The classic error that outsiders make in Afghanistan is to
single out a proxy in whom to repose trust and through whom to interact with
most other locals. Over the years of intrusions by outside powers, some Afghans
have grown adept at capturing this privileged position and exploiting it to
advance and enrich themselves, while dis-empowering (and thus incensing) their
neighbors….
In my case I Kandahar, the self-interested intermediary was
a balding, dour-faced Karzai retainer named Abdullah, who called himself an
engineer, and who President Karzai’s younger half-brother, the late Ahmed Wali,
recommended to me in the following terms: “If I put a million dollars in a
storeroom and have Abdullah the key, and I came back in ten years, I’d find
every penny of that money still locked inside.” I hired the man.
In late 2002 I departed Kandahar for an extended flurry of
talks and meetings in the United States. Before leaving Abdullah in charge of
the NGO, I walked him through my system for keeping track of petty cash
expenditures: marking each outlay on the back of the envelope in which I
carried the money, along with the date and the purpose. For an engineer, he
seemed to have trouble catching on.
I returned, after several weeks, to find not a single new
mark on the back of that now-empty envelope. Not one receipt, not a record of a
single purchase, did Abdullah turn over. We were building schoolrooms. He had
made deliveries of bricks and sand and gypsum, had paid weekly cash wages,
bought the food our cook prepared for our employees…
Swallowing my panic, I demanded receipts. Abdullah went
scurrying around to gather some. Sweating, I pieced together forensics that
could tell a semi-coherent tale.
Years later another employee recounted Abdullah’s derisive
comments about “Western accounting” and “Afghan accounting” – in which I was
obviously unversed. I heard painful stories of suppliers who had never been
paid. I reconsidered the probable reasons we’d been forced to leave a school
building unfinished for lack of funds.
I had, in other words, been an accessory to fraud….
One way Abdullah kept me in thrall was by cultivating fear:
by convincing me that Kandaharis were unabashed murderers and thieves. Himself a
transplant from near Kabul, he professed a pious horror of the people among
whom he was living. They would, he insisted, dismember me in a second were it
not for his watchful protection.
A further technique was to keep me from interacting with
anyone else face to face, without his presence in the room. Abdullah could get temperamental.
Once when I decided to eat lunch with the rest of the staff, instead of
separately with him, he threw a violent tantrum, refusing to speak to me for
three days. I put it down to jealousy or made excuses for his psychological
fragility. How rational would I be after more than two decades of war? Besides,
I needed Abdullah. He got things done. What if he were to quit? What would I
do?
