Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan To A More Dangerous World. Christina Lamb
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to Yusuf’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11. He had been close to bin Laden since the 1980s, when he referred to him as his ‘golden chicken’, and was instrumental in helping him move back to Afghanistan in 1996. Without Sayyaf, 9/11 might never have happened. I wasn’t sure if the Americans didn’t realise that, or just didn’t care. Either way, with American help he got his house back in Paghman, a beautiful valley of snowcapped mountains about an hour west of Kabul, where his gunmen were soon terrorising the local population, breaking up weddings if music was played and seizing property. Sayyaf installed his men in key positions such as police chiefs and the judiciary in Wardak and Ghazni, while his commander Mullah Taj Mohammad became Governor of Kabul. This meant his men had carte blanche to terrorise western Kabul, looting and raping, armed with Kalashnikovs and grenades.
In the east, Karzai had appointed Din Mohammad, brother of the late Abdul Haq, as Governor of Nangahar; but the real power lay with Hazrat Ali, the man with the singing birds. In neighbouring Paktia, Karzai had named a warlord, Pacha Khan Zadran, as Governor, but locals had already appointed their own man, and refused to accept him. Scores of people were killed between February and May 2002 as Pacha Khan and his men tried to fight their way into the palace in the provincial capital Gardez, unleashing rockets on the city. Eventually Karzai sent a delegation asking him to surrender. ‘Who is Karzai, who is the government?’ he laughed. ‘Is Karzai going to come and kill me? He needs his head examined!’
Most powerful of all was Marshal Fahim, who despite being Defence Minister was clearly not the least interested in building a national army. He still kept his own militia and his options open by continuing to take money from Russia and Iran, and one only had to go an hour north of Kabul to see his tanks on the Shomali plains.
It was all mad.
Back in December 2001 the warlords had been running scared. Just before Karzai’s inauguration, I attended a meeting at Kabul’s dilapidated Intercontinental Hotel. One after another roared up to the front entrance, accompanied by pick-ups full of gun-toting militia. Inside the banquet hall they discussed the American bombing campaign which had enabled them to run the Taliban out of the country. They all agreed they had never seen anything like the B52s.
It was clear they thought their days were over. They were almost all on the criminal lists of human rights agencies, and when they heard about Guantánamo they feared ending up there.
Instead, the Americans had come to their rescue. Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American academic who had worked for Reagan, had been sent as US Envoy by his great buddy George W. Bush, and argued that they had no choice. ‘We couldn’t have cut them out – they’d been decisive,’ he said. ‘We had a few hundred people and an air force liberate this country – they were the ones who actually fought. When I went to my hometown of Mazar-i-Sharif they asked, “Who the hell is Karzai? It was Dostum who liberated Mazar.” It was people like Dostum, Ismael Khan, Mohaqeq, Khalili, Fahim, who were in the trenches putting their life on the line. What we hoped was, as central institutions built up, these other forces would weaken,’ said Khalilzad. ‘I felt these warlords were paper tigers.’
Yet Zal, as everyone called him, played his own part in undermining Karzai’s authority. He soon became known as ‘the Viceroy’, and acted as if he was running the place, even sitting in on cabinet meetings. While Karzai rarely left the heavily guarded palace, Zal flew around the country in a US military plane resolving disputes and handing out wind-up radios, accompanied by a gaggle of attractive young female aides inevitably known as Zal’s Gals.
Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff, also felt there was little choice but to work with warlords: ‘It was impossible to find anyone with clean hands,’ he said.
However, the fact that American forces continued to work with the warlords and pay them gave them new power in their communities. They intimidated local people by telling them they could call in airstrikes on their satellite phones. And to the horror of many of the Europeans, Rumsfeld and other US officials would visit them as if they were important leaders. ‘There is a certain illogic in trying to boost the authority of the central government on one hand and in conniving with local warlords on the other,’ complained Chris Patten, the European Union Commissioner, when he visited Kabul in May 2002. ‘There are things done in the short term which are unhelpful in the long term.’
While the warlords were becoming prosperous and powerful on CIA handouts, in Kabul the government was weak and broke. Said Tayeb Jawad, who had left a lucrative job as a lawyer in San Francisco to come back to set up a private university and had ended up as Karzai’s chief of staff, was shocked. ‘We didn’t have a single computer in the Presidency – all we had was my laptop I had brought from the US. We didn’t have a printer, so I would type documents then show them to the President on the screen, or to the British or US Ambassadors, then drive across town to an office with a printer.’
Communications were equally difficult. The Presidency had a few satellite phones, but if they wanted to arrange meetings with people like Brahimi, the UN Special Representative, or his deputy Jean Arnault, they would have to send a messenger. ‘There was no postal service, no fax, so our only connection with the outside world was the twice-weekly Ariana flights to Dubai,’ said Jawad. ‘I’d give instructions for them to call me before flying, so if I needed to get a document out they would fly it.’
I experienced this first-hand when Karzai asked me to send him cuttings about himself from British newspapers. The envelope addressed to ‘President of Afghanistan, Arg Palace, Kabul’ came back stamped ‘Addressee Unknown’.
There was an even bigger problem. Karzai’s government had so little money it could not even afford its fuel bills, let alone pay salaries. Six containers full of banknotes printed in Russia for the Taliban regime had been seized by the Northern Alliance when they entered Kabul, and they refused to hand them over. In January 2002 the representatives of sixty-one countries had gathered at a conference in Tokyo and raised an impressive-sounding $4.8 billion for Afghan reconstruction. But for a population of twenty-five million that was just $20 per head – a fraction of what was given to Bosnia, Kosovo or East Timor ($256 per head) at the end of their wars. The Americans only contributed $290 million – little more than half the $540 million provided by Iran. The money took a long time to come, much of it never arrived at all, and most countries used their contributions for projects using their own people rather than entrusting it to the Afghan government.
Meanwhile, Karzai’s government had 260,000 civil servants to pay, yet only $20 million in the kitty. ‘Money was a major issue,’ said Jawad. ‘I had to phone round begging money from different Embassies. We didn’t even have a functioning toilet in the Presidency for guests coming in. We could get money for specific things like this, or vehicles, but not for running the government and paying our staff.’
They became dependent on cash handouts from the CIA which were dropped off in suitcases, rucksacks and even plastic bags. This was known as ‘ghost money’, because it came and left secretly. From 2003 Karzai’s office was also given cash by the Iranian government, which the previous year Bush had declared part of the ‘axis of evil’.
The lack of funds made it difficult to find good people to work for the government, particularly as the years of war had left the vast majority of the population with no education. The only trained administrators were those who had been taught by the Soviets during the communist regime, and who were thus regarded by many as unpalatable. In the end it would be these people the West would come to rely on most, such as Hanif Atmal, who set up the National Solidarity Programme to alleviate poverty, and Gulab Mangal, who became the Governor of Helmand.
Karzai himself had no experience of running anything. He was, said Jawad, ‘hopeless with numbers, confusing billions and trillions’. Jawad found himself having to do things such as draft his own investment law. ‘I did some research and found the best one was Chile’s, so I just copied that, took it to cabinet and they approved it. I could feel the pressure on Karzai’s shoulders,’ said Khalilzad. He had no executive experience, and the challenges of rebuilding this shattered country were huge, while the capacity of people with relevant knowledge and experience was very limited. ‘I remember I had to go and object to someone we thought non-desirable,