At present, the grand vizier, and almost all the great officers of the state, are Baurikzyes, and they owe their elevation to the courage and attachment of their clan. . . . They are a spirited and warlike clan.
—Mountstuart Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul and Its Dependencies in Persia, Tartay, and India, vol. 2, 1842
Each section of a tribe, however small, has its leading man, who is known as Malik, a specially Pathan title. In many, but by no means all, tribes, there is a Khan Khel, usually the oldest branch of the tribe, whose Malik is known as Khan, and acts as chief of the whole tribe. But he is seldom more than their leader in war and their agent in dealings with others; he possesses influence other than power, and the real authority rests with the Jirga, a democratic council composed of all the Maliks.
—Intelligence Branch, Division of the Chief of Staff, Army Headquarters, India, Frontier and Overseas Expeditions from India, vol. 1, 1907
In the fall of 2001 Hamdullah Nazak sat in a jail cell in Kandahar City. He was barefoot because his captors had taken his shoes, and his entire body was battered.
Until that morning his uncle had been with him in the jail, but when the sun rose his uncle was taken from his cell, escorted to the front of a crowd of people in a downtown street of Kandahar City, and hanged from a crane. Nazak knew fear. His Taliban captors had promised twenty-three-year-old Nazak that his turn on the crane would come when the sun rose the next day.
But by a remarkable stroke of good fortune for Nazak, the Taliban ran out of time. The next morning the Taliban fled the city as American and Afghan forces approached. Nazak lived to see his young life almost ended and then suddenly restored.
Nazak was jailed because he was caught spying for the former governor, Gul Agha Sherzai. Four days after the American bombing began, Nazak’s uncle, Abdullah Khyal, almost fifteen years Nazak’s senior, dispatched Nazak to Sherzai’s house in Quetta, Pakistan. There Sherzai gave Nazak a satellite phone, a GPS device, and a small video recorder. Nazak hid them behind the dashboard of his car and drove across the border back to Kandahar.
Nazak, his uncle, and other helpers tracked the movements of the Taliban, plotted their positions, and telephoned the coordinates to Quetta. They eyed the house of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and walked Taliban trenches near the airport. After American bombs struck, they would assess the damage and report back. Sometimes the Americans would strike again if the target was not completely destroyed. Nazak later told a reporter that he hated the Taliban and felt they were an embarrassment to the country.
One day in November Sherzai called on the satellite phone and told Kyal and Nazak to leave immediately. But the Taliban police moved in too quickly, catching them with sketches of Taliban positions, target lists, and a telltale satellite phone number. Nazak was beaten in jail with truncheons and cables across his whole body for weeks on end. His uncle died under the torture before the Taliban took his body to the square to hang before the crowd. They left his corpse there for three days as a warning to others, draping a banner on him that read “Abdullah, son of Habibullah, inhabitant of Salehan, who had a satellite telephone and was giving information to the Americans, and was killing Muslims through the Americans.” Nazak learned of his uncle’s death only after he was released from jail, and by then Sherzai was in the governor’s office in Kandahar City. Nazak was rewarded by Sherzai with temporary command of more than a dozen soldiers.1
It was natural that Nazak and his uncle would have sought out Sherzai as a benefactor, and it was his good fortune that he was accepted, though it almost ended his young life and did end his uncle’s. Nazak’s uncle was a strong supporter of the monarchy that had been overthrown in the 1970s. Nazak’s own family came from a moderately distinguished line of military leaders. His village lay only a few miles from Sherzai’s. Nazak was also a member of the same tribe, the Barakzais.
Dand District holds a mix of Barakzai, Popalzai, Achekzai, and various other tribes. Sherzai is not the only powerful figure to come from Dand District; President Karzai, a Popalzai, also hails from the district. The Karzai family seat in the village of Karz, in Dand, is a few short miles from Sherzai’s home village. Karzai’s Popalzai tribe resides in the northeast of the district, while Sherzai’s Barakzai tribal power base occupies the south and southwest.
Competition between the two tribes has lasted for centuries. The Popalzais ruled at the very beginning of modern Afghanistan but were supplanted by the Barakzais; they have tried to claw their way back to dominance ever since. The rivalry exists, in part, courtesy of a common lineage. Both belong to the Zirak Durrani tribal confederation.
This amalgamation of tribes is immensely powerful. The name Durrani originated with Ahmad Shah Abdali, the modern state founder who unified Afghanistan. He was a member of the Sadozai, a minor subtribe of the Popalzai. As a young man, Ahmad Shah was serving as the leader of the bodyguards of a Persian emperor when the latter was suddenly assassinated by unhappy liegemen. Ahmad Shah quickly returned to Kandahar before suspicion could fall on him, as he was carrying part of the Persian state treasure. In 1747, already a noted warrior and suddenly the holder of great wealth, Ahmad Shah was elected leader of all the tribes in a grand jirga of tribal elders in Kandahar.
Ahmad Shah quickly took the title Durr-i-Durrani (Pearl of Pearls), and the Durrani name was substituted for his former tribal name, Abdali. Ahmad Shah quickly consolidated the tribes beneath him and embarked on successful military campaigns into India.
Though Ahmad Shah hailed from the Sadozai subclan of the Popalzai tribe, his fame kept alive the claim to Popalzai ascendancy for centuries, even as the Popalzais were overtaken by the Barakzais in power politics. Even in the twenty-first century President Hamid Karzai benefited from his Popalzai heritage.
Tribal splits defined, in part, the fissure between the Taliban and the government. The Taliban have a natural identification with a rival Afghan tribal confederation known as the Ghilzais. And many more Taliban adherents come from another tribal confederation, the Panjpai Durranis.
The very genesis of the Taliban is rooted in this split. According to Peter Tomsen, who worked for years as a U.S. diplomat in the region, the Pakistani intelligence service, known as the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate or ISI, helped to establish the Taliban in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the agency promoted young Mullah Mohammad Omar, a Hotak Ghilzai, as a leader. This shrewdly worked the tribal angle. By selecting Omar, they harkened back to the Ghilzai elders, who had led the region before being shunted aside by the Durrani rule centuries earlier.2
Popular lore has it that the Taliban arose as a reaction to a single atrocity. The legend goes that a local leader of a gang of gunmen kidnapped, raped, and killed the children of a family of travelers near Kandahar City in 1994. By hanging the leader of that gang from the barrel of a tank gun and then eliminating many other strongmen, the Taliban became a force of popular resistance to the arbitrary disorder then reigning in Kandahar. Other accounts differ on the precise origins of the movement, with the hanging occurring at a different place or time, but most agree that a group of tribal elders and religious figures became disenchanted with the actions of the warlords, who stole, raped, and molested people on the roadways. They banded together to stop the lawless behavior. Mullah Omar, a village religious leader who had fought the Soviets in the Kandahar area, was elected the leader of the group.
Rather than being a popular movement, the reality of how the Taliban grew is murky, according to Tomsen, who says the Pakistani ISI played the tribal card heavily when setting the Taliban in motion, as it had in the 1980s when it supported hard-line party leaders over moderates against the Soviets.
According to Tomsen, “Colonel Imam and ISI’s Quetta office had been remolding the Argestan shura into the Taliban for over a year before the apocryphal scene on the road to Kandahar took place. The ancient vendetta between Afghanistan’s two largest tribal confederations, the Durrani and the Ghilzai, played an important role in Imam’s shrewd construction of the Taliban’s hierarchy. He gave overriding preference to anti-Durrani Ghilzais, as Zia had in selecting the seven party leaders. And he placed Ghilzai Hotaks, such as Mullah Omar, in strategic control of the movement.”3
Though analysts differ on the details, they agree that the centuries-old jostling between the Zirak Durranis and their rivals, the Panjpai Durranis and the Ghilzais, fuels the conflict today.4 Many ordinary Afghans of the Zirak Durrani, such as Nazak, would have turned naturally against the Taliban. The Taliban’s tribalism and radical ideology separates it from Karzai’s ethnically mixed government and most of the Afghan people, because banning the education of girls, employment for women, and even music is counter to most of the closely held beliefs of ordinary Afghans.
Given this tribal background, it was natural that Nazak would seek out Sherzai to work against the Taliban. Nazak also wanted to rise. As a teen he’d ping-ponged from job to job, working as a farmer, a carpenter, and in a brickyard, always looking for something better. Even as his father advised him to settle down with a single profession, his mother expressed faith that he would succeed. His home life not always happy; young Nazak had something to prove.
So the arrival of the Americans in Kandahar City proved a double bonus. It saved Nazak’s life and installed Sherzai into the provincial governor’s office, which he seized at the first opportunity.
In late 2001 Karzai was approaching Kandahar City from the north as Sherzai came from the south. Both enjoyed having American advisors and patronage, but in December Karzai was appointed the head of the interim government. One of Karzai’s first moves was to appoint an Alikozai tribal elder and veteran mujahidin commander, Mullah Naqib, as governor of Kandahar Province. Outraged, Sherzai marched to the governor’s office and refused to leave. Karzai hastened from Kabul to Kandahar City to see Sherzai, which was probably a mistake, because in a tribal society it made Karzai look weak. When Karzai emerged, Sherzai was still governor, either because Karzai gave in or Naqib acquiesced under pressure.
Naqib retired quietly to a district just north of the city, while Sherzai consolidated his power and began to engage in the massive corruption that marked his tenure as governor. A powerful leader, Sherzai ran Kandahar as his personal fiefdom with little interference from Karzai, taking over business rivals and extorting money by arresting tribal leaders, who could pay the ransom for their release.
Meanwhile a now free Nazak lacked an obvious way forward. Still seeking advancement and progressing steadily in business and local politics, he bounced from Dand to the border city of Spin Boldak and back again, along the way becoming a village elder and a used-car dealer. He established a national youth organization, garnering positive attention from provincial authorities. At age twenty-eight he received the appointment as governor of the “unofficial” district of Dand. (As Kandahar Province’s newest district, Dand had a constitutional status that remained in limbo for years.)
By then Sherzai had been transferred to Nangarhar Province in the north, and Nazak was operating on his own in Dand. He quickly moved to undermine the Taliban, and the Canadians began to spend money widely. Within three years Nazak had turned that money into a viable political system capable of resisting the Taliban’s repeated incursions.
At the heart of Nazak’s system lay a bargain he made with local maliks, or village headmen. He would send them projects, but only if they came to the district center to arrange the assistance. A steady flow of maliks began to stream into the district center, a visible sign of the success of Nazak’s system.
In return for projects the elders also pledged security, and they would prove this security worked by opening the local school. To do this, the villagers would provide tips that allowed the security forces to weed out the Taliban. “Security depends on the maliks,” was Nazak’s oft-repeated maxim.
Under Nazak’s bargain, if villagers provided no tips about the insurgents and the maliks did not visit the DDC, then projects would not flow to the village. If a village underperformed and the school failed to open, Nazak replaced the malik and the village tried again. Nazak reckoned his system created better security, improved the economy, and restarted the dialogue between the people and the government, without which the war could not be won.
As months passed farmers could see better security, and their perception of security became more positive, which in turn made them more likely to inform on the insurgents, which improved security even more. It was a virtuous cycle, but the system relied on a steady stream of quick-impact projects, such as a new well, that could be installed without a lengthy delay. Nazak needed people to feel he was responding to their needs, even if he was merely channeling foreign money while the foreign soldiers throughout the district actually handled most of the details.
The system worked, even though being a malik was risky. In 2009 the Taliban began a campaign across Kandahar to kill tribal elders and political leaders, including those in Dand. As late as 2010 visiting Canadian VIPs were shot at by insurgents who lurked outside the district center. In mid-2011 elders were still being beaten up or killed by Taliban infiltrators. One kidnapped malik gained his freedom only after a group of elders traveled to Panjwai District, where he was being held by the Taliban, and retrieved him.
It was risky for maliks to work with the government, but they gained personal prestige by bringing projects to their people. This played into the widespread Afghan desire to gain a public reputation. Tribal custom is based on pride and honor. The more honor an Afghan male possesses, the wider his reputation. Honor and reputation are bound together. In a small village in Dand a malik who brought money and projects to the people gained such a reputation. At the same time Nazak also exploited the tribal ties that people shared with the government.
I already knew a few dollars could make a huge difference in a village, despite the risk. The year before, on a patrol in a rural district north of Kandahar City where I worked with the Department of Defense, we had driven to the isolated village of Baghtu. Located near the main road to Uruzgan Province, the collection of two hundred mud houses built at the bottom of a deep valley drew few visitors from the passing traffic. Rocky hills covered in scrub rose on either side. The villagers in Baghtu wanted a stone wall to protect their crops and houses from the river that ran through the village and surged with snowmelt each spring.
“The village needs a wall to keep out the flood waters,” one farmer said. “The recent flood destroyed a lot, and all the wheatfields are hurt. We have lost twenty-five acres of wheatfields this year due to the flood.”
The protective wall would cost about $11,000, and it represented the first government gift to the village. But the risk was great. Several years before, the people in the Baghtu Valley had risen up against the Taliban and banned them from their village. But the Taliban returned in force to kill the ringleaders on their doorsteps. At that time the government had been no protection. Now the villagers just wanted help.
“If we take projects, the Taliban will be angry. They will come and beat us,” the farmer told us. “But they will beat us anyway, and we want the projects. We want the work, and we will deal with it.”5
In Dand, under the influence of projects, tribe, and pride, the maliks signed up en masse with Nazak. Information flowed in. Schools opened as projects flowed back into villages. Eventually most of the northern part of the district near the district center became safe. Then the southern half of the district grew safer. By late 2010 it too was mostly pacified.
In early 2011 the Canadians further regularized Nazak’s system and persuaded him to divide the district into twelve different clusters of villages, each of which would receive one million Afghanis, worth about $20,000, to spend as one-time assistance. Each cluster of five to fifteen villages would hold a weekly shura, or consultation council, composed of local village maliks, and each cluster would send one cluster leader to the district center with requests.
Nazak disliked the idea of having cluster leaders, which he viewed as potential rivals for authority and who in practice unfairly favored their own villages when it came to apportioning the Canadian money.
“I don’t want to work with the cluster leaders. I want to work with the maliks,” insisted Nazak. “I don’t like the cluster system.”
But the ever-practical Nazak never turned down free money. He approved the plan and simply worked around the leaders as best he could.
With his system working and the district center humming, Nazak next attempted to bring the local mullahs on board. For nearly a year he assiduously courted them, but the Taliban closely monitored the mullahs. One mullah told Nazak that to visit the district center he needed the police to pretend to arrest him and bring him to the DDC, where they could discuss working together. He would then be taken back to the village by the police, showing some light abuse to keep his cover story intact. The pressure on the mullahs by the Taliban, plus the lack of funds to offer them, made this idea a challenging one for Nazak to implement.
Nazak’s innovations were all the more remarkable when compared with neighboring Panjwai District, where the government made few inroads into the insurgency throughout 2011. Its political system floundered under steady insurgent pressure.
As Dand stabilized, Nazak began to look ahead to the next step in his career. Perhaps he would become deputy provincial governor or the mayor of Kandahar City or maybe even provincial governor, or one day he might even take Karzai’s job. Why not? He had pacified Dand. But even in his triumph the years wore on without advancement, and his enthusiasm waned. The routine administration of villages seemed to become boring to Nazak.
Even as Nazak’s system bore fruit in early 2011 it was threatened by outside forces. Though the system was built on projects, that spring the U.S. staff in Kandahar City began to discuss cutting Dand from projects as an experiment to see what would happen when the inevitable U.S. withdrawal began. Dand might become an early guinea pig to see how districts could handle the inevitable reduction of resources. In meetings with Nazak U.S. officials promised their full support, while in official channels they worked to cut aid and begin an experiment leading into the unknown. A few months later when Nazak heard about this, he complained this concept would destabilize the district and his own personal prospects. It was too soon to pull resources, he argued, because his system needed time to become fully entrenched. People needed to have a robust trust in their government when resources were drawn down in 2012 or 2013.
Nazak worried. He knew the Americans would leave and the projects needed to control the district would have to come from the Afghan government. But would the Americans stop the flow of projects before his own government, which until then had proved incapable of delivering almost anything, stepped up? And would the Americans pull the plug earlier than necessary in some sort of ill-advised experiment?
As Nazak looked ahead to the transition he suspected that the Americans would make pulling out a priority, and U.S. officials would find it difficult to understand Nazak’s system. He suspected the Afghan government would fail to support the district for years to come, and therefore the eventual failure of his system was almost assured.
He said only half-joking, “When the Americans pull out, I am leaving too.”
Three things would happen in the next year or two. First, the amount of money and troops the Americans committed to Dand would steadily decrease. Second, we needed to preserve the political system by finding a low-cost option that would let us continue affecting people’s lives in a positive fashion while using only a fraction of the money we used now. Third, we would need to improve the economy so the people could see their lives improving as well.
And so we turned to thinking about the economy. A booming economy would ensure the viability of Nazak’s system, while failure would allow the Taliban to return. Recalling Keith’s turbulent experience with the people at KAF, I figured it wouldn’t be easy to find a good economic plan that would pass muster back at headquarters.