It’s not something I could say openly at the time, but I’ll say it now: Hamid Karzai’s new Afghan cabinet made me nervous.
Sworn in on December 24, 2004—President Karzai’s birthday, as it happens—his cabinet members were mostly top campaign backers and their allies being rewarded for their loyalty. The secrecy surrounding their selection was itself worrying: before announcing the new lineup, Karzai had been cloistered for long sessions with US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. UN special representative Lakhdar Brahimi and his deputy, Jean Arnault, had pushed hard for competent reformers. But ultimately, the imperative of political payback had driven Karzai’s final decisions.
Karzai had decided early on that he would not be forming his own political party. Such parties were the sine qua non of political life in most places, but Afghanistan was not like most places. During Karzai’s lifetime, he had witnessed Afghan parties rip the country apart, including the Communist PDPA, which acted as the Soviets’ puppets after seizing power in 1978. Islamist parties, such as Sayyaf ’s Ittehad-i Islami, likewise had become key players in Afghanistan’s various civil wars. To many Afghans, parties were spent shell casings from old conflicts. Karzai wanted to transcend the old partisan model of politics.
In 2004, this strategy had seemed to work. The wings of the old warlord class, from which the Islamist party bosses had sprung, were clipped, and Karzai’s rivals, such as Younis Qanuni (a Tajik) and Abdul Rashid Dostum (an Uzbek), were unable to use their political machines to break out of their narrow ethnic constituencies.
But the price Karzai paid for his party-free approach was that he was constantly beholden to a constellation of parochial supporters with different agendas. These included jihadi leaders who had backed his campaign—Pir Gilani, Hazrat Mojadeddi and Sayyaf—who each got two ministries. Some of their own nominees were decent choices; others proved disastrous.
The influence of the old Northern Alliance declined—but only slightly. Out of cabinet were the former Alliance leader Fahim; Ahmad Shah Massoud protege Qanuni; Sayed Mustafa Kazemi (who would be killed by a suicide bomber in 2007); and Mohammad Mohaqiq, the Hazara leader. But Abdullah Abdullah, one of the Northern Alliance’s few English-speakers, remained foreign minister, with General Bismullah Khan and Amrullah Saleh retaining key positions as chief of the general staff and intelligence chief, respectively. One of the younger brothers of Massoud, Ahmad Zia Massoud, who had been ambassador to Russia before the election, became first vice-president in succession to Fahim. Karim Khalili, a mujahidin veteran from Wardak province, remained as second vice-president—even though most Hazaras had voted for Mohaqiq.
The least that could be said for this group was that it was diverse. Despite winning primarily on the strength of the Pashtun vote, Karzai, to his credit, was keeping northerners who had battled the Taliban— many of them ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras—close to him.
Another group of political actors whom Karzai was keen to promote and cultivate were multilingual, westernized, suit-and-tie intellectuals who had been part of the Afghan exile community during the Soviet and Taliban years. This “Rome group,” as it came to be called, included the American-educated scholar Hedayat Amin Arsala, the French-educated Zalmai Rassoul, the German-educated Mohammad Amin Farhang and man of letters Sayed Maktoum Raheen. All these men remained in cabinet, while the American-educated military officer Rahim Wardak was promoted to minister of defence.
This would be the last cabinet that Karzai would be able to form without parliamentary scrutiny. As a result, several major portfolios would now languish without strong leadership. A case in point was the thorny energy file. As noted in Chapter 4, in keeping with the deal done to secure his bloodless departure from Herat’s governorship in September 2004, Ismail Khan had become minister of energy and water in the new cabinet. His appointment had the strong support of Khalilzad, though Ismail Khan himself had coveted the Interior Ministry. With Kabul and other Afghan cities mostly cold and dark for another winter, critics argued that the Energy Ministry file should be in the hands of an experienced technocrat, not an ex-warlord with a major political axe to grind. The counter-argument was that it behooved the country to have this ruthless power broker physically removed from his seat of power in Herat. As always, political decisions in Afghanistan involved choosing the lesser evil, which was anyway rarely subject to broad agreement.
Management of counter-narcotics also suffered. After endless discussion, responsibility for this critical issue was removed from the country’s high-level National Security Council and downgraded to the level of ordinary ministry. Habibullah Qaderi, the new minister, was a straight-shooter from a respected Kandahari family but also an outsider to Kabul’s power politics. His ministry lacked the clout to compel action from governors or other ministries. To make matters worse, several ministers, as well as generals at interior and defence, had intimate ties to major trafficking networks, which they barely sought to disguise.
All of which to say, Afghanistan’s reform drive, which began with much fanfare at the 2001 Bonn conference, was running out of gas. A symptom of this unfortunate trend was the departure of Ashraf Ghani from the Finance Ministry.
Ghani had sufficient stature to later be spoken of as a possible successor to former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. His departure not only dealt a blow to the Afghan Finance Ministry but endangered the country’s relationship with its donors. One of the first actions of Karzai’s new finance minister (Anwar ul-Haq Ahady, an Afghan-American political scientist, who will be discussed later) was to launch a review of the well-regarded National Solidarity Programme, an effective and widely lauded 2003 initiative aimed at permitting Afghanistan to manage its own rural development projects. Major donors, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Canadian and UK governments, were unimpressed.
It proved to be a harsh winter, with most of the snow coming late, in February and March. On February 5, we were at Kabul Airport waiting to fly to a heavy-weapons cantonment ceremony—a major focus of my work during that period. Our flight had been postponed by a heavy snowfall. The dozen or so ISAF flags were snapping in the wind, with the hills surrounding Kabul blotted out by the storm.
A Canadian friend I knew from Russia called from Herat, where he had been waiting for his own flight to Kabul. A former air traffic controller, he had gone up to the tower at Herat’s airport to ask about the weather in the capital. Now he wanted the lowdown from me. “A bad snowstorm,” I told him. “Kabul Airport may be closed for hours, even days.” He rang off. A few hours later, Kam Air 737 from Herat slammed into a mountain east of Kabul, killing all 104 people on board—the deadliest air disaster in the country’s history. Having found Kabul Airport paralyzed by what turned out to be the city’s worst snowstorm of the decade, the pilot had been heading north to Bagram. We all lost friends and colleagues. But my Canadian caller had decided not to board.
The Taliban’s senior military commander made a point of saying for once that his men weren’t responsible for the aircraft’s destruction and even expressed regret at the tragedy—a rare gesture of humanity from an enemy that normally placed no value on innocent human life.
The tragedy came at a time when the world’s military footprint in Afghanistan was changing. With over 20,000 troops, Operation Enduring Freedom (the official name used for the US military campaign in Afghanistan) now operated over one dozen Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in the west, south and east of the country. ISAF had completed its expansion to Afghanistan’s north, where it now had five PRTs.
Kabul itself was still on edge. On the night of March 7, 2004, Steve McQueen, a British microfinance expert then advising Rural Rehabilitation and Development Minister Haneef Atmar, emerged from the Elbow Room, an ex-pat nightspot next to the Foreign Ministry. Minutes later, the vehicle he was driving was forced to stop by two others—one in front, one behind—on Qala-ye Faitullah Road. McQueen was shot dead at close range. The attack bore all the hallmarks of a targeted killing. The official version later blamed the hit on the same criminal kingpin responsible for the kidnapping of UN staff the previous autumn, a man who may have wanted a foreign hostage as leverage to spring his mates. When they went to kidnap McQueen, he had apparently reached behind the passenger seat. Fearing he was going for a weapon, his assailants shot first.
The episode horrified everyone. McQueen had been on the verge of heading back to the United Kingdom. His fiancée, pregnant with their first child, worked in Khalilzad’s office. An economics whiz, McQueen also had been involved in a complex audit of AREA, an NGO managed over the years by many Afghans who now held positions of power. Adding another layer of murkiness to the episode, McQueen recently had been detained and interrogated by the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s domestic intelligence agency, during which time some claimed he had witnessed a violent episode he was not meant to see. The killing might have emerged from one of several directions, in other words. In my remarks at his memorial service, I paid tribute to his many outstanding contributions to Afghanistan. His tragic death was a stark reminder of the dark eddies of conspiracy still swirling around Kabul’s heart.
There were glimmers of hope too. Prince Mostapha Zahir, the favou-rite grandson of King Zahir Shah, had joined the government as director general of the new Environmental Protection Agency. For years as a young prince, he had helped manage his grandfather’s court-in-exile in Rome. Until 2004, he had served as ambassador of Afghanistan to Italy. A graduate of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, he, and his father also, had lived part of the former king’s dream of life in Canada. Now forty, Mostapha Zahir was hungry to take on a challenge in the land of his birth. The royal family long had been a champion of hunting and the preservation of Afghan wildlife and natural environment. For Mostapha Zahir, a child of privilege and exile in equal measure, stewardship of the environment was a natural fit.
Then there was Sima Samar, chair of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), who already possessed the confidence of a trailblazer and a survivor. In 1978, her husband was arrested and subsequently disappeared. In 1982, at the age of twenty-five, the Helmand province native became the first woman from Afghanistan’s Hazara minority to obtain a medical degree from Kabul University. After violence and persecution forced her family into Pakistan, she established her own medical organization in Quetta dedicated to the treatment of women and girls. All in all, she spent seventeen years in the Pakistani city, coming and going to Afghanistan when it was safe, and eventually built over a hundred schools. In 2002, she returned to Afghanistan for good, first as deputy chair of the interim government and then as minister for women’s affairs.
Samar had seen it all since 2001—the false starts, the hopes gone sour, the warlord comeback, the first executions, the clamour over civilian casualties—yet she remained an idealist. She once gave me a set of placemats with “No Peace without Justice” embroidered on them. A few years ago, she came close to replacing Louise Arbour as UN high commissioner for human rights. More recently, she became an honorary officer of the Order of Canada.
“No doubt there has been a lot of improvement [in Afghanistan],” she told me during an interview at an AIHRC office in the Karte Se neighbourhood of Kabul. She ticked off access to education and health care as major accomplishments (“though much less than what the government says,” she adds). She was also bullish on freedom of expression and the blossoming of the Afghan media. On this file too, though, she added a caveat: a lot of the media was still controlled by warlords. (“Each one of them has his own TV station!”)
She adds women’s rights to the list, highlighting the number of women (27 percent) elected to Afghanistan’s parliament. “Imagine somebody like me talking against everybody—against the president, against [then interior minister Haneef] Atmar, against the members of the parliament. But I’m still alive. So these are the things that are happening in Afghanistan.”
Nevertheless, she was pessimistic about the chances for peace: “The president keeps saying that we should have a loya jirga to reconcile the Taliban. [That is] not going to solve the problem. First of all, with [the] Taliban, we do not know with whom we should talk. If we speak of Quetta Shura [the Pakistan-based Taliban leadership council], who [are they]? How many people do they have? Which parts of the country do they control? Is it really only [the] Taliban in Helmand [province] and those areas? Or is it the Hezb-i Islami and Jamiat-i Islami [militias]—the Taliban’s brothers? There is a lack of clarity.”
Without basic human security, corruption was inevitable, she added: “Anybody [regardless of position]—he doesn’t feel secure, he thinks that he will lose his job, so he has to collect as much money as he can [in the meantime].” She cited the case of Zarar Ahmed Moqbel, ousted from the Interior Ministry for gross corruption. But there were many other examples; the Afghan government was full of foxes guarding chicken coops.
Regarding her own battle for human rights, Samar described her work as a series of small campaigns, not all of which become news in the Western media. One of her missions, for instance, had been to make Afghanistan’s penal code for juveniles consistent with its human rights obligations. There was also her battle against efforts to encode retrograde attitudes toward women into Afghan law, attitudes she described as “stupid and crazy.”
Some of Samar’s critiques of Karzai’s Afghanistan were quite shocking. On paper, she said, everyone had far more human rights now than under the Taliban, yet criminals who broke the law were rarely caught. Under the Taliban, there was “more security than now,” she declared. “We have a court for counter-narcotics,” she added, “which was not existing at all under the Taliban. It was not a crime. Now it is a crime, we have a court, but people are caught with 125 kilograms of heroin and they are released.”
She also cited the example of Basir Salangi, chief of police in Kabul when twenty families in the city’s Sherpur district were evicted from their homes so that senior Afghan officials could build private residences. “I think he [Salangi] has three palaces there.” On such issues, Samar remained a kind of national conscience for Afghanistan.
Improbable as it may now seem, Afghanistan actually had a proud place in the post–World War II history of global human rights. Together with Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Turkey, it had been one of seven majority-Muslim countries to vote in favour of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris on December 10, 1948. Afghanistan also acceded to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1956. In the 1980s and 1990s, even as the country plunged into civil war, Afghanistan signed on to more instruments, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Convention against Torture, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Under the circumstances gripping Afghanistan during this period, these were mere symbolic gestures, of course. But at the very least, they showed the world that Afghanistan aspired to the lofty principles contained in these instruments, thereby suggesting that the gap separating them from Afghan reality was not unbridgeable.
Nor were the concepts of due process and rule of law foreign to Afghanistan. Long before it began to sign on to human rights instruments, Afghanistan was a centre for Islamic jurisprudence. As early as the eighth century, Abu Hanifa, founder of the most influential and commercially minded school of sharia, was born into a Kabul merchant’s family. More recently, under the emirate of Habibullah Khan in the early twentieth century, Afghan judges were renowned for their incorruptibility. The country enacted its first written constitution in 1924.
But as Cicero put it, Inter arma enim silent leges—“At times of war, laws fall mute.” During most of the two decades preceding 9/11, the country was effectively lawless. Since the Taliban’s ouster, Afghans have been trying to reclaim their judicial traditions, but progress has been painfully slow.
When I visited Abdul Salam Azimi in the office of chief justice of the Supreme Court of Afghanistan, his walls were lined with collections of fiqh—books of Islamic jurisprudence compiled from his time at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, then as a professor in Kabul and at the University of Arizona. Before becoming Afghanistan’s chief justice in 2006, he helped write the country’s constitution (based mostly on the 1964 version) and served as Karzai’s principal advisor on legal issues. Here was a serious and educated legal mind dedicated to building a just and humane legal system—but there were few men like him to do the front-line work of actually hearing cases.
Of all the sectors requiring reform after 2001, Azimi told me, justice had got off to the slowest start. By early 2005, senior prosecutors were still making as little as $50 per month, padding their income with bribes on all sides. The amiable attorney general, a Northern Alliance functionary named Abdul Mahmood Daqiq, presided over a shambolic bureaucracy that mixed cronyism and incompetence in equal measure. Religious extremism was also an issue. One particularly conservative chief justice, an elderly cleric named Fazl Hadi Shinwari who had once sided with the Taliban, was making noises about cutting media freedoms, while also moving to restore a Saudi-style department for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice. (Meanwhile, his own two sons were reputed to be influence peddlers.)
The Ministry of Justice under Sardar Danesh had wholeheartedly embraced reform, but his office lacked the resources to make much of a difference. Moreover, the prisons for which the Justice Ministry was now ostensibly responsible were powder kegs. In 2002, they had been virtually empty. Now, they were full with the political opponents of the country’s various governors, as well as violent criminals and Taliban. With illiterate staff and minimalist infrastructure—Afghan prisons often were just metal freight containers sunk into the earth, with padlocked doors—the country’s detention and correctional facilities were hardly worthy of the modern Western-style justice system the country was supposed to be building.
In January 2005, Sima Samar’s human rights commission published A Call for Justice: A National Consultation on Past Human Rights Violations in Afghanistan, a document offering recommendations for addressing the country’s legacy of violence and persecution. Based on eight months of consultations with thousands of Afghans during 2004, the report called for the expulsion of past human rights abusers from positions of power in Afghanistan and the creation of an investigating body to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity. Samar and her colleagues drew on the examples of South Africa and Cambodia to argue that human rights victims needed an opportunity to tell their stories and pursue justice.
To hammer out an agenda for implementing these principles, interested donors led by the Netherlands, Britain and Canada met with an Afghan delegation, which included Samar, in The Hague on June 6 and 7, 2005. But the resulting action plan was short on specifics, and its provisions would prove notoriously difficult to translate into tangible initiatives. As a result, Afghanistan has never witnessed anything like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
But the pressure for action continued. In the spring of 2005, the Afghanistan Justice Project issued a hard-hitting report, entitled Casting Shadows, chronicling major abuses from 1978 to 2001. Human Rights Watch published a report called Blood-Stained Hands, just as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights put the finishing touches on her own report—an attempt to inventory all categories of abuse since 1978. There was little prospect of confronting the perpetrators of these abuses. Still, for the first time, their crimes had been systematically catalogued. Some fraction of truth was being salvaged, even if reconciliation was nowhere in sight. In Afghanistan, that’s progress.
The United States military is rightly given credit for ejecting the Taliban from power in October and November 2001. But it’s important to remember that, as already discussed, much of the actual combat was done by a confederation of nine Afghan militias, loosely organized under the Northern Alliance banner, mostly led by men whom the Taliban had beaten back in 1996 and whom had been fighting to reclaim power ever since.
The militia commanders were well-known figures in Afghanistan and in many cases were infamous. Paid and supplied by CIA officers and US Special Forces units that had been mobilized in the days after 9/11, they advanced into Afghan provinces they had not held in years. With the Taliban reeling in the face of punishing US air power, Northern Alliance commanders and their subordinates moved into their old offices and started to call the shots for the first time in fifteen years.
The Bonn Agreement of December 2001, which essentially recreated the Afghan state, was designed to rehabilitate the country in the wake of Taliban rule. But the other, less widely acknowledged, function of the agreement was to impose some measure of control and accountability on the Northern Alliance leaders who suddenly were controlling the levers of power. Moreover, the United States and many Afghans knew that it was necessary to include exiled Afghan groups from Iran, Pakistan, Europe and North America. These various factions had failed in their last effort to put together a functioning country in the early 1990s. Old animosities still flourished.
Unfortunately, prospects for accountability slipped as the most aggressive militia leaders rushed to exploit their window of opportunity—the short period between the creation of the new Afghan state and national elections. And naturally, they had very little enthusiasm for investigative bodies snooping around the country, looking into 1980s- and 1990s-era human rights abuses.
One bright spot, as mentioned, was disarmament. After a slow start in 2003, heavy-weapons cantonment was mostly complete by 2005. Most of the nation’s tanks, artillery, multiple rocket launchers, anti-aircraft guns and other heavy weapons were either in government hands or dysfunctional. (The last province to disarm was, not surprisingly, Panjshir, in the country’s rugged northeast—the centre of resistance to both Soviet occupation and Taliban rule.) Afghan militia units also were disbanded, with commanders being co-opted by the prospect of influence in the new army and police forces, helping to consolidate power in the official Ministry of Defence.
Northern Alliance veterans still dominated the country’s military establishment. But in December 2004, Mohammad Fahim was succeeded as defence minister by Abdul Rahim Wardak, a Pashtun and former Soviet-era mujahidin leader. General Bismullah Khan, an ethnic Tajik, meanwhile, became chief of the general staff. Such partnerships lay at the foundation of the new Afghan state.
President Karzai was deeply involved in both heavy-weapons cantonment and the process formally known as Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR), hosting at least eight major meetings on the subject and encouraging Japan to fund the project. Then finance minister Ashraf Ghani also was involved, as was I— alongside the ambassador of Japan and UNAMA. In late 2004, Ghani cut state salaries for militias, both to encourage the centralization of force within the Afghan military and to cut down on the deliberate inflation of budgets through the use of ghost combatants.
On July 7, 2005, President Karzai attended a ceremony to mark the completion of DDR at the new West Point–style officers’ academy constructed in the old Soviet-built air force facility at Kabul International Airport. It was clear to everyone present that DDR had been a necessary program. But by that time, it also had the air of being yesterday’s news: in mid-2005, everyone already knew that the principal security concern was cross-border infiltration and the drug industry. The army still numbered only 40,000; the police remained unreformed. Despite having taken 35,000 small arms off the streets and putting over 10,000 heavy weapons in cantonment, Afghanistan was just starting to come to terms with its new security challenges.
“Has demilitarization had any enduring success?” I put this question to Masoom Stanekzai, long-time presidential advisor and deputy chair of the demobilization commission. In the early years of the transition, Stanekzai was communications minister, delivering the reforms that made telecom the most successful sector of the Afghan economy, with 11 million wireless subscribers (by 2010). But he was one of the reformers to leave cabinet with Ghani at the end of 2004. With fears growing of a resurgent Taliban, men such as Stanekzai were under pressure to neutralize the jihadis in the same way they’d helped rein in the militias.
“Without DDR and heavy-weapons cantonment, without destroying ammunition and decommissioning old militia units, we could not have a national army today of this capacity—able to respond effectively to the kind of attack that took place last Monday,” he told me, referring to four suicide attackers from North Waziristan who had briefly occupied a commercial office in Pashtunistan Square in Kabul a few days earlier. “I think you can see a tangible result in some areas,” Stanekzai concluded.
He was proud of the program to secure the country’s heavy weapons. In the first years after Bonn, he remembered, “we witnessed heavy fighting between the big warlords. They were using all kinds of weapons. [DDR helped to reduce] the power bases of the very strong people in five or six different regions.” This allowed “central government to extend its authority gradually into the provinces, and into the districts.”
The problem was that DDR had been too modest in scope. “We targeted commanders for DDR too narrowly,” Stanekzai told me. “We forgot about the other commanders.” There were hundreds, from various phases of the conflict, who had not been part of the standing militia forces of 2001. “They were heavily armed,” Stanekzai added. “They were part of the whole campaign—whether with one group or another—and we forgot about that.” The insiders had received incentives to cooperate—study trips, training, small business packages, government positions—and so they “came to the conclusion that, yes, there was something for them; and then they started to cooperate.” But outsiders were ignored, even commanders who had turned in the most weapons of all. An unknown number from among these militia veterans had found their way into the insurgency. “I think we had a double standard,” Stanekzai admitted. “The program was not designed to be flexible.”
By 2005, when the Taliban insurgency began heating up, Afghanistan’s leaders began to realize all this. But by this point, the political momentum for demilitarization had been spent.
The larger problem, according to Stanekzai, lies with foreign attitudes: there is still an unspoken understanding that it is somehow acceptable for neighbouring countries to arm and train their chosen allies in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, Karzai was giving mixed messages about how these proxy forces should be treated. By nodding and winking to the old jihadi establishment, which the president had courted as part of his power base, the government itself was still indirectly supporting illegal armed groups.
To counter these influences, Stanekzai told me, the government would have to deliver physical protection and material benefits at the local level, in villages and districts. Specifically, it had to deal with the mass of youth in the countryside that both the anti-Soviet mujahidin and the Taliban had exploited. Moreover, the country would have to enforce established codes of conduct at the village level: “If somebody is killing someone, using a gun, and he is brought to justice, nobody will do it again. Afghanistan has a culture and accepted norms—even women use guns for hunting. . . . But you cannot kill somebody, because the relatives will come after you. For that reason, people are extremely careful not to use guns to kill innocent people.”
As Afghanistan moved toward another election campaign in 2005, this time for the lower house of parliament and the first-ever elected provincial council, on September 18, it was clear security would be a tougher challenge than it had been for the presidential race. On May 7, a suicide attacker detonated inside a Kabul Internet café. Later the same month, the rumoured desecration of the Koran by US forces at Guantanamo Bay led to demonstrations in several cities. Criminal kidnappings and gang-related violence were on the upswing as well. In the countryside, attacks by the Taliban-led insurgency were far outpacing those of previous years.
On June 1, 2005, the amiable new police chief of Kabul, Major General Akram Khakrezwal, was killed by a remotely detonated IED while visiting a mosque in his native Kandahar. He had been a fierce opponent of the Taliban but also a pillar of the Alikozai, a key Durrani tribal grouping in southern Afghanistan. Later in July, a major road accident involving a coalition truck whose brakes failed led to an angry standoff with US forces in west Kabul, followed by a riot that swept through the city, targeting compounds where foreigners lived. The violence was mostly contained; casualties in the end were light. But the situation in Kabul was shown to be on a hair-trigger.
The situation in the provinces was volatile in part because former warlords were being installed in regional governments. In June, on the basis of a deal brokered mostly by Zalmay Khalilzad, Gul Agha Sherzoi became governor of Nangarhar province. Former Kabul governor Sayed Hussain Anwari went to Herat, and Haji Din Mohammad, scion of Jalalabad’s most influential family, whose two brothers had been killed since 2001, came to Kabul. With the appointment of Ustad Mohammad Atta in Balkh, each one of the major provinces (outside the south) was now in the hands of a figure from the mujahidin past. But with the exception of Atta, none was serving in his home region, in keeping with the precedent set when Ismail Khan was removed from Herat and brought to Kabul in 2004. These figures were not being brought to justice for their past actions, but at the very least, they were being detached from their power bases, making them somewhat less of a threat to the central government.
Meanwhile, relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan were swinging back and forth between suspicion and cooperation. Thanks to the strong relation between Ghani and Pakistani prime minister Shaukat Aziz, trade between the two countries was increasing, a fact that helped soothe various bilateral irritants. Karzai was an official guest of Islamabad for Pakistan Day in March 2005, a visit that may in retrospect have been a high point in the countries’ post-Taliban relationship.
In May 2005, Karzai went to Washington to formalize a memorandum of understanding between Afghanistan and the United States. In a passage that no doubt raised eyebrows in other nations, the document stated that “the United States and Afghanistan plan to work together to develop appropriate arrangements and agreements to implement their strategic partnership.” To Teheran and Islamabad—even to Moscow, Tashkent and Beijing—this was code for permanent military bases. It went well beyond the Bonn Agreement and the language establishing UN and ISAF mandates in successive Security Council resolutions. It was Khalilzad’s last bequest to his native country before leaving his post as US ambassador in June. By July 19, the United Kingdom had negotiated a similar declaration of their “enduring relationship” with Afghanistan. By mid-2006, the EU and China signed on to similar bilateral agreements. So did Iran and Pakistan.
But these two latter agreements could not paper over the conflicts between Afghanistan and its neighbours. Karzai had made his first official visit to Teheran in January, finding ample common ground with the relatively moderate Mohammad Khatami, then the country’s president. He later sent his chief of staff, Umar Daudzai, as Afghanistan’s ambassador. But the election of the viciously anti-Israeli and anti-American Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Iran’s presidency in August 2006 would stretch bilateral relations to their breaking point.
Relations with Pakistan followed a similar course. In June 2005, dismayed by Kabul’s carping about Pakistan’s inaction against the Taliban, President Pervez Musharraf made a speech in Australia placing blame for the worsening violence on Afghan shoulders. He continued to deny the existence of the Taliban’s leadership council (including the Quetta Shura) and the presence of Mullah Omar or any of his lieutenants on Pakistani soil.
This did not prevent Pakistani prime minister Shaukat Aziz from making a two-day visit to Kabul in July, together with a delegation of ministers, during which he confirmed Pakistan would make up to $100 million available to support development and reconstruction in Afghanistan. Then, in September, as part of the diplomatic see-saw, Musharraf proposed that the border between the two countries be fenced or even mined, to erase any remaining doubts about the role of cross-border infiltration in Afghanistan’s conflict.
In fact, Musharraf had larger problems to deal with: the strategic balance in South Asia was shifting. In July 2005, President Bush signed a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with India, a move that excited jealousy and heightened anxieties in Islamabad. As always, Pakistan looked to Afghanistan as a source of strategic depth in its rivalry with its larger neighbour.
In September, at the UN General Assembly, Bush met with Musharraf and Karzai together, extracting as firm an undertaking as he could from the former to ensure security conditions were conducive to the holding of elections in September. At a meeting on election preparations in Kabul held around the same time, I warned the Pakistani representative that the international community would not stand idly by when all evidence pointed to Afghan insurgents being trained, controlled, financed and supplied from Pakistani territory. He was furious, but several colleagues from other NATO countries chimed in with support. (Later, the poor man had the temerity to have his government complain to Ottawa about my comments, which only drew more attention to his government’s disingenuous stance.)
By summer, the parliamentary race had moved into high gear. The walls of buildings across Kabul and other major cities were plastered with posters of candidates—elders and young upstarts, men and women alike. There was a mad scramble to prevent those with active armed groups still under their command from qualifying as candidates. In the end, only thirty-four people were removed from the ballot, out of at least a hundred who deserved close scrutiny. But the pressure resulting from this single criterion for candidacy was enough to trigger the collection of over 14,000 light weapons. It was the first success for the program to disband illegal armed groups, known as DIAG, the successor to DDR.
With 2,379 male candidates and 328 women divided among thirty-four provinces, some of the ballot papers ended up becoming small books. This led to confusion in Kabul and other places. Even larger numbers of candidates contested the provincial-council elections. At the height of the process, the Joint Electoral Management Body had nearly 180,000 local staff working for it. This complexity drove costs well over $170 million. On election day, September 18, turnout was lower among the 12 million registered voters than it had been for the presidential elections. But at 51.5 percent, it was still respectable. Jihadi political heavyweights such as Kazemi, Mohaqiq and Sayyaf in Kabul, Burhanuddin Rabbani in Badakhshan province, and Hazrat Ali in Nangarhar were returned easily. Provincial councils turned up a mix of old-timers and newcomers. Controversies over complaints, mostly involving disqualifications for failure to disarm, raged for weeks, placing the Canadian head of the Electoral Complaints Commission under terrible strain. At one point, crowds outside his office chanted, “Death to Grant Kippen.” But all disputes were fairly resolved, and the results were widely accepted.
With the last major milestone of the Bonn process completed, Jean Arnault, now UNAMA’s head, turned his attention to the post-Bonn framework for continuing partnership. There was broad agreement that the US-led military effort in the country must continue, even deepen. But with the conflict in Iraq getting worse, few combat-ready units were on offer, and fewer still with the capability to train Afghan forces. Although a few development programs had excelled, government institutions remained weak.
How could this be remedied? In 2004, Afghanistan had presented a blueprint for development called Securing Afghanistan’s Future, but with Ghani’s departure, the impetus behind it had been lost. An Interim Afghanistan National Development Strategy, including an anti-poverty plan required by the World Bank, was in the works. However, its adoption wouldn’t guarantee continued support from the international community, much less that this support would be delivered coherently or effectively. The risk of donor fatigue was real. With Iraq generating new divisions and controversy every week, a rush for the exits seemed possible.
Arnault’s elegant solution was an Afghanistan Compact, a five-page political declaration to be issued by the Afghan government together with donors, detailing commitments to security, governance, development, aid effectiveness and counter-narcotics, backed by concrete benchmarks for success. It was an attempt to enlarge the Bonn framework, which had focused almost exclusively on political legitimacy, to include the broader goals of stability and national development. Would anyone buy it?
I met regularly with other national representatives, starting in the summer of 2005, then continuing all autumn. At first these sessions brought together selected donors, then all of those represented in Kabul. There were a few fiery debates, with the United States at one point unwilling to support the creation of an Afghan army exceeding 70,000 troops by 2011. Aid experts doubted whether it was realistic to bring electricity to 25 percent of rural households or build functional justice institutions at the provincial level. Few of these objectives were yet backed by firm plans or programs, let alone funding. But all were desperately needed. It was at least an outline of what would be required to make the country’s economy, government and infrastructure viable.
After the parliamentary elections, I left my position as ambassador of Canada, after twenty-six months on the job, as part of the normal rotation that comes with life in the diplomatic corps. By this time, 2,300 Canadian troops were on their way to take the lead in Kandahar province. A new phase was beginning for Canada in Afghanistan.
I had a decision to make. NATO secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer had asked me to be his senior civilian representative in Kabul. At the same time, colleagues in UNAMA, backed by Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guéhenno in New York, wanted me to replace Filippo Grandi, the Italian who had replaced Arnault as deputy special representative of the secretary-general.
Both roles were important. NATO was becoming, by its sheer scale, the most influential international player in Afghanistan. It had Kabul and the north under its command; expansion to the rest of the country was due in 2006. But we already knew military action inside Afghanistan would not be enough. Taliban and al Qaeda leaders were across the border, out of NATO’s reach. Persuading Pakistan to do the right thing was a political task.
In the end, political leadership would have to come from national capitals. And the political umbrella under which we all worked inside Afghanistan would remain UNAMA. Ultimately, this is why I decided to take the UNAMA job.
Not that I was naive about the UN’s shortcomings. With offices in only ten of thirty-four provinces, its mission was still small. Joint planning and execution among UN agencies, funds and programs was spotty at best. Worst of all, UN diplomats were unwilling to confront Pakistan over its blind-eye approach to jihadis and cross-border interference. Even with fresh insurgent campaigns being launched from Pakistani soil, New York was unwilling to confront the problem. After all, Islamabad was a top troop contributor to UN peacekeeping.
The pressure to take the NATO job had been heavy. The idea of working even more closely with the military professionals I had already seen in action was tempting. We needed more unity of effort in the Provincial Reconstruction Teams and elsewhere. But I was a diplomat—a political animal. Only within a UN framework did we stand a chance of getting the politics of peace right for Afghanistan. UNAMA already had the most talented team of political officers in the country. We would press forward with political prerequisites for stability, from elections to reconciliation, while championing larger investments in institution building.
There were risks. New York might fail to come through with additional resources; some there even thought UNAMA should scale down. My own career might suffer as I took leave without pay from the Canadian Foreign Service, but without any real interest in a UN career after Kabul. Moreover, the regional dimension was fraught with risk and complexity: generations of UN envoys had been gored on its many horns. Still, UNAMA was the best place for me to continue contributing. I would start in December.
In the meantime, my wife-to-be, Hedvig, and I travelled in early October 2005 to Islamabad, then north to Skardu and Shigar in Pakistan’s north, on the way to the base camp for K2, the world’s second-highest mountain peak. On the day of the devastating Kashmir earthquake, October 8, we were in a beautiful Kashmiri maharaja’s palace lovingly restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Pervez Musharraf ’s brother had been staying there just before us. The old building had rattled and swayed, remaining wholly intact. Elsewhere in our area, roads were washed away and landslides had buried parts of villages. But as we would later learn, the local damage was nothing compared with the devastation farther south.
We travelled onward to Gilgit, a transit point for Himalayan mountain climbers, and then into the picturesque Hunza Valley. We then passed over the Khunjerab Pass from Sost into China’s Xinjiang region, staying successively in Tashkurgan, Kashgar and Urumqi, where the Silk Road came to life before our eyes.
In late November I was back in Kabul, in my new capacity as deputy special representative of the secretary-general, drafting and redrafting the Afghanistan Compact’s dense language, seeking clarity and consensus. It would be the centrepiece of a conference in London that would renew the international commitment to Afghanistan for another five years.
By December, the political renaissance ordained by the 2003 Bonn Agreement had been implemented almost in full. The new 250-member lower house of the National Assembly, the Wolesi Jirga, or People’s Chamber, was inaugurated on December 19, 2005, again with speeches by Zahir Shah and Karzai. US vice-president Dick Cheney represented the Bush administration.
The new Afghan state now had its skeletal structure, complete with a veneer of political legitimacy. But with the exception of disarmament, nothing had yet been done to challenge the local power of commanders in most villages and districts. In fact, the military campaign of 2001, the two loya jirgas and the elections themselves had in some ways reinforced their influence and impunity. To make all these national projects work, Hamid Karzai and his men had to cut deals with the people who held power on the ground. As the Afghanistan Compact itself would later say, “The transition to peace and stability [was] not yet assured.”
In fact, security was slipping, even in Kabul. In August, the Taliban claimed credit when a Spanish helicopter crashed near Herat, killing seventeen. In November, suicide attacks were launched against German ISAF soldiers. In December, there were attacks at the Friday Mosque in Herat, followed by suicide attacks elsewhere in the city. It was a sign of the brutal campaign to come.
The UN mapping report chronicling past atrocities was not yet published. In fact, the only substantial action to legally address past Afghan human rights abuses was taking place in foreign jurisdictions. In London, a commander by the name of Faryadi Sarwar Zardad was arrested for war crimes on July 14, 2003. He was convicted on July 18, 2005, for his sadistic acts, including torture and summary executions, which he had committed in the early 1990s while running a checkpoint between Kabul and Jalalabad. (Abdullah Shah, convicted in Kabul in October 2002 and later executed, had been his subordinate.) Several persons suspected of war crimes at earlier stages of the conflict were indicted in the Netherlands. In Afghanistan itself, Assadullah Sarwary, intelligence chief and deputy prime minister under the pro-Soviet administrations of the late 1970s and 1980s, was tried in late 2005 for incidents of torture and mass murder that took place under his watch. He was sentenced to death in March 2006 in Afghanistan’s first indigenous war crimes trial. A report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights found numerous procedural shortcomings: “Detained without charge since 1992, [Sarwary] had no legal representation, and standards of evidence, as well as other due process safeguards, were ignored.”
Massacre sites in Kabul and elsewhere began to be uncovered. Witnesses came forward, often pointing fingers; statements were taken. But commanders often acted quickly to bury the evidence. In some cases, mass graves were destroyed on the spot. NGO workers and eyewitnesses were threatened. Transitional justice had become a tug-of-war, recalling the anything-goes thuggery of the 1990s. In one of my first speeches as deputy head of the UN mission, I addressed a workshop on transitional justice bringing together activists from across the country. After consultations in many provinces, they concluded that there could be no substitute for real criminal-justice prosecutions.
A case study in the manner by which realpolitik has trumped accountability is the Islamist militia Hezb-i Islami, which was Afghanistan’s most potent military force throughout the anti-Soviet jihad and ensuing civil war, until it was displaced from Kabul by the Taliban in 1996. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the group’s leader, with a reputation for brutality, spent most of the Taliban years in Iranian exile. In 2002, Tehran made a show of extraditing him but sent him to Pakistan, where he was welcomed in radical circles with open arms. Though Hezb-i Islami was largely excluded from government positions in the early years of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban regime, it received several ministries at the 2002 emergency loya jirga. In the years since, Hezb-i Islami reportedly has joined forces with al Qaeda and the Taliban. In 2003, the United States government identified Hekmatyar as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” Yet several major segments of Hezb-i Islami had been reconciled in 2004—even though Hekmatyar himself remained at large, just like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.
The situation in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province, the centre of the nation’s drug trade, also put on display the frustrating moral complexities of Afghan realpolitik. In the summer of 2005, the gubernatorial incumbent was Mullah Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, a scion of the province’s most famous jihadi family. They had ruled the province with an iron fist in the early 1990s. Since their return in 2001, they had meted out summary justice to many of their rivals, who had sided with the Taliban in the interim. By sharing power with notorious commanders from the other main tribes, Sher Mohammad had kept stability in Helmand. But he and his ilk also had presided over the most spectacular drug bonanza in Afghan history.
For London, which then had the NATO lead on counter-narcotics, this made Sher Mohammad an unacceptable bedfellow. And it made his removal a condition of its deployment as it moved to take over responsibility for Helmand in 2005. Karzai complied, but it was a decision he later would come to regret. Sher Mohammad’s removal was just the opening that the Taliban, now returning in numbers to neigh-bouring Oruzgan, to the northeast, were awaiting.
What was worse, as Sher Mohammad returned to Kabul in December to take up a seat in the new upper house, he ordered his followers not to hinder the Taliban resurgence. For him, this was a good business decision: the financial needs of the insurgents would take opium cultivation to new heights in Helmand, visiting a new form of revenge on the British.
The story of Sher Mohammad is just one example of one politician, in one region. But it lies at the intersection of many factors that make Afghanistan complicated and violent: drugs, warlords, power politics and a culture of payback and vengeance. After more than two years in this country, I was coming to realize how difficult it would be to prepare the ground for peace.