The Punishment of Virtue (46 page)

No wonder his body had looked so small.

The picture was resolving. The bomb would have detonated slightly to Akrem's left; that was why he had been projected rightward, why his left side was injured, and the front of the bodyguard who had brought his shoes and who was standing to his right, watching while he put them on. The back of Akrem's leg had been torn off, but the face of the nephew who was following him toward the gate. The blast must have gone off behind Akrem and in front of the boy.

A suicide bomber between Akrem and his nephew?

There were some other details I needed to check out. An American official had told me the legs I'd seen in the hospital had been found well away from the site, one in a neighboring garden. They had to be the suicide bomber's, he implied. There were even rumors of a head, supposedly retrieved on a roof somewhere. I went back to the hospital and found the old mullah who was keeper of the refrigerated container. Struggling with the horizontal clasp on the heavy hermetic door, he opened it for me. Sure enough, the two legs were still there, shorn off below the knees, veins and sinews curling up from the ends like snapped electrical wires. They were otherwise uninjured. They could not have been projected high into the air and tumbled through branches into a garden. The old mullah confirmed that they had arrived amid the chaos of injured and dead and the other severed body parts. It was terrible; he hadn't had time to pray that whole day long. But no, the mullah told me, no head had been retrieved. It would have come to him.

Over the following days, I questioned three other survivors of the blast, two who had been standing in front of Akrem and one behind. All had seen the same thing.

“The flash came up through the rug,” said one older man, who lived among the trees in Arghandab. “He looked so beautiful, I was staring at him.” Smiling, the gentleman put out his two fists as though gripping the arms of an armchair, eloquently: “He was nice and big, you know?”
Elephant bodied. Like Rustam.
“He was wearing a white tunic and a black turban, and I couldn't stop looking at him because he was so beautiful. I wanted to go up and congratulate him for being appointed to Kabul. I saw him step into one shoe, and he was about to put on the other when the flash came. Behind him. Through the rug.” The man pushed the fingers of one hand up between the thumb and forefinger of the other.

Another bodyguard, very young, still deaf from the blast and limping painfully, flapped his shawl to demonstrate how the rug had lifted.

He had been posted at the row of bricks in front, with Landau. Both were injured. Mir Wais, after putting down the shoes, was standing beside Akrem, with two more bodyguards deployed behind. Those three soldiers were dead. The impressionistic dots on my map were coming into focus. The bodyguards had done their job after all. They had established a close-protection perimeter around Akrem. No unknown person could have penetrated it. This was not a suicide bombing.

I started writing the findings up, reading them out loud to Shafiullah as I went along. What stunned us both was that no one else was doing this. The chief of police of the Afghan capital had been killed and not a single person had interviewed an eyewitness: not the local police, not the commission the interior ministry had sent down to Kandahar, not an American official, not a journalist—neither the Afghan reporters at the radio station I had set up with Qayum Karzai nor any foreigners. Even Carlotta Gall, the seasoned
New York Times
correspondent who made straight for Akrem whenever she visited a city he resided in, contented herself with the official declarations. The site of the blast had been cleaned up within hours; no meaningful forensic examination could have taken place; and the two legs were still sitting at the hospital, ignored. On the basis of what evidence were these certainties being propounded?

Something else troubled me. The night Akrem's brother had returned from Khakrez, he had received a visit from Governor Shirzai, accompanied by the liaison to the investigation team sent down from Kabul, who happened to be Shirzai's tribesmen. The governor had stayed till midnight. “You shouldn't ask so many questions about this suicide bombing,” he had admonished Akrem's brother. “I'll find the killers and deliver them to you, I promise. I had information about four Taliban who were planning to do this thing. Now they're in Helmand Province. I'll get them for you. But don't keep saying it wasn't a suicide bombing.”

“First it was an Arab, and now it's Taliban from Helmand?” exclaimed Akrem's brother. “He thinks I'm a child.”

I was reminded of the assassination of ICRC engineer Ricardo, on the lonely road to Urozgan. Gul Agha Shirzai had thrown sand in our eyes then too, storming about Taliban in government, when he had allowed the Taliban who did it to come across the border from Pakistan. This had always been Shirzai's role in Kandahar: to facilitate activities by the Pakistani ISI and help cover over the tracks afterward. If Gul Agha Shirzai was lying this energetically, I thought, if he was trying this hard to keep things hushed up, then the government of Pakistan had to be involved in this murder.

It fit the pattern.

JUNE 2005

T
HERE WAS GOING
to be a national memorial service for Zabit Akrem in Kabul, at the main mosque near Qayum Karzai's house. Half the Alokozai tribe was headed up to the capital. I decided to join them. There were some people I needed to explain the truth to. Jalali. The U.S. embassy. President Karzai.

“Comandan Saab, I've left politics!”

The reason this was so important to me was not just that Akrem had been my friend. It was because there were serious policy implications to getting this right. If Akrem had been killed by a suicide bomber, then the culprit was part of some nebulous and undifferentiated “terrorist threat”—was one of those ideological fanatics spawned by Usama bin Laden, who could only be fought in the immediate term by force. A purely military solution was called for. If, on the other hand, a remote-controlled mine, say, had been planted inside that well-guarded mosque, that was different. The assassin had local complicity. Men whom President Karzai and American officials had placed and obstinately maintained in power were responsible. This murder was the direct result of policies that I—and Akrem—had been decrying for the past three years. If, as I suspected, this was a Pakistani job, then a change in U.S. policy toward Pakistan was called for, because it was proof positive that our “ally” Pakistan was working to destroy everything we were working to create in Afghanistan. Left alone, this hidden Pakistani enmity would sooner or later explode in our hands. And if it was a Pakistani job, then President Karzai finally had to fire those Pakistani intelligence agents who infested his provincial government.

The distinction was crucial. It was terribly important to get this right.

True to form, Interior Minister Jalali agreed to see me immediately. He was devastated. He looked ten years older. After all his jousting with Akrem, it was Jalali who felt in his gut the import of this loss. He wondered how I was doing. I said OK and handed over the document I had drawn up with Shafiullah, launching into my exposition.

Jalali cut me off. “No, no, no…it was a suicide.” His tone was gentle, that of a rational man trying to pry a grief-stricken relative away from some fantasy about the deceased. “Everyone agrees, Sarah: the local police, the commission I sent down, the FBI; everyone says it was a suicide.”

I began making the counterarguments. Jalali's ears pricked a little. “OK, OK,” he said. “I'll read your document.”

The next stop was the U.S. embassy. I didn't know anyone there anymore; I had been away too long. But I arranged a meeting with the current political affairs officer, and he brought along a couple of FBI agents. I drew my map for them. I passed around the ball bearing.

“I was determined to make doubt triumph over certitude.”
A line from an Italian crime novel.
¹

They were mildly intrigued. “The thing is,” said the chief agent, “we are here in Afghanistan in a supporting role. We have a team in Kandahar, and they made themselves available to Afghan investigators, which meant, essentially, giving them help with forensics. But what I'm saying is, because there were no U.S. citizens killed in that bombing, we couldn't take any…initiative. You get me? That understanding is part of the basis for our being here. If there had been an American citizen, on the other hand…”

But there was an American citizen. It took me a couple more days to work that out. An in-law of Akrem's, who was visiting from Albany, New York, who had been standing right by Akrem's nephew when the bomb exploded, had been an American citizen. I introduced his son to the FBI team on the base in Kandahar. The Americans had not even looked closely enough to find that out themselves.

The FBI guys at Kandahar Airfield did seem on the ball, though. They were welcoming, energetic, and forthright. They elaborated on the nature of their “conclusion” in favor of the suicide-bombing thesis.

“Look, we couldn't get access to any of the bodies. I mean, you couldn't really call it an investigation as we know it. We couldn't see the bodies; we couldn't get to the scene until two days later. We dug around some, where the blast had broken the ground, but who knows what we were looking at by then.”

I was sitting with three agents at an outdoor picnic table on base, with a little wooden roof over it to shade it from the sun. It was the most private place to talk.

“We couldn't interview anyone either, since it's hard for us to get into town. What we did was look at a bunch of photographs that had been taken after the explosion. And there was stuff in those pictures that looked consistent, to us, with a suicide bombing. The legs, for example, blown off at the hip.” The agent was on a roll. “Typically, if a suicide bomber has the charge in a vest, or taped around his chest, his limbs are going to be blown off at the joints, because that's the weakest place.”

“At the hips?” I interrupted. “But wait a minute. That's not right. Those aren't the right legs.”

“Excuse me?”

“The leftover legs that everyone's talking about? They weren't blown off at the hips. I checked them at the hospital last week. They were severed below the knees.” I bent over and delivered a karate chop to my own shin.

“Really? See, we were looking at these legs in the picture they showed us, and we just assumed they were the legs in question.”

Negative, my index finger waved. “Those ones must have been picked up by a family. The legs that were left in the hospital were shorn off below the knees. I should have taken a picture.”

“Was it clean, like?” another agent chimed in. “Cauterized?”

“Like they'd been chopped off with a cleaver and sealed.” And I described the curly wires of veins and nerves sprouting from the ends of the legs.

One of the agents glanced at the other: “That sounds kind of like a claymore.”

I spoke to other security officials, from other countries. The words
claymore mine
kept leaping to their lips. The expertise of these officers made short work of the other main argument in favor of the suicide bombing theory: the lack of a crater where a bomb would have been laid. “There's a mine called a Jumping Jennie,” one officer told me, his Australian twang making a delight of that middle “e.” “When it's tripped, it springs about yea high.” He held his hand at chest level. “Then it explodes.”

That would not have been consistent with those poxlike wounds on Landau's legs, but it gave a notion of the possibilities: a shallow crater did not rule out a remote-controlled bomb.

“Mines are very versatile,” said a French Special Forces officer, at a dinner sometime later for the departing U.S. Civil Affairs team in Kandahar. “You can rig a mine to do anything. It's easy to fit it with a remote-controlled detonator.”

Claymores. My interlocutors kept coming back to claymores. They weren't very thick, their blast sliced through limbs, and they were usually packed with ball bearings. Surely it was worth consideration?

The FBI agents on base interviewed Landau and the little bodyguard and the gentleman from Arghandab when I brought them out one evening weeks later. They were diligent about it, meeting the witnesses separately, taking notes, backtracking over questions. The agents spent a lot of time. But when I asked one of them afterward, “What do you think the upshot of all this will be?” he took a breath.

“You know,” he said. “The problem here is one of mentality. That's the biggest thing we're up against, all the time.”

By “here” the FBI agent did not mean “in Afghanistan.” He meant where he lived, on base—in the American community in Afghanistan.

“The mentality here is a war-fighting mentality. It's not a criminal investigations mentality. It's like, you don't really have to find out
who
did this, and prove it so it could stand up in a court. The enemy did it. That's the mentality. The enemy did it and we have to kill him. It's like a culture clash between us FBI guys and the rest of them. And so…I guess I don't really know what the upshot will be.”

This is the mentality that the Pakistani government has so astutely figured out. It is by exploiting this bias that Pakistan has gained free rein to organize, train, equip, and deploy thousands of “Taliban insurgents” in Afghanistan in exchange for turning over a handful of Al-Qaeda members. By exploiting this mentality, the Pakistani government was able to cling to a policy that will leave not just Afghanistan, but Pakistan too, a dangerous, volatile, hamstrung place for years to come.

Venal provincial officials were catching on too. The suicide-bombing theory that Governor Shirzai had made up out of whole cloth was carefully calculated to continue exploiting this bias.

It was breathtaking, how it worked.

“I don't think the issue of who was killed is as important as the fact that it was a suicide bombing—if that's what it proves to be,” the State Department representative in Kandahar told me, as we lolled on overstuffed easy chairs in the Civil Affairs compound that June.

I was speechless. Here was one of the savviest and most experienced U.S. officials currently stationed in Afghanistan, who—past a token acknowledgement that the suicide bombing theory was unproven—was dwelling on how much it impressed him. He had taken the bait.

“See, suicide bombing is pretty common in Chechnya. And there have been reports of Chechens operating around Gardez. This would be the first example of that sort of tactic this far south. It would be really worrisome if Chechens were moving in down here.”

Chechens. Members of that far-flung constellation of ineffable terrorist groups. Nothing to do with the realities of the situation in Kandahar. Nothing to do with the poor decisions made by President Karzai and the United States over the past three years.

I was getting nowhere.

My third big meeting in Kabul was with President Karzai. I asked if we could do it alone. Two staff members stood up and left his small office with the tables in a T.

“I've been wanting to see you!” Karzai launched in when they were gone. His voice has a surprisingly rich timber to it. “I saw your article in the
New York Times;
it was excellent.”

“I'm glad you liked it.” This was an op-ed I had written about the recent anti-American demonstrations. I said that at their root, they had not been about desecration of the Koran; they were fomented by Afghanistan's neighbors in opposition to the “strategic partnership” between Kabul and Washington.

“I was telling exactly this to President Bush,” said Karzai, who had been in Washington when the piece came out. “I was speaking quite strongly, and then your article appeared the very next day.”

“Oh, good. So I corroborated you.”

“Yes, it was very useful. I read your piece about Zabit Akrem too.”

That one was a private e-mail that I had sent out to my friends. I had been writing these since I first came to Afghanistan with NPR, one every few months, when there was something to say. This latest one was pretty raw—written the day I came down from the burial at Khakrez. I wondered who had forwarded it to Karzai.

I told him: “Mr. President, you have just lost your best friend.”

“I know, I know,” President Karzai replied brightly. “We were good buddies, going way back.”

“That's not what I mean. I mean professionally. For your government, for your country.”

He said something else off the mark. He didn't get it.

“Listen,” I pursued. “I've been doing some work on the bombing. There really hasn't been any investigation. I wanted to give you the information I've come up with.”

Karzai said he'd love to hear it. I started drawing my sketch-map. “This is the road to Chahar Sou, right? And this is the dirt road next to the mosque…” Karzai was from Kandahar; I could refer to the landmarks. I pushed the slip of paper over to him, then leaned over his shoulder to explain the dots: who was standing where when the bomb when off. I told him I was absolutely sure it was a Pakistani job.

“Of course it was!”

We were fellow Kandaharis, communing together. I could hear his tuning fork.

“I don't think Gul Agha did it though. I know him. He's not that kind of person; he's not that clever.”

“OK fine, Gul Agha didn't do it himself, personally. But people under him did. He provides the umbrella that allows Pakistan to place its operatives in Kandahar. That's his role. That's always been his role.”

“I agree with you.”

“So get rid of him,” I pleaded. “And the others. You've given these people enough time. Here's what you've been doing: you've been thinking you can buy your enemies, and you've been taking your friends for granted. But you'll
never
be able to buy your enemies. No matter how much you give them, they'll never change. And meanwhile, you're losing your friends. You've come to the end of that rope. The people can't stand it anymore. Stop dancing with these thugs.”

“You're right,” President Karzai said. He promised me he would do it.