Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan To A More Dangerous World

It was because of bin Laden that Hazrat Ali, at thirty-eight, and with three wives to support, was experiencing such a change in fortune. Barely able to read or write, he was from the small Pashai tribe, which was looked down on by the local Pashtuns. Behind his back they called him ‘shurrhi’, which means stupid mountain man. He didn’t care. Marshal Fahim, the Defence Minister, had named him military commander for Jalalabad; he claimed to have 18,000 men under his control; and more importantly, he had the most powerful backer of all.

Back at his house, two visitors had arrived. I was shown into the living room. Hazrat Ali was sitting cross-legged on the floor, sucking salted pomegranate pips that shone like rubies in a dish and click-clacking a string of blue prayer beads, lapis from the mountains of Badakshan. Next to him was a satellite phone.

His visitors were two Americans, squatting awkwardly on the floor cushions with a black briefcase in front of them. One was pale, grey-bearded and blue-eyed, the other olive-skinned and black-bearded, with thickly muscled arms and Oakley sunglasses. I recognised the pair immediately. They had been staying in the building behind the Mustafa Hotel in Kabul which had been taken over by the CIA/special forces operations team Taskforce 121, who were looking for bin Laden.

Hazrat Ali handed them a lined A4 sheet of paper torn from a notebook. It was a list of names. In return they slid over the briefcase. He popped open the catch and allowed himself a thin smile. Inside were stacks of $100 bills.

Similar transactions were going on all over the country. In the hunt for bin Laden and al Qaeda the CIA was totally reliant on local informers. President Bush had demanded bin Laden ‘dead or alive’, and the Agency had $1 billion to spend, putting some 45,000 warlords on the payroll.

There was one major flaw. ‘How do you know they’re al Qaeda?’ I asked the Americans later. ‘Those names are probably just Hazrat Ali’s enemies and rivals.’ I had spent the previous evening at the house of Haji Zahir, a rival commander, who told me, ‘If there are five houses in a Pashtun village, at least three will have feuds.’ No wonder Hazrat Ali was smiling. He could get one of his enemies taken out by an American bomb, and be paid for it. There were even stories of one group of US special forces almost calling in an airstrike on another group because they were with rival warlords.

The Americans didn’t seem to care. They told me his list would be entered into the big Harmony computer at Bagram. The names would also be cross-checked with what they called ‘the 1267’, the sacred list of bad guys they all carried around with them, which some referred to as the kill-list. Some of those on Hazrat Ali’s list would end up in prison in Bagram or at Guantánamo.

Outside, his men glowered. Some were missing limbs, and several had eyes lined with kohl, and wildflowers tied onto their Kalashnikovs. Most of them knew nothing but fighting. One told me he only went to school till the age of eight, then joined the mujaheddin. A year later, some of these men would feature in a report issued by Human Rights Watch entitled ‘Killing You is Very Easy for Us’.1 (#litres_trial_promo) It carries interviews with people claiming that Hazrat Ali’s commanders ran a reign of terror in the province, keeping secret prisons, raping young boys, making arbitrary arrests and demanding bribes to release people. It alleged that anyone who refused to do his bidding was warned that he would call down American B52s on them.

The Americans were shocked that I was travelling around on my own, and offered me a lift to Kabul. Against my better instincts I accepted. Four foreign journalists had recently been killed on the road – their names were on a plaque put up by colleagues at the Spinghar Hotel. As I climbed into the back seat I saw the glint of a Glock pistol strapped on the thigh of one of them. ‘Bet you’ve never felt so safe,’ he grinned.

Actually, I didn’t. I usually travelled very low-profile, in a battered vehicle, often wearing a burqa so as not to be identifiable as a foreigner to anyone watching from the roadside. The Americans would never look like Afghans, however much facial hair they grew, and they seemed very conspicuous to me. The pistols made me uncomfortable. I almost missed my hashish-smoking driver from my last trip along this road, whom I had christened ‘Easy Dent’ after we had smashed into another car and he had laughed, ‘No problem, easy dent.’

I never tired of this road. The tarmac had long disintegrated under columns of Soviet tanks and American bombing, and it was now almost entirely hole. But I loved the way it lulled one into a false sense of security by starting with soft painted scenes of green fields, watered by the turquoise Kabul River, papyrus grass blowing in the wind and occasional flashes of colour as young girls in pink and red passed with jugs of water on their heads, heading to mud-brick villages. On a patch of dusty ground a group of boys were playing cricket using a pile of balanced stones as a wicket. The mountains in the distance looked like crumpled paper.

Then, with the city no longer in sight in the back window, you round a corner and the landscape changes dramatically to grey, pebble-strewn mountains. The road becomes a switchback of hairpin bends between towering granite cliffs that lean on each other, goats perched precariously on ledges. I thought about the thousands of British troops and followers retreating this way in the wintry January of 1842 at the end of the First Anglo–Afghan War and being picked off by the tribals on the hillside until only Dr Bryden was left to tell the tale.

As we bumped along, the younger of the two Americans told me, ‘We’ve been handing out a lot of dosh to commanders. In J-bad [Americans seemed unwilling to allot more than two syllables to any Afghan town, so had abbreviated them all] this commander told us he’d captured a computer with phone numbers of all the bad guys. He asked for $100,000. It turned out to be a videophone he’d stolen from CNN. The only numbers were for their editors.’

The car lurched back and forth as the driver negotiated the remains of a bridge which had been smashed into concrete blocks propped up on two rusted, upended Soviet tanks. From nowhere a grinning man appeared at the window, waving a lot of fish on a string.

‘Fucking Afghans,’ said the younger American. With that he stuck on the headphones of his iPod, selected Alicia Keys’ Songs in A Minor and tuned out Afghanistan.

To the Bush administration, contracting out the removal of the Taliban to local commanders backed by small groups of special forces and a hi-tech air force had been a highly successful new way of waging war with minimum cost or risk to its own troops. So it also seemed to make sense to contract out keeping the peace in the countryside, and the hunt for bin Laden.

The problem was, it was these very commanders or warlords whom Afghans most blamed for the destruction of their country. Kabul in particular had remained intact during the years of Soviet occupation – it was afterwards, when the mujaheddin ousted the communist-backed President Najibullah in 1992 and ran the country for four years, that their leaders all started fighting each other, turning the capital into a battlefield. You could see the damage everywhere. Kabulis would curse, ‘Jangsalar,’ Dari for ‘warlords’, as they showed you the destruction, their eyes often wet with tears as they waxed lyrical about how their city had been a beautiful place full of rose gardens and fruit trees.

As a Deputy Minister in that administration, albeit briefly, Hamid Karzai knew this only too well. ‘I’m very adamant we must finish warlordism, and will use whatever means necessary,’ he had told me before his inauguration. ‘It won’t be like last time. The problem is, what do we do with them?’ he mused. ‘If only I could just chop off their heads!’ We were sitting with his elder brother Qayum, who had recently returned from Baltimore, where he ran one of the family’s Afghan restaurants. They joked about turning the warlords into tour guides to show visitors the part of the city they were personally responsible for destroying.

In Karzai’s first month in office he called on all militias to go back to their bases: ‘All people with weapons or ammunition are not allowed to walk in the streets’, read the order. No one had taken the least bit of notice. Karzai exerted absolutely no power over these men.

He had, for example, promised the governorship of his hometown of Kandahar to Mullah Naqibullah, head of the Alikozai tribe, who ended the war by negotiating the Taliban surrender of the city on 7 December 2001. The two men were old friends – in 1988 I travelled with Karzai to Kandahar and we stayed at Naqib’s base in Argandab, and heard stories, true or otherwise, of him shooting down three Soviet gunships with Stingers.

But while Naqib was negotiating peace, Gul Agha Sherzai, head of the rival Barakzai tribe, was driving from Quetta into Kandahar airbase, accompanied by pick-up loads of his men, including some of the Achakzai I had met at Spin Boldak, escorted by US special forces. Sherzai was one of the Pashtuns with whom the CIA had made contact after 9/11, and had already received $1 million for sending some of his men to act as target-spotters for US bombs. Karzai called him by satellite phone to instruct him to stay at the airbase, and told him he was to be commander of the base while Naqib would be Governor. Sherzai was furious. ‘I don’t take orders from Hamid Karzai,’ he raged. ‘Kandahar is mine!’ He and his fighters headed into the city under cover of US air support, and moved into the Governor’s Palace, next to the mausoleum of Afghanistan’s founding father Ahmad Shah Durrani.

Local Kandaharis did not have fond memories of Sherzai. A giant bear of a man with dyed black hair flattened across his pate and a bristly beard, missing front teeth and an elaborate turban, he had been Governor before, from 1992 to 1994 during the mujaheddin government. Then there was so little authority that local commanders set up chains or ropes all along the highway manned by gunmen demanding bribes from everyone who passed. He had a reputation for being uncouth, blowing his nose and wiping his mouth on his turban, and had taken the name Sherzai, which means ‘Son of Lion’ – in fact he was the son of a dogfighter called Haji Latif.

But his new US escort gave him superpower credibility, and taking him on would mean taking on American B52s. Khalid Pashtun, Sherzai’s slick Afghan-American spokesman, began spreading stories to their US friends and foreign journalists that Naqib was linked to the Taliban, and had brought them to Kandahar in the first place. Naqib unwittingly played into their hands by setting up camp across town in Mullah Omar’s old headquarters, amid its fibreglass palm-tree sculptures and garishly painted rooms, from which the Taliban leader would hand out money from a tin box.

To try to resolve the issue, Karzai called a meeting between Sherzai and Naqib at the Governor’s Palace. Sherzai’s American friends sat on his side of the table. Karzai acted as interpreter, and when Sherzai accused Naqib of handing the city over to the Taliban in 1994, he did not intervene. Naqib had indeed handed over Kandahar to the Taliban, but it was in order to end the factional fighting, and had been at the urging of Karzai himself, who in those days was chief fundraiser for the Taliban. This was something the new President did not want to remind the Americans of.

The meeting ended with Sherzai as Governor. He quickly became one of the most powerful Governors in the country as well as one of the richest men, helped by contracts with the Americans to supply fuel and cement at exorbitant prices, and selling back the Stingers the Americans had given him in the first place.

‘My motto is “Construction with corruption”, that’s why people like me,’ he boasted to me once over a bowl of mutton soup he told me he’d cooked himself. I tried not to think about that as he tore off hunks of fatty meat which he plonked on my plate in between noisily sucking the flesh off a large bone, then wiping his mouth on the end of his turban. A British official told me that Foreign Minister Jack Straw had been incapacitated for days after lunching with him.

I survived the lunch, and next saw Sherzai in Jalalabad, where he had been transferred and had renovated the King’s palace. As always, he was presiding over a long table of tribesmen chewing and slurping food. He was wearing a black shalwar kamiz, with a white linen cowl wrapped over his head and round his neck as a napkin. He insisted I sat next to him so he could spoon chunks of meat onto my plate while he chewed away at large bones. Also at the table were two shadowy Americans who had jumped out of big Hiluxes with blacked-out windows. They told me they were involved in ‘development projects’, and made sure they were out of sight whenever I took photographs. Sherzai was well known to be on the CIA payroll.

Afterwards he took me on a tour. In the audience room was a painting of the man for whom the palace had been built, King Abdur Rahman. ‘My grandfather,’ announced Sherzai. I looked at him in astonishment, but this was not the time for a discussion of heredity. We headed for the basement, where the Russians used to kill people and the walls were stained with blood. Sherzai had turned it into a disco room with platform, glitter ball, giant woofers and carpets to lounge on. The tour ended outside, with a final flourish of warlord kitsch – a display of coloured lights round the fountain and swimming pool. He told me he was leaving for Germany the next morning to get his teeth fixed. I loved the idea of a warlord with a sparkling CIA-funded smile.

It was a similar story all over the country. Ismael Khan had declared himself Emir of the West, in charge of five provinces. In the north, the Uzbek warlord General Dostum had added to his past atrocities by suffocating hundreds of Taliban prisoners in metal shipping containers after defeating them, and was battling it out for control with his Tajik rival Mohammad Atta. Another Tajik commander, General Daud Daud, controlled Kunduz and the north-east. The central Hazarajat region was dominated by the Shia Hazara warlords Mohammed Mohaqeq and Karim Khalili.

In Kabul and the south-east, the dominant figure was the man I found scariest of all – Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an enormous white-bearded Wahhabi with a penchant for strange pronouncements: ‘If somebody becomes kind and shows sympathy to the tiger, this will be cruel to the sheep,’ was typical. Sayyaf had been the most fundamentalist of all the seven mujaheddin leaders, the man responsible for inviting Arabs to join the fight against the Soviets, long-time critic of the Americans and patron to a veritable Who’s Who of terrorists. His camps in Peshawar trained Ramzi Yusuf, who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, and the report by the 9/11 Commission named Sayyaf as ‘mentor’ to Yusuf’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11. He had been close to bin Laden since the 1980s, when he referred to him as his ‘golden chicken’, and was instrumental in helping him move back to Afghanistan in 1996. Without Sayyaf, 9/11 might never have happened. I wasn’t sure if the Americans didn’t realise that, or just didn’t care. Either way, with American help he got his house back in Paghman, a beautiful valley of snowcapped mountains about an hour west of Kabul, where his gunmen were soon terrorising the local population, breaking up weddings if music was played and seizing property. Sayyaf installed his men in key positions such as police chiefs and the judiciary in Wardak and Ghazni, while his commander Mullah Taj Mohammad became Governor of Kabul. This meant his men had carte blanche to terrorise western Kabul, looting and raping, armed with Kalashnikovs and grenades.

In the east, Karzai had appointed Din Mohammad, brother of the late Abdul Haq, as Governor of Nangahar; but the real power lay with Hazrat Ali, the man with the singing birds. In neighbouring Paktia, Karzai had named a warlord, Pacha Khan Zadran, as Governor, but locals had already appointed their own man, and refused to accept him. Scores of people were killed between February and May 2002 as Pacha Khan and his men tried to fight their way into the palace in the provincial capital Gardez, unleashing rockets on the city. Eventually Karzai sent a delegation asking him to surrender. ‘Who is Karzai, who is the government?’ he laughed. ‘Is Karzai going to come and kill me? He needs his head examined!’

Most powerful of all was Marshal Fahim, who despite being Defence Minister was clearly not the least interested in building a national army. He still kept his own militia and his options open by continuing to take money from Russia and Iran, and one only had to go an hour north of Kabul to see his tanks on the Shomali plains.

It was all mad.

Back in December 2001 the warlords had been running scared. Just before Karzai’s inauguration, I attended a meeting at Kabul’s dilapidated Intercontinental Hotel. One after another roared up to the front entrance, accompanied by pick-ups full of gun-toting militia. Inside the banquet hall they discussed the American bombing campaign which had enabled them to run the Taliban out of the country. They all agreed they had never seen anything like the B52s.

It was clear they thought their days were over. They were almost all on the criminal lists of human rights agencies, and when they heard about Guantánamo they feared ending up there.

Instead, the Americans had come to their rescue. Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American academic who had worked for Reagan, had been sent as US Envoy by his great buddy George W. Bush, and argued that they had no choice. ‘We couldn’t have cut them out – they’d been decisive,’ he said. ‘We had a few hundred people and an air force liberate this country – they were the ones who actually fought. When I went to my hometown of Mazar-i-Sharif they asked, “Who the hell is Karzai? It was Dostum who liberated Mazar.” It was people like Dostum, Ismael Khan, Mohaqeq, Khalili, Fahim, who were in the trenches putting their life on the line. What we hoped was, as central institutions built up, these other forces would weaken,’ said Khalilzad. ‘I felt these warlords were paper tigers.’

Yet Zal, as everyone called him, played his own part in undermining Karzai’s authority. He soon became known as ‘the Viceroy’, and acted as if he was running the place, even sitting in on cabinet meetings. While Karzai rarely left the heavily guarded palace, Zal flew around the country in a US military plane resolving disputes and handing out wind-up radios, accompanied by a gaggle of attractive young female aides inevitably known as Zal’s Gals.

Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff, also felt there was little choice but to work with warlords: ‘It was impossible to find anyone with clean hands,’ he said.

However, the fact that American forces continued to work with the warlords and pay them gave them new power in their communities. They intimidated local people by telling them they could call in airstrikes on their satellite phones. And to the horror of many of the Europeans, Rumsfeld and other US officials would visit them as if they were important leaders. ‘There is a certain illogic in trying to boost the authority of the central government on one hand and in conniving with local warlords on the other,’ complained Chris Patten, the European Union Commissioner, when he visited Kabul in May 2002. ‘There are things done in the short term which are unhelpful in the long term.’

While the warlords were becoming prosperous and powerful on CIA handouts, in Kabul the government was weak and broke. Said Tayeb Jawad, who had left a lucrative job as a lawyer in San Francisco to come back to set up a private university and had ended up as Karzai’s chief of staff, was shocked. ‘We didn’t have a single computer in the Presidency – all we had was my laptop I had brought from the US. We didn’t have a printer, so I would type documents then show them to the President on the screen, or to the British or US Ambassadors, then drive across town to an office with a printer.’

Communications were equally difficult. The Presidency had a few satellite phones, but if they wanted to arrange meetings with people like Brahimi, the UN Special Representative, or his deputy Jean Arnault, they would have to send a messenger. ‘There was no postal service, no fax, so our only connection with the outside world was the twice-weekly Ariana flights to Dubai,’ said Jawad. ‘I’d give instructions for them to call me before flying, so if I needed to get a document out they would fly it.’

I experienced this first-hand when Karzai asked me to send him cuttings about himself from British newspapers. The envelope addressed to ‘President of Afghanistan, Arg Palace, Kabul’ came back stamped ‘Addressee Unknown’.

There was an even bigger problem. Karzai’s government had so little money it could not even afford its fuel bills, let alone pay salaries. Six containers full of banknotes printed in Russia for the Taliban regime had been seized by the Northern Alliance when they entered Kabul, and they refused to hand them over. In January 2002 the representatives of sixty-one countries had gathered at a conference in Tokyo and raised an impressive-sounding $4.8 billion for Afghan reconstruction. But for a population of twenty-five million that was just $20 per head – a fraction of what was given to Bosnia, Kosovo or East Timor ($256 per head) at the end of their wars. The Americans only contributed $290 million – little more than half the $540 million provided by Iran. The money took a long time to come, much of it never arrived at all, and most countries used their contributions for projects using their own people rather than entrusting it to the Afghan government.

Meanwhile, Karzai’s government had 260,000 civil servants to pay, yet only $20 million in the kitty. ‘Money was a major issue,’ said Jawad. ‘I had to phone round begging money from different Embassies. We didn’t even have a functioning toilet in the Presidency for guests coming in. We could get money for specific things like this, or vehicles, but not for running the government and paying our staff.’

They became dependent on cash handouts from the CIA which were dropped off in suitcases, rucksacks and even plastic bags. This was known as ‘ghost money’, because it came and left secretly. From 2003 Karzai’s office was also given cash by the Iranian government, which the previous year Bush had declared part of the ‘axis of evil’.

The lack of funds made it difficult to find good people to work for the government, particularly as the years of war had left the vast majority of the population with no education. The only trained administrators were those who had been taught by the Soviets during the communist regime, and who were thus regarded by many as unpalatable. In the end it would be these people the West would come to rely on most, such as Hanif Atmal, who set up the National Solidarity Programme to alleviate poverty, and Gulab Mangal, who became the Governor of Helmand.

Karzai himself had no experience of running anything. He was, said Jawad, ‘hopeless with numbers, confusing billions and trillions’. Jawad found himself having to do things such as draft his own investment law. ‘I did some research and found the best one was Chile’s, so I just copied that, took it to cabinet and they approved it. I could feel the pressure on Karzai’s shoulders,’ said Khalilzad. He had no executive experience, and the challenges of rebuilding this shattered country were huge, while the capacity of people with relevant knowledge and experience was very limited. ‘I remember I had to go and object to someone we thought non-desirable, and he said, “Give me some names.” In fact we didn’t have a lot of names. He said we foreigners didn’t appreciate this.’

The international community preferred to build schools for children, which made nice photographs back home, rather than funding unsexy adult programmes to train a civil service. Yet there was one resource staring them in the face. In those early days hundreds of Afghan-Americans like Jawad were coming back to their country, eager to help. ‘The international community never came up with a viable plan of mobilising the expat community,’ he said. ‘They were ready. All they needed was housing and a decent salary of $2,000 to $4,000 per month. International consultants were getting that a day.’

Instead, contracts were awarded to American consultancies like Bearing Point, or Adam Smith from the UK, to bring in their own people to run ministries and government departments. The Afghans themselves had little say. ‘The quality of internationals was extremely poor,’ complains Jawad. ‘I had an adviser to my office assigned through USAID, and one day I asked him to draft three template letters in English to reply to congratulatory letters to the President, and requests we kept getting for pictures and flags. All it needed to say was “Thank you, but we don’t have any.” This adviser spent two days on this, and then I had to go and correct it – and it wasn’t even my language. In the end I said, “You’re fired.”’ Jawad then received an angry call from the USAID office to say they had spent $60–70,000 on hiring this man, so he could not fire him. ‘I don’t care,’ replied Jawad. ‘I don’t have room for him in my office – send him to Dubai or somewhere. So much money was wasted.’

In the bazaars between the carpet merchants and burqa sellers and stalls draped with second-hand clothes it was common to see men sitting with satellite phones and calculators on which they would tap away. This was Afghanistan’s banking system – hawala – an informal yet highly efficient way to transfer money in an entirely cash economy. I used it myself when I was running low on cash – I would hand over a cheque from my UK bank account and be magically presented with bricks of afghanis.