Cash on the barrel
By F. Brinley Bruton, Kabul

Pervasive corruption and shaky security are encouraging Afghan merchants to dream of a return to Taliban rule.

Engineer Rafur Rahmani should be pretty pleased with himself
– he is second in command at Azizi Hotak Group, one of Afghanistan’s largest companies. The firm is Afghanistan’s sole Nissan supplier, runs one of its few private banks and imports 80 percent of the country’s liquefied petroleum gas.

But Rahmani has become pessimistic of late, despite the apparently fine fortunes of the firm he works for. “A lot of businessmen aren’t coming to Afghanistan and others want to leave,” he said, sitting in the company’s offices in downtown Kabul. “The problem is that the government has warlords in positions of authority. This is not good – they are making money by the gun. We wish foreign countries would get rid of these men.” In the past, he said, government workers lived in modest houses or apartments, but nowadays many tear around in large new SUVs and live in lavish homes.

Rahmani was echoing a commonly heard complaint – that the central government is corrupt to the point of irrelevance and that some of its officials, armed commanders commonly known as warlords, are aiding the intensifying banditry and violence.

“Under the Taliban there wasn’t this sort of corruption,” Rahmani said. Though the Taliban was far from perfect, he added, some of its members were good, “clean” people. Then Rahmani said something that would until recently have been almost unthinkable: “Yes, the Taliban can govern us again as long as there is peace.”

Rahmani is just one of many businessmen comparing the climate of insecurity now to the peace under the Taliban, which was toppled five years ago. They say the government and international forces are doing nothing to stop warlords who kidnap, terrorize and extort money and land from legitimate businessmen. Some of these warlords are in government, they say.

And not only are local bandits siphoning off customs revenue, they say, the police are getting in on the action. This is helping turn part of the population, especially but not exclusively in the south, away from the weak central government and its international backers and toward the resurgent Taliban.

Trucking trickery. Warlords are taking advantage of the fact that much of Afghanistan’s $4.5 billion a year in imports comes into the country by truck. Baralai, who like many Afghans uses only one name, imports fruit to Kabul from Pakistan. He said that though business is up these days – he now runs about ten trucks a week into the capital compared with about one during the Taliban – official corruption is oppressive.

“Taxes are really high, and then you have to pay the police,” he said as he sorted through a pile of bananas in Kabul’s wholesale fruit and vegetable market. “Every truck costs 10,000 Afghanis [about $200] for the government. And then I have to pay about 3,000 Afghanis for the police at checkpoints.” He shook his head and smiled. “The police have no shame. They say that their salaries are very low and if we don’t pay, they won’t allow us to come to Kabul,” he said. He too brings up the comparison with the Taliban. “With the Taliban, it was 100 percent safe. Under them, you could go everywhere,” he said.

Trucks streaming into the capital under the cover of darkness bear out Baralai’s words. Officially, trucks are not allowed into Kabul before 8 PM and after 5 AM. Unofficially, well, it is at the discretion of police. At 7 PM on a recent night a long line of trucks carrying oil, tractors, bundles of clothes and fruit from Pakistan and Iran inch toward Kabul. At Kote Sangi, the intersection leading into the city proper, uniformed policemen reach up into cabbies before waving the vehicles on. Some vehicles, however, have stopped on the side of the highway. One driver, who declined to give his name, sat smoking a cigarette next to his truck on the side of the road. “The police won’t let me go; they will only let me go if I bribe them,” said the driver nonchalantly. “The businessmen I work for do not pay me enough to pay the bribe night after night so I wait until the road opens,” he said.

The Ministry of Interior denies that bribery is being given free rein at Kote Sangi or any of the other three gates into Kabul. “[Claims of corruption] are completely wrong,” said Zamarai Bashiri, a ministry spokesman. “A team checks police stations every month. We’re always listening to businessmen’s complaints.” Bashiri said that a month earlier the ministry had swooped on one of the gates and relieved several staff members of their duties there for breaking the law.

Bigger problems. The director of customs in Afghanistan’s restive southern province of Kandahar, Azizullah Sakzai, takes a more pragmatic view, acknowledging that skimming from the top is widespread but that there are bigger things to worry about, like extortion. “Yes, you see police stations stopping trucks and asking for money,” he said. “But it is not a huge problem, they aren’t asking for too much money – maybe a truck gives them 100 or 200 Afghanis each. The real problem is the commanders [warlords].” Gunmen controlled by warlords operate illegal checkpoints throughout Kandahar, extorting money from truckers and helping them bypass customs officers, Sakzai said.

The problem is not isolated to Kandahar. Finance Ministry spokesman Aziz Champs estimated that as much as half of the country’s rightful customs duties are siphoned off before they can get to government coffers. Last year, customs garnered the Finance Ministry about $200 million. Bashiri acknowledged great “security problems,” common code for warlordism and banditry.

What Sakzai and Bashiri describe is not new. During the civil war, powerful Kandahari gunmen operated checkpoints along the route from Pakistan to Heart, near the border with Iran. The violence and chaos also made the roads linking Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan dangerous for traders. So truckers, frustrated with disrupted trade routes, were among the Taliban movement’s first supporters and funders. But now the gunmen are often operating with official support, Sakzai said.

“My problem is that the government is not listening to me, especially [President Hamid] Karzai. I have sent letters to Kabul many times telling them about this,” he said. Sakzai has made a name for himself by raising a fuss about corruption and the power of local warlords, and has in fact offered to resign at least once. He said he would stay on now, even though he and his family faced constant death threats. The worst is that warlords operate in cooperation with authorities, he said.

“I want to explain to international people that if the commanders do something wrong they do it with the help of the government,” he said. He would not give the names of who were providing this support, explaining that doing this would endanger his life even more.

Unholy alliances. Many agree that the government and foreign forces are collaborating with corrupt warlords. Some of these men formed part of the Northern Alliance, a collection of ethnic militias that fought the Taliban and then collaborated with foreign troops to oust the overwhelmingly Pashtun movement in 2001.

The inclusion of these so-called holy warriors, or mujaheddin, many of whom fought the Soviets in the 1980s and then plunged the country into civil war also upsets many. Human rights activists accuse the government of embracing men who have committed atrocities allowing them to enrich themselves now.

As always, the discussion with Sakzai goes back to how this compares to Taliban times. “The commanders are not Taliban, they are not doing this,” he said. The Taliban, he said, were not corrupt and helped keep the countryside safe. This is an impression gaining currency every day, despite the strong link between the growing insurgency and the country’s booming drugs trade.

Fazil’s story offers an insight into why many are thinking longingly of the ousted movement. Earlier this year, powerful men seized his family’s farmlands in Panjwai, a restive district of Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province. Fazil, 25, said he and his father appealed to the local authorities, presenting documentation that proved the land belonged to them.

“We paid the government a bribe like they asked, but the people who took our lands also paid. When we paid 1,000, they paid 2,000,” Fazil said. “The government then gave the land to the men who had paid 2,000.”

In desperation, Fazil’s family appealed to Taliban members in their village – the movement has established ad hoc courts in mosques in villages in the east and south, the movement’s traditional heartland. Taliban representatives listened to Fazil and his father and examined their documents.

“The Taliban said to us, ‘You are right, this land belongs to you and nobody can take it away from you,’” said Fazil. “The Taliban said to the other people, ‘If you bother these people again we will kill you.’ After that we got our land back,” Fazil said.

Beginning of troubles. But troubles had only just begun for Fazil and his family. Just weeks after the land dispute was solved, Afghan National Army and foreign troops bombed Panjwai, accusing locals of sheltering the Taliban. Panjwai has been the site of bloody confrontations in recent months, with Afghan and foreign troops fighting major battles to oust the Taliban and their sympathizers.

So Fazil and his extended family fled their home. He now sells roasted nuts and seeds from a small cart on the streets of that province’s capital city. His relatives – two brothers and two sisters and their families – live in a small rented house. “Now we hate the Afghan army and the foreign people,” Fazil said.

This is not to say that the Taliban is garnering adherents en mass. Many people are still vehemently anti-Taliban, citing the way they treated non-Pashtun communities, the Shi’ite minority and others. “The Taliban were bad people,” said Said Mir, a butcher in Kabul who is Tajik, the second largest ethnic group after the Pashtuns. “My uncle was put in jail by the Taliban. One told me to pay 500,000 [Afghanis] to get him out. I paid the money but when I went back they beat me and said they would arrest me too if I stayed around.”

Five years after the Taliban was toppled by US-backed forces, many in the business community are warning that if order is not restored soon, allegiances could shift back to the fanatical group. As Rahmani of Azizi Hotak Group put it: “A Talib can be president just as long as there is peace. Really, our only wish is that there be peace."