The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [60]
Sabit now courted the media so incessantly, he seemed to be running for office—and as it turned out, he was. The Brits and the Americans had been trying to improve the country’s justice system, even though neither group was supposed to be involved. In one of the biggest practical jokes ever played on Afghanistan, Italy had been tapped to reform the courts, despite the country’s lackluster justice record—in only the most recent example, Italy’s prime minister had been accused of bribing judges and tweaking laws to avoid conviction. The Italians’ efforts on judicial reform in Afghanistan so far could only be described as impotent.
Unwilling to sit on the sidelines, the Brits and the Americans now sold Sabit as the answer to government corruption. He was being pushed as the best choice for attorney general, the top lawyer in the land, a crucial job. Somehow the Afghan government needed to convince its citizens that criminals would be held accountable, that corruption would not be tolerated, and that an Afghan justice system was more effective than the Taliban’s Islamic courts. Like civilian casualties, corruption was turning into a major wedge issue. The Taliban may have been strict, but they did promise law and order, and they weren’t for sale. (Most of the time. In Afghanistan, there were always exceptions.)
Sabit was not an entirely new suggestion for attorney general. I had heard about this plan months earlier, from a U.S. embassy official.
“Sabit? Really?” I had asked.
“Sure,” the embassy man had said. “He may be an unguided missile, but he’s our unguided missile.”
And maybe that was true—when Sabit visited Guantánamo Bay, he largely validated what the United States had said about the American detention center there, even as he pushed for some allegedly innocent men to come back home. He had also sounded all the right notes about fighting corruption and following the advice of his benefactors. Yet Sabit faced an interesting paradox. Some people saw him as too conservative, given his morality campaign and past alliance with the fundamentalist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Others saw him as a U.S. patsy.
But Karzai nominated Sabit anyway, which meant that Sabit had to appear before the Afghan parliament and convince members to vote for him. This wasn’t entirely necessary—Karzai largely ignored the body, and would later even choose to keep his foreign minister when the parliament sacked him. But the affirmation would give Sabit legitimacy. He gave a long speech, talking poignantly about corruption and the need to fight it. The parliament overwhelmingly voted for him.
“You should have seen my speech to them,” Sabit told me later. “I won them over. By the end, they all loved me. They were all clapping. Some were crying, they were so impressed.”
Typical Sabit self-aggrandizement, and I believed one-third of it, a good rule of thumb for most Afghan officials. Regardless, the wild-haired Pashtun with the long white beard and tailored suits who had taught me to shoot a Kalashnikov and threatened to kill his neighbor became the country’s attorney general. He called me over to his new office in the fall of 2006. His desk was heaped with bouquets of fluorescent, glittery fake flowers, and I tossed a box of chocolates into the psychedelic garden, which promptly swallowed it. Dozens of men in turbans and various hats sat in his office, which smelled vaguely of feet.
I sat in the office politely. About a hundred more men waited in the lobby and garden. Sabit held court for an hour in Pashto. At a certain point, I walked out and left my regrets with the secretary, who had been fired as Sabit’s driver soon after our shooting expedition.
That became a daily routine—Sabit called me over. I sat in his office, drank a lot of green tea, and ate a few bitter almonds. And then I left, without talking to anyone.
“I’m not coming to see you anymore,” I finally told him. “It’s pointless. You have