The Punishment of Virtue (41 page)

Al-Qaeda strategists had to know that Washington would retaliate for 9/11 by engaging in Afghanistan. And they had to assume that once involved in that intractable land, chances were high that the United States would make mistakes, just as the British and the Soviets had. And those mistakes might just bring the longed-for war closer. Especially since some U.S. strategists seemed to be promoting a similar agenda from the opposite side.

As I listened to this canny officer, with the backbeat of my Afghan friends' mounting frustration thudding in my ears, the parts of this scenario suddenly meshed for me, and I understood how it could play out.

What if villagers, driven to distraction by the arbitrary violence the warlords were wreaking—the extortions and the arbitrary searches, aimed more at looting than finding weapons or opium, the fingering of tribal enemies as Taliban, the monopolizing of foreign subsidy—what if villagers, sick of all of this, began conniving with the Taliban militants who passed through their territory or who set up ambushes on their roads? What if villagers began giving the militants food at night, or letting them use their houses, or even lending them their sons? These isolated villagers might do that because they had no choice when the armed insurgents were demanding their help at gunpoint. Or they might do it because the Taliban did not seem much worse than the current alternative, the gunmen who preyed on them under cover of U.S. army fatigues. What would happen then? Would the United States begin bombing those Afghan villages? And then what? Would the Afghan people pull out of this latest experiment in nationhood? Would they revolt? Would my friends' warnings be fulfilled, and even doctors and engineers take up arms against the Americans, the way they had against the Soviets?

I arrived at that meeting shaken. I left it almost paralyzed with fear.

It was in this condition—I can't quite remember on precisely which July day—that I made another trip to Kabul. I was at Qayum's house in the leafy Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood, resonating with the menace of Kandahar, unable to adjust. Qayum invited me to join him for dinner at Interior Minister Jalali's place a few streets over.

Jalali was a former colleague of mine, of sorts. He used to run the Persian and Pashtu service of the U.S. government–funded shortwave radio service, Voice of America. In the distant past he had served as an army officer. Jalali was a member of the Afghan American mafia Qayum had corralled into accepting cabinet positions in the fledgling Afghan government. He was inordinately kind to me, absorbing my impertinent humor like a soft punching bag, top cabinet minister though he was. He took to addressing me as Kid, in our e-mail exchanges. I would write back to GU, for “grown-up.”

Jalali was trying, against difficult odds, to bring some professionalism to his ministry. But he had been away from Afghanistan for a long time, and his decisions often smacked more of wishful thinking than of savvy solutions turning local conditions to advantage. Jalali was gravely out of touch, and he was about to waste Akrem, and that night, I had run out of patience for it.

Just the scene, when we entered the house, almost made me bolt. I was up from Kandahar, where the food we ate seemed to be extracted from the parched ground with the same painful travail as an impacted molar. Jalali's tables buckled under the spread. There were five large oval platters heaped with meat. In one of them, the meat was liver. Without at first realizing what I was about, I caught myself scanning the size and number of the pieces, engaged in a rough estimate: how many sheep had gone into that plate of glistening morsels? There was an array of succulent vegetables, the sweet, light-green squash that is cooked down unctuously, plates of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers and herbs, and, on each coffee table, several bowls filled with sweetmeats: almonds crystallized with sugar and orange blossom water; cashew nuts, almost unheard of in Afghanistan; and the very best raisins, two sorts.

To consume this gargantuan feast, we were seven. Jalali and his wife, a tiny pistol of a lady, on her first visit from the United States since the Taliban collapse, dressed, the way I did in Kandahar, in an embroidered man's tunic. I registered, with gratitude, a current of sisterhood. There was Jalali's housemate, the deputy defense minister, revoltingly overweight. He would sit silently inside his rolls of fat, looking out like a malevolent Buddha. His wife was a Walt Disney witch, long fingernails filed to a tapering point and daubed with silver polish, face like a Venetian mask. There was another man, positively normal in this company, and Qayum, and me, Cassandra.

I went on and on that night. I lectured them about the warlords, about Pakistan, about the mounting danger, telling Qayum and Jalali they didn't know what they were talking about.

That one drew an uncharacteristically harsh retort from Qayum: “After a year and a half here, you think you know more about Afghanistan than we do?”

I did. Kandahar was burning, and they were enjoying their meal in a shaded back garden, oblivious. When they tried to jolly me out of it, their smug condescension only infuriated me more.

There was one piece of business I had to conduct with Jalali. Akrem's police force had gone unpaid for months. I had told the minister about this on an earlier visit to Kabul. The central government, I learned then, had been transferring the money to Governor Shirzai for distribution, but Governor Shirzai, naturally, was not passing it along to Akrem. Even that equation was a little theoretical, it emerged. Despite his promises at the big governors' meeting that May, Shirzai was still keeping customs revenues for himself. So in retaliation the central government was sending little if any money to Kandahar. Shirzai was not the one who suffered. He made sure
his
private militiamen got paid out of the customs dues. It was Akrem who, starved of public funds, could cover the cigarettes his men smoked only thanks to contacts in the Alokozai business community. Akrem, and his police force, was living on donations again.

I spelled all this out in front of the assembled company. I was stunned that Jalali didn't understand why, given the context in Kandahar, the riches Shirzai was robbing from the Afghan state and people would never make it to the police department.

When we returned home, Qayum gave me a dressing down. Jalali was my elder, and he was a minister, for God's sake. It was unforgivable for me to behave that way in public. And another thing: hadn't he told me not to breathe a word about Pakistan in front of the deputy defense minister?

Oh? Did Pakistan control officials so high up? Even Qayum was cowed?

The next day, I phoned Jalali to apologize. He accepted, gamely telling me to keep it up, he liked it. That afternoon, he called me back: he had checked the records; I was right; he would be sending the police salaries to Kandahar.

I sat in on the distribution of some of the money. To my surprise, Akrem was not even present. He directed me to his finance department in a different building, and got on with the business he was attending to. I had assumed that he, like any other Afghan official, would want to bask in the glow that day, taking personal credit for the arrival of the money.

I did not know Akrem well enough yet.

Anyway, it did not matter much. I was about to lose the war over his future that I had been waging with Jalali all summer long.

AUGUST 2003

A
KREM WAS ON
the phone. It was August 13, nearly noon. He had received a summons from the ministry; he had to go to Kabul. His voice was flat. He was calling because he wondered if I would mind checking if there was a flight on one of the planes that catered to humanitarians. The U.S. Army still occupied Kandahar's civilian airport, and he could only fly if I got him a seat.

Oh no. I knew what this meant. And I couldn't keep the knowledge out of my voice. “Oh, Comandan Saab…” I stammered. He was silent. “Of course. I'll call you right back.”

“Salamat wosai,”
he thanked me gently. He knew what it meant too.

I looked at my watch. I knew there was no way, but I called the UN and the subsidized humanitarian airline anyway. If Akrem had to go by road, he would be driving all night. The thought of it, in my alarmed state, terrified me.

I remember exchanging a couple of calls back and forth with him, asking what time he had been ordered to report, and waiting while he checked with the ministry. Ten tomorrow morning, came the answer. That settled it. There were no more flights that day, and the next day's UN plane would get him there too late. He had no choice but to take that road. It seemed unfair. Governor Shirzai had been called to Kabul too; he had flown up that morning. Jalali could have had the courtesy to give Akrem the same prior notice.

“Call me when you leave,” was all I could say.

He did, his voice reaching me as if through water from his satellite phone, some ways outside Kandahar. It was around 5:00
P
.
M
. I had never set off for Kabul later than dawn.

The next morning, I started calling him as soon as I woke up. I couldn't get him. I called some more. I imagined him meeting with the president, his phone turned off. I imagined a lot of things.

Finally, in the early afternoon, I found out what had happened. It wasn't as bad as some of the things I had conjured up, but it was pretty bad.

On that impossible road, with the sine curves and the ruts carved into the hardened clay and the desert floor on either side split open by dry river beds, his bodyguards' truck had tipped into a ravine. Fighters sit on benches fitted into the open backs of those trucks. One man was killed; another—slight, with a pointy face—suffered a compound fracture of the femur; and another whom I came to know later, who looks like a Mexican out of a television Western with his drooping mustaches and crossed bandoliers, broke his shin. There must have been a lot of other wrenches and bruises; I didn't hear about them. Akrem had worked through the night at the crumpled wreck, calling for a car to carry the body back to Kandahar, and then rushing on to Kabul and the Emergency Hospital near Qayum's house.

And so Zabit Akrem arrived in the Afghan capital, his mind otherwise occupied, after his dismissal had been broadcast on the radio and TV.

He and Governor Shirzai had both been removed. Shirzai was promoted to run the ministry of urban development. As had been suggested months earlier, his longtime confidante, Yusuf Pashtun—that same cabinet minister whom April Witt had quoted in her naughty article—was sent down to Kandahar to take over the governorship. And there was no job for Zabit Akrem.

Why had I bothered meddling?
Shirzai was now promoted. He was replaced in Kandahar by a fellow tribesman and intimate, a man who had served him faithfully for the past decade, only leaving his side when President Karzai had appointed him minister. Now, deprived of Akrem, Kandahar was at the complete mercy of Shirzai's mafia. And the new governor, according to three separate sources, was not just some Pakistani sidekick, he was a close interlocutor of the intelligence agency, the ISI.

My shocked and self-lacerating reverie was interrupted by a call from Dubai. It was my boss, Qayum Karzai, on his way to the United States. In other words, I suddenly realized, he and Jalali had bolted Kabul the minute they announced the shuffle.
Well, well, well. How very brave.

“So, how's it going down there?” Qayum wanted to know.

These big people—I was picturing it now—the president's older brother and his pal the minister of interior, had been standing on the airplane steps when they fired their warlord. The steps had pulled back and the plane had whisked them off to safety, just in case anything went wrong. I was here in Kandahar, in the line of fire. And they wanted a situation report.

The situation in Kandahar was flat calm, I informed Qayum.

How very odd it was after all that effort. After all the hand-wringing and plan-making and climax and anticlimax, the decision, when it finally came, seemed almost offhand. Far from being consulted or asked for technical support, the Americans had not even been informed.

In any case, the U.S. Afghan mission was back where it had started. Ambassador Finn was gone but not yet replaced, and the whole team I had come to like and rely on—Bill Taylor and Kurt Amend and one or two others—was back in Washington. Colonel Campbell had taken up a new post at the Pentagon. But his unit's rotation in Afghanistan had been extended. The exhausted, homesick, disgruntled soldiers were on automatic pilot, while a three-month interim commander struggled to learn how to pronounce local place-names. There was no one home again in Fortress USA. It was just astonishing. It was as though President Karzai had made his changes in the dead of night, when no one was looking. And disaster had not struck.

Over the next day or two, the significance of this event I had so urgently desired sank in. And I was devastated.

In effect, Shirzai had not been removed at all. His brother remained at the airport in charge of outer rim security, reaping the attendant benefits. A henchman of his and of Pakistan's was now effectively running the police department, so all of the brutal petty commanders still held sway at their checkpoints from Kandahar to the border. Factotum Khalid Pashtoon had swiftly transferred his allegiance to the new governor. My friends the unsavory but sometimes usefully insubordinate Achekzais were being cleared out of their positions on the border. Ties to Pakistan at the top of the provincial administration were even stronger than before. And the best official I had encountered in Afghanistan was unemployed.

Everything, in other words, was the opposite of what was being described in the press, and to and by the international community in Kabul: applause for the arrival of a qualified technocrat to replace the warlord Shirzai.

For two full weeks, I turned the facts over and over in my mind. How could my friends the Karzais possibly be so stupid? How could these mature Afghan government leaders not see the implications of what they had done? A great service to Pakistan and to the cause of corruption in the Afghan south.

And then it hit me: a blow to the gut that left me struggling for air and on the edge of tears for days. Maybe they weren't being stupid. Maybe they had made their move this way on purpose. Maybe they had been conniving all along with the forces they claimed so loudly to be combating.

It was the only thing that made sense.

And I realized something else: the forces at work were more powerful than I could ever get a purchase on. The people I had believed in must be compromised in ways I could never understand. I was going to have to part company with them, I realized—though it would take some time and some sorting out of my deeply conflicted feelings in order finally to disengage.

Somehow, it was the president of the Ghiljai elders' tribal council who continued to host Gul Agha Shirzai's farewell lunch. Bustling with busy energy, he met us at the gate of the hotel he had reserved for the purpose. He showed us to the verandah, where the drivers and bodyguards were seated. Abdullah and I looked at each other. We looked at the French windows opening onto the hall where the guests of honor were arriving. And we made for the windows, pushing through the seated servants.

The whole cast of characters was present. Gul Agha Shirzai was wedged on a couch next to his original rival for the governorship, Mullah Naqib. I greeted Ahmad Wali Karzai and the new governor, Yusuf Pashtun, under his shaggy, glowering eyebrows. And, opposite me at table, next to his weak-faced replacement, sat Zabit Akrem. He didn't speak. He was just murmuring under his breath as he fiercely fingered his string of green stone beads. I later learned that the Ghiljai council president, whose steadfast benefactor Akrem had been, had asked him to leave. Gul Agha Shirzai had threatened not to come if he was there. Akrem was feeling homicidal. He was saying prayers to hold himself back.

The Ghiljai council president, who in private had flung at Shirzai every insult he could conjure, delivered an orgy of praise as a welcome speech.

At the end of the meal, when the guests were collecting in a clot at the door, Shirzai, the freshly appointed minister of housing and urban development, called me over. He called loudly, so everyone would hear.

“Sarah,” he said. “I'm giving up warlordism. I'm going to Kabul to be a minister.”

“That's good,” I replied—still, at that stage, excavating some humor in the thing. “It's my turn. I'm going to be a warlord now.”