Whereas Raziq’s techniques labored in some respects, beating again the Taliban in Kandahar and incomes him the admiration of many who opposed them, the technique got here at a transparent price. It stirred such enmity in components of the inhabitants that the Taliban turned his cruelty right into a recruiting instrument, broadcasting it to draw new fighters. Many Afghans got here to revile the American-backed authorities and every thing it represented.
“None of us supported the Taliban, at the very least not at first,” stated Fazul Rahman, whose brother was kidnapped in entrance of witnesses throughout Raziq’s reign. “However when the federal government collapsed, I ran via the streets, rejoicing.”
Even some who cheered the ruthlessness Raziq wielded in opposition to his enemies lamented the broader corruption and criminality he helped enshrine, a key a part of why the Afghan authorities collapsed in 2021. After his demise, his commanders expanded their predation additional, extorting peculiar individuals and stealing from their very own males’s wages and provides.
“What they introduced below the title of democracy was a system within the fingers of some mafia teams,” stated Qari Mohammad Mubarak, who ran a women’ faculty in Kandahar and initially supported the federal government. “The individuals got here to hate democracy.”
Many American commanders, diplomats and their allies in Afghanistan knew on the time they had been bankrolling a battle that strayed far exterior worldwide regulation.
“Typically we requested Raziq about incidents of alleged human rights abuses, and after we acquired solutions we’d be like, ‘Whoa, I hope we didn’t implicate ourselves in a battle crime simply by listening to about it,’” stated Henry Ensher, a State Division official who held a number of posts on Afghanistan, together with as the highest civilian consultant in Kandahar in 2010 and 2011, when he labored with Raziq.
“We knew what we had been doing, however we didn’t suppose we had a selection,” Ensher stated.
Most American leaders — together with greater than a dozen interviewed by The Occasions — stated that Raziq had been seen as the one accomplice able to beating again the Taliban within the heartland of the insurgency, the place a pitched battle for dominance was underway.
“Within the second, we would have succeeded, however so what?” Ensher stated. “All the enterprise was flawed.”
Many Afghans say Raziq used the People and their army would possibly to pursue a private vendetta, taking vengeance in opposition to the rivals his tribe had been preventing for many years.
In interviews, many former senior American officers acknowledged that they by no means grasped that dynamic. It was a defining attribute over a era of fight — how little america understood concerning the battle it was waging.
The United Nations, human rights teams and information shops raised severe considerations about Raziq and his forces, however impartial investigations had been restricted, particularly with the area so impenetrable in the course of the battle.
To find out the extent of the abuses, The Occasions combed via greater than 50,000 handwritten complaints that had been scrawled into the Kandahar governor’s ledgers from 2011 via the top of the battle in 2021. In them, we discovered the rudimentary particulars of just about 2,200 instances of suspected disappearances.
