The Foreign Service Journal, October 2015

28 OCTOBER 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Afghanistan. For him, justice meant the end of corruption as well as the establishment of Sharia law across the country. On another occasion I met with the head of the religious affairs department in Kandahar. He had served as the Taliban shadow governor in Kunduz before joining the government and had just returned from fulfilling the hajj, the obligatory pilgrim- age to Mecca. “Did you meet any of your old comrades from the Taliban in Mecca?” I asked. “Oh, yes, I saw several of them.” “What did they say to you?” “They asked why I had crossed over to the infidels.” “And what did you say to them?” “I asked them why they had joined up with the Pakistanis.” My major contacts included Shah Wali Karzai, titular head of the Popolzai tribe and half brother to Afghanistan’s then-president, Hamid Karzai. He lived in a new housing development on the edge of Kandahar. The roast lamb and pomegranate juice that he served in his large, yet not especially ostentatious home was delicious. I met often with three of the four governors in the region: Tooryalai Wesa (Kandahar), Sher Mohammed Akhundzada (Uruzgan) and Mohammed Ashraf Naseri (Zabul); we rarely met with leaders from the more remote fourth province (Dai- kundi), a largely mountainous and mostly peaceful area inhab- ited by Hazaras who traced their ancestry back to the soldiers of Genghis Khan. We also met from time to time with Haji Dastageeri, a soft- spoken yet charismatic tribal leader with a black beard, black turban and hairy feet, who had somehow managed to maintain cordial relations with the Taliban, al-Qaida and the Americans. He was one of the richest men in southern Afghanistan, own- ing a construction company in a place where the demand for building and rebuilding was insatiable. Our other contacts included judges, lawyers, mullahs, mer- chants, human rights activists, security officials and the warden of Sarposa Prison. On one occasion we drank tea with the “Keeper of the Cloak,” who looked after a famous garment locked inside three progressively smaller metal trunks in a shrine near the governor’s palace in Kandahar. The threadbare cloak had reportedly once Jonathan Addleton at Kandahar Air Field. The USAID FSO served on detail to the State Department as the senior civilian representative for the U.S. embassy in southern Afghanistan from August 2012 until August 2013. STAFFSGT.ASHLEYBELL,MISSISSIPPINATIONALGUARD/COURTESYOFJONATHANADDLETON