Northern Afghan warlord Nabi Gechi flanked by bodyguards at one of his eighteen military outposts throughout the Qal-i-Zal district in Kunduz Province.
Nabi Gechi’s men looked like pirates. Not skinny Somali pirates, but the kind you find illustrated in a Howard Pyle book or on a ship in the middle of the seventeenth century, wrapped in dark turbans, flashing hard steel and cold stares.
They were a microcosm of Afghan society—Turkmen, Hazara, Uzbek, Tajik. They were men who’d fought alongside Gechi for years—some had even fought against him. All of them earned and continued to earn their living in blood. To lead killers like that you need to be a killer yourself—the best killer of them all—and the men you lead must believe that you are difficult, if not impossible, to kill. It was obvious that Nabi Gechi’s men believed this. If they didn’t, at least one among them might have tried to collect the price on his head.
“There’s a $500,000 reward to kill Nabi,” said Mullah Jilani, a former Taliban soldier turned Gechi lieutenant. “The Taliban are very afraid of him.”
Two years ago, when Jilani had been with the Taliban, he’d wanted to kill Nabi Gechi. And shortly after Gechi was hired to provide security for his home district of Qal-e-Zal in northern Afghanistan’s Kunduz Province, Jilani said he did, in fact, set out with more than two hundred of his Taliban comrades to assassinate him.
Instead, Gechi routed them. According to Jilani’s explanation, Gechi executed a flanking maneuver that seemed straight out of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, corralling most of the Taliban in one of the wooden stalls in the village market. Then, using his favorite weapon, the Russian GP-34 rifle-mounted 40-mm grenade launcher, he killed the Taliban commander.
“After that,” said Jilani, “we called off the attack and left the village.”
When Gechi defeated the Taliban during a second assassination attempt, Mullah Jilani arranged a meeting with the warlord.
“I told him, ‘I don’t want to fight you anymore. There’s no benefit for either of us,’” Jilani told me. Then he switched sides and began fighting with Gechi against the Taliban.
Gechi’s reputation as the fiercest Taliban killer in the north has only grown since his return to the district. In early July 2013, he directed an attack against a house in northern Afghanistan filled with Taliban. After his men surrounded the house, Gechi, again using a rifle-mounted grenade launcher, personally unleashing a hell storm that seemed extreme even for Afghanistan. Each grenade had a lethal blast radius of 18 feet, and Gechi fired not just a few, not a dozen, not 50 or even 75. Gechi alone fired 123 grenades at the house. They were meant to be lobbed in a long arc at a target hundreds of meters away, but Haji Muhammad, Gechi’s son-in-law and bodyguard, said the commander fired them like they were bullets—straight at his target.
I had come here to meet this warlord, who until recently had been on the Americans’ payroll in their effort to roll back the Taliban resurgence in the region. Although feared by most, Gechi was also revered by many in the Qal-e-Zal District as their protector and enforcer—a thoughtful, soft-spoken local boy who carried a big grenade launcher.
He made his name not with talk but by plying Afghan’s national trade: warcraft. He’d distinguished himself in the past as a lieutenant with some of the biggest and bloodiest names in Afghanistan’s warlord business, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Rashid Dostum.
So it was surprising when, in 2009, Gechi gave up the fight to start a successful fish and kebab restaurant in Mazar-e-Sharif. But two years later, in 2011, the local elders asked him to come back to Qal-e-Zal and provide security for them in a place overrun with Taliban. The district was also overwhelmed by a massive drug problem: almost half of its population—nearly fifteen thousand people—were addicted to hashish, opium, and other drugs. That number included many children, whose mothers, who worked long hours weaving carpets, fed their children sedatives so they could work undisturbed.
Gechi did return. He reconstituted his loyal followers as a standing militia of three hundred, setting up eighteen command checkpoints around the district that shut down Taliban operations there.
Malika Gharebyr, the head of women’s affairs for the district, told me that the Taliban had harassed her every time she went outside her house. “Nabi brought security here,” she told me when I visited her home a day after leaving Gechi’s compound. “It’s much better now.”
Gechi also provided the protection that allowed the government to destroy poppy fields in the area.
“Without Nabi, we wouldn’t have been able to eradicate the fields in Qal-e-Zal, said Abdul Bashir Morshid, the head of the Department of Counter-Narcotics in Kunduz Province, from his office in Kunduz City.
The American military initially liked what Gechi was doing so much that they sent in Special Forces soldiers to train, arm, and pay his men as part of a controversial program called CIP, or Critical Infrastructure Police. These were irregular units set up mostly in northern Afghanistan, sometimes even comprised of former Taliban. It was the perpetuation of an American counterinsurgency tactic used in Iraq: find a way to badge certain types of militia men—those not wed to a specific ideology—arm them, pay them, and train them. And hopefully, next time they’ll be shooting for your side. The Sons of Iraq program in Al Anbar Province, also a CIP, seemed to work—as long as the money continued to flow.
In Afghanistan, the CIP were given yellow armbands but no uniforms and were co-opted, at least part-time, to fight the Taliban. But many of the CIP units, taking advantage of their guns and badges, began to freelance, shaking down the local communities for food, fuel, and whatever else they wanted.
Similar allegations surfaced against Gechi’s militia. While each militia member was paid about $200 a month from a NATO discretionary fund, Gechi’s group was accused of “taxing” the locals for security, taking payments in bags of wheat and chicken or other foodstuffs to eat or sell on the market.
The CIP program was created by the Americans, reportedly without the knowledge or consent of President Hamid Karzai, who ordered it dismantled in 2012. Karzai feared that irregular forces with no official or financial connection to the national government might one day pose a threat to it.
Eventually, the American money dried up and the CIP program dissolved—but Gechi’s militia did not. With a security tax made up of foodstuffs regularly delivered to his compound and checkpoints in the district, the militia has been able to stay in business. And while he’s been a proven asset in the fight against the Taliban, Gechi has evolved into what Karzai had feared most: a battle-tested, off-the-books warlord with no formal allegiance to the Afghan government.
While trying to solve one problem covertly, the U.S. military had inadvertently helped extend the most popular Afghan franchise: warlord-ism, an institution in which he with the most guns wins. But Qal-e-Zal’s elders, who showed up by the dozens to meet with me at Gechi’s compound when I arrived with Matin and Dost, told me they needed Gechi for security. They said Karzai should either turn Gechi’s militia into a full-time, government-paid local police force, or send in another of their own. Until then, they would welcome the security Gechi’s militia provided, even if they had to pay for it, though they admitted not everyone in the community was happy with the taxes.
“The people asked me to come here and provide security,” Gechi said to me. “I’m happy to serve them, and if I’ve done anything wrong, I should be in a court, and let them speak out against me for my crimes.”
Gechi walked us around a few of his strongholds, high-walled compounds with watchtowers where his men kept a lookout for approaching Taliban. Inside the compounds were dozens of bags of summer wheat. When I asked Gechi if these were taxes paid by the locals, he nodded.
“Yes, it is both food that the soldiers can eat or that can be sold to buy supplies.”
It was clear he didn’t want to dwell on the topic, and I wasn’t keen on pushing the issue. While we met with the village elders, Gechi played the silent, humble servant, letting everyone else speak on his behalf. When he did speak, his voice was so soft you had to lean in to hear him. And while his face betrayed nothing, I sensed a quiet malevolence that he could summon at any moment.
This was in part because I knew some stories about him, and I also felt it again later at the broad, muddy Kunduz River, where he took us for a swim at dusk.
Our driver, Dost Muhammad, who seemed willing to try anything, stripped down to his underwear and jumped in first. Then, like kids on summer break, Gechi and I did the same and plunged into the coffee-brown water, whose current was so strong you had to swim full force to avoid being swept downstream.
The beautiful light of dusk turned everything a dusty, rose color, and as I swam I recalled a similar moment during another war, when I’d videotaped Kurdish Peshmerga fighters doing backflips off a bridge into a stream filled with anti-tank mines outside the city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq.
Matin took photographs of us as we climbed out onto the muddy bank and dove back in. Momentarily, it didn’t matter that men with guns were watching over us; it seemed simple pleasures could be found anywhere in the world, no matter how odd the situation.
But when we clambered out a final time to take a group photograph, Gechi pushed down hard on my shoulder and threw his leg in front of mine, ready to toss me to the ground. I was surprised by his aggressiveness and wondered if I’d done something to piss him off, or if he was just having some fun. I looked over to Matin, who held the camera with an alarmed look on his face; Dost and Gechi’s men were laughing hard.
I’m not a bad wrestler, but I couldn’t see a good way out of the predicament. If I made a real effort and won, he’d lose face in front of his men, especially problematic since we were scheduled to stay at Gechi’s compound that night. But if he legitimately took me down—or worse, if I let him—he’d likely lose respect for me, and there were still a lot of questions I wanted to ask him without being unduly deferential.
I chose an Afghan standoff. I held him at a distance, smiled, and tried to maintain equilibrium, without provoking him. After a few minutes of this he grew bored with me and broke off from the grapple. I took a deep breath of relief and posited that if the Taliban here had used the same technique with him, more of them might still be alive. Maybe this was exactly what Mullah Jilani had figured out and that’s why he wasn’t buried with his former comrades.
After we dressed, Gechi asked if we’d like to see how he and his men captured Taliban fighters when they used the river to smuggle supplies. I nodded enthusiastically. Gechi directed two of his men to board a flat-bottomed boat nearby and cover their faces with their scarves so they looked like Taliban. A boy then poled them out to the middle of the river, where the current wasn’t as strong.
When they were in position, Gechi’s men on shore pointed and shouted as if they had discovered the Taliban trying to slip by them on the boat. Gechi squatted on his haunches and used his AK-47 with the mounted grenade launcher to casually fire a grenade in a high arc over the boat and hundreds of yards up river. For almost forty seconds, nothing happened.
“That looks like a dud,” I said.
But then we saw a thin spout of water splash high into the distance, and then the low, thundering sound of the explosion sped toward us, loud enough to set off the alarm on Dost’s car.
“Spoke too soon,” I said. “Is the commander going to have some fish for dinner tonight?” I joked. But as with the grenade, there was a sound delay—just long enough for Matin to translate—and then Nabi Gechi and his men laughed.
The boy poled the boat back into shore. The “Taliban” had their hands raised in surrender. Luckily for them, I thought, Gechi had decided to fire only one grenade.
Back at his compound that evening, Nabi Gechi was a gracious host, giving us appetizers of fresh watermelon, nuts, raisins, and tea and then feting us with a big dinner of pilaw, heavy flat bread, yogurt, and, oddly, Mountain Dew. Besides his two lieutenants, one of whom was the ex-Taliban Mullah Jillani, we were his only guests. Gechi chatted with us in between taking phone calls, which came in one after another for hours.
Gechi told us that he had seven daughters and four sons from three wives. (Islam allowed four wives, if a man could afford to take care of them all equally.) This seemed standard practice for warlords of means like himself, who exuded power, wealth, and virility, not just through their firepower but also through the size of their families.
One of his sons, a precocious five-year-old named Atiq, joined us in the guest room and became interested in the strange-looking foreigner in his father’s house. I wrote his name in English on my notepad and told him to copy it exactly the same way. He wrote it instead in Dari. I guess something got lost in the translation.
His father called him over and told him something that sent him scurrying to a back room. When he returned, he was struggling to carry Nabi Gechi’s battered and dirty AK-47 rifle with the GP-34 grenade launcher. It was obvious Gechi didn’t fetishize his gun like many fighters did. To him it wasn’t a showpiece, like those shiny, toy-like gangster guns pimped out with pearl handles and plated in gold, nickel, or silver that had been brandished by dead former dictators like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Gechi’s rifle was not a garish tool for conveying wealth and power but a practical tool for killing, with a simple, fold-down metal stock and a wood fore-end covered with age-darkened gashes and scars.
The boy brought the rifle to his father, who adjusted the strap and then hung it over his son’s shoulders. Atiq’s eyes became huge and seemed like they were rolling around his head like the eyes of some crazy cartoon cat. He struggled to keep the weapon pointed up and at an imaginary enemy.
The rifle was on safe and Atiq kept his fingers off the trigger, but there was a thirty-round clip locked in place, and it was hard to stop staring at it, imagining the boy sliding the lever down, pulling the trigger, and then pogo-sticking the muzzle in an accidental death dance around the room.
I took a few pictures of him in the hopes of ending the show-and-tell portion of the evening’s entertainment a little more quickly. Matin, Dost, and I all let out a little sigh when Atiq took the AK back to where it hung in the back room.
A little later, Gechi’s tea boy connected a camcorder to a television in the room. We saw the images of the aftermath of his most recent victory over the Taliban, their bodies blackened, peppered with shrapnel, and stiff. There were close-ups of the entry and exit points of their wounds and of the body parts they’d lost to one of Gechi’s grenades. Toward the end of the video, they were piled onto the back of a pickup like cord wood and presented as a gift at the Afghan National Police headquarters. At the press conference the next day, also recorded, the police chief called Gechi a hero. I looked over to see his reaction. He was already asleep and snoring, sprawled out on the floor like a bearskin rug. Just a few minutes before, his son-in-law and bodyguard, Haji Muhammad, had been walking on his back in an effort to massage out the knots in his burly frame. It must’ve worked.
After we watched the video of Nabi Gechi’s bloody Taliban slaughter, I wondered what his ex-Taliban lieutenant, Mullah Jilani, had been thinking while watching those images.
“Yes, I chose the right way,” Jilani said when Matin and I later asked him about the gory video. “I could have been one of those bodies.” He continued. “If I had met you a few years ago I would’ve killed you. Killing is the first option, because we [the Taliban] were really angry with the foreigners. We would use a Kalashnikov to kill you. And we would be very happy, because it’s really good for us to kill a foreigner.”
While I was the only foreigner in the room, Matin would not have been spared, Mullah Jilani assured us.
“Because you are working with him,” Jilani said to Matin, “you would be killed as well; you are the same.”
But Jilani said it wasn’t only his respect for Gechi’s fighting prowess that prompted his battlefield conversion. He said he also had a revelation of sorts. After he developed kidney stones, the pain was so bad he eventually went to a German military hospital, part of NATO’s Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in the region. Jilani said the staff treated him with such kindness that he began to think what the Taliban had been telling him about the foreigners was just propaganda.
“I found them to be really good people. They were helping me a lot, and everything was free. They weren’t just in Afghanistan to kill people, but to help others. I was blind to that.”
While that finally convinced him to break ranks with the Taliban, there were a lot of other things that troubled him about the organization.
“The Taliban is really from Pakistan; they came here to destroy our country. That is clear to everyone,” said Jilani. “In the beginning, I thought it was jihad against international troops, but I found out we were fighting for Pakistani interests—we were getting orders from Pakistan. Most of the leaders are not religious; they want to come to Afghanistan and tax the locals during the time of the harvest and take the money back to Pakistan. There is no jihad,” Jilani said.
“Our leaders were in Pakistan in nice houses spending a lot of money on themselves—good food, good clothes—but they’re asking us to go to Afghanistan to fight on the front line. They were giving us 500 Pakistani rupees for a week (about US$5). You cannot eat for a day on that,” he said. “It was a really hard time when I was with the Taliban. During the day we were fighting and at night we had to be careful because we were afraid of the night operations [NATO Special Forces]. We changed our positions several times a night.”
I asked Jilani about Taliban tactics and how they were organized.
“At the beginning of an operation we would pray, and then the commander would divide us into small groups of about ten men called a delgai. In each delgai there was one fighter with an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] launcher and one fighter with a [Russian] PK machine gun. The rest would be armed with Kalashnikovs. Each delgai had a commander. We used two kinds of attacks, either encircling our enemy or an ambush which starts with the RPG and PK.”
Jilani said bomb-makers and suicide bombers were different from regular Taliban fighters.
“I never had any real contact with those who made the [roadside] bombs. They wore camouflage uniforms, sometimes the same as the ANA [Afghan National Army]. These people were separate from us, not Afghans—either Uzbeks, Chechens, Al Qaeda. I also never saw a suicide bomber, but I believe they were the same people. I heard our leaders talk about them.”
If more Taliban had experienced the foreign medical care and technology that Jilani had, I wondered, would they have switched sides too? Or was its promise enough to at least get regular Afghans to reconsider their support for the Taliban?
Embedded with American troops in southern Afghanistan in 2010, I’d watched American military surgeons in a remote field hospital work on a thirteen-year-old Afghan farm boy named Habibullah, whose arms had been severed in a threshing machine. They not only kept him alive but also, miraculously, reattached both arms, a difficult surgical feat even under the best conditions, let alone in a combat zone. He became a living testament that American technology could save lives just as skillfully as it could take them.
Even so, that would unlikely be enough to convince the Afghans, especially those in rural areas, to accept all the other things the Americans and other foreigners brought with them. This included the concepts of women’s rights and freedom of expression that often offended conservative sensibilities—things they likely believed were incompatible with Islam.
No matter how many hospitals with twenty-first-century life-saving medical care were built in Afghanistan, many Afghans would continue to see foreigners as would-be conquerors and an assault on Islam. That mindset, I knew, wouldn’t disappear with a single kidney stone procedure or even a miracle like Habibullah’s arms. Perhaps it never would. But at least it had with some, like Mullah Jilani.
While everyone else was preparing to sleep, Jilani watched Matin use his computer to Skype with a colleague. He had never seen anything like it and was awed by the technology and Matin’s mastery of it.
“This takes education,” Jilani said to Matin. “All the educated youth like you are good for our country. I am an uneducated person, so why should I kill you?” Not so much a question as a reminder to himself.
After a peaceful night’s sleep and a quick breakfast of bread, cheese, and coffee, Nabi Gechi took us down a small stairway that led to a dark enclosure under his compound.
The cramped room, lit by a single overhead bulb hanging from a wire, was filled with three different-size spinning wheels connected to each other by drive belts similar to those used in car engines. But what force was powering them? Gechi must’ve been reading my thoughts because he ushered me over to an exit through a hole in the wall on the other side of the room. The sound of rushing water was too loud to speak over. Attached to a wall outside the compound was a large wooden paddlewheel turning swiftly to the rushing current of a man-made waterway that Gechi had diverted from the Kunduz River.
Nabi Gechi’s talents, it seemed, went far beyond handling a grenade launcher. The man I had seen only through the prism of his Taliban-killing prowess had also constructed a small hydroelectric plant that generated a continuous power supply for him and many of the local businesses. When I asked him how he was able to put together such a complex engineering system, he said he looked at other working models, read schematics, scavenged the materials, and then simply built it. If he were able to do it on a bigger scale, to get permission from the government to divert more of the river, he added, he could generate enough power for the entire district. I looked at him as he inspected the machinery and felt a bit ashamed of myself. Like so many foreigners in Afghanistan, I had failed to see beneath the surface. At the river, I had been quick to sense Nabi Gechi’s quiet malevolence, which might really have been only been playful energy, while overlooking his genius completely. The strong current of the Kunduz River in which we had both swum was just a workout for me, but it was a source of power for him. While I stroked against it for fun, he had harnessed its energy underneath his own home.
My failure of imagination, I thought, came from a Western arrogance that characterized the Afghan people as an impediment to the development and stability of their own country, rather than the solution to it. Nabi Gechi was indeed a spectacular instrument of war, but also, at times, effective in creating instruments of peace. If he could hang up his grenade launcher and devote all his energy to projects like these, I wondered what he might be capable of creating. But the truth was Nabi Gechi would probably be dead in a year. While hard to kill, he was also a very tempting target.
Warlords have a short shelf life in Afghanistan.