Hamid Karzai is a middle child, one of seven sons and a daughter born to the late Abdul Ahad Karzai, the former speaker of Afghanistan’s royal parliament and paramount chief of the ethnic Pashtun Populzai tribe. (After the Taliban assassinated Abdul Ahad, in the Pakistani border city of Quetta, where the family was then based, in 1999, Populzai tribal leaders elected Hamid to succeed him.) The family’s ancestral home is in the hamlet of Karz, in the parched flatlands just outside the southern city of Kandahar. Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was assassinated Tuesday, apparently by a long trusted aide and member of his inner circle, was the sixth son. At the time of his death, he was the boss of Kandahar and, in the past few years, widely reputed to be deeply involved in Afghanistan’s opium trade—something that not even American officials denied, while he was also (allegedly) on the C.I.A. payroll.
When I visited Kandahar for The New Yorker in early 2002, just a few weeks after the rout of the Taliban, “AWK” (as the Americans and other Westerners involved in the NATO war effort in Afghanistan came to refer to him) had clearly emerged as the regional powerbroker. He was in charge of the tribal town council, and, in that guise, and as his brother’s American-backed brother’s personal representative, held the balance of power between Kandahar’s several duelling tribal warlords. He was serious, opaque, but polite; a difficult man to read, but quite willing to speak his mind about the power dynamics of Kandahar into which he had become a new and potent player.
On a return visit to Kandahar, in late March 2005, I paid a call on Ahmed Wali Karzai. His house was a large one, decorated with gray and white marble, and sat at the end of a residential street a mile or so from the city center. Its approaches were guarded by small gauntlet of road barriers. A number of sentries stood around in front of the house, where twenty or more Toyota Land Cruisers and other vehicles were parked. I noticed some changes since I had last been there. Two new, imposing houses had been built next door, and, so I was told, also belonged to Ahmed Wali. In the intervening years, clearly, his power had deepened and intensified, and yet it was not visible in the conventional sense. It was as if Kandahar were an Afghan Chicago, and AWK was its unofficial Mayor Daley, who did not go to an office, but whom people—and, in his case, especially tribal elders and other traditional leaders—came to see.
Ahmed Wali emerged to introduce me to his older brother, Qayum, who happened to be visiting from the United States, where he ran a number of Afghan restaurants. Qayum was an older, slightly fleshier version of his brother Hamid, and spoke uncannily like him, in the same carefully articulated, American-accented English. Qayum took me to visit the family’s village of Karz. We drove out of Kandahar in one of Ahmed Wali’s Toyota Land Cruisers. Along the way, I inquired about an attack that had occurred in the city the night before. The noise had resounded through the city center and awakened my fellow guests in the small hotel where I was staying. That morning, I had heard that the Taliban had shot up a police station. Qayum told me that an office of the Afghan intelligence services had been targeted by an anti-tank rocket, but that he did not believe the Taliban had been involved. He said it was thought to have been carried out by gunmen associated with Khan Muhammad Mujahid, who had recently been ousted as Kandahar’s chief of police.
“I think it is part of this struggle for stability … with warlordism,” Qayum explained. “You know, these people that have been removed together with the police chief. It seems like it. That is what people are saying. They found that the rocket that had been fired had come from the stocks of the police station.”
When I expressed my surprise at the implications of what Qayum was saying, he replied drily, “Well, you know the nation-building process is much more difficult than it is perceived in the framework of the United Nations.”
Indeed it is. The regional clans—Populzai, Alokazai, and Barakzai, chiefly—are involved in an age-old competition for power and patronage, and there have been many times in history when their rivalries have played out bloodily, as they do today. Shifting alliances are continuously being forged and broken between players who have taken sides in the NATO-vs.-Taliban conflict.
Last April, in a foretelling of AWK’s own assassination, Kandahar’s police chief was killed by a suicide bomber wearing a police uniform. The chief was Khan Muhammad Mujahid—the same man who had been ousted from the job in 2005, and whom Qayum had suspected of exploding a bomb as an expression of his displeasure. He had recently returned to Kandahar and been reinstated. In the killing of Khan Muhammad, the Taliban were blamed, but few believed it, nodding instead to the murky underworld of Afghan political intrigue where power alliances are struck and later undone in betrayals—the milieu in which Ahmed Wali Karzai spent his life. In a treacherous environment in which the rule of the game is to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, proximity to sudden death is always a real prospect.
As for AWK’s killing, an Afghan friend of mine, the journalist Habib Zohori, told me that one theory was that it may have just been a case of explosive temper: Ahmed Wali was abusive, and had yelled at his aide, Sardar Muhammad, who then killed him. “He had worked with Ahmed Wali for seven years,” said Zohori. “If he had been a Taliban infiltrator he could have killed him a long time ago.” Like most political murders in Afghanistan—the traditional method by which most Afghan leaders have left office—there is mystery in the aftermath, even if a glimpse of the truth emerges after a time.
Photograph of Ahmed Wali Karzai by STR/AFP/Getty Images.
