The Punishment of Virtue (16 page)

Close to half the British force perished in the engagement, and the panicked flight back to Kandahar sounds frankly hellish. “In one confused mass European and native, officer and private, old and young, brave and coward, fled along the road.”
²⁶
Mounts were bleeding from shrapnel and slashing sword wounds; donkeys and ponies and camels were held back in a jostling mass to pick up the wounded; Afghans were mixed in with the British at such close quarters that fighting could only continue by means of knives and bayonets, and “the road was soon slippery with blood.” To add to the uproar, thirst set in; the frenzied British almost began killing each other to get at the water when they finally reached a stream.

Writing from his hospital bed afterwards, one of the embittered officers lashed out at the boardroom generals whom he was sure had commanded this operation from the comfort of faraway India: “Playing chess by telegraph may succeed, but making war and planning a campaign on the Helmand from the cool shades of breezy Simla is an experiment which will not, I hope, be repeated.”
²⁷

But it is repeated, again and again.

The British disaster worked to the advantage of the newly inaugurated amir in Kabul, Abd ar-Rahman Khan, and his hopes to unite Afghanistan. It fortified the Liberal view in London that Britain should not seek to hold either Kabul or Kandahar. A decision was made to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan.

But the smarting British did have to avenge the mortifying defeat at Maywand, and rescue their garrison now besieged in Kandahar. And so, under an able and ruthless general, the Redcoats left Kabul for India, taking not the most direct route via Jalalabad, but the longer southern road that passed through Kandahar.

Amir Abd ar-Rahman contentedly paved their way. “I will merely say that our march up to the present time has been a veritable picnic,” writes one pleased officer, “not unaccompanied by a rubber of whist in the afternoon, or a little duck and quail slaughter.”
²⁸
Abd ar-Rahman did everything he could to make the journey agreeable. For it would be to his political advantage if Ayyub Khan, his arch rival and the hero of Maywand, was defeated, and even more so if it was the British, not Abd Ar-Rahman himself, who did the defeating. So when, at the end of their pleasant journey, the British did indeed thrash the Herati amir, they put Abd Ar-Rahman well on his way to uniting Afghanistan.
²⁹

Still, it took him about a decade of intense and sometimes savage fighting, as well as several forced relocations of population—ethinic cleansings, in effect—to complete the job, to force his unruly countrymen to submit to him. Once he did, once he was solidly possessed of the whole country, it was, in his view, “of the first and greatest importance to mark out a boundary line all around Afghanistan.”
³⁰

This project, which both Britain and Russia had come to desire as strongly as Afghanistan did, was almost ruined by a fresh British election that replaced the Liberal doves with the hawkish Conservatives.
³¹
The viceroy in India sent letters to the amir “in a tone that I was not accustomed to,” sniffs Abd ar-Rahman, “for he wrote in a dictatorial manner, advising me upon matters of internal policy in the administration of my kingdom, and telling me how I ought to treat my subjects.”
³²

Still, the amir exercised his patience and eventually received a British delegation led by Sir H. Mortimer Durand, whose task was to reach an agreement on a permanent boundary between the two kingdoms. This mission traced the line that till today has marked out Afghanistan's southern and eastern frontier.

Durand, who later served as ambassador to the United States, remembered the boundary talks as being a bit knotty. The issues to be settled, he told an audience at the Central Asian Society in London in 1907, were “rather complicated, and it took us a long time to thresh them all out.”
³³
Durand claimed that the amir did not have a very good sense of geography, and was forever challenging the British maps. “‘Whenever you are dealing with one of my alleged encroachments, it is made very big on the map,' Durand remembers Abd ar-Rahman complaining. “‘When you are dealing with one of your own, I notice, it is quite a tiny little thing.'”
³⁴

That sounds just like the amir. And he was probably right. Then, as now, no one had much good to say about the border that was eventually agreed upon, as the medley of even Anglo scholarly opinion in the upcoming footnote indicates.
³⁵

Probably no one hated the Durand Line more than Amir Abd ar-Rahman, who was appalled when he saw an advance copy of the map Britain intended to use as the basis for the Durand Commission's work. “It is necessary to mention here that in the map sent to me by the Viceroy all the countries of the Waziri, Chaman and the railway station there…Chitral, and other countries lying in between, were marked as belonging to India.”
³⁶
You can almost hear Abd ar-Rahman gulp.

These were regions that had been cut out of Afghanistan under the Treaty of Gandomak. Abd ar-Rahman had been quietly courting them for years, seeking to bring them back inside his newly united Afghanistan.
³⁷

The amir made his reservations known in a letter to the viceroy in India, correctly predicting endless tribulation on the frontier if the British went through with their plan. But his arguments were rebuffed. The overwhelming power of the British Empire made further argument impossible. This appears to be another moment at which the amir decided the better part of valor was patience. In return for a 50 percent increase in the subsidy Britain was paying him, and some valuable weapons, Abd ar-Rahman gave up his claim to territories amounting to something like half of modern-day Pakistan.

Between the lines of the diplomatic language in his autobiography, the amir makes it clear that he felt forced into this agreement by the threat of war. And his hostility toward British advances into what he considers his territories never wanes. A new railhead in Chaman he felt most painfully: “They were pushing the railway line into my country just like pushing a knife into my vitals,”
³⁸
he groans. It seems clear that Amir Abd ar-Rahman hoped some later course of events would allow him or his heirs to reverse his concession, just as he had been able to reverse his early concession of a separate, British-held Kandahar.

But so far, that course of events has never materialized. Afghan lore holds that the Durand Agreement expired after one hundred years—that would have been in 1993 or 1998, depending on whether you count from the sealing of the agreement during ceremonies in Kabul or from the final demarcation of the line. But nothing in writing actually stipulates a hundred-year deadline.

In 1947, India became independent of British rule, and in a violent and painful split, majority Muslim areas in its north were partitioned off into the new state of Pakistan. Thus, Pakistan has inherited the decades-old tension over a boundary that is unpopular with Afghans and its own Pashtuns alike. Even without an explicit hundred-year expiration date, the treaty's ongoing validity is cast in some doubt since one of its signatories—British India—no longer exists. Recent governments in Kabul, including the Taliban, have never been willing to revalidate it by explicitly reratifying it with Britain's successor, Pakistan.

To this uncertainty, the Pakistani government seems to react with a version of the British Tories' forward policy, assuming that the best defense is a good offense.

After the fall of the Taliban, for example, Pakistan quickly moved the Chaman border crossing up about a mile inside Afghanistan. What used to be a teeming Afghan bazaar was bulldozed, homes wrecked, shopkeepers ordered to clear their wares or lose them. For, as one of them later told me, they were informed that the “dust beneath their shops was Pakistani dust.” At a ceremony in early 2002, Governor Gul Agha Shirzai laid the cornerstone of a towering new Friendship Gate straddling the place like an arch of triumph. This gate marks the new Pakisian-Afghan border. The U.S. overseas development agency, USAID, has invested in a new state-of-theart customs and immigration complex on the Afghan side of this new line.

Thus has Pakistan, assisted by the Kandahar provincial government and the United States, and unhindered by President Karzai, nibbled away yet another morsel of Afghanistan.

JANUARY–APRIL 2002

I
CAN
'
T REMEMBER HOW
, but I did manage to browbeat the Pakistani bureaucrats into allowing me back in their country. Rushing now to get home to Quetta, my big driver tried to skip the stop I insisted on in the Chaman bazaar to drink one last round of tea with my Achekzais. It was a delicious moment, suspended in time, infused with a loving kind of fellowship.

And then I couldn't delay it any longer. We climbed back into the long-suffering yellow taxi, and headed down the switchback road to Quetta. It was January 11, 2002. I was tasked to meet my NPR replacement at the airport and do a pass-off, before finally pulling out of the region.

What I was really looking forward to was dinner with Uncle Aziz Khan Karzai—King Uncle, as he is known. He was the sparkling and sharp-eyed gentleman who, during the drawn-out negotiations for the surrender of Kandahar two months back, had helped me understand the Pashtun propensity for consensus building.

We had a lovely evening. I remember Uncle Aziz aligning and realigning the fine, olive-green stones of his prayer beads on the sofa cushion beside him as he voiced his fears about what would come next for Afghanistan. By this time, his nephew Hamid had left Kandahar for his capital, Kabul, accompanied by a vast crowd of well-wishers and job seekers. He had settled in the sprawling, tattered royal palace, where, bereft of the most elementary infrastructure, he had set about creating a nation-state out of whole cloth.

Aziz was troubled by the humanitarian free-for-all he knew would be unleashed as opportunists poured into the Afghan vacuum, riding the projected tide of aid. “They are sharpening their teeth and sharpening their knives,” he said of the old barons of local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). War profiteers, they have lived for years off the humanitarian bonanza, the latest incarnation of the foreign subsidy that has long sustained the Afghan tribes. “The word NGO should be struck from the English language!” Uncle Aziz cried. He knew something about it. He had placed several of these barons in charge of local branches of big international nonprofits, back in the pre-Taliban heyday of the aid biz.

At last I rose to leave. I turned in the doorway to thank Aziz one last time, and abruptly he asked me:

“Wouldn't you come back and help us?”

The question hit like a bolt from a crossbow. My ears registered with surprise what my mouth replied.

“Yes.”

And then our thoughts started tumbling out, in an excited jostle. “You find someone to send you here,” he said, “someone to pay your salary, and we will give you all the authority.”

Almost without faltering, as though hypnotized, I set out upon the course so abruptly opened by that brief exchange.

For this was what, unwittingly, I was waiting for. Well before 9/11, a part of me had been casting about for such a sense of potential as I was feeling now. I could no longer bear to watch our Atlantic democracies go through the motions, in a business of democracy, while half our people didn't even vote. That couldn't be right. Through my reporting, I had gained the conviction that somewhere out there, from one of these postconflict disaster areas, a phoenix was going to rise. Someone from some other place—not America or Western Europe—was going to winch us up out of this rut.

Though I searched, I did not find it in the Balkans. The very worst tendencies of that region's peoples had been stoked white hot by cynics and by disillusionment. Everyone in the Balkans was out for himself.

This was different. The context was much bigger. The context was the alleged confrontation between the two great cultural and ideological rivals of the day: Islam and the West. Both of them were part of me. Hamid Karzai was different, too. He was the most inspiring political leader I had come close to in my adult life.

And this man's uncle wanted me to help?

I went to the United States, instead of home to Paris, and spent two months casting around for a way to do it.

The time was punctuated by calls to Uncle Aziz in Kabul to reaffirm the reality of it all. He had joined the team in Kabul and would describe life in the leprous presidential palace, the Afghan equivalent of the White House—an empty, echoing place, without steady electricity to stave off the midwinter cold, or telephones, or a single computer, let alone the Internet, or a satellite dish to catch coverage of nephew Hamid's first, acclaimed visit to the United States.

Karzai's elegant style and ringing eloquence took Washington by storm. Newspaper reports were comparing him to South Africa's Nelson Mandela, and commenting on his dazzling sense of fashion, as, grafting together typical clothes of different Afghan regions, Karzai invented a new national dress. The acclaim was only reaching Kabul in tiny fragments.

Stunned by Aziz's description of the home front, I wondered: how anyone could possibly start building a country in such conditions. Everyone knew how backward and shattered Afghanistan was even before the latest conflict, after centuries of isolation and three straight decades of war. Given the notoriety of the place and the symbolism of the moment in the wake of 9/11, I was astounded that someone like Microsoft's Bill Gates had not thought to pack off a half dozen computers and the $5,000 satellite dish it would take to establish an Internet connection. All of the postconflict zones of the past decade had been in similarly desperate shape when the shooting stopped. I thought that if the United Nations wanted to do something really useful, it could organize a rapid-reaction force for public utilities: a team of engineers on call to dash to countries emerging from war and restore communications, electricity, running water.

In the end, at Aziz Khan's suggestion, I fell in with another one of his nephews, Qayum, President Karzai's senior by a decade. Qayum Karzai and his wife, Patricia, had founded a nonprofit organization four years earlier in Baltimore: Afghans for Civil Society (ACS). After a brief telephone conversation, I suddenly found myself field director for ACS's as yet unborn operations in Afghanistan.

In a similarly noninstitutional way, I roped my older sister Eve Lyman into the venture. Radiating a dazzling gold, like a human sun—not just from the color of her mane of curls and the golden clothes she wears to set them off, but from the intensity of her passion and drive for life—Eve was at a turning point too. She jumped in with all her being, and side by side we set about inventing an NGO.

It was like being poised at the lip of a bright, churning, intoxicating tract of white water. The twinned feelings of urgency and opportunity were overpowering. With inspiring Karzai at the helm and Americans of good faith in the field, it actually seemed Afghanistan might be the place where some of the damage could be repaired—the damage caused by years of ignorance and neglect, arrogance and withdrawal; the damage caused by the surrender of the force of ideas, in much of the United States and the Muslim community, to those who would split the world into opposing civilizations, irrevocably hostile. Afghanistan might just prove them wrong.

And how fitting:Afghanistan, which for seven years had symbolized the twisting of Islam into a glowering fascism—bent on social control, isolation, extirpation of difference—could regain its ancient role as a connector of empires, facilitating the exchange of riches, people, and ideas between them.

This vision for post-Taliban Afghanistan was always, and openly, the inspiration at Afghans for Civil Society. We never espoused the traditional humanitarian credo of rigid political neutrality. It was not our aim simply to ease physical suffering indiscriminately. Rather, we wished to focus our necessarily limited activities to influence, in whatever tiny way, the direction the new Afghanistan would take. And unashamedly, we wished to promote awareness, understanding, and mutual appreciation between Afghans and Americans.

The window of opportunity seemed unparalleled. Here was a Muslim country that had twice in two decades rid itself of tyranny thanks to U.S. assistance. I thought of the Kosovo Albanians' indelible gratitude following the 1999 expulsion of the Serbs by NATO, the United States in the lead. On September 12, 2001, the light of a thousand candles lit the Kosovar capital as Albanian Muslims thronged the streets in condolence for America's loss. A Kosovar friend called me in Paris to say that a group of his peers wanted to enlist in the U.S. army to fight against Al Qaeda, and what should he tell them?

I hardly entertained any delusions of the same kind of outpouring from the prickly Afghans. And yet this historical juncture was pregnant with a unique potential. In contrast to the Balkans, Afghanistan was blessed with visionary leadership in Hamid Karzai. But the Afghans had suffered from too many leaps of faith in their recent turbulent past to sustain another if it did not pay off fast. Eve and I judged there were about six months to make a palpable difference before the moment would be lost. I went back to Afghanistan to meet Qayum in person and search for likely projects.

Qayum and I hit it off instantly, connecting, fanning the embers of each other's enthusiasms.

One decision I urged upon him during that exploratory trip was to base Afghans for Civil Society in Kandahar, not Kabul. I knew how it went with postconflict capitals. They always draw the bulk of the international resources, as humanitarian organizations devise projects within driving distance of their spacious headquarters, and new restaurants open up to cater to the foreign crowds. I felt that it was important to reach beyond the capital and the artificial world that develops there. Only by that extra effort can money be distributed with any fairness through the country being assisted. And only by that effort can any sense be gained of the country's real conditions. In the capital, solutions are viewed as abstract models, while the details—the local anecdotes that illustrate the projects' true impact and meaning—never come to light.

A new culture takes root in postconflict capitals like Kabul. I am not sure—to adopt the terms of a debate among some humanitarians and some of their beneficiaries—whether humanitarian action as currently practiced constitutes a form of colonialism. I do find, however, reading those accounts of the nineteenth-century British in Afghanistan—with their servants, foxhounds, and cigars—a certain parallel with at least the lifestyle of Western aid workers in Kabul.

They live apart from Afghans in guarded compounds. They do not walk about, but are driven by chauffeurs. They eat special food, imitation Western, bought in special stores—instead of popping down to the corner for fresh-baked local bread. They indulge in riotous drinking parties, with almost no thought for how this may offend their Afghan staff, almost no realization that such behavior in itself constitutes a security risk: in a strictly dry culture, many Afghans take exception to the injection of such taboo behavior into their country, seeing it as exactly the kind of corruption that Westerners bring with them—another reason to keep Westerners out.

My bias in favor of local action immersed in local knowledge was to be confirmed and reconfirmed during my time in Afghanistan.

Such a bias would have argued in favor of any provincial town over Kabul. Even more so Kandahar, with its special symbolism as Afghanistan's former capital and the native region of all its rulers. Kandahar, I knew, also had a special symbolism as the native region of the Taliban. In the new Afghanistan, it was a pariah. But I was sure that if Kandahar was left behind, the rest of Afghanistan would not be going anywhere.

Besides, I loved the place.

That spring of 2002, residents of the city dizzied by this latest revolution—their fourth in a quarter century—wore out a path to the house of the younger Karzai brother, Ahmad Wali. As the de facto representative of the new president in his home base, the de facto elder of the Popalzai tribe now that President Hamid was off in Kabul, and as a man known for getting things done, Ahmad Wali Karzai was one of the few fixed landmarks in sight.

Like most houses in Kandahar, his consists of two separate buildings, one for the family, one for receiving guests. The private residence is set back from the public one across a few feet of dry rose garden, where birds in wicker cages sing. Small bedrooms, a kitchen, and a Western-style living room for private talks or honored friends open onto a carpeted hallway with cushions on the floor, which serves as the general gathering place. Tea and glass dishes of raisins and pistachios, and meals laid out on a plastic cloth, are served here in shifts: first family and friends, then the platoon of young men who keep the place running. They are “Karzai's people,” utterly devoted, utterly respectful, but reveling in a certain irreverent intimacy. Inside this sanctum the Karzai magic reigns, a kind of gracious calm, in the face of the hot, dusty whirlwind—human and meteorological—buffeting the house.

The front building is dedicated to the tribal elders and petitioners who fetch up at all hours, and must be welcomed and heard out without exception. Five separate receiving rooms are arrayed about its two floors. The indefatigable, beturbaned Lajwar guides each delegation to its appointed place, according to its rank, and whether—because of some feud or private confidence—it might be inopportune for its members to see or be seen by some other party present. Lajwar executes the steps of this complicated minuet with a surefootedness born of a detailed but unspoken familiarity with the private histories of all comers.

That spring of 2002 the building hardly emptied. You could tell with a glance if Ahmad Wali was home by the crowd of shoes waiting outside the door.