What followed was a debacle. The Noorzais, fearing their tribal enemies, rose up and joined forces with the Taliban. Razik and his men responded to the unexpected resistance with brutality. "They were killing women and children," said Ustaz Abdul Halim, a Noorzai and former mujahideen commander who lives in Kandahar city. "After that, everyone was with the Taliban."
Capitalizing on the tribal dynamics, the Taliban installed a Noorzai, Mullah Rauf Lang, as their commander in Panjwaii District. Later that fall, newly arrived Canadian troops in the area would launch Operation Medusa, a large-scale assault that killed hundreds of fighters and scores of civilians in weeks of close combat and withering bombardments. Today, the area remains one of the most violent in Kandahar Province--the Canadians suffer many of their casualties there and have recently abandoned two untenable forward operating bases in the area--and anti-government sentiments still run high.
A grim irony of the rising pro-Taliban sentiments in the south is that the United States and its allies often returned to power the same forces responsible for the worst period in southerners' memory--the post--Soviet "mujahideen nights." In the case of Gul Agha Shirzai (now governor of Nangarhar but still a major force in Kandahar), the same man occupied the exact same position; in the case of Razik, nephew of the notorious Mansour, it is the restoration of an heir. By installing these characters and then protecting them by force of arms, the ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force, a patchwork of different nations, that was bolstered by 20,000 additional U.S. soldiers sent to Afghanistan during the months leading up to the eighth anniversary of the 2001 invasion) has come to be associated, in the minds of many Afghans, with their criminality and abuses. "We're doing the Taliban's work for them," said one international official with years of experience in counternarcotics here.
In the initial scramble to invade Afghanistan in 2001, there was a certain pragmatism to enlisting the mujahideen, who represented the best means of taking over the country in the absence of a substantial U.S. ground presence. But those troops were diverted to Iraq, and the ISAF was cobbled together slowly, arriving too late and with too few soldiers to upend the warlords' rule. Canadian forces didn't deploy to Kandahar until 2006, and even then their contingent of 2,500 was stretched far too thin to control one of the most critical provinces in Afghanistan.
"We were facing the worst-case scenario in 2006--a conventional takeover by Taliban forces," said Brigadier General Jonathan Vance, the Canadian commander of ISAF forces in Kandahar Province. He was proud that his country's small contingent had been able to hold the insurgency more or less at bay. But he admitted that the life of the average Kandahari had become less secure as the Taliban began to tighten their grip on Kandahar city. "I don't have the capacity to make sure someone doesn't rip their guts out at night."
Military officers like General Vance find themselves in a peculiar fix when confronted with characters like Abdul Razik. These entrenched figures hold posts or wear uniforms whose legitimacy must be respected. But many of those who maintain their power through corruption and coercion were originally installed by the U.S. military--a fact not lost on Afghans, who tend to have longer memories than Westerners here on nine- or twelve-month rotations.
I asked General Vance if he was aware that Razik was directly involved in the drug trade. "Yes," he said. "We are completely aware that there are a number of illicit activities being run out of that border station." He had few illusions about Razik, with whom he interacts directly. "He runs effective security ops that are designed to make sure that the business end of his life runs smoothly, and there is a collateral effect on public order," he told me. "Ideally, it should be the other way around. The tragedy of Kandahar is that it's hard to find that paragon of civic virtue."
Honest people in Afghanistan don't often occupy the halls of power, and they don't usually have the resources to be the first in line for big development contracts. Should one's security restrictions allow one to stroll the streets, however, one will find them (the honest people) there, pushing carts of vegetables, positively begging strangers to join them for a cup of tea that might cost them half their day's salary. If one looks a little harder, one will find them in crumbling little homes, so unlike the palatial "poppy palaces" of Kabul's new elite, dwellings such as Fayda Mohammad's in Spin Boldak, or Hajji Ahmad Shah's in Carte Nau Market, a poor area on the edge of town: places of exile, to which honest men have been marginalized either by force or by choice. In other cases--such as that of Malalai Kakar, Kandahar's top female police officer, who was shot in September of last year by unknown assailants, or that of Alim Hanif, chief judge of the new Central Narcotics Tribunals Appeals Court, killed outside his house in Kabul by masked men--the honest Afghans will be found in the cemetery.
As for Razik, he remains alive and very much the master of the borderlands. Occasionally, outside forces will annoy him: in July, CNPA teams, working with DEA mentors, raided two caches of hashish in Razik's territory, arresting one of his commanders in the process. But Razik is hardly at odds with his government. After the first round of national elections closed on August 20, his men forcibly took Spin Boldak's ballot boxes into his house for "safekeeping" overnight. It was just one of the many reports of electoral fraud in Kandahar Province, which polled overwhelmingly for President Karzai, according to the independent Election Commision of Afghanistan. The count from Spin Boldak's polling stations: Karzai, 8,341; his main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, 4. http://harpers.org/archive/2009/12/0082754?redirect=429066851
