Opium Nation Page 25

  Idrees normally leaves the house in the morning and comes home after the sun sets. He likes to walk the half hour to work or take one of the two bicycles the family uses for transportation. They do not own a car. Sometimes he gets a call in the middle of the night to come to work, to prepare for an operation. Then he’s gone for a couple of days. Idrees does not tell people that he works for the NIU. Only his family knows. Other relatives and friends know him as a simple policeman. Even at home he talks about his colleagues but never about the cases he’s working on—it’s understood that his job is a secret.

  One August night Idrees is watching the news on television while his wife nurses one of the twins. They have eaten dinner and Idrees is relaxing on the toshak, his muscular arm resting against a pillow. He’s drinking his tea slowly, engrossed in the news, when his cell phone rings. He listens to the voice on the other end.

  “I’ll be there in thirty-five minutes,” he responds. Afghans tell time in intervals of thirty minutes. Mentioning that extra five minutes is a mark of Idrees’s promptness and his police training.

  His relaxed demeanor suddenly shifts to an urgent strut. He orders Tahmina to bring a washed pirahan tomban and his checkered scarf, which he wraps around his neck. He looks in the mirror to make sure his mustache is trimmed. On this pleasant summer night, he puts on his silver watch and his beige vest over his starched outfit and walks to the counternarcotics compound.

  Tahmina dreads the late-night calls. She becomes quiet and sad when Idrees leaves for operations. Before he leaves that night he tells his younger brother Zaki, a student at Kabul University, “I’ll give you a missed call when I reach the compound. We’ll stay the night there and then go on the operation sometime in the morning.”

  The family waits for the phone to ring. Forty-five minutes later, at 10:45, Idrees lets the phone ring once to signal his safe arrival. Tahmina breathes a sigh of relief and goes to bed.

  Idrees sleeps on a cot in the compound, as does his partner, Obaid. In the early morning the two men will embark on their most dangerous assignment yet, to Helmand province in the south, a stronghold of the Taliban and drug smugglers.

  The Taliban have made a ferocious comeback. They are better trained and well armed. Helmand is their backyard, supported by powerful drug trafficking networks. The United States, with the help of Afghan authorities, have arrested four kingpins linked to the Taliban, including Haji Juma Khan and Haji Baz Mohammad, but their networks are still active. The networks operate with the Pakistani truckers’ mafia, the Quetta Alliance, which smuggles contraband and goods across Afghanistan to Pakistan and Iran and controls a large share of the drug industry coming from the southern Afghan provinces. It is the Quetta Alliance that helped bring the Taliban to power in 1994. The traffickers pay the Taliban to protect their shipments, and in return the Taliban receive funding and weapons. The most lucrative trafficking route runs through Nimroz province, west of Helmand; Nimroz is a Baloch ethnic area that shares a border with both Iran and Pakistan. This tri-border route provides the shortest way for drugs to be trafficked via sea, air, or land. The Taliban and these networks have a base in Baramcha district, in Helmand, and Afghans who have been there tell stories of a village with twenty-four-hour electricity powered by generators and an underground depot stocked with thousands of tons of opium and heroin. Neither the Afghan government nor any foreign military has been able to penetrate Baramcha. This is the Helmand that Idrees and Obaid are about to enter.

  When I enter the counternarcotics compound in Kabul to visit with General Asif, I notice framed certificates hanging on the wall. On each certificate is a photo of a man, one with a mustache and one with a beard. They look like criminal mug shots. The photos on the wall are of Idrees and Obaid, and the certificates were printed in honor of their bravery.

  I have known General Asif, the immediate head of the NIU, for a year, and it still takes several cups of tea and chitchat to get a useful sentence out of him. Today I find he is not his usual hospitable self. “Fariba Jan,” he says in his calm Pashto accent, “you have no idea what I’ve been through since you were here last. I lost two of my best boys in Helmand. One of our sources was a double agent, and now he’s fled to Pakistan. We haven’t gotten him yet, and who knows if we ever will.

  “These two agents could think on their feet and work independently. They were the first two that I thought of for the job,” Asif tells me.

  These are the first high-profile homicides in Asif’s Western-trained elite unit, and the Afghan authorities have teamed up with the DEA, the British, and the Pakistani police to capture the people responsible.

  For the operation in which Idrees and Obaid were involved, the British worked with an Afghan informant who provided intelligence on drug dealers. That information was then shared with the Afghan government selectively. The informant worked with another man from Helmand, Shah Wali, who was connected to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s former mujahideen party, Hizb-e-Islami. Hekmatyar was a known trafficker in 1979 when the CIA began funding his faction through Pakistan’s ISI. He was largely responsible for the destruction of Kabul during the civil war in the 1990s and had teamed up with the Taliban against the U.S. coalition. Hekmatyar was involved with large narcotics smuggling rings in the eastern part of Afghanistan and tribal areas of Pakistan.

  Shah Wali told the British informant that two tons of opium were stashed in a house near Grishk district, in Helmand. Idrees and Obaid were to be sent to check out the location of the house. If the information was accurate, they were supposed to quickly drive away. Then a government raid would take place.

  The two men were physically fit. Each wore a badge to show to other government forces if they were stopped, and each had a nine-millimeter pistol and a cell phone tucked away. Shah Wali accompanied them in a taxi from Kabul to Kandahar, where they spent the night. They then hopped in another cab and drove toward Helmand. At about six PM Shah Wali made his call. He told his contacts that the NIU agents were on their way.

  It was a setup.

  Four to six men on motorcycles stopped the men’s car, dragged them out, tied their hands, blindfolded them, and drove them to a house sixteen miles away in Gaz, a hotbed of Taliban support. Taliban commanders Mullah Khaliq and Mullah Manan met them there. Obaid began crying, begging them not to kill him. He was poorer than Idrees, and the breadwinner for a family of twenty. He pleaded that his family had no one to take care of them if he was dead. Idrees yelled at him to stop begging. He knew he and Obaid would be killed. It happened almost immediately.

  One of the commanders shot Idrees first, then Obaid, multiple times in the chest and head. The bodies were left where they were killed, by the side of the road. Shah Wali had hoped that Americans or the British would come, because then there could’ve been a ransom. But the bodies of foreign-trained Afghan police were good enough to send a message: the Taliban and their drug lord friends ruled this area and they’d kill whoever got in their way.

  Shah Wali and the other killers crossed the Afghan border to Pakistan, but the Helmand governor, Sher Mohammad Akhunzada, also an accused drug dealer opposed to the Taliban, turned over Abdul Malik, Shah Wali’s son-in-law, who was present at the executions. Abdul Malik, who was small fish in this high-profile murder, became the fall guy while the masterminds of the homicides walked away. The British protected their informant, who remained unnamed and unharmed. “The drug lords in the south are much harder to fight than those in the north of the country,” an official in counternarcotics tells me. “In the north, drugs are commerce, and loyalties can be easily bought. The southerners are tied to tribal loyalties and antiforeign ideologies. They justify their drug dealing politically and convince many younger men to participate by manipulating religion. Twenty kilos of opium for a foreigner’s head—that’s about a six-thousand-dollar reward offered to fresh recruits of the insurgency.”

  Two months after Idrees’s murder, I visit his family at their Khair Khana home. The cemented front yard is decorated with
more than a dozen plants. I can smell rotting garbage mixed with the aroma of fresh adobe after a light rain. My shoes feel heavy from the mud I collect as I walk to the door. I knock, and a young girl in a head scarf answers. I hear a baby crying. “That’s my little brother, Rahim,” the girl chimes.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Hellay,” she says shyly. She’s Idrees’s oldest child. She leads me to the living room, where I meet her grandmother, Idrees’s mother, Jahan.

  “Welcome,” she says. We kiss three times on the cheek, and I sit in a sparsely furnished room warmed with a wood heater. Jahan orders one of her daughters to bring tea and then turns her rosary. (Muslims recite verses from the Quran as they finger each bead on the rosary.) I explain my visit. “I want to give my condolences because of your son. I also want to know how the family is doing.”

  “Not a minute goes by that I don’t think about him,” Jahan says, her voice thick with authority. She has General Asif’s sweet Pashto accent when she speaks Farsi. “We were kings before my son died. Now the flowers are all dead and the house is empty without him.” There are no tears in her eyes, no sign of emotion, except for hollow pain. A toddler walks in the room and sits on her lap. Jahan holds her and kisses her head. She sighs.

  “This is his youngest daughter, Sarah. Her twin brother is with her mother. She’s cooking nazr [food for religious offering].”

  “How is their mother?”

  “She has become very sensitive. She would get upset if she knew I was talking about her with you. She loses her patience and hits the kids. Instead of nursing them, she hits and slaps them, and I’m scared of her anger. She’s a widow. God give her patience. We tell her not to hit. If their father was here, he would become very upset. He didn’t believe in beating.”

  “Were they happy together?” I ask.

  “Yes, they were good friends. They were first cousins and lived as husband and wife for nine years. Tahmina is only twenty-five years old,” Jahan says.

  Idrees’s sister Khadija brings tea and joins the conversation.

  “My brother was the person we all looked up to in this house,” she says. “He taught me different ways to decorate the sweets for Eid [a feast after Ramadan]. He had a woman’s taste and a man’s authority. I water the plants now, but they’re dying.” Her voice trails off as the tears run down her face.

  I have moved into a newly constructed apartment complex in the Project Taimani neighborhood with a good friend. Patricia Omidian is an American anthropologist in her fifties who is well respected for her work and charity among Afghans. We live by ourselves on the third floor in a two-bedroom apartment at an intersection with a mosque, a wedding hall, and welding shops. I have to learn to fall asleep to the muezzin’s call to prayer fused with Afghan disco pop music bursting through the wedding hall until two am. Most expatriates live as a group in large guarded guesthouses in wealthier neighborhoods, as I did in Karte Parwan. Among the foreigners live the drug lords, in opium palaces, or they rent out their houses to foreigners. A Washington Post article about opium palaces describes them best: “For rent on Street 6 in the neighborhood of Sherpur: a four-story, eleven-bedroom dwelling of pink granite and lime marble, complete with massage showers, a rooftop fountain and, in the basement, an Asian-themed nightclub. Price: $12,000 a month.” The foreigners in Kabul stimulate the drug economy just by renting.

  Patricia and I want to keep a distance from the foreigner-occupied neighborhoods. We think it’s safer to live a quiet life among Afghans. We have no guards, no cooks, and no foreign guests. We have a woman come once a week to clean the apartment. The neighbors here are a mix of ethnicities and languages. They do not bother us, and I do not try to befriend or antagonize them.

  “How can you live there?” an Afghan American friend in Fremont asks me during a phone call. “I mean, you don’t have reliable power, clean water, or the right to wear or say what you want. Why keep going back when the situation is getting worse? All of you guys who’ve gone back to rebuild the country have made it worse.”

  It’s a question I’ve answered dozens of times, but the longer I stay in Afghanistan, the more complex my answer becomes.

  “Because every morning I wake up, there’s a surprise: a new person I meet, a new experience I’m told about, a new discovery about myself, about the people here,” I tell her. “In college, when I insisted that I would come back someday, an American friend scoffed at me and said I wouldn’t be able to adapt. The Afghanistan of the past was gone and the new one would not welcome me. I wondered the same thing myself. But that’s not the case.

  “It’s true I came here to make peace with the past, and that journey is ongoing. Perhaps I never will. But I’m on a new journey here and I’m finding out things about myself that I never would in the U.S.,” I tell her, impassioned.

  “Like what?” she asks sarcastically.

  “Like I can use just a bucket of water to shower, like I can eat potatoes every day for five weeks and be fine, like I can have a deep conversation with an Afghan man who has four wives and makes a living dealing drugs.”

  “I think you’re still romanticizing it,” she insists.

  “Sweetie, I’m not going to lie to you. It’s awful on some days. I’m learning to live beyond my nostalgic dreams. I hate the misogyny, the corruption, the greed, and the mistrust of so many here. But with it there’s resilience for survival and love,” I explain to her as I make sense of my own mixed feelings. “People here still can love you despite what they’ve been through.”

  “I guess,” she says. “Whatever makes you happy, but I think you’re wasting your time. Afghanistan’s doomed to fail.”

  “That’s like saying your family’s sick and doomed to die. I guess you just don’t feel the personal ties I do with this place,” I say. We end the phone call on a polite but tense note.

  My friend’s cynicism reminds me of my father’s attitude. I can understand him because he’s old. But I’m angry with my friend for her willingness to give up on her former country, to disconnect herself from a place that needs young dreamers.

  I’m frequently traveling around the country, but in Kabul, where I spend the majority of my time, I find a microcosm of all the issues linking narcotics that I am investigating in the provinces. I live in a city that has become home to countless dealers, corrupt officials, bartered brides, and addicts. The stories of those of us who live here are intertwined in that we are all part of the polluted metropolis that has become Kabul. My mother’s Kabul is unrecognizable.

  Millions of people in the capital still do not have reliable access to services such as water and electricity, even though $10 billion in international aid has been spent on reconstruction since Karzai declared peace in 2001. Few of the ministries have regular power, water, sewage, or sanitation. If residents have the money, they can afford a generator and dig a well, but there is no water treatment plant in the country. The underground aquifers in Kabul are drying up because too many people rely on well water. Sewage wells are already contaminating well water. There is no government resource to store rainwater or collect river water. As for power, neighboring countries sell electricity to some bordering Afghan cities, but the capital relies on dams. In the spring and summer, the snow melts on the mountains, feeding water to the dams and giving people more hours of electricity.

  While Kabul has been the beneficiary of much money, Afghanistan as a whole has seen little change. One in four children still dies before the age of five; about 3.5 million people still rely on food rations. Dozens of private clinics have popped up with phony doctors and fake medicines, partly because the Western-backed government has not been able to build enough genuine clinics to provide basic health care. Many foreign-funded structures have had severe problems. Roads, hospitals, and schools are crumbling. The Taliban take advantage of the people’s discontent with the Karzai government and its foreign backers. Suicide bombings shot up 600 percent from 2005 to 2006. The rising anger in Kabul explode
s in the spring of 2006.

  On the afternoon of May 29, 2006, I fly from Herat to Kabul and find the airport nearly empty and quiet at a time when crowds and porters usually leave little room for walking. The parking lot where dozens of taxis pick up passengers is vacant. The roads are full of foreign troops with guns. It is one of the most violent days in the capital since Karzai took control. I share a cab I find on the street with a few other passengers. The driver tells us the city was on fire a few hours ago. “An American military truck coming from Bagram lost control and killed and injured several civilians near Kotal Khair Khana. Some people think the truck killed the Afghans deliberately. So they started a protest.”

  The number of rioters was small, in the hundreds, but the damage done was bloody: at least seventeen people were killed and dozens of buildings, mostly the homes and offices of foreigners, were looted and set ablaze. The rioters chanted, “Death to Karzai, death to America.” Peacekeepers—the U.S. military, along with the Afghan police and army—worked for hours to restore order.

  I go out the next day, following the whiff of soot, to talk to Afghans who witnessed the burnings. Some say they understand why the violence occurred but they do not support it. “People are frustrated because they have no jobs and don’t feel safe anymore. Their lives have not improved, so they took it out on the foreigners, who are innocent,” a shopkeeper tells me.