The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (24 page)

These questions became even more difficult to answer when applied to the biggest warlords, the leaders of powerful tribes. Much of the previous generation of tribal leaders had died or fled during the three decades of war, and the men who replaced them often clawed their way to prominence on the battlefield. Maybe they were simple gunmen in the 1980s when they faced Soviet tanks, but by now they were dignified elders who sat on tribal councils and represented thousands of kinsmen. Tribes traditionally served as the
main political forces in southern Afghanistan, especially when the government has been weak. In the uncertainty of life in Kandahar, tribalism had again emerged as an important way of deciding whom to trust. The major tribes had no official power in the government, but seemed capable of reaching decision with broad authority. The United Nations spent millions of dollars on successive programs to disarm the warlords and tribal chiefs, but in Kandahar these programs had little practical effect on the tribal strongmen. Everybody assumed they could mobilize thousands of armed men if necessary.

I didn’t realize quite how much authority rested with these unofficial chiefs until I looked into the death of a diplomat. Glyn Berry, fifty-nine, political director of Canada’s reconstruction team, died in January 2006 when a suicide bomber drove a silver minivan packed with explosives into a military convoy. The Canadians evacuated their injured and dead, and left the lead investigation to the Afghan police. Officers poked through the wreckage until they found the identification numbers on the chassis and engine block of the attacker’s vehicle, a four-cylinder diesel Toyota Town Ace. They also deciphered the licence plate number, and went looking for its owner. This kind of police investigation did not usually work in Kandahar, where people make deals in cash with no records. Hundreds of nearly identical Toyotas stand in huge lots on the edge of the city, a waypoint for car smugglers. But the investigators got lucky in the hours that followed the diplomat’s death: the traffic department pointed them to the vehicle’s last registered owner. He showed them letters certifying that he sold the vehicle to a second man, who in turn could document the fact that he sold the minivan to another pair of men. One of the buyers was missing a leg, he said, and the other was named Pir Mohammed. Police arrested Mr. Mohammed the next morning, when he couldn’t come up with a good explanation for what he did with the vehicle. They searched his house and reported finding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a Kalashnikov rifle, ammunition, documents in Arabic and a photograph of a reputed Taliban leader.
His home also had car parts strewn around the courtyard, which relatives explained as the detritus of a second-hand car business, but which the police saw as evidence that he ran a chop shop for turning vehicles into bombs. The officers threw him into the cramped holding cells at police headquarters. In his mug shot, he looks like any other local resident, perhaps thirty years old, wearing a suit vest over his traditional clothes, with a mop of curly black hair sticking out from his turban. The police report called Mr. Mohammed a “terrorist” and a “mastermind.” The document offers little to support the idea that he was any sort of ringleader, but under the circumstances it did seem reasonable to hold him.

However, the investigation did not seem reasonable to Kandahar’s most powerful tribal warlord, Mullah Naqib. He was sometimes called by his full name, Naqibullah, and sometimes people used labels other than “warlord” to describe him because that word didn’t seem big enough for his hulking presence. Looking back through my newspaper stories, it’s interesting to see how my shorthand for him started out cold and analytical—I described him as a “powerbroker” in 2006—but later became warmer, and by 2007 I was calling him a “jovial, grey-bearded strongman.” Among all the old warriors who fought the Soviets and later became leaders in southern Afghanistan, he was easily the most prominent. His forces turned the Arghandab valley north of Kandahar city into a killing ground in the 1980s, repelling wave after wave of Soviet troops from the pomegranate orchards and grape fields. After the Russians finally retreated, the communist administration reached an understanding with Mullah Naqib that recognized his authority in the valley—a truce that likely saved the local government from being overrun by mujahedeen rebels. The communist regime eventually collapsed in 1992, and Mullah Naqib’s tribesmen joined the rush to divide the spoils among the former resistance fighters, but he played peacemaker again in 1994 when the Taliban started sweeping away the squabbling mujahedeen factions. Mullah Naqib’s faction was the
largest, and he represented a tribe, the Alokozai, whose fighting strength had been noted by every commander in the region since Alexander the Great. Mullah Naqib avoided a bloodbath with his decision to pull his men back into their strongholds north of the city, handing over power to the Taliban. He later served as kingmaker for a third time after 2001, when he helped broker the Taliban’s surrender and threw his support behind the new regime of Hamid Karzai. Despite his lack of official status in the government, he continued his role as adjudicator of disputes, holding court in his comfortable house on the north side of Kandahar city, so it was natural that his tribesmen would ask him for help with the case of the slain diplomat.

The man arrested for the bombing, Pir Mohammed, belonged to a family of Islamic teachers, respected members of the Alokozai tribe. In the hours after his arrest, they visited Mullah Naqib and pleaded their case, arguing that it wasn’t possible for him to have assisted the insurgency. Their family had feuded with the Taliban in previous years, they claimed, over a disagreement about a holiday on the lunar calendar. The warlord considered their case, and what happened next became a study in the way power worked in Kandahar. This was the moment of transaction, when a family trades its status within the tribe for a favour. Mullah Naqib led a delegation of elders to the home of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half-brother, who made a phone call to the governor. The governor called the police chief, and the suspect went free. All of this happened in less than two days. It illustrated whom ordinary people trusted to solve their problems—a tribal leader, not the government—and showed the hierarchy within the local administration, ostensibly run by the governor but supervised by Ahmed Wali Karzai, a member of the ruling family.

My newspaper articles about this incident suggested that Mullah Naqib was an anachronism, following ancient rules of tribal leadership that did not belong in modern Afghanistan. I wrote at length about interference in the courts, and international efforts to build
a new system of justice. Canadian officials were not pleased about Mullah Naqib’s meddling with the investigation, and responded to my articles by raising the issue with Afghanistan’s intelligence chief in Kabul. One of my stories was accompanied by a photo of Mullah Naqib shaking hands with Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, and the affair got picked up by blogs under the headline, “Harper shakes hands with terrorist warlord.” I had not intended to portray the warlord as a villain, but the tone of the coverage rankled Sarah Chayes, an American author who was then living in Kandahar city. She scolded me via e-mail, complaining that I painted the warlord as a “monster” and suggesting that the international community should try to improve its relations with respected figures such as Naqib.

She was right; the warlord deserved better. Mullah Naqib’s influence may not have been welcomed by the Canadians in that particular episode, but in reality the government’s justice system was far less trustworthy, overall, than he was. He may have gained fame and power by shooting rockets at Soviet aircraft, but in his middle years he had played a stabilizing role in Kandahar that few people fully appreciated—until his death.

The warlord’s territory had been fairly calm as the rest of the south erupted into insurgency in 2006, which led to rumours that Naqib must have cut a deal of some kind with the Taliban. The insurgents themselves spread those whispers: one Taliban operative tried to persuade me that Mullah Naqib had endorsed an insurgent attack because he was disappointed with the government. Any doubts about his loyalty to Kabul were erased in March 2007, however, when a bomb exploded near his armoured sport-utility vehicle, injuring him badly. The Taliban wanted him out of the way, but the bearish old man did not give up. He returned to Kandahar after several months of treatment in India, limping and leaning on a crutch. He looked tired, with white streaks in his beard. His long-time friend Sarah Chayes said he seemed disconsolate about the worsening situation. When he finally died of a heart attack in October 2007, she
claimed that his death was not related to the bombing. She sat with him on the veranda of his home the night before he died, looking at his gardens and talking about the Taliban’s growing strength. “He died of a broken heart,” she said.

Insurgents had been trickling into Arghandab district in the previous months, but the warlord’s death unleashed a flood of trouble in his home territory. At the time of Mullah Naqib’s funeral, no regular troops were posted in his district. Military bases had been unnecessary in the valley, even though the terrain offered plenty of hiding places for insurgents and could have served as a pathway to the edge of Kandahar city from the Taliban enclaves in the north. In the days after Mullah Naqib’s death, however, many people wondered if the Alokozai tribe would continue serving as guardians of those northern approaches. Feuds emerged among tribal figures who wanted to succeed him as leader, and President Hamid Karzai, who rarely risked a trip to Kandahar, arrived by helicopter to resolve the leadership question. As hundreds of tribesmen gathered in Mullah Naqib’s front garden to mourn his passing, the president stood before them and placed a silver turban on the head of Kalimullah Naqibi, a chubby twenty-six-year-old whose main qualification for the job was being Mullah Naqib’s son. The president obviously hoped that the young man would maintain his father’s loyalty to the government, although some in attendance grumbled that the Karzai might also have wanted an inexperienced leader for the tribe as a way of ensuring the Karzai family’s dominance of Kandahar city politics. The official line was that the president’s gesture merely recognized a selection already made by Alokozai tribal elders, but most people in the city understood the central government had interfered with tribal traditions. I felt sorry for the new leader, sitting in his father’s house, carrying his father’s cellphone, trying to live up to his father’s legend. He claimed to be happy about his new role, but then he paused, and his face clouded. Speaking more quietly, he invoked a Pashto saying—“When the turban falls from the head, it lands on
the shoulders”—meaning that the burdens of the father are passed to the sons.

The weight of those burdens soon became clear. Arghandab’s police chief received threatening phone calls a week after Mullah Naqib’s death, warning him to allow safe passage through the district for Taliban fighters. He refused, and two weeks later hundreds of insurgents poured into the valley in a coordinated assault from three sides. They swarmed the north bank of the river, seizing about half the district and storming into Mullah Naqib’s hometown. They danced on the roof of the warlord’s house and dug holes around his property in an apparent search for a weapons stash. Mullah Naqib had surrendered many of the arms he used during his fight against the Soviets, but he had been rumoured to keep a supply of leftovers, perhaps even shoulder-mounted missiles capable of shooting down NATO aircraft. It wasn’t clear whether the Taliban found anything on their treasure hunt, but the raid sent a message about the insurgents’ power. Foreign troops scrambled to muster a counterattack, and soon pushed the Taliban away.

This marked a change in the military landscape. For years, the primary threats to Kandahar city had come from the southwest, the same places where Operation Medusa had been fought. Now the international troops found themselves opening a new front, defending from the north. Arghandab grew steadily more violent after Naqib’s death, eventually requiring entire battalions of US troops to keep the insurgents at bay. The valley became notorious as one of the most dangerous places in the country.

Mullah Naqib was the biggest of the fallen warlords, but not the last. The Taliban’s assassination campaign gathered pace after his loss. One of the failed candidates to replace him, and a powerful warlord in his own right, was Abdul Hakim Jan, an uneducated fighter whose trademark was a habit of wearing blue clothes. He had been fighting the Taliban since the movement’s birth, and according to legend even armed his wives with automatic rifles. He reinvented
himself as a police commander under the new government, becoming a fierce opponent of the insurgents. That probably explains why the Taliban went after him with such spectacular blood lust, sending a suicide bomber who caught him as he was sitting down to watch a dogfight and enjoy a picnic with tea and oranges. The blast killed him, along with perhaps a hundred fellow spectators who had gathered in a field to see the match. In the aftermath of that assassination, one of the first people I called for information was Malim Akbar Khan Khakrezwal, a former intelligence chief and an ex-mujahedeen leader himself, who said the warlord had been receiving threats from the Taliban but refused to stay away from public gatherings. Such advice didn’t help Mr. Khakrezwal himself, as gunmen found him outside his house four months later and shot him dead. His brother, a former police chief, had already been assassinated in another bombing. The next month it was Habibullah Jan, the chain-smoking warlord whose cellphone numbers I had given to the Canadian commander, who was gunned down near his house. Men on motorcycles sprayed him with bullets as he was taking a short evening walk from his office to his wife’s quarters.

It went on and on, like a panicked pulse. The assassination squads behaved with terrible efficiency, and usually without attracting much notice. We never heard of any arrests. The killers often struck in daylight with plenty of witnesses, and they usually followed a routine: two insurgents on a small Honda motorbike drive up, the man on the back of the bike pulls a Kalashnikov from under his shawl and unleashes a short burst. The hits that gained attention were the big warlords or major government officials, but more often the targets were petty. The death of an aid worker, or a translator, or just the unlucky relative of somebody suspected of collaborating with the foreigners, did little to help the insurgents on the battlefield. But the killings communicated the Taliban’s power, and sapped the will of those trying to help the government. When my acquaintances started dying, at first I posted short obituaries like this on Facebook: