eight parts. Qayum, it emerged, could be quite practical when pushed. Here is what we wrote:

1. Begin with Gul Agha Shirzai.
   
2. Choose a replacement:
   Someone with strong administrative skills, integrity, and the stature required to mobilize allegiance.
   
3. Call Gul Agha to Kabul,
   without telling why. (Note: breach of this plan's security will allow him and those around him to prepare a riposte, so care should be taken to avoid leaks.) When he gets here, tell him your decision and explain that it is based on continuing governance problems in Kandahar.
   
4. Simultaneously, or slightly prior, you or your envoy should
   contact the heads of the Kandahar security forces: Zabit Akrem, Khan Mahmad, Mahmad Shah, Amir Lalai…apprise them of your decision. Entrust them with maintaining the public order. Assign the one you most trust to pay special attention to Razziq Shirzai, Gul Agha's brother.
   Explain that the integrity of the Afghan nation depends on them.
   
5. Secure Spin Boldak on the border with Pakistan.
   This is another place where disruptive activity might be launched.
   
6. At the same time as you are meeting with Shirzai, a trusted envoy whose dignity and stature are recognized in Kandahar should
   gather the main elders of all the Kandahar tribes and explain your decision to them, enlisting their support.
   
7. Maintain all other provincial and municipal officials in their positions,
   as an incentive not to resist the decision. The new appointee should begin the process of cleaning up his government after a month.
   
8. Consult with key Americans—civil and military—on the elements of this plan.
   Solicit their input, and
   request specific support:
   For example, assistance in securing Boldak and the border area. Or, since Razziq Shirzai's compound is on the airport grounds, the Americans could be asked to provide a minimal deterring presence, so as to maintain order there and keep him from mobilizing his men to mischief. Or, the State Department representative in Kandahar could be asked to contact Khalid Pashtoon and tell him the U.S. will hold him accountable for any breach of the peace.
   

I heaved a sigh of relief. There it was at last: how to fire a warlord, in eight easy steps. But I thought it needed a little something more.

During my days in the Balkans, I had absorbed some principles of military planning. NATO, I learned then, does not reason in classic best-case/worst-case terms. Its planning is a little more subtle. Officers are called upon to imagine what the
most likely
scenario will be and plan for that, and then think about what the
most dangerous
scenario might be and how to protect against it. We should adopt those technical terms, I thought. It might impress the Americans.

So we added a most likely/most dangerous section to our plan—adulterated, I felt, by Qayum's tendency to focus on the result he hoped to obtain, rather than the truth. I thought he downplayed the potential dangers a bit too vociferously, instead of simply assessing them.

Anyhow, I printed the thing out in several copies, Qayum looking on, almost boyishly jubilant. When he left for dinner at the palace that night, he put one in his briefcase.

For my part, I never went to Kabul anymore without stopping by the U.S. embassy. It had improved a lot since the days of the revolving door. The political affairs desk was in the hands of a savvy and thoughtful young man named Kurt Amend, who had spent time in Pakistan. The ambassador, a bit of an oddball, was a hero in Central Asia for his cultural sensitivity there in the 1990s. Flanking him was a dapper, upbeat, switched-on man named Bill Taylor, of ambassadorial rank, the most impressive diplomat I have ever met.

So I rushed off to give that chain another yank. I called on Bill Taylor, and I handed him a copy of our eight-point plan.

But I wasn't done meddling yet.

I returned to Kabul in early March for an International Women's Day conference, and I had to see President Karzai on another matter. Never once had Qayum bothered to invite me to the palace, though he went several times a day. I never did discover why he wouldn't take me along. That March, I decided to make the move myself.

After a bit of awkward circling, which finally left me seated in a cavernous waiting room upstairs at the palace, admiring the warm ochers of its two great rugs, I found myself alone with President Karzai, in his private office.

It was only the second time I had seen him face to face. The first time was at his brother Ahmad Wali's wedding, when he had narrowly missed being killed.

“So
you're
the one who writes me the letters,” he had said then, stunningly cool and gracious after what had just almost happened to him.

This time, we sat at his elegant desk in the form of a T, with me along the upright and him at the crossbar. He was as direct, and charismatic, as I had hoped. At one point, he broke off a sentence, stood up, and ambled over to a low table to grab a fistful of raisins from a glass dish, then sat back down, sharing out my half.

Our other business finished, I ventured: “So, I hear you were looking for a plan for how to get rid of the warlords.”

I suspected that Qayum had never given our document to his brother after all.

“I never asked for a plan,” the president denied.

“Well, I have one.”

“Let's see it.” President Karzai smiled indulgently, stretching out a hand. I passed it over. He looked at it, folded it in two, and slipped it into his slim leather briefcase.

Well. That was that accomplished. I thought all I had to do now was wait a few days.

MARCH 2003

P
RESIDENT
K
ARZAI DID
need to get a move on. During that spring of 2003, the atmosphere in Kandahar took a distinctly menacing cast.

One afternoon in late March, in his office at police headquarters, Akrem was taken up in conversation. Sitting not behind his imposing desk, but in a corner, on one of the overstuffed velvet chairs, he was bent toward a man who gave the impression of being out of breath, though he wasn't literally.

I could not understand what the man was saying. He and Akrem were conversing quickly and quietly, and I didn't know Pashtu yet anyway. Nor could I presume to interrupt for a translation. But as soon as the man left, Akrem turned to give me a synopsis.

The man was one of Akrem's informants, in from the field where he had been carrying out some surveillance. With a group of former Taliban, he had just crossed over from Pakistan into Afghanistan, on one of the innumerable dirt paths that traverse the vast, lonely frontier. The informant had accompanied the militants all the way to a trackless piece of country in northern Kandahar Province, where they were now arrayed, bunking in the villages or spread out in the hills around. “I never saw so many of them cross at once,” the man said. “There were twenty-five of us, maybe thirty.”

I took in this information, not immediately registering its significance. The militants, Akrem added, were being paid and trained in Pakistan. From this man and other informants, he had learned that the orders insurgents like these received were to cross into Afghanistan, to work first in outlying districts, and then move slowly in toward Kandahar, progressively tightening their ring around the city.

Three days after this conversation, a convoy from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was ambushed, crossing the zone the informant had described. A foreign aid worker was murdered. That incident, more than any other single event, set in motion the gradual but steady withdrawal of international humanitarian and reconstruction agencies from the Afghan south.

His name was Ricardo Munguia, a hydraulics engineer. He was a man, I am told, who distributed the warmth of his native Latin American sun wherever he went, who had a luminous word for everyone. With three Afghan colleagues, he had driven out along the ghostly trail that can scarcely be called a road, which winds northward from Kandahar to Tirin Kot, the capital of Urozgan Province.

Urozgan was a complicated place. In the hands of a grizzled governor with one milky eye and the manners of an aging lion, uncouth and rapacious and devoted to President Karzai, it was the base from which Karzai had launched his campaign to pry the hidebound southern Pashtuns away from the Taliban. And yet this same Urozgan was where many of the Taliban had come from. In the conservative south, it was the most isolated and backward province. Hardly any aid organizations worked there.

The day after Ricardo's death in that godforsaken place, I had another appointment with Akrem, at his house. I got there just as the U.S. State Department's representative in Kandahar was arriving. I invited him in with me. He was visibly shaken—he had seen Ricardo's body, and it had hit home.

He wanted the police chief's opinion: Didn't he think that people loyal to the old extremist
Jihad
commander Gulbuddin Hikmatyar had done the murder, and wasn't it likely that…And the rattled U.S. official launched into an involved exposition of his own theories about the event and the light it shed on the nature of what was beginning to be termed the “insurgency.” At last he asked Akrem, “So, what do we do?”

Such a speech could only draw the most general kind of response, and Akrem obliged—keeping close to the terms of the question he had been asked out of native caution. The presence of the official's interpreter, a Shirzai crony, hardly encouraged frank discussion either. Akrem laid out the elements necessary in his view for the proper governance of the Afghan south: clear job descriptions for administrative departments and security forces, direct supervision by the central government, fair distribution of employment and reconstruction benefits across the various tribes, and so on. It was a policy speech, and it was sensible; it seemed to satisfy the State Department official, who left in a rather distracted rush. He might have been bucked up by these abstractions, I realized as he made his way out, but he had not learned anything very concrete.

A reporter's habits come in handy: my questions formed themselves. How many cars? What terrain? How many fighters? Who were they? And the picture took shape under the precise brushstrokes of Akrem's answers.

Insurgents had trickled across the border in groups—taking ancient footpaths across the deserted frontier, or walking brazenly through at Chaman, where complicit Pakistani guards waved them past—then gathering, maybe more than a hundred strong, in northern Kandahar Province. Ambush sites are abundant there, and the assassins had selected a good one. At the very fringes of the jurisdictions of Kandahar and Urozgan, a place where patrols are rare, the road wedges its way between two towering chunks of rock. The Taliban deployed above, some forty fighters on each side of the road. They only had to put two men down there, aiming guns at drivers.

The fighters stopped several local cars and ordered them aside. Then a two-vehicle convoy appeared—white late-model Toyota Land Cruisers, the ICRC logo painted on in red, oversized antennas flexing skyward from the prow of each. Ricardo and three “local national” staff members were aboard.

Akrem recited witnesses' descriptions: how one of the militants had stepped away with his satellite phone. “We have three Afghans, one foreigner,” he was heard to ask. “Do you want four bodies or one?” The answer came back. He smacked the fat antenna back into his sat-phone with the palm of his hand, and signed to his men to stand Ricardo up against the side of his car and shoot him. When the Taliban set the car ablaze, the ICRC's Afghan staff begged to be allowed to take the body out of reach. No wonder the sight of it had unsettled that State Department guy.

By the time I left Akrem's house a half hour later, I had details down to the names of the two villages where the Taliban had spent the night. And I was angry, because this thing could have been prevented.

Ricardo's execution was no vague hint, like those harmless explosions we had become used to. The killers were notorious former Taliban. They had deployed into the area in insolent platoons. They had selected Ricardo, the first foreigner to arrive, ignoring other potential victims. They had pushed him up against his car and emptied their guns into him, and they had let his body burn.

The impact on Kandahar's small international community was like an electric shock. After drawing together for a moment to grieve, lining their cars up in a cortege to bear Ricardo's body to the airport, the foreigners sent up a yell. More offices closed, agencies “suspended operations”; employees were evacuated to Kabul.

I felt at the time—and I still do, to some degree—that the clamor was a bit excessive. An objective comparison of conditions in Afghanistan with those in any other recent conflict or postconflict situation came out in Afghanistan's favor. I remember trading assessments with a former member of the British Special Air Service, converted in his retirement to protection work for war correspondents. Bosnia in 1996 was far more dangerous than Afghanistan was now, he judged (and then treated me to the details of his only bit of real work so far: patching up a hole in the BBC crew's cook, who had been stabbed by a jealous colleague).

I had to agree. It is not that I deliberately discounted the value of Ricardo's life. Had I known him personally, had he been my friend, I might well have felt differently. But I did not know him, and I was left with the bare count. In more than a year, in the place whose very name had become a synonym for anti-Western fanaticism, one single foreigner was dead.

So why such panic? The international humanitarian organizations, I concluded, were committing an amalgam. They were harnessing the issue of security to another debate entirely.

That debate had to do with the way the United States was behaving abroad. Most foreign humanitarian workers in Afghanistan were not American. Most of them came from countries and segments of the population that were, rightly or wrongly, furious at America's foreign policy. It was not just the recent invasion of Iraq, which drew unanimous—and, as it proved, well-founded—criticism from every country on earth, but what had come before Iraq as well. The Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the U.S. attitude amounted to saying, “Because we do not wish to reduce our standard of living, you will breathe polluted air.” The Land Mine Treaty, which had helped reap a Nobel Peace Prize and which the United States refused to consider ratifying. The International Criminal Court, aimed at curbing war crimes, which the United States had sought to undermine. The United States seemed to be sticking out its tongue at the rest of the world, and the rest of the world had no leverage to respond.

September 11 had prompted people all across Europe to drop these concerns in sympathy. And now it seemed that the United States was taking advantage of that sympathy to push its agenda down their throats. For international aid workers in Afghanistan, the only available target upon which to vent their frustration was the U.S. presence there.

And so humanitarian workers, Europeans as well as many Americans, opposed this presence far more vocally than Afghans did. They said it was the U.S. troops who endangered their lives, since the U.S. troops were doing reconstruction, and “insurgents” could not distinguish between soldiers and aid workers. In the context of an argument that was really over U.S. policy and the U.S. presence in Afghanistan as a political issue, inflating the danger to aid workers was a way of reinforcing their case.

I think my colleagues' arguments were wrong. I think the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan made all of us safer. The expatriates, I believe, misunderstood the nature of violence in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a place where mutually assured destruction remains a viable doctrine. It is a culture of retribution. I learned this back when I was reporting, and I sensed the importance of having that young fighter with me on the road to Kandahar. Not because he could actively protect me with the Kalashnikov he held between his knees, but because his presence silently threatened the vengeance of his tribe should any harm befall me. Walls and barbed wire, I had learned, are not all that significant in Afghanistan, when it comes down to it. Preventing your own murder—once someone has resolved to commit it—would be almost impossible. But if you are seen to belong to a recognized group, a family or tribe that might retaliate, your chances of survival increase. The way to stay safe in Kandahar was to suggest the certainty of violent revenge should you be killed or dishonored, so as to deter attack before it is undertaken.

That is, to advertise your affiliations.

For this reason I felt, in my own case certainly and to some degree for the rest of the foreigners, that being confused in Afghans' minds with the Americans actually improved our chances of survival. I took some elementary precautions: I kept a Kalashnikov beside my bed. I varied my times and my routes, and I rolled up my windows. But I was not troubled that Afghans saw me driving on and off the U.S. base.

There was something deeper to the humanitarians' confusion, however.

I am beginning to believe that the international humanitarian community failed to perceive a transformation that was taking place in the world around it, which profoundly altered its status.

Aid workers took their own good intentions for granted, and were used to beneficiaries doing the same, more or less. Arriving on the heels of an earthquake or a tidal wave with their stretchers and rehydration salts and their kits for putting up temporary shelter, or spending a year in an African village improving an irrigation system, they were siphoning off some of their rich countries' surplus to alleviate pain in the Third World. They could count on gratitude, even if it was grudging or muddied by cynicism.

In the internal conflicts that shaped humanitarian action in the 1990s—Somalia, the Balkans, Rwanda—the aid workers' very outsider status, and their neutralist credo, was their force. Only a foreigner, it seemed, could be trusted by the different parties. Only a foreigner could shuttle between the factions, ministering to victims on all sides. And so the aid workers flaunted their foreignness, and clung to their neutrality—in spite of its moral ambiguity in some contexts. This neutrality was both their power and their safe-conduct across the front lines. Aid workers were harassed; occasionally they were used as bargaining chips. But when they got killed, it was usually by accident: they had misjudged the direction of an offensive and been caught in the shelling.

This self-image still dominates in the international humanitarian community. Aid workers have trouble accepting that they are now in the crosshairs themselves. When one of them is killed deliberately, the loss sparks shocked hurt feelings as well as grief. For the unconscious belief persists: If humanitarian workers are being targeted, there must be some mistake.

Afghanistan, regarded through the old prism, would seem to be a conflict between the United States on the one hand and some constellation of Muslim groups on the other. In line with their traditional role, aid workers wanted their neutrality recognized so they could cross the front lines as usual. But it wasn't working. Something was wrong. Ricardo had been killed.