The New Republic Online
"The game is so large that one sees but a little at a time," said Mahbub Ali, the Afghan horse trader and occasional British agent, advising patience to Rudyard Kipling's Kim, who was hungrily learning the spy trade at the height of the Great Game between Russia and England. It is wise counsel these days in Afghanistan, where the last days of Taliban rule have brought forth an avalanche of political intrigue, much of it utterly opaque to those unfamiliar with this decimated land. A few weeks ago an Afghan friend of mine was sitting in a town near Kabul, writing seemingly innocent lines on pieces of paper--permissions granted for petrol, guns, cars--on behalf of his illiterate friend, a commander with the Northern Alliance. Three weeks later I ran into him again, this time in Kandahar. I call him Sami, short for Samiullah, though he's assumed an assortment of names over the years as his identities have changed--Taliban Acting Intelligence Minister, man on the run, rug merchant. Now I learned that some of those letters weren't as innocent as they seemed; Sami was informing various mujahedin and Taliban commanders in the provinces surrounding Kabul of a plot to sabotage Afghanistan's new government. "My Dear Friend," the letters began, "I would like to inform you about the international imperialism and Western-style government that THEY are bringing to our country. America and Western countries want to bring back the former king. It is our obligation to Islam to prohibit their activities. We will try to make a real mujahedin government inside Afghanistan. Now you must keep control of your areas, find artillery and weapons. If you need some materials from our side, just inform me and I will cooperate with you.... God will help us and I will inform you by letter again of your orders and our program."
So my friend is a fundamentalist, a militant anti-American who hopes to restore something like Taliban rule, right? Well, not exactly. Sami says he doesn't believe what he writes in those letters at all; in fact, he considers the king's return to be Afghanistan's only hope. So why did he write them? Because Sami has enough experience working with the Taliban, being jailed by the Taliban, pursued by the Taliban, and forgiven by the Taliban to know the importance of befriending one's enemies. He's playing both sides, keeping his options open in case the tide swings back the other way, leaving both his enemies and his friends guessing. In other words, he's playing politics in Afghanistan.
Ami is Pashtun, and his clan is the Populzai, the same as Hamid Karzai's. His clansmen are Taliban and anti-Taliban, and like everyone here they deal in tribal negotiations and in cash. Right now they are negotiating with, and extorting from, the newest and most powerful tribe in this region that stretches from Kandahar to the non-border with Pakistan: the Americans. Clad in black wool caps, the Americans are dropping money into the economy, buying generators and spare parts. They're encamped in the house of the governor, Gul Agha Shirzai, who is flush with Afghan notes supplied, everyone says, by Americans. Some Americans have also camped out in the guest house in Mullah Omar's lavish but bombed-out palace, which Hamid Karzai has made his Kandahar base. They're installed at the airport, where two days ago two sick, hungry Al Qaeda foot soldiers crawled out of a hole. (The Afghan soldiers keeping watch beat them and discovered about 60 more in unknown underground hideouts.) FBI agents are building a high-security prison at the airport to hold Al Qaeda and top-level Taliban both for interrogation and to prevent the uprising that ended so bloodily last month in Mazar-e-Sharif. The Americans are learning how this all works. One officer told his men to be careful not to shoot anti-Taliban fighters, that if they meet armed Taliban they should simply take their guns, send them home, and tell them the war is over. And be sure not to fire at Afghans shooting fireworks to celebrate the end of Ramadan. "We just hope the Americans don't leave us now or we won't be able to defend ourselves," one of Sami's cousins, a dark-haired, chubby mujahedin named Jumai Gul, told me. "If they go, the Taliban will be back in one week." He'd grown fond of the Americans as they fought the Taliban together in the mountains around Kandahar. One of them had given him a pair of green goggles that he kept in his bedroom. "He was an older guy, with yellowish hair," he said. They'd eaten together, talked by hand gestures. Then one night the Al Qaeda and Taliban soldiers on the other side of the river advanced, he said, to within 400 meters. "It was nighttime and we were all confused. They came on our side. We went on theirs. We couldn't surrender because we knew they'd kill us. And the Americans in the sky didn't know we were Karzai forces." That's when his American friend died. "He was killed by the American bombs." Jumai Gul still had shrapnel in his thigh from the attack, and still carried in his pocket a folded-up reward flier with a picture of Osama bin Laden and his right-hand man, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, with a promise of $25 million from America.
One night i took a long, rocky journey out of Kandahar with Sami's cousin, a well-known commander named Shawali Khan, who is based near the Kandahar airport. He's a jolly pasha of a man who looks like a drawing out of a child's Arabian Nights--he has a lion's mane black beard, thick eyebrows, a blue gown embroidered with silver flowing over his enormous torso, and he walks in a cloud of rose oil perfume. He eats too much, smokes too much, spits and burps too much. He commands a force of more than 200 soldiers, including his brother Jumai Gul. We stopped at a village where the Americans had accidentally bombed themselves, and paid a visit to Shawali Khan's cousin, a former powerful Taliban commander named Mullah Azam. The mullah's father, an old, white-bearded man in a white gown and white turban, was reclining in his mud hut with a gaslight. He told us that his son was sleeping and still fasting, though Ramadan had just ended. "He's angry and afraid," someone else in the room said. Mullah Azam is a typical Talib. He grew up in a madrassa, and believes in no other form of education. He was a fearless fighter and powerful commander at the Bagram front lines north of Kabul. Last year bin Laden invited him to his base, promised cooperation, forces, supplies. In these last months he was pursued by American planes as he drove his truck with no lights from post to post under the night sky. Now Mullah Azam is the ward of his cousin Shawali Khan, to whom he forfeited his shiny red Toyota pickup.
As we sat with his father, he bounded bravely into the room, ready for a fight. "We'll still destroy you," he said to Shawali Khan, the only man who can protect him from prison or worse. "If you were a Muslim, you wouldn't support Karzai because he's receiving aid from the U.S. All the non-Muslims are uniting against us and we must support pan-Islamism," Mullah Azam said to Shawali Khan's brother, Jumai Gul, the next day. By then we were in Shawali Khan's village--a compound with two family houses, two guest houses, and a cow shed--in the desert mountains. Then, in the middle of our conversation, Mullah Azam suddenly clammed up and said he'd never had anything to do with the Arabs and was only a Taliban commander. Jumai Gul became furious. "Why don't you tell the truth," he shouted in a high wail. "You were with Arabs for seven years and know everything about Al Qaeda and bin Laden--tell them the truth. It's clear to all of us that all the power belonged to the Arabs." Then he said to me, "He joined the Taliban because they gave him lots of money." "I will never speak about Al Qaeda's ideology," the mullah said, and lit a cigarette. "And why are you smoking?" Jumai Gul asked with a laugh. Unlike chewing tobacco, in which everyone here indulges, cigarettes were supposedly prohibited by the Taliban. "Because I'm unhappy and saw all my cars being driven by the Northern Alliance." At which point Sami whispered to me: "There's no ideology. Shawali protects him because he's our relative, and because he's given him all his cars!"
Mullah Azam had given Shawali Khan more than that. Two months ago Shawali Khan was captured by the Taliban. "They locked the door for three days, interrogated me, and decided to execute me." Though Shawali Khan had fought through Russian ambushes and survived an earlier Taliban imprisonment, this time he saw no way out. Mullah Azam heard of his cousin's plight, and he informed a bigger Talib. The big Talib, Mullah Rahmatullah, whom Shawali Khan had once saved, purchased Shawali Khan's freedom for ten long guns and100,000 Pakistani rupees--approximately $1,600. Now, in just a matter of weeks, they've exchanged fates. Two days ago Mullah Rahmatullah was captured by Governor Gul Agha's men in Kandahar and interrogated in prison; it was Shawali Khan's turn to bargain and wheedle him out of prison. And now Shawali Khan is driving Mullah Azam's big truck, collecting his vehicles and weapons--and protecting him. There's an old Pashtun proverb, Sami told me, that goes something like this: "A cousin is good against another tribe. A brother is good against cousins. And a son is good against brothers." Which is why if you don't give birth to a son here in Pashtunwali land, you're as good as finished. "All your assets will go to your enemy," said Sami, who has only four daughters. And who's the enemy? Your cousin.
One morning, relatives from neighboring villages, Taliban and anti-Taliban, arrived for Eid al-Fitr and gathered over cups of tea and small dishes of sweets and nuts. Shawali Khan presided, giving out Afghan notes and discussing how to get more Taliban cars. Two men sat next to each other, one wrapped in a shiny black turban, the other in a shiny white turban. The black turban was happy and laughing. The white turban had a long, grim face. The black said of the white: "He made our lives so hard.” The white said: "The Taliban gave us money so we joined them. I am Taliban but I was also mujahed and fought the Russians." He pulled up his pant leg to show his scar. When I asked about the color of their turbans, everyone laughed. "When Karzai came we changed white for black like we used in the mujahedin time," said the black turban. "But this one only has white ones and can't buy a new one because the Taliban leader who was funding him is in hiding." The room trembled with giggles. When I asked how they made a living, the black turban said, "Now we are happy. The Taliban forbid us to grow our opium last year. But now Hamid Karzai told us we can smoke and drink and everything will be `broad-based,'" he laughed, riffing on the overused catchphrase for Afghanistan's future "broad-based" government. "So last month we planted our opium again. If we had other agriculture we wouldn't grow it, but we need the money," he said. After nine months he would harvest it and smuggle it to Iran. Someone in the room said: "Don't talk about the opium or the Americans will come and forbid it." But the black turban was too pleased about the future too care. "We send it to Europe and America," he confessed, "because you are the superpowers and have big money." As the gathering broke up we climbed up the rocky knoll behind the kraal to the family graveyard. One blue-painted raised tomb stood out from the rest, telling the family's story of badal, retaliation, one of the cornerstones of Pashtun society. It read, "Welcome to the Martyr's grave," and noted the Islamic date on which he died 13 months before. "The cruel people martyred him and we pray his spirit will be alive and we will pursue his enemy until we kill him." It was Shawali Khan's uncle, a former leader of the family and enemy of the Taliban, who'd been gunned down by family enemies loyal to the Taliban. The cause was an old land dispute that stretches back to the time when Shawali Khan's father was orphaned and this family of the same tribe captured their lands. Each time the political winds changed, the other family would rise to power and wrestle back the land. "It's our national right to hunt his enemies who were Taliban," said Shawali Khan's father, now the elder of the village. "First we'll kill the man who made the plan, then those who executed him. After we've taken our revenge we can send a delegation to solve the problem.” Shawali Khan's father was on his way out to settle the dispute of another family down the road, where two brothers were nearly killing each other because one went to the bazaar and brought back material, but no thread, to make clothes. As he left he said, "We have a proverb. Someone took his revenge after one hundred years. And another said, `You did it so fast? Why didn't you wait a little time?'" The idea being that the longer you wait, the clearer the situation will be.
Golden rays were falling on the mountains, and Shawali Khan decided to drive us into the desert to one of Afghanistan's most popular pilgrimage sites, Baba Nikke, which the Taliban vainly tried to ban as idolatrous. When we arrived he smoked a hash cigarette, stepped out of his shoes, and wandered into the grounds, which are centered on a sacred, multi-trunked tree, now festooned with pilgrims' offerings--rams' horns, goat bones, bits of cloth, tea cups. He prayed, kissed the Koran and its wooden stand inside the prayer room. It's a place of legends and a place where "possessed" women are brought to be cured of their demons or to die. The desert shapes were fading under shades of rusty light left behind by the sun. As we left, Shawali Khan, in his great gown and rose oil perfume, asked me if I'd facilitate some contacts with the Americans he'd fought alongside in the mountains last week. Apparently there was some internal Populzai friction and he wasn't assured of Karzai's financial support. "Everyone needs a foreign sponsor," someone said, "otherwise you are nothing here now." Shawali Khan's own general commander had just returned from Iran, where he'd spent the last year in exile. And the ex-Taliban Mullah Rahmatullah claimed that a former Taliban acting foreign minister has just opened an office in Quetta so that when Zahir Shah returns, the Taliban in waiting will launch their activities against him on Pakistan's behalf. And so the centrifugal game begins again. And the players are pretty much the same: monarchists, fundamentalists, nationalists, hopeful democrats, illiterate pawns. And the big players: Americans, Russians, Iranians, Pakistanis, Indians. "If the Americans abandon us like they did last time when the Russians retreated, it will be our doom," said Sami. "We will never survive another civil war."