Anand Golap's story on Harper's about Gen. Raziq

1. REPORT 53
report
kandahar’s
mystery executions
Are the Afghan police using torture to achieve peace?
By Anand Gopal
The first bodies were found early in
the morning, after the call to prayer, in
the tall reeds abutting the southern edge
of Kandahar city. One was lying faceup,
lower lip split, stab wounds to the face
and stomach, a hole where the left eye
had been. The second, a few yards away,
had brown-black mottled skin and burnt
hair. The third body’s neck was par-tially
sawed through, and the face bore
the same pattern of black scarring and
singed hair. All three were handcuffed.
The next day, in Subdistrict 7, a
working-class area to the north of the
city, a shopkeeper discovered a corpse in
a canal. A report by the United Nations
noted: “Head riddled with bullets and
was smashed completely.” Two days later,
at Mirwais hospital, Kandahar’s main
health center, two bodies came in with-out
any visible marks except a small hole,
apparently made with a drill bit, in each
of the skulls.
By the end of that week, early last
October, ten bodies had surfaced around
the city. By the following week, the
count had swelled to nearly forty across
Kandahar province. Because of smashed
Anand Gopal’s article “Welcome to Free
Syria” appeared in the August 2012 issue of
Harper’s Magazine. His book No Good
Men Among the Living was published in
April by Metropolitan.
A recruiting poster in a window at police headquarters in Kandahar, April 30, 2014.
Photographs by Victor J. Blue

2. teeth and missing noses, eyes, or heads,
many could not be identified. On Octo-ber
17, a local television program claimed
that “civilians are mysteriously killed in
the province on a daily basis,” and aired
an interview with Sahebzada Nalan, an
official with the Afghan Independent
Human Rights Commission. “Com-plaints
of the people are received every
day,” he said. “People say their brother,
uncle, or relative have been kidnapped
or are missing. They come here and
complain, scream, and cry.” An Afghan
journalist launched an investigation, but
stopped when he began receiving threat-ening
phone calls. By month’s end, local
media had gone silent on the story.
I learned of it from a twenty-five-year-
old worker at a demining NGO
whom I’ll call Noor Atal. (The names
of the victims, their family members,
and the Afghan civilians who helped
me report this article have been
changed for their safety.) We met in
November, a month after the first bod-ies
were reported. As it neared dark,
Atal brought me to a firewood yard on
the outskirts of town where his brother
had worked. The yard lay across the
street from a row of small huts, most of
which were selling bicycle tires and
chains by the light of kerosene lamps.
The shopkeepers there all repeated the
same story: close to dinnertime one
evening in early October, a green Hum-vee
54 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2014
pulled up in front of the yard. Mo-ments
later, it drove away, and Atal’s
brother and a second worker were gone.
A few hundred feet down the road, it
stopped again. An imam at the local
mosque was crossing the street when
someone called to him from inside the
vehicle. He approached and was pulled
inside the Humvee.
The imam’s brother, whom I’ll call
Janan, went to the nearest police check-point,
then to police headquarters in his
precinct and in the next one over, but
they wouldn’t give him any answers.
Atal searched too, canvassing police
stations, calling the governor’s office.
After five or six days, police from a
neighboring district called and said, “we
found your brother,” after a village elder
had stumbled across him lying in the
grass. When Atal reached the station,
he saw his brother’s body, which was
missing an eye. Janan’s search also came
to an end: his brother’s body turned up
at the local hospital, bearing wounds
that doctors described as consistent with
“massive electrocution.”
After an official inquiry, the police
ruled the killings unexplained. Atal felt
he could say nothing. “If I argued,” he
said, “they’d kill me.” The family had
already seen its share of suffering: they
had fled rural Kandahar years before
because the Taliban had killed another
brother, a teenager accused of being an
American spy. Since this most recent
death, Atal’s mother has become with-drawn,
shunning relatives and keeping
her house dark for the Eid holiday. Atal
cannot get the image of his brother’s
face, with its empty eye socket, out of his
mind, and sometimes he finds himself
snapping awake at night. But he keeps
this to himself, and his neighbors avoid
the subject. Every few weeks,
though, another body
turns up. Kandahar, the country’s
political and cultural heartland,
home province of both the Tali-ban
and Afghan president Ha-mid
Karzai, is the scene of what
might be America’s biggest suc-cess
in recent years. After peak-ing
in 2010, insurgent-initiated
violence inside city limits had
plunged 64 percent by 2013—
largely on the heels of the
U.S. military surge and the as-cendance
of a new police chief,
Abdul Razik, whose forces have
pushed the Taliban into the hin-terlands.
Once, assassinations
and suicide strikes came regular-ly,
a rhythm of violence that cur-tailed
trips to the market and re-scheduled
appointments at the
bank. Today, though, the gov-ernment
has flushed most neighbor-hoods
clean of insurgent cells, and the
city feels rejuvenated. Unlike Kabul,
where the impending withdrawal of
U.S. troops has sparked capital flight,
Kandahar is humming with newfound
money and—in some quarters, at
least—rediscovered hope.
Each day, the city’s squares fill with
auto rickshaws, Corolla taxis, horses,
and mule carts. At sidewalk markets,
men sell raisins and pomegranates, ra-dios
and pirated DVDs, and half a dozen
varieties of energy drink. Young men
traffic the many gyms, particularly the
two-story fitness center on Shafakhana
Road, with its Arnold Schwarzenegger
posters and cases of creatine sitting by
the window. Outside the governor’s
house, scribes complete paperwork for
illiterate farmers, and in the alley near
the soccer stadium, boys play cricket.
Near the eastern limits lies Aino Mina,
a ten-thousand-acre development built
by Mahmud Karzai, one of the presi-dent’s
brothers. It’s a planned commu-
This page: The father of a boy taken by police in Kandahar, April 24, 2014. The man petitioned for
information and was told to stop his search under threat of death. Weeks later he received an anonymous
phone call telling him of the location of his son’s body. Opposite page: A photo of the boy’s body.

3. REPORT 55
nity, more than 2,000 spacious and
modern houses with archways and bay
windows, broad tree-lined streets, hoo-kah
lounges, ice cream parlors, and,
distinctive in a city with electricity woes,
cascading fountains that never seem to
run dry. It’s all for the ultra-wealthy,
mostly the contractor nouveau riche, but
poorer Kandaharis can also be seen
strolling through, just for a look.
On the western side of town,
there’s even a park with a gigantic
Ferris wheel, on which you’ll oc-casionally
see a few people riding
a cab.
Were it not for the inescap-able,
overwhelming presence of
the security forces, it would be
almost possible to forget the war.
On the fifteen-mile drive from
the airport to downtown, I
counted eighteen police check-points.
Tethered white surveil-lance
blimps, carrying cameras
operated by the U.S. Army, hov-er
permanently above the city. In
crowded areas, plainclothes
agents chase away loitering push-cart
vendors and begging or-phans.
Many Western news web-sites
are blocked, and people
avoid talking politics in public.
Some Kandaharis have accept-ed
this trade-off—hypersecurity
for a bomb-free existence. They lavish
praise on Razik (the subject of the
article “The Master of Spin Boldak”
in the December 2009 issue of Harp-er’s
Magazine), whose exploits killing
Taliban have given him near Schwarz­enegger
status. Razik is also an impor-tant
ally of the U.S. military. The
number two American commander in
the country, Lieutenant General Jo-seph
Anderson, was recently photo-graphed
with his arm around the po-lice
chief. Alongside Razik’s forces are
the Afghan army and an assortment
of militias. Many U.S. officials believe
that this network of armed groups
represents the country’s best hope for
peace. “Beginning in 2009, we’ve fo-cused
on developing Afghan national
security forces,” said General Joseph
F. Dunford Jr., the top U.S. commander
in Afghanistan. “Today, as a result of
those efforts, capable and competent
Afghan forces are securing the Af-ghan
people and the gains that we’ve
made over the past decade.”
Not everyone has such faith in the
police. Soon after arriving in Kandahar
last fall, I went to a neighborhood in the
western part of the city, where I found a
long street lined with one-room shops,
the buildings leaning into alleyways
smelling of dung, the incessant hum of
generators everywhere. The population
here was all Noorzai, a tribe that had lost
out to Razik’s tribe, the Achekzais, in
the jockeying for government posts and
American patronage. It was here that I
met Janan, the imam’s brother.
In the month since the imam’s death,
the Noorzai community had suffered
two more unexplained executions, a
rickshaw driver and a shopkeeper. The
rumor here, and among seemingly ev-eryone
outside the En­glish-
speaking
elite (who ignore the issue altogether),
was that the police were behind the
killings. “You think about it,” said Janan.
“He was picked up by a Humvee, and
two days later we find him in a govern-ment
hospital, with police. You tell me.”
There was one police officer whose
name popped up again and again, a com-mander
who, the speculation went, was
orchestrating this dirty war with
Razik’s blessing. In Kandahar
he was known simply as Jajo. According to his Facebook
page, Abdul Wadood Sarhadi Jajo
supports women’s rights, admires
modernizing reformers from Afghan
history, and despises the Taliban.
My sense, from reading the posts,
was that these convictions were
heartfelt. If you listen to stories in
the bazaar, though, you’ll also learn
that Jajo forced those violating the
city’s one-person-to-a-motorcycle
rule to kneel on the asphalt and kiss
the sizzling hot exhaust pipe (Taliban
are known to prefer doubling up on
motorcycles); that he stripped prisoners
naked and paraded them around his
base; that men under his command
used rape as an interrogation tool; that
when executing prisoners he might re-sort
to a pistol or electrocution, but
that he preferred beheadings.
I heard so many such tales I was
beginning to think his name was
simply shorthand for the grinding
trauma and anonymous bloodshed
that these neighborhoods had suf-fered
over the past decade. Whenev-er
I pressed for specifics, or tried to
find someone with direct experience,
I came up empty. I found a pigeon
salesman who said his son had been
tortured, but just as he was about to
recount the story, he was stopped by
a friend, who asked, “Are you crazy?”
A student who said he’d been arrest-ed
and beaten by Jajo made it all the
way to my hotel room for an inter-view
when, despite my promises to

5. REPORT 57
protect his identity, he had a change
of heart and backed out.
In the words of an official at the Unit-ed
Nations, Jajo was one of the “four
horsemen” of counterterrorism, a quartet
of police commanders who are Abdul
Razik’s main enforcers in the fight against
the Taliban. In 2011, after the United
Nations released a report accusing the
Afghan police of torture, the United
States halted the transfer of detainees to
Afghan custody. In response, Afghan
officials began operating a series of secret
prisons, outside the monitoring reach of
the United Nations or the Red Cross.
According to a senior Afghan National
Police official who investigates police
impropriety, and who spoke on the con-dition
of anonymity because of threats to
his life, the four horsemen each run a
private jail; Jajo’s is in a former American
military facility near the Mirwais Mina
neighborhood of Kandahar city.
The facility was notorious in the area,
but, as with all things Jajo, I couldn’t find
anyone willing to come forward to dis-cuss
it. I was beginning to lose hope
when one day an Afghan friend working
for a local NGO slipped me a flash drive
containing thirteen videos. The clips,
which were being passed around among
activists and aid workers, had been tak-en
a few days earlier, and they showed a
group of turbaned elders seated amid the
rubble of a demolished house. The men
spoke in turn to the camera about Jajo
and his henchmen, a protest they hoped
would somehow reach the outside world.
One said a bomb had gone off near his
house, prompting the police to climb in
over his outer wall, arrest him, and haul
him off to their base. He was beaten, lost
consciousness, and awoke to find himself
locked in the bathroom. Another, a
disabled auto-rickshaw driver, said he
was arrested because he wasn’t carrying
his tazkira, the national I.D., which
many poor villagers don’t possess. After
the police stuffed a scarf into his mouth,
one officer sat on his stomach, another
sat on his hand, and a third sat on his
head. Then, he was sometimes hung by
the scarf, and sometimes choked with it,
a total of ten times. “Even the Ameri-cans
haven’t done this sort of thing,”
another speaker said. “Even
the Soviet army hasn’t.” From the mountains in the back-ground
of the video and the names of
landmarks mentioned, it was clear that
the men lived in Mirwais Mina. I
headed there with an Afghan journal-ist
I’ll call Nasir. We left before dusk,
heading west until we were on a
bumpy road that ran uphill to a large
stretch of suburban settlements. We
passed a pair of police checkpoints,
stopping at each as Nasir exchanged
greetings and popped the trunk for in-spection.
We rode switchbacks up the
hillside until we came to a third
checkpoint. This one looked different
from the others: gabions lined the
roadside, a single-room concrete hut
behind them. Four policemen were
standing watch, twice the usual num-ber.
Two wore navy blue uniforms, two
full black, with various lapel pins and
Afghan flag patches, and they were all
Hazaras from Kabul or northern Af-ghanistan.
While the others checked
the vehicle, the youngest-looking one
approached and asked where I was
from. I was wearing local clothes and
can sometimes pass for an Afghan, but
I knew my accent would give me away.
When I told him I was an American
journalist, his eyes widened. He con-ferred
with the others and then or-dered
us out of the car. Nasir and I
were searched and told to wait while
they summoned their superior. Nasir,
who overheard part of their conversa-tion,
leaned to me and whispered,
“They are Jajo’s people.”
The superior arrived. I explained
that I was a journalist interested in life
in Kandahar after the American with-drawal.
He radioed headquarters, then
ordered us back into the car, along
with one of the policemen. We were
led by a police truck through a net-work
of broken back roads, the land-scape
bare save for the occasional
loose concertina wire or orphaned
section of blast wall. There were some
houses in the far distance. People
emerged to watch us pass. A few years
before, the entire area had been Tali-ban
controlled, the policeman said,
until Jajo recaptured it. “Even the
Americans had failed here,” he said.
After thirty minutes, we pulled up
to a compound built from rows of Hes-cos
stacked atop one another, extend-ed
in sections with old shipping con-tainers.
The policeman told us it was
once an American military outpost
that had passed, like many other such
facilities, into Afghan hands. We were
taken inside and up to the roof of a
building, where a group of plain-clothed
men sat smoking cigarettes
amid scattered walkie-talkies, comput-ers,
and cans of Red Bull.
It was not long before I realized I
was standing before Jajo himself. He
was a slight man in his late twenties,
with a floppy, boyish head of hair, five-o’clock
shadow, and keen, confident
eyes. He studied my passport as I ex-plained
that I was an accredited jour-nalist.
He handed it back and said,
“No one comes to my area without my
permission.” He ordered the police-man
to take us away.
We were loaded into our car with the
policeman at the wheel, and soon we
were being driven back east, through
dozens of checkpoints, as he explained
at each that he was escorting prisoners.
Darkness had fallen by the time we ar-rived
at a cluster of warehouses surround-ed
by barbed-wire fencing, caution signs,
and searchlights. The air smelled of sew-age.
We were led by the policeman into
a windowless building with concrete
floors, down a long hallway, and depos-ited
in a cell with three other prisoners.
Many hours passed. I tried talking to
our cellmates, who were teenagers, but
they ignored me. A guard appeared, ask-ing
if we would need blankets. Nasir was
let out to use the bathroom, and en route
he glanced into another cell. He said it
was wall to wall with prisoners, all of
them teenage or younger. The warden
for our section entered and everyone
stood up, shaking his hand and greeting
him hopefully. I produced my passport,
which he examined upside down because
he could not read. He said I looked like
a Pakistani, a designation synonymous
with “terrorist” in official circles. One of
the teenagers tried to ask something, but
the warden waved him off.
After he left, the other prisoners
looked at us more sympathetically, a
newfound solidarity uniting the
room. The oldest, a sixteen-year-old,
said he was a high school student,
with aspirations to apply to medical
school, but he’d been arrested because
his family had run into debt. They
would release him, he said, if he could
come up with $100,000—most of
which would go to his creditors, with
a cut for the police. He had been here
for eight months. The other two, who
Opposite page, top: Police officers patrol Kandahar’s Police Subdistrict 4, April 28, 2014.
Bottom: A hand-painted map of Subdistrict 4 hangs on the wall of the commander’s office
in central Kandahar, April 28, 2014.

6. looked to be twelve or thirteen at
most, remained silent.
We settled in for the night. Then, a
few hours later, the door swung open. A
pair of Afghans walked in carrying clip-boards,
and following close behind, to
my surprise, was a U.S. Army officer.
The children stood up expectantly.
“Why would you come to Kandahar?”
he asked me. “It’s not safe here.” It
turned out he was an adviser to Razik,
and he had been sent to see if I was tell-ing
the truth about my nationality. He
took notes and snapped my photo, and
said he’d take the responses to “the
General”—Razik—who’d determine our
fate. “They’re only detaining you for
your own protection,” he said. “Kanda-har
is a crazy place.”
Still later, a bit after nine o’clock, they
brought us to another room, where a
bright, smiling Afghan police captain
named Ahmed Zia Durrani interrogated
us. I pointed out that merely driving
through the city, or interviewing resi-dents,
was hardly an arrestable offense,
but he countered by saying that the
situation was tense, that his country was
at war. Journalists visit Kandahar all the
58 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2014
time, he said, but they seek government
permission before visiting any particular
neighborhood. This was not true, but it
did not matter: the subtext was not that
we’d lacked official sanction but that
we’d ventured close to something that
outsiders shouldn’t see.
It was close to midnight when we
were finally released. Before he left us,
Captain Durrani (who is also a police
spokesman) relayed an official directive
from General Razik: We should leave
Kandahar in the morning and never
return. The airport authorities had al-ready
been alerted. “That,” he said, “is
an order.” I caught the first flight out
of Kandahar, to Kabul, the
following morning. In mid-January, two months after
my departure, Jajo posted a note on
Facebook mourning the death of
someone named Farid Ahmad. An
accompanying photo showed Jajo
having lunch alongside a stout,
chubby-faced man in his early twen-ties.
Jajo ascribed the death, which
appears to have affected him greatly,
to “terrorists and enemies of Afghani-stan.”
Elsewhere, after a bomb attack
in Kandahar city, he wrote, “today,
beautiful Kandahar was a guest of
tragedy” because “Punjabi slaves”—
the Taliban—“set off explosions in
public areas in order to kill civilians.”
It was true that, though the Taliban
had mostly left the city, violence contin-ued
in the countryside, where police
were still dying in steady numbers. Every
roadside bomb, in turn, provoked an-other
round of kidnappings. In Kabul,
officials I spoke to insisted there was no
proof of a government-led campaign of
torture and execution, and, for fear of
exposing the men from Mirwais Mina,
I could not show them the flash-drive
video. I wanted to find more people will-ing
to speak on the record. Security at
Kandahar airport was porous, so in
early February I decided to return.
I arrived on a cold morning to find the
city in a particularly tense mood. Presi-dent
Karzai was to make a rare visit later
that week to inaugurate a new agricul-tural
school, so streets were closed all
over Kandahar and the mobile-phone
networks had been shut down. I was now
working with an Afghan friend I’ll call
Clockwise from top left, at police checkpoints around Kandahar: Taxi passengers wait to be searched
April 26, 2014. A member of the Afghan National Police searches motorists and pedestrians, May 1,
2014. Police search cars, April 26, 2014. A police officer frisks a taxi passenger, April 26, 2014.

7. in the Afghan countryside, and picked
up a thin, snaggletoothed man to
guide us. He climbed into the car with
the splintered half of a hoe and a small
sack of clay bricks. He said ours was
the first car he’d seen in hours.
Some minutes later, we pulled up to
a three-way intersection. To the right,
the hitchhiker said, was the road to
Shoyeen. It ran past a large warehouse-type
structure a mile off, an outpost of
the Afghan Local Police, a village-based
militia modeled on similar U.S. programs
in Iraq and Vietnam. He pointed to the
building and said he’d rather walk the
back road, thanked us, and left.
Numbering close to 25,000 country-wide,
the ALP are trained by the
U.S. Special Operations Forces and are
nominally under the authority of the
Afghan government, though in fact they
are often controlled by local strongmen.
In this area, ALP units are said to work
closely with the official, uniformed police
chiefs under Razik’s authority.
Driving up to their checkpoint, I saw
a few men in civilian clothes, holding
Kalashnikovs, gathered around a farm-er
standing nervously by the roadside.
REPORT 59
Rafeh to track down survivors. We would
avoid police checkpoints by taking back
roads, and I traveled everywhere with a
shawl wrapped Kandahari-style around
my shoulders and head.
I had planned to resume my attempt
to interview the villagers who’d ap-peared
in the video, but they had left
with their families for refugee camps in
Pakistan. Rafeh and I spent three days
meeting tribal elders and shopkeepers,
sometimes in the back seat of a car,
sometimes in the private garden of an
acquaintance’s house. Most were unwill-ing
to introduce us to their relatives and
friends who had been affected. Then I
learned of a case in Shoyeen, a village
eleven miles north of Kandahar city,
where police had supposedly buried a
man alive. Somehow he had escaped,
living on the lam for months. Eventu-ally,
the police unit in question had ro-tated
to a different village, and he re-turned
home to live with his father, an
old farmer named Feda Muhammad.
We left Kandahar early in the morn-ing,
as the first rays of light were catch-ing
the mountains. Our driver led us
through the maze of checkpoints on the
city’s outskirts. At one, we were stopped
by an Afghan soldier wearing a bando-lier
and aviator shades, his muscles
bursting from his shirt. I told him I was
a journalist. He asked for a government-issued
press I.D. and I handed him my
library card from New York; he looked
it over and waved us on.
We followed the road as it hugged
the mountainside, rising a few hundred
feet over Firebase Maholic, formerly the
house of Taliban leader Mullah Omar
and now a base for the CIA and their
Afghan paramilitary group, the Kan-dahar
Strike Force. Soon we made a
sharp turn onto a bridge spanning the
Arghandab River; the eastern bank,
which we were leaving behind, is home
to the Alikozai tribe, which has tradi-tionally
been tied to the government.
The western bank, more diverse in
tribal composition, was in recent years
a Taliban stronghold.
We passed a small bazaar, a collec-tion
of corrugated iron shacks with
rust-eaten roofs and some children and
old men sitting out front. After a few
minutes, we were lost. We saw some
people hitchhiking, which is common
An Afghan National Police officer searches a passenger
at a checkpoint in Subdistrict 1, May 1, 2014.

8. We passed unnoticed, and soon we ar-rived
at the village of Jelahor. Houses
made of mud and stone extended in all
directions into the open desert, one here,
two there, as if ancient travelers had
dropped their knapsacks wherever they
had pleased and set up homes. Jelahor is
known as a center of religious learning
and as the home of a man named Lala
Malang, who rose to become the leading
mujahedeen commander in southern
Afghanistan. He was killed on the bat-tlefield
in 1987, and since then his
name has graced clinics and schools
throughout the area.
Lala Malang’s younger brother,
Tayyeb Agha, became an important
figure in the Taliban, and Jelahor was
closely associated with the movement.
In 2001, though, the local council of
elders declared support for the new Kar-zai
government. The Americans, work-ing
with regional warlords, repeatedly
raided the village anyway, arresting in-fluential
tribal leaders. Villagers rebelled,
and soon enough Jelahor was again a
Taliban stronghold. For years, multiple
American incursions into Jelahor and
surrounding villages failed to turn the
tide. But beginning in 2011, the U.S. and
the Afghan government recruited locals
to join the ALP, and the Taliban lost
their monopoly on violence. Insurgent
checkpoints vanished, and you could no
longer see Taliban racing along the dirt
60 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2014
roads on their motorcycles. It wasn’t
clear whether the Taliban had simply
blended back into their homes and fields
or were really gone.
We were still half an hour from
Shoyeen, but we decided to stop and
take a look around. Everything every-where
was the color of sand: the houses,
the road, the mosque, and, strangely,
even the trees. The air smelled of sand.
We saw a man driving a tractor along a
dry riverbed with six or seven children
on board, including two sitting in his lap
and one on his shoulders. He said he was
happy the Taliban were gone, because
when they were here the government
and foreign forces would make life dif-ficult.
He refused to comment on the
ALP, saying only that he had fought
against the Soviets, which he saw as the
beginning of this unending cycle of vio-lence.
“I see brothers killing brothers
and I ask myself, ‘Why did I ever pick up
the gun?’ ”
He did direct us, however, to a
nearby house whose residents he said
might be more willing to speak about
the ALP. When we arrived, there
was only one male family member at
home, a farmer named Jan Agha
who’d just come in from the fields.
He had been asleep one night a few
months earlier, he said, when ALP
militiamen showed up outside and
demanded that his cousin, Noor
Agha, make himself available. Noor
Agha owned 150 grape trees, and
some Taliban—or some teenagers
the ALP believed to be Taliban—
had been seen running through the
orchard. Noor was taken out of
view, to a riverbank behind the vil-lage,
and sometime later Jan heard
gunshots. Later, the family found
Noor’s body and that of another
villager lying naked in the mud,
their arms and torsos crushed, the
marks of tire treads running
across them. A white security
blimp hovered above.
This was the first case I’d
heard in which the victim was
linked, even tenuously, with
militants. It turned out that Jela-hor
abounded with similar sto-ries:
later, in Kandahar, I met a
Jelahor tribal elder who had sent
his teenage son to study in Pak-istan.
Shortly after the son had
returned home for a visit, a road-side
bomb went off not far from
the village. The ALP accused
the boy of having links with
Pakistani intelligence, and he
was pulled from his home and
taken behind a mosque. When
his family found him the next
day, his skull had been shattered
into many pieces and his abdo-men
had been cut open, expos-ing
his intestines.
Jan Agha offered to take us to
meet other ALP victims—but I wor-ried
that it might not be long before
the ALP or the Taliban, if there were
any left, showed up. We gathered back
in the car and headed out on the road,
passing one ALP checkpoint after
another. As we drove north, though,
government forces became
a rarer sight. It was past noon when we finally
reached Shoyeen. The settlement of
two dozen adobe houses lay some five
hundred feet off the main road; there
was no turnoff, only empty scrubland
rutted with motorcycle tracks. There
did not appear to be ALP or police
anywhere. Nor were there any villag-ers.
A single concrete building, maybe
a shop, sat shuttered. A few of the
mud-brick enclosures had partially col-lapsed,
exposing houses pockmarked
with bullet holes. In a clearing was a
A police officer riding through Subdistrict 2, April 27, 2014.

9. REPORT 61
graveyard with the Taliban’s signature
white flags whipping in the wind.
Eventually, we found some boys
walking their goats and got directions
to Feda Muhammad’s house. We made
our way down a winding path, the car
barely fitting at points, and then
turned into a long alleyway and drove
up to the last house. The driver shut
off the engine and Rafeh went to
knock on the door, which was an-swered
by a hunched, white-bearded
man. Rafeh spoke to him and
then he tottered toward us. He
labored to fit into the back seat,
next to me. A few children gath-ered
nearby to watch.
I asked if he was Feda Mu-hammad,
and he nodded. I
asked if we could meet his son.
He said his son was away. Chil-dren
were now pressing their
faces into the window.
“Was your son arrested?”
He said yes. I waited for him to
elaborate. A woman emerged from
her house, clutching a cooking
pot, trying to peer into the car.
“Was he released?”
He nodded. Moments went by
as we sat in silence. Somewhere
close, a stream was running. The
children outside were not saying a
word. There were now maybe eight
of them. The woman shifted closer.
Finally, I asked, “Was he
mis­treated?”
He shook his head no. He was star-ing
into his lap. In one hand, he held
prayer beads. Not far away, there was
the sound of a motorcycle.
Rafeh could no longer control him-self.
“We heard something bad had
happened,” he said. “They tried to bury
him alive?”
“No, no, no, no,” Feda Muhammad
said. “I don’t know anything about
that.” He looked up at me, and his eyes
were wet. The motorcycle was very
close now.
We thanked Feda Muhammad and he
climbed out. I’d lost my nerve, and as we
backed out of the alleyway I slouched in
my seat, out of sight of the growing crowd
that had come to see our car. Soon we
were back on the main road,
heading for Kandahar. One evening, back in the city, an
Afghan journalist friend brought a tall,
gaunt twenty-year-old shopkeeper I’ll
call Wodin to my hotel. He was “just
desperate enough,” my friend explained,
to speak to us. The room’s electricity had
failed, and Wodin sat in a corner amid
the shadows. Haltingly, almost apolo-getically,
he spoke of his shop in the
southern part of the city, how it had
been a popular neighborhood hangout,
and of the winter morning when a com-mander
who served under Jajo had
walked in through the door.
He had been hunched over a ledger
as the commander perused the mer-chandise.
Out of the corner of his eye,
he saw a second man enter and raise his
arm toward the commander. Before
Wodin knew what happened, he was
covered in blood. For a moment, he
thought he’d been shot. He looked up to
see the assassin fleeing down the street
and the commander motionless on the
floor. “I’d never seen anything like this.
It felt like I was in a dream.”
Soon the police were at the scene,
enraged and rounding up everyone in
the vicinity. Wodin tried to explain, but
they threatened to kill him right then
and there if he didn’t keep quiet. He was
brought to a police base and locked in-side
a shipping container, together with
a few others who’d been picked up with
him, including an off-duty police officer.
Throughout the day they were beaten
with cables, sticks, pipes. The next
morning, he was dragged outside and
had each of his hands tied to a police
truck, in a crucifixion pose, while he
stood barefoot on a block of ice. As his
feet sunk in, a policeman poured chilled
water on them.
At this point in Wodin’s story, he
grew quiet and looked at the floor. He
began whispering to my friend and
seemed reluctant to go on. Finally he
looked up at me. “Why am I telling you
this? I’m going to die if I tell you this.”
I assured him I’d protect his iden-tity.
My friend coaxed him to con-tinue.
He stared hard into his lap.
“I lost my money, I lost my house, I
lost my health,” he finally said. “He’ll kill
me. I have nothing left to live for, but so
that this might help others.”
He told me he was made to stand
on that ice block for thirty minutes at
a time, and would then be forced to
run barefoot across the gravel while an
officer cable-whipped him. “My feet
were burning,” he said, “and then I
could no longer feel them.”
He was accused of being a member
of the Taliban, of Al Qaeda, of Paki-stani
intelligence. He denied it, but
they did not believe him. The police
moved him to the facility I saw in Mir-wais
Mina. He was kept in an under-ground
bunker, directly beneath the
building where I’d met Jajo. Through-out
the morning, he could hear voices
A brother and sister walk past a checkpoint in Subdistrict 2, April 27, 2014.

10. from above discussing his case, explor-ing
ways of getting him to talk.
In the afternoon, three policemen
entered and stripped him naked.
Then they forced one of his legs be-hind
his neck, and then the other,
until he was in something that, but
for the bone-crunching pain, was
like an advanced yoga pose. A po-liceman
appeared with a crescent
wrench. He fit it around Wodin’s tes-ticles
and began to tighten, slowly.
Wodin doesn’t remember much of
what happened next.
Sometime in the evening, the bunker
door opened and Wodin saw Jajo him-self
standing above him. Before he could
say anything, he was slapped across the
face. Jajo then told him to go home and
return with community elders who
could vouch for his innocence. He
showed up the next day with them, beg-ging
for his freedom, the elders swearing
that he was uninvolved in the insur-gency.
Jajo let him go.
In the months since, Wodin, whose
kidney was damaged, has spent a for-tune
on doctors in Pakistan. While he
was away, the police looted his shop,
and he was forced to sell his house to
make ends meet. He showed me his
62 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2014
scars and his medical papers, then
asked if I knew where he
might find work. In late May, a few months after
my meeting with Wodin, Jajo was
driving alone through Kandahar’s
streets in an armored SUV when a
burqa-clad figure approached. As Jajo
slowed, an explosion rocked the ve-hicle.
He was rushed to the hospital,
where he soon died of his injuries.
The Taliban claimed responsibili-ty
for the attack, stating that they
had sent a suicide bomber to kill a
“notorious enemy.” It was unclear
how they knew where to find Jajo
alone, and without bodyguards, sug-gesting
either that they had an ac-complice
inside the government or
that they merely took credit for the
attack after the fact.
Before his death, Jajo had made ene-mies
throughout the city. Not all were
suspected of Taliban ties; one man re-counted
how, after being caught with
hashish, he was taken to the private jail.
He was forced to the ground, a scarf
stuffed in his mouth, while four men beat
his extremities repeatedly with wooden
planks and sections of pipe.
Some of Jajo’s victims, like Wodin,
simply had bad luck. Some, it seemed,
were killed because they were Noorzai,
members of a tribe that in the govern-ment’s
eyes is infested with Taliban.
“This is a tribal war,” said Payenda Mu-hammad,
a man I spoke to after his
brother was plucked off the street one
afternoon and subjected to “twenty-two
different types of torture.” And some,
like the victims in Jelahor, were associ-ated
(knowingly or not) with insurgents.
The only thing linking these catego-ries
was the role the murders played in
bringing some semblance of order to
Kandahar. The Taliban insurgency fol-lowing
the U.S. invasion had succeeded,
in part, through fear and domination.
Now, in Kandahar, the counterinsur-gency
had come to mirror the thing it
sought to eradicate.
If the Taliban were the ones respon-sible
for Jajo’s death, then there was a
certain symmetry to the whole bloody
mess. But the end of Jajo’s reign of
terror doesn’t necessarily mean the
end of torture in Kandahar. After all,
three of the four horsemen are still
alive, and above them all sits Razik.
Already, new bodies are starting to
show up around the city. n
General Abdul Razik in his office in Kandahar, April 30, 2014.