A Reality Check in Afghan Homeland

Until last week, Solaiman Faizi’s biggest problems were making sure that guests at his newly opened hotel didn’t burn the place down with their small propane stoves or overload the tenuous power supply.

But after an unpleasant encounter with post-Taliban vengeance and justice, Faizi isn’t so sure that he should have left New Jersey to help reopen his family’s hotel in one of the world’s most treacherous cities.

One of his brothers is stewing in Kabul’s central jail, recovering from a beating by soldiers. Another brother just got out of the hospital, where he says he was treated for a concussion and bruises to his face and kidney inflicted by the same government forces. And their elderly father is worried that there’s worse to come.

This, unfortunately, is what happens when a couple of Jersey car dealers go mano a mano with a cabal of well-connected Afghan shopkeepers.

The Afghan Americans of the Faizi clan are locked in a battle of wills with the Kabul merchants to determine who, in the timeless Afghan tradition, can round up the toughest street muscle and summon the heaviest political connections. It’s the Tajik Americans versus the Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley, a Northern Alliance-dominated area north of Kabul, the Afghan capital.

“We’re not in America anymore,” Faizi said from the family’s second-floor drawing room above the merchants’ shuttered shops. “Here, it’s all about the clan who you know and how good your connections are.”

The trouble erupted one afternoon last week when Faizi’s hot-tempered older brother, Mustafa, sent an emissary to confront four merchants who run shops on the ground floor of the family’s Mustafa Hotel, which opened Nov. 19 for the first time since 1979. Mustafa said the merchants owed four years’ back rent, which went uncollected during the Taliban era.

The merchants begged to differ. According to the Faizis, the tenants attacked the emissary. Enraged, Mustafa grabbed a hockey stick--his brothers hail from New Jersey Devils country--and smashed the merchants’ windows on the theory that the glass technically belonged to his family.

After Mustafa calmed down, his brothers said, he turned himself in to the police. The merchants called the Afghan version of 911, according to the Faizis, by summoning one of the shopkeepers’ brothers, who works at the Interior Ministry--which is dominated by Northern Alliance Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley.

Soon a squad of Northern Alliance soldiers was roaring up to the hotel from the ministry two blocks away. The family says soldiers and merchants forced their way into the hotel and tried to abduct the clan’s 72-year-old patriarch, the stout, white-bearded M. T. Faizi. Protecting him was his youngest son, Wais, 31, a former sales manager for a Nissan dealership in Bergen County, N.J.

“I told them they’d have to kill me first,” Wais said later. He issued his challenge in fluent Dari, followed by what he acknowledges was an equally fluent torrent of Dari curses and insults. He may be an Afghan American, but he’s Jersey all the way.

“They said, ‘OK, tough guy, we’re taking you instead,’ ” Wais said.

Wais and the soldiers reached the street at the moment Mustafa was returning from the police station. This being Afghanistan, a brawl erupted. During the melee, Mustafa allegedly stabbed three people. The Faizis are pleading self-defense. Anyway, they say, the cuts were mere flesh wounds.

According to the family, Mustafa was slapped, punched, kicked and whacked with a rifle butt by the soldiers. Then he was hauled off to the Interior Ministry, where, the family says, he was smacked around some more.

What happened next is not in dispute. The soldiers had the misfortune of conducting their affairs in view of a hotel full of journalists. Among them was Dan Alexe, a Radio Free Europe correspondent who was on a balcony with a video camera.

Alexe’s videotape shows Wais, covering his head with his arms, being hit on the crown with a gun barrel. Several soldiers then slap, punch and kick Wais as they stuff him into a vehicle and drive away.

As Wais is beaten, the video shows, a truckload of peacekeepers from the International Security Assistance Force rolls slowly past a few feet from the soldiers. The truck rumbles on with hardly a pause.

At the Interior Ministry, Wais said, a commander slapped him. Then the official snapped his fingers. Suddenly a dozen or more soldiers were kicking and punching him. An hour after his release that night, his face was scarlet and puffy, and two crimson welts had erupted on his swollen forehead, he said. His kidneys ached.

“I feel like I just went 10 rounds with Mike Tyson,” he said.

With the two brothers in custody, the family says, the soldiers again confronted the elder Faizi. This time Solaiman, 34, came to his father’s defense. He said he was stabbed in the hand as he and the hotel staff fended off soldiers and merchants. The soldiers left without the family patriarch.

Here matters became complicated. Wais and Solaiman grew up in the U.S. and are naturalized American citizens. Mustafa, 39, grew up in Afghanistan and is not. While Wais was freed, Mustafa remained a guest of the Interior Ministry.

That night, Solaiman and Wais phoned U.S. relatives who they said have connections at the State Department and the United Nations and with the brother of Afghan interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai.

The next morning, Wais and Solaiman hustled down to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. There, security staffers in effect told the brothers: Hey, we warned Americans not to come to Afghanistan.

In an interview, an embassy spokesman cited a State Department advisory that warns Americans to stay out of the country. “If American citizens choose to do business in a high-risk environment, in what is still a war zone, then the ability of the U.S. government to assist them is very limited should they run into problems,” said the spokesman, who requested anonymity.

If a similar incident occurred in, say, Paris, the spokesman said, the embassy would tell an American citizen how to file a complaint with “the relevant local authorities.” Unfortunately for the Faizis, the relevant local authorities turned out to be, alas, the Interior Ministry.

“Unfortunately,” the spokesman solemnly agreed.

The Faizis were not deterred. Cashing in on years of connections built by their father, who they said owns considerable local real estate, they were granted an audience with the prime minister. Karzai is an ethnic Pushtun who, at least in theory, would have no part in this fight among ethnic Tajiks.

According to the brothers, Karzai apologized and promised to fire the Interior Ministry commander who had led the posse of soldiers. Keeping his wits during his ordeal, Wais had scrawled the commander’s name on his palm.

The brothers said Karzai sent them to speak with Interior Ministry officials about securing Mustafa’s release. The officials were conciliatory at first, they said, but the brothers found themselves escorted back into the very rooms where Wais says he was beaten.

There, they said, commanders upbraided them for taking their complaints to the embassy and the prime minister. That was precisely the wrong way to handle these matters, they said they were told.

“The right way,” Solaiman said with contempt, “is to keep your mouth shut and pay somebody off.” Solaiman too is a Jersey guy, who says he was a general manager for a Toyota dealership.

The offending commander was not fired, the brothers said. Mustafa was not released. Worse, he was transferred to the dank city jail, Solaiman said.

“This just shows that Karzai isn’t in control of his own government,” Solaiman said. “The Interior Ministry is run by the Panjshir Valley guys. They don’t answer to anybody.”

This is a fine way to treat American investors, the Faizi clan says.

“We left good jobs in America and came back here to try to help rebuild our country,” Wais said. “If this can happen to us, American citizens with a lot of connections, who’s going to come here and invest? Nobody.”

“I’m not going to be intimidated by these thugs,” Wais said. “I’m staying right here. This is my country. My father and mother were born here. Anybody comes in this hotel trying to grab my father, he’ll have six bullet holes in him.”

A written request for comment on the family’s allegations left with Foreign Ministry officials in Kabul last week had not been answered as of Wednesday. When a reporter attempted to interview Interior Ministry officials, he was told that no one would speak to him because he was staying at the Mustafa Hotel.

It pains the American-raised brothers that some Afghans consider them interlopers who returned only after the Taliban had been routed. They point out that Mustafa and their father stayed in Kabul throughout the years, watching over family interests.

“As bad as the Taliban were, they never pulled anything like this,” Solaiman said. “At least they respected the elders. They would never try to intimidate my father.”

For now, the Faizi family is keeping watch over the street from its second-floor hotel redoubt. The merchants have not returned, and the proprietor of a shop next door said they are plotting their next move. The merchants’ shops are locked and dark, and the icy Kabul winds whistle through the broken glass. There is menace in the air.

On a recent evening, Wais sat nursing his injuries, a handgun strapped to his hip. He stared down at the gray streets smeared with dirty snow. “It’s not over,” he said.