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