The Punishment of Virtue (10 page)

The issue of what Karzai's motivation might have been is even more complex. It may be that he was genuinely duped, that Karzai took his Taliban friends at their word. More likely, perhaps, he overestimated his own power over the force he helped unleash. One family retainer describes Karzai thinking he could ride this Taliban tiger, while the Pakistani ISI, whose project the Taliban movement really was, looked on delighted at the help he was providing. Some part of personal ambition must have played a role—a patient kind of ambition that Karzai's lighthearted exterior belies.

I do not believe that Hamid Karzai ever actively subscribed to the Taliban's radical ideology. What seems clear to me is that his actions—even those he admits to—amounted to connivance. Such connivance may be morally ambiguous at best, but we should remember that the United States was doing nothing different all those years.
“The Americans are supporting this.”
Negotiations between Taliban and U.S. officials about an oil pipeline were quietly continuing throughout the 1990s. Taliban leaders were visiting America. It was only the determined protests of American feminist groups that kept the U.S. government from officially recognizing the regime.

But after the 9/11 watershed, no one was remembering such things.

The meeting between Hamid Karzai and Mullah Naqib at army headquarters in Kandahar that summer of 1994 proved crucial to the revolution that would shortly take place. As a result of that discussion, the veteran anti-Soviet commander provided the Taliban with what amounted to a decisive piece of assistance: abnegation. Mullah Naqib did not stand in their way; and he prevented Akrem and his dissident group from standing in their way. And so, the way was clear. The Alokozais, led by this innocent man and unbeatable tactician, were the most powerful fighting force in the south.

I wondered, a decade after that fateful spring, how decisive Mullah Naqib's decision really was. “Do you think you could have stopped them?” I asked Akrem. His answer was swift and categorical:
“Bsyar bale.”
It means, “Extremely yes.”

A few commanders from other tribes did eventually throw up a last-ditch resistance to the Taliban; but without the Alokozais, they were doomed.

In that sense, what Shirzai's people told the Americans was true, and all Kandahar knows it. Mullah Naqib was the Taliban's friend; by refusing to defend Kandahar from them, he handed them the keys to the city. What escaped the official history, however, is that he most likely did so at the behest of Hamid Karzai. In front of Gul Agha Shirzai and the CIA, at that tense meeting in December 2001, President Karzai could hardly defend his ally without indicting himself.

Gul Agha Shirzai emerged from that meeting the governor of Kandahar.

DECEMBER 2001, 1500—1765

T
HE CITY
G
UL
A
GHA
S
HIRZAI
laid hands on is arguably the most significant in Afghanistan.

Situated precisely on the fault line dividing two great civilizations—the Iranian and the Indian—Kandahar appears from the perspective of each to be on the extreme fringes of the known world. For Persians, wrapped in the comfort of their ancient and elaborate culture, Kandahar's very name has become a metaphor.
Safar-i Qandahar
in Persian is the equivalent of “an odyssey”—a voyage so long and fraught with discomfort and danger as to be beyond telling.

And yet Kandahar is founded upon voyages. It lies on a rare route piercing a most strategic land. Like a wall, Afghanistan rises up between Iran and India, and also a third region, Central Asia, with its vast, fertile steppes and explosively mobile populations. Only two roads connect these worlds across forbidding Afghanistan, and Kandahar straddles one of them. Kandahar, on its plateau of packed earth, sheltered by bulwarks of jagged rock, constitutes a mandatory way station for traders, warriors, immigrants, and invaders moving from one of these zones to another.

Despite its impoverished aspect, despite the conditions in which most of its citizens survive—in the dust amid their chickens, forced to defecate in a corner of their unplumbed houses and shovel the dirt outside to a street without sewers—it is in some ways a wealthy town. I once saw a decent piece of real estate—a distinguished but dilapidated two-story yellow house on a piece of land fronting a main street—go for one and a quarter million dollars. This in a town with no banks, no commercial airport, little running water, precarious electricity, and hardly a paved road in sight. Only cash—in certain hands—is abundant.

Kandahar, like much of Afghanistan, has survived through the years on three main sources of revenue: pillage, tribute or tolls, and subsidy. This latter is dutifully handed out by the Great (foreign) Power of the day, in an effort to buy docility from the denizens of
Yaghestan
.

The last quarter of the twentieth century was no exception. Subsidy came in the form of lavish funding for the anti-Soviet resistance, dispensed by the CIA, the Saudi Arabian government, and the Pakistani ISI. Trunks of cash would be handed over to commanders and faction leaders, who took their cut while their soldiers sometimes did without blankets. Subsidy also took the form of humanitarian aid: money earmarked for reconstruction projects, not half of which were implemented. Mountains of wheat donated in the 1980s and 1990s by the UN World Food Program to pay for labor were measured off and sold in the bazaar, and not a workman hired. Monitors—who got a share of the take—signed off on fictional reports of the projects' progress.

Kandahar did count one local item among the sources of its wealth: opium. The Taliban made a show of banning poppy in the last year of their regime. But that was only in 2000, when there was such a glut on the world market that the price was falling. Officials made sure they had plenty of paste in stock before they started burning poppies. Before that, the Taliban would attach special security details to convoys running loads of opium from Farah Province down to Kandahar. Opium gorged the Taliban treasury.

And the time-honored transit trade continued to make Kandahar-area smugglers rich. The Taliban worked with them, too. In a deal that favored their interests over those of the Afghan state, Taliban authorities slashed customs dues. The local transit mafia had a field day.

But Kandaharis have a reputation for hiding their gold in rags and bones.

The city's bad name is not only a Western invention, tied up with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Even within Afghanistan Kandahar is reviled. Its people are known as the greediest, the rudest and most unruly, the most treacherous of all. More than one Afghan has assured me that the Taliban were the best thing that could have happened to Kandahar.

And yet there is obviously something about this place, something that goes right to the marrow of Afghanistan's bones. “Whenever change has come to Afghanistan,” several locals have explained to me, “it has come from Kandahar.”

Soon after the Taliban collapse, people began to arrive, as if on pilgrimage.

There is a building in the heart of town they flocked to visit—that mausoleum right across from the governor's palace. It has a graceful dome, something like a smaller, Afghan version of the U.S. Capitol. And, I gradually came to understand, the people were coming to see it just the way Americans go to visit the U.S. Capitol, or in family groups with paper cups of frozen yogurt and sweatshirts tied around their waists, walk the Freedom Trail in my native Boston.

It is the mausoleum of Afghanistan's George Washington, the country's founding father, Ahmad Shah Durrani. It is a symbol of the Afghans' nationhood. Unruly though Afghans may be, they cleave with fierce pride to this nationhood. It is their collective manhood. So, especially since the events took place on the very ground I was treading, it seemed incumbent on me to find out how this nation came to be. Without understanding what binds the disparate and chauvinistic Afghans together, I would never understand them very well.

But it took awhile to begin learning about their creation myth. I was not able to read into the history until some months later—after I finished my NPR rotation, left Afghanistan, visited the United States, and then left reporting and moved back to Kandahar to live.

That happened in the spring of 2002. I moved back under the aegis of the Karzai family: the president's older brother hired me. I'll explain all about that later. For now, the relevant point is that the only English books at my disposal are—incredibly—President Hamid Karzai's college textbooks. My de facto deputy at the nonprofit I'm running, a Karzai family retainer, has kept them squirreled away under his bed all these years, along with boxes of papers from the anti-Soviet
Jihad
, and now we've dusted them off and lined them up on a shelf built into a niche in our office wall.

I smile at Karzai's signature, inked neatly on the flyleaves with a fountain pen. Most of the books are Cold War–era treatises on international relations from a third world perspective. But there are also some quaint volumes on Afghanistan. These have titles like
The Pathans
or
The Kingdom of Afghanistan
. They are written by members of the class of Englishmen that seems not to provide its children with first names, but just pairs of initials. Several authors served as officers in British India. Their tone is shamelessly judgmental, soaked in superiority. I have my doubts as to the accuracy of their accounts, but nothing I've found in the bookstalls clustered near that mausoleum in the bazaar seems a lot more reliable.

So I plunge in, the way I used to do it in grad school. I fan four or five old tomes around me. There is one on an arm of the wood-framed easy chair where I've ensconced myself; I've got another two, one inside the other, on the coffee table by my knees; and there's one more lying open on the floor. I pick up one book and then another. Then I reach for the first one again, trying to piece together a coherent narrative.

Here is what I come up with.

We're in the middle of the eighteenth century. Appropriately, this Ahmad Shah Durrani seems to have birthed his country on a highway robbery. I keep toggling between the different books because they disagree on the details. One version describes the haul as booty: the treasure looted from conquered India—including the fabled Koh-i-Nur diamond—passing through Kandahar on its way to the shah of Persia, who had done the conquering.
¹
Iran's sway, at that time, reached rather farther east than it does today. A different account, written by a successor of Ahmad Shah's, describes the load as tribute duly paid to the Persian overlords: 13 million rupees worth, or several years' tax from the subject provinces of Kabul and Peshawar.
²

Either way, the young Ahmad Shah laid hands on a fabulous trove. That much is par for the course. What is more interesting is that instead of going on some gigantic spending spree, he used the money to bind to him the chiefs of the same tribes I have come to know: his own Popalzais (the Karzais'tribe), the rival Barakzais (now headed by Governor Gul Agha Shirzai), Akrem and Mullah Naqib's Alokozais, and one or two others.

Frustratingly, the books are short on images of Ahmad Shah's raid, perhaps out of discretion about the nature of this founding escapade. No one bothers to describe what must have been an impressive train of camels, piled high and decked out in dyed woolen tassels, swaying up the road to Kandahar. Protected by outriders and maybe a cannon or two rumbling on wood-wheeled carts, probably including some heavy-footed elephants, the caravan would have kicked up a storm of dust. Just the polished metal of a saber or the sun glinting off a piece of glass would have thrown off a flash.

Did Ahmad Shah ambush this cortege where the old road leading north from India mounts the edge of a hill just shy of Kandahar? Or did he dash out eastward and surround it in the plain crossed by travelers coming down from Kabul?

He was privy to breaking news: there was no more shah of Persia to accept the treasure this caravan was bearing. The shah had just been decapitated by his own men. So why not keep the money? Maybe Ahmad Shah encountered the caravan before he even reached Kandahar, galloping with his Pashtun and Uzbek horsemen away from the scene of the assassination.
³

This Ahmad Shah was the youngest son of a proud family. His forebears had enjoyed the favor of their Persian overlords. They were settled in the city of Herat, located on modern Afghanistan's border with Iran. Their whole tribal confederation had moved there in the late 1600s, in a confusing and perhaps forced exodus from Kandahar.
⁴
Their new home, Herat, was a former imperial capital whose heyday had come some two centuries before. Great mosque complexes and minarets from that time, redolent of arabesques in turquoise mosaic, dominated the cityscape. They still do.

In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Ahmad Shah's headstrong kinsmen were growing turbulent—that much I can make out. I've been going over and over the story for several days now, but I can't get the versions to add up. In sum, it seems they broke off Herat, this fabled seat of Persian culture, from the shahs' dominions, making it a kind of independent city-state.

What is clear is that the shah of Persia's court was in full decadence. Ministers and eunuchs, engaged in a murderous ballet around the debauched person of the monarch, were too busy stabbing each other in the back to see to the shredding at the borders of their lands.
⁵
All of this was taking place during the final decades that consummated the demise of two of the greatest empires the world has seen: the Iranian Safavis and the Indian Moghuls.

These empires met along a fault line that has persisted down the millennia, as though the raw geography of the region has forever determined its political configuration. They split much of the Asian landmass between them, with the Safavis ruling the Iranian plateau and the Moghuls the Indian subcontinent. Kandahar's lot—as it was before and would be ever afterward—was to mark the cusp between the two. It changed hands a dozen times.

Of course I've heard of the Moghuls: they built the Taj Mahal. I've heard of the Safavis too, but I can't dredge up much beyond the name. I decide I just have to delve back a little further in time, to try to picture the context at the eve of Afghanistan's emergence as an independent country. Without some sense of the situation that allowed a whole new country to be born, the details of the labor pains aren't going to mean very much. There must have been a crack somewhere, it seems to me. Some kind of geopolitical fissure that the budding Afghanistan was able to force open, the way the sprouting root of an apricot kernel splits apart the hard shell. The opportunity Ahmad Shah cleverly seized to capitalize on Kandahar's location and its road must have been more profound than the passage of a single caravan.

I don't see any way to avoid plunging into some more research. I note down a few titles and authors' names from footnotes in Hamid Karzai's schoolbooks.

I find the books on a U.S. trip, in my university library. I photocopy them cover to cover for reading at my leisure. That happens later. The fat copies, held together with black binder clips, stick out over the edge of the wooden bookshelf I had a carpenter make up in Kandahar. I've adopted a baby goat as a pet and cannot bring myself to bar him from my room, since he cries so plaintively when I do. He loves munching on one of these volumes in particular, a book by Laurence Lockhart called
The Fall of the Safavi Dynasty
.