Reading Online Novel

My Share of the Task(192)



                One of the strongmen to emerge from that time was Nasim Akhundzada, a mullah from Musa Qalah. A devout, effective man, Nasim rose quickly in one of Helmand’s most prominent anti-Soviet insurgent groups. The fighting in Helmand, however, quickly got messy and the factions began fighting one another, not just the Soviets. They pursued criminal, tribal, and family feuds under the guise of jihad. In this grapple, Mullah Nasim showed himself tenacious. He reportedly executed his prisoners—Russians and Afghans alike—buried them, and then sat and ate his meals on the platform he built overtop the soil of their graves.

                The anti-Soviet war was good for Nasim’s family; his personal ascendance gave the Akhundzadas a prestige they previously lacked. Looking to transform his martial clout into a political and economic franchise, Nasim brought the province an innovation: The expansion of poppy. Though farmers had long grown the bulb-headed crop in the arid, northern tip of Helmand, he succeeded in integrating it down through the agricultural band of the snowmelt-fed Helmand River, where the vast majority of Helmandis live, and into the province’s south. He expanded his work under a fatwa he issued in 1981, justifying the seemingly unholy trade of opium by citing the poverty of the river valley farmers. As Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, Nasim contacted the U.S. embassy in Pakistan and offered to shut down the opium trade exchange for two million dollars. He was on his way to doing so when assassinated by a rival faction that stood to lose from the eradication. Nasim left behind the structures of a durable drug cartel, which became the Akhundzada family business.

                The withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1989 only exacerbated the fray among insurgents-turned-barons and pettier gangs of criminals. Amid these clashes over land, money, and ideology, the population of Helmand suffered. Most of Helmand’s roadways became a checkerboard of roadblocks where militia commanders and local gangs shook down passersby.

                When the Taliban arrived in 1994, and dispensed with these warlords and their client gangs, the Akhundzadas put up only brief resistance. Instead, they retreated to Pakistan. It was there the family became close with another exiled Pashtun family—the Karzais.

                Across the border in Helmand, the Taliban program took hold with relative ease. Especially in the province’s sparser areas where a rural, conservative Islam was the norm, the simple religious dogmatism of the Taliban found a sympathetic audience. But the sharia was strict, and Helmandis lost their right to music, flying kites, and dogfighting. Worse, the Taliban showed themselves unqualified to bring about any substantive economic or infrastructural improvements. Thus began the dilemma of the Helmandis, which persisted in 2009, to be caught between the usurious militarism of warlords and the harsh, incompetent rule of the Taliban.

                With the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, it was the Taliban’s turn to flee across the border to Pakistan. When President Karzai returned to Afghanistan and sought a strong anti-Taliban force to install in Helmand, he turned to the clan with the roots and connections to subdue the province: the Akhundzadas. At the ready was Nasim’s nephew, Sher Mohammad, whom Karzai made the provincial governor in 2001. Worst among the old comrades, the Akhundzadas brought back into power was a man named Abdul Rahman Jan, who became the tyrannical provincial police chief. He ruled a small district called Marjah as his own drug-financed fiefdom, where he and his men stole boys from local families for their sexual pleasure.

                From a distance, their rule gave an appearance of stability; up close, the population chafed. While violence in Helmand only simmered after 2001, small groups of Taliban trickled back into the province and mustered networks of aggrieved locals. Abdul Rahman Jan became the frequent posterboy of insurgents’ propaganda, and a steady refrain in their stirring sermons.

                The situation in Helmand began changing rapidly toward the end of 2005. The British were preparing to deploy a brigade-size task force to the province as part of wider NATO effort to reclaim momentum from the Taliban across the country. Understandably seeking a better governmental partner than Akhundzada after authorities found him with nine metric tons of opium inside the governor’s office, the British pressured Karzai to replace him as governor. Such a move would be a family matter: Perhaps to prevent feuding, or to gain a foothold in the other’s sphere of influence, Sher Mohammad and President’s Karzai’s half brother Ahmed Wali Karzai had married two sisters. Karzai relented under British demands, however, and removed Akhundzada in December 2005 by promoting him to parliament, away in Kabul.