Afghan Gangs on Rise

Searching for his brother, Lahore Khan discovered some dark truths about the new Afghanistan: Terrorists are giving way to gangsters, who often have friends in high places.

It took Khan two years to establish that his younger brother Nasir, 19, was killed by a gang that allegedly strangled taxi drivers with a rope, and then broke down their cars and sold the parts on the black market in Pakistan.

Just 20 days after Nasir disappeared in April 2003, Khan showed the Nangarhar provincial police chief, a former warlord, a letter from a witness that named a prime suspect.

The police did little to follow the lead, Khan said. So the poor farmer from Barikaw, about 20 miles north of Kabul, began his own investigation. He walked for months along the main highways of several provinces, looking for his brother’s body and any sign of his old, battered taxi.

While Khan searched, the gang apparently took more victims, burying some of them in the yard of a Kabul house. His brother’s corpse was finally discovered there in February, 80 miles from the bus stop where he had picked up his last fare.

Although he lacks proof, Khan thinks there’s a simple reason it took police so long to solve the killings of his brother and at least 26 others.

“These people have friends in Kabul in the Interior Ministry, and in the police stations, who are supporting them,” he said of the criminal gang.

Senior officers in the national police share Khan’s suspicion that organized criminal groups involved in armed robbery, kidnapping, drug trafficking and murder have powerful friends in the government headed by President Hamid Karzai.

Gangsters are like “the snake in the sleeve,” and they pose a bigger threat to Afghanistan’s emerging democracy than terrorists, said Gen. Abdul Jamil, who heads the police crime branch in Kabul.

“These are the most dangerous enemies because they look like friends,” he said. “But in reality they are our enemies, and these are the people who work alongside us in the government. They are really dangerous.”

Karzai’s spokesman, Jawed Ludin, acknowledged that there were criminals in the ranks of the national police who were getting help from some senior government officials. But, given a history of two decades of war, Karzai is making dramatic progress, he said.

“It was to be expected that in Afghanistan this area would be the most damaged, the most corrupted, because this is how past regimes tortured people and committed all their crimes,” Ludin said.

After Karzai won last the election in October, he promised to form a government based on merit, not a coalition to appease warlords. Compared to the warlords, he said, the remnants of the Taliban regime were a minor problem.

But at the urging of the U.S. and other Western allies, Karzai continues to accommodate former warlords in the central government in the hope that they will be easier to control inside the halls of power.

Karzai’s critics say he is trading one set of problems for another: As the Taliban weakens and terrorism wanes, gangsterism is on the rise.

“This is a big mistake by the government,” said Azaryuon, who heads a coalition of human rights groups. Like many Afghans, he uses only one name. “They think they might reform these [militia] commanders. Not only are they not reforming them, but they are also giving these criminals power.”

Karzai made one of his most controversial appointments March 1, when he made strongman Abdul Rashid Dostum army chief of staff. New York-based Human Rights Watch and other groups say Dostum is one of several militia commanders who should be prosecuted for war crimes.

When police chiefs and governors start acting more like mobsters, Karzai moves them in the hope that they will be less autocratic off their home turf. In September, he removed Ismail Khan from the governorship of Herat, bringing him to Kabul and giving him a place in his Cabinet.

But betting on cooperation from warlords and shifting them around the country strengthens their grip on power because they are learning to cooperate, Azaryuon said.

“Karzai thinks that if he switches them from one area to another he can control them, but he is wrong because they are all together and united now,” said Azaryuon, project coordinator for the Civil Society and Human Rights Network, a coalition of more than 30 Afghan groups.

Karzai has had some success building a professional army with a Western-trained officer corps loyal to the government. The new Afghan National Army cut its desertion rate significantly by boosting wages and now has more than 21,000 soldiers, although far short of the 70,000-troop target. Improved recruitment is leading to a better ethnic balance, but there are still rivalries.

Karzai and the U.S. military say the Taliban and their allies are on the decline despite a recent surge of attacks after a winter lull. Karzai hopes to further reduce the threat in coming months with an amnesty offer to Taliban members not suspected of serious crimes.

But restoring law and order is proving much more difficult.

In some areas, militia fighters have followed their commanders into the local police force, turning it into a private army in police uniform, human rights activists and other analysts allege.

The national highway police, made up largely of former mujahedin trained to protect the main road linking Afghanistan’s regions, are considered a key link in the trafficking network that, according to the State Department, supplied almost 90% of the world’s heroin last year.

Kabul, the capital, has suffered a surge in major crimes since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001. More than 180 people have been killed in the last year, and police are having trouble stopping armed robberies, said Jamil, the police commander.

One of the capital’s most feared gangs is headed by Rais Khudaidad, who has safe haven with his men in Kabul’s lawless Paghman district, Jamil said. He said several other gangsters in Paghman were beyond the reach of the law “because these people have a lot of friends in the government.”

Over the last two years, about 40,000 militia fighters have disarmed under a voluntary program, but it is unclear how many men still carry arms. Warlords who once wore combat fatigues are trying to maintain their power even as they switch to suits. Some are trying their hand at politics, and plan to run for parliament in election scheduled for September.

“Political and military analysts in Afghanistan increasingly recognize that there has been a fundamental change in the commanders’ priorities during the past three years,” the Brussels-based International Crisis Group said in a February report.

“Most no longer see the need to maintain large stocks of heavy weaponry, since the coalition presence precludes the waging of open warfare. Instead, they have opted to maintain leaner, lightly armed forces adequate to protect their political, military and economic interests, including narcotics trafficking.”

When Lahore Khan’s brother disappeared, another taxi driver, in a letter, identified the missing driver’s last fare as Shah Mahmood, a tailor. He also warned Khan to be careful because he was up against powerful people.

Khan went to look for Mahmood in his village on the pretext of buying a cow. Mahmood wasn’t there. So Khan visited his shop. He wasn’t there either. Each time Khan went back, the family said Mahmood was in Kabul.

Khan appealed to a provincial council that includes the governor, his deputy and the police chief, Hazrat Ali, a former warlord who provided militia fighters in the effort to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in late 2001. Some suspect that Ali allowed Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders to escape, a charge he denies.

“I asked them, ‘What kind of commanders are you? People are disappearing and you don’t care about it,’” Khan said. “And then Hazrat Ali told me that Shah Mahmood is one of his men. He said, ‘Find him yourself, then I will punish him.’ ”

Sitting on the floor of his farmhouse, next to a wall of dry mud dotted with bits of straw, Khan unfolded a letter that he had sealed in plastic wrap to keep it clean. It is on the letterhead of the Bank of Afghanistan and signed by Hazrat Ali.

The undated letter, addressed to “All Security Guards and Policemen,” advised that Khan’s brother was missing, and instructed them to help “find the person he suspects.” No names. No addresses. No orders to investigate a possible murder.

Khan carried on his search alone. He eventually found Mahmood and led the police to him. Khan says the judge who heard the case told him to produce a witness. The taxi driver who tipped him off was afraid to testify, Khan told the court. There was no proof his brother had been killed because his body had not been found.

With so little evidence, the judge sentenced Mahmood to two years in jail, Khan said. Even now, he is not sure what crime, if any, Mahmood was found guilty of. He suspects the judge only acted to protect the rest of the gang. It apparently went on kidnapping and killing until Kabul police uncovered the mass grave and charged seven people, including Mahmood, with murder in the serial killings.

When Khan heard a Radio Liberty report on the arrests and the mass grave, he went to the intelligence bureau of the national police to ask whether he could see the bodies. He was able to identify his brother from clothing, and the license plate of his car, which police found in the gang’s house near the shallow grave.

During his hunt, Khan said he was often tailed by a man in a Datsun four-by-four truck. It was only months later, when police in Kabul published photos of seven people charged with the serial killings, that Khan learned his name.

The man was Rahmatullah, and Khan recognized him as a guard at the gate of Hazrat Ali’s office in Jalalabad.

In an interview, the police chief said he couldn’t recall whether he had met Khan, but insisted his force was clean.

“I did hear many complaints about cars being lost, so that is why I tried my best to arrest the criminals,” Ali said by phone from Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province. “And finally I did it. But their release or their punishment isn’t up to us. It’s up to the prosecutors.”

Police in the national intelligence unit say Rahmatullah, a thin man with a long black beard and an artificial leg, is the gang’s leader. His wife, Shirin Gul, is being held in the women’s wing of Kabul’s Pul-i-Charki prison. Her first husband was among the gang’s early victims, police say. She’s glad the gang killed him because, she said, he took her as a bride when he was 45 and she was a 13-year-old orphan and abused her and later forced her to work as a prostitute.

“I will always forgive Rahmatullah because he has saved me and he has fed my children and me,” she said, “I think killing a coward and a person who doesn’t care about his wife is allowed.” Gul’s son is also charged.

Police permitted a reporter to see, but not interview, Rahmatullah and Gul’s son, Samiullah Khan, in another prison. Authorities gave conflicting accounts of where the rest of the gang, including Mahmood, were being held. Gul says they have escaped.

Despite finding his brother’s killer, Khan says he doesn’t feel a sense of victory or justice, or even of a long journey ending. He is certain the gang is bigger than the seven people arrested, and after two years of investigating, he thinks their victims number closer to 100 than 27.

He’s afraid his children, or three other brothers, could be next. They live in a village not far from the sprawling U.S. base at Bagram, north of Kabul, yet Khan feels he lives at the mercy of criminals.

The suggestion that the system may have finally worked made Khan angry. His eyes flashing, he recalled a popular Afghan adage: “A drum always sounds good from afar.”

“This saying is really true in Afghanistan’s case because if you are in a foreign country you will always hear about democracy, peace and justice and security here,” he said.

“But I don’t think any of those exist.”