An Afghan Reconstruction Horror Story

A major troop surge is currently underway in Afghanistan, where in the past year more American soldiers were killed than in any previous year since the war began. President Obama has called the country “the central focus, the central front, on our battle against terrorism,” citing the need for the Afghan government to do more to combat resurgent al Qaeda and Taliban forces. But if the first internationally led endeavor in post-9/11 nation-building fails it won’t be solely because of a battlefield defeat. The warped nature of the Afghan political system will be as much to blame. Many honest liberals and reformists, culled from the ranks of an impressive Afghan diaspora, have tried to rebuild a country ravaged by a decade of Islamist totalitarian rule only to discover that, while surface appearances may indeed be more hygienic, “official” corruption and criminality persist at levels intolerable for the future viability of a post-totalitarian regime. The sad case of Dr. Mohammed Atash, the former president of Ariana, Afghanistan’s largest commercial airline, should be seen as a cautionary tale for what the U.S. and Europe may face in short order: namely, a failed state built on the ruins of the Taliban and sustained by cynical domestic interests.

Like many gifted students from the Middle East in the late 1960’s, Atash received a cosmopolitan education, first earning a B.S. in chemistry from the American University in Beirut, for decades the training ground for future Muslim luminariesÑin Atash’s year, the school graduated the U.S. ambassador to both postwar Afghanistan and postwar Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, Voice of America journalist Rauf Mehrpour, former Chancellor of Kabul University and Minister of Finance Dr. Ashraf Ghani, as well as a host of other notable Afghans. And like Khalilzad, Atash continued his graduate studies in the U.S., attaining a Ph.D. in Educational Research, Statistics, and Measurement from Florida State University, which enabled him to act as the Head of Chemistry and Research Departments in Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education Science Center between 1970 and 1977. Having completed that stint, Atash returned to the U.S. and worked as a researcher and professor of applied statistics; he also founded a chain of automotive lube shops; his own consulting firm, PARSA; and the non-profit Nooristan Foundation, which has been dedicated to rebuilding schools in the rural districts of Afghanistan and in 2003 received a $100,000 grant from America’s Fund for Afghan Children, established by President Bush. In 1999, Atash was invited to participate in the Rome Group of the Loya Jirga, the government-in-exile that sought a peaceful form of regime change during the pre-9/11 reign of the Taliban.

So he had all the credentials of a brilliant and influential member of the Afghan diaspora, which, even before the first bomb fell on Kabul in 2001, was poised to begin the long process of rebuilding its impoverished homeland. After the Taliban was routed, Atash became a fixture in the international media: He was the Founding Chairman of the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce and helped projects through institutions such as the World Bank and the United States Trade & Development Agency that lay the seeds of foreign investment in Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, he was approached in 2005 by Hamid Karzai’s Ministry of Finance, which recruited him as a Senior Advisor, a role which afforded countless opportunities for abstract planning but very few concrete projects. It was a more interesting phone call that Atash answered months later that forever changed his life, and altered his view of the Karzai government.

Enayat Qasimi, an Afghan-American attorney and former legal adviser to the newly elected President Hamid Karzai, had been recently  appointed Minister of Transportation, a significant post since Afghanistan sees as many as 30,000 Muslims making the annual hajj and traveling to Saudi Arabia. It was especially for the purpose of reforming the “hajj operation” that Qasimi solicited Atash to become the new President of Ariana, one of Afghanistan’s leading airlines, once considered by travel experts to be among the finest in the world. (Qasimi had previously hired Atash as unpaid consultant to the Ministry of Transportation on the strong recommendation of Ambassador Khalilzad.) It was now known as one of the world’s “most dangerous” carriers. A combination of Taliban incompetence and economic sanctions had reduced Ariana to a scant fleet of mostly Russian- and Ukranian-built aircraft, and with a foreign flight route limited to Dubai and Riyadh. A U.N. Security Council Resolution in 1999 ordered the grounding of all overseas flights and the shuttering of Ariana’s offices in Kabul. The national airline’s use in the trafficking of drugs, as well as of Al Qaeda and Taliban figures, had been notorious for years, and with these added restrictions, it didn’t take long for Ariana effectively to go out of business, which it did a month after 9/11.

By 2002, the U.N. resolution was lifted, but the state of industrial disrepair endured, and the hajj was being conducted in such a disorganized and dangerous manner that the new Karzai administration set itself an ambitious goal: By December 2005, all pious Afghans should be able to make an easy pilgrimage. This was the task Atash stood to inherit, so he was understandably reluctant to accept, citing also his lack of experience in the aviation industry. But Qasimi persisted and eventually his fellow expatriate felt morally obliged to accept the corporate presidency, which he describes as a “demotion” given his thirty-plus years as a successful businessman in Washington, D.C., and a slew of remunerative private sector offers. His government salary was set at $100 per month, paltry even by Third World standards, and the post required him to live in Kabul with U.S. and NATO forces on the ground and warlords and resurgent Taliban fighters still an ever-present threat to his safety. Atash also agreed, out of apparent magnanimity, to do without a personal security detail and to live in relatively spartan conditions at a time when most other administration officials and adjuncts enjoyed lavish accommodations.

But there was an additional reason for Atash’s reluctance: He knew the weak track record Karzai’s government had in weeding out corruption within its own ranks; corruption, Atash explains, was that government’s modus operandi, a fact that had become clear to anyone paying attention during even the early phases of reconstruction. “There is no culture of criticism of authority in Afghanistan,” Atash told me, “and anyone working in the government can afford to accept zero accountability for his actions.” The best tenure as a minister or high-level functionary was one distinguished by non-accomplishment, and a genuine reformer was seen as engaged in a hazardous occupation. “I killed my political ambitions by accepting this job,” Atash said. Nevertheless, his conscience prompted him to accept Qasimi’s offer, which he did in May 2005.

For the first few months, Atash became a student again, learning whatever he could about aviation and redeveloping a multibillion dollar transportation company that had been, as he put it, a “neglected house with no repairs.” A chief obstacle was the culture of graft and embezzlement that governed the airline’s day-to-day operations, a culture that was given particular leeway by Ariana’s lack of a modern accounting apparatus. Amazingly, the company hadn’t produced a balance sheet in twenty years, so Atash created a computerized bookkeeping system using the SAP software and he hired two foreign firmsÑone German, the other IndianÑto conduct audits of Ariana’s two previous years, which could then be used as a basis of comparison against future performance. Greater transparency meant not only eliminating graft but also highlighting old debts; Atash obtained more than $6 million in outstanding payments from Ariana’s General Sales Agent in Saudi Arabia. He made the company more amenable to employee feedback, holding regular meetings with Ariana staff during which everyone from ticket agents to baggage handlers could air their grievances and offer insights as to how the airline was performing in general. In addition, Atash reopened its training center for pilots and airline personnel, which had been closed for many years, as well as instituted a cargo deal with the United Arab Emirates to expand Afghanistan’s exports internationally.

Safety was another priority, as Ariana was notorious for its malfunctioning aged aircraft, which were often forced to make emergency landings (Atash was a passenger during one such episode, caught on film, in 2004).

As with most mismanaged corporations, Ariana was hemorrhaging cash, mostly for defunct projects that had been outsourced to foreign entities in the mad rush to reform Afghanistan’s infrastructure after the Taliban’s removal. In one of his first orders of business, Atash cancelled a contract with Lufthansa Consulting, which had been hired at a cost of $2,000 per day per person, inter alia, to assist in the airline’s management as well as to write an operation manual for Ariana, . In a year’s time, the contract hadn’t produced significant improvements, and after nixing it, Atash instructed Captain Assad Sharza, Ariana’s Vice President of International Affairs, to write an operation manual himself, which he did within three months, in his spare time, and at no added expense to the airline.

Sharza is Western-educated pilot who was imprisoned by the Taliban in the 1990s after having returned to Afghanistan to help in an early, doomed revitalization program for Ariana. At Atash’s request to recruit qualified Afghans, Sharza was contacted by the Afghan Embassy in Washington, D.C., in 2004 to help the airline.  He had never met Atash before working with him, but described him, in a phone conversation with me, as “very knowledgeable in economics and business. He was the first president of Ariana I saw who was willing to discuss anything with me.” Sharza’s tenure with the airline hovers between tragedy and farce: He was not only fired from the position after Atash resignedÑthe new president fearing Sharza’s loyalty to the oldÑand he was not only refused his salary of $5,000 for six months of executive employment, but also the government declined to cover his cost of living beyond his basic hotel room charges. By the end of his stay in Kabul, which the new administration talked him into as his wife lay dying back in New York, Sharza found himself having to pay $45,000 of his own money in incidental expenses. “It is such a corrupt country,” he said, stifling a laugh. “From Karzai, all the way down.”

One would think that because a large part of Atash’s mandate was managing a successful hajj operation, he’d be accorded every necessity and favor at President Karzai’s disposal. Yet, in preparations for the 2005-2006 pilgrimage (hajjis typically leave in November, and return in February of the following calendar year), Atash ran afoul of Karzai, who wanted to have things both waysÑreform without initiative, and reward without investment. For one thing, global gas prices had nearly doubled between May 2005 and May 2006, and Ariana found itself paying $1,000 per ton of jet fuel. The cost of simply powering the aircraft was complicated by another source of corruption: the American-owned fuel company Tryco, which held a monopoly on providing Ariana’s supply. Atash says a representative from Tryco one day walked into his office and tried to bribe him into maintaining that monopoly. When Atash refused, the Tryco employee threatened him: “You think you know people. Now you will see who I know.”

In the event, no headway was made on reducing fuel prices for the 2005-2006 hajj season, and so in order for the airline to stay solvent, Atash calculated, it would be forced to charge each passenger traveling to Jeffah $1,050 for a round-trip ticket. He duly informed Karzai in the presence of Qasimi, but the Afghan president was resolute. He ordered the price of tickets reduced to $850, claiming he didn’t care about revenue lossesÑhe just wanted a good hajj operation.

As it transpired, the operation, which took seven months of laborious planning and preparation, went “exceptionally well,” as Qasimi, now a partner in a Baltimore law firm, explained to me over the phone. Twenty-five thousand tickets were sold, all flights departed and arrived on time, and there were no riots or deaths such as had plagued Afghan sojourners in years past. Atash was even granted an award for excellence by the Saudi government, which had previously fined Afghanistan each year for assorted managerial snafus, although he received no credit from his own government; Karzai, he says, never publicly acknowledged Ariana’s singular triumph. Atash believes this owed to the President’s fear that he’d use the airline’s newfound popularity as a platform for launching his own political career. (Atash had expressed no interest in running for office. He had even offered to resign after the end of the hajj season, but was told by Qasimi to stay on duty for at least another three months, to help Qasimi’s replacement get acclimated). What’s worse, however, was that Ariana’s staff, consisting of more than 2,000 employees – 200 of whom had been hired by Atash to handle the excessive demands of a growing airline – had worked tirelessly to bring off this key event, yet were never even congratulated by Karzai. It was a slight that took a palpable toll on company morale. 

Of course, morale was always a tricky sentiment in an airline overridden with sinecurists who had friends in high places. Karzai had instructed Atash in the early days of his tenure to fire all corrupt employees from Ariana, a measure he said he would support in his capacity as President. After completing an internal investigation, Atash decided that four airline employees were engaged in illegal activities and should be fired. One man, Timor Shah Stanekzai, took his termination personally and initiated a smear campaign against Atash, a relative easy task given that two of his friends were Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabet and Zabiullah Esmati, head of Afghanistan’s Anti-Corruption Commission in Ariana during Atash’s presidency. Both would play instrumental roles in abusing their powers to threaten Atash and causing him to leave Afghanistan. Esmati was an expat who had lived in northern California, where he had been receiving disability payments for a mental disorder, and Sabet had lived in exile in Canada after being refused entry into the U.S. in the 1980s. After declaring his candidacy for President in July of 2008, he was fired by President Karzai and placed under investigation for “criminal activities.” According to Sky News reporter Arthur Kent, who has done yeoman’s work in exposing the rampant corruption in the Karzai government, Sabet “has been publicly accused of accepting bribes from known drug traffickers, and of conducting vendettas against dozens of prosecutors and other officials working in Afghanistan’s struggling justice system. During his two-year tenure as Attorney General, Sabet amassed a file of failed investigations, and sent not one significant anti-corruption case to trial.”

In the midst of being faced with this difficult environment, part of Atash’s dilemma was restructuring a notoriously monolithic and hidebound transportation company in such a way that competence and accountability could be measured. Ariana may still have been a state-owned entity, but that was no excuse for failing to make it a horizontally integrated one with the possibility for privatization down the line. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Atash decided to split the company into six separate subsidiaries to handle international versus domestic flights, catering, cargo, and so on. Each subsidiary would function semi-autonomously and therefore be held accountable for its individual success or failure. This required an updating of Ariana’s archaic legal structure, held over from the days of Communism, by rewriting the company’s bylaws and doing away with its old board, which consisted of five ministers from the Afghan president’s cabinet, and two state-owned bank presidents, in favor of a new and independent board of directors. After Atash’s departure, the new bylaws were never implemented, an outcome he believes to be rooted in certain officials’ desire to keep Ariana state-owned.

Many may have had a motive for ensuring the status quo: The Minister of Finance, Dr. Anwar ul-Haq was rumored to have connections with another Afghan airline, Pamir, and encouraged other government officials to bad-mouth Ariana. Corrupt Ariana employees did not want reform or change. Ariana’s fuel supplier wanted to continue selling fuel to the airline at many times the market cost. Drug traffickers, who for years had been using Ariana’s planes to transport heroin out of the country, didn’t want the airline sold even in part to private interests. Of course, even to speak publicly of “drug traffickers” was to risk being murdered. The going euphemism, Atash told me, is “administrative corruption.”

From the start, Atash was helpless in combating vested interests in an international drug trade that, instead of dwindling after the fall of the Taliban, proliferated with the encouragement of the newly elected regime. As Thomas Schweich reported in an explosive article for the New York Times Magazine, Karzai has been playing the U.S. “like a fiddle” in terms of pretending to oppose Afghanistan’s narco-economy, but then doing everything he can to guarantee its continuance, from preventing aerial elimination of the poppy cropÑof which Afghanistan produces 93 percent of the world’s supplyÑto appointing his friends and cronies to key administration positions despite their known ties to drug dealers. In fact, some of the officials are drug dealers: Izzatullah Wasifi, whom Karzai selected to head an anti-corruption committee in 2007, had actually been convicted as a heroin dealer in Nevada; Karzai’s own brother, Ahmad Wali, who, as Schweich put it, “was running half of Khandahar,” was also involved in drug trafficking.

Contrary to popular myth, poppy farmers are not all poor or driven to cultivate an illegal crop out of agrarian “tradition”; as Schweich wrote, the U.S. has taken photos of “industrial-sized poppy farms”Ñmany owned by pro-government opportunists, others owned by Taliban sympathizers.” And that many of these farms are located in the wealthy Pashtun south, from which Karzai hails and received 95 percent of the vote in the last presidential election, should also be cause for concern. Moreover, in April 2006, his former attorney general, Abdul Jabar SabetÑa man known to be in thrall to the fugitive warlord and Al Qaeda associate Gulbuddin HekmatyarÑfired one of Afghanistan’s proven drug busters, General Aminullah Amerkhel, the esteemed chief of border police at Kabul Airport. Amerkel used to arrest five or six traffickers a week; in the six-month period since his dismissal, collars had fallen to a laughable total of five. Sabet, meanwhile, was sacked from the country’s top legal office in July of 2008, whereupon he declared his intention of running against Karzai for the presidency. Such hypocritical policymaking, which takes place with the knowledge and consent of the Pentagon, has not helped men like Atash dislodge the mafia elements overrunning the Afghan economy. Warlords, too, have a stake in horizontal integration. And Atash knew he’d angered exactly the wrong kind of person when, in 2005, he refused the then-Minister of Water and Energy’s request to keep a commercial flight grounded in Herat while that minister attended a meeting of unspecified purpose. That the passengers on the return trip would consequently have their flight delayed mattered not to this administration official; this how things were done in Afghanistan, and in case one forgot it, there was the helpful reminder that this minister was close to a well-known warlord. Atash, fearing the plane might be used for drug trafficking, told the minister that if he wanted a private plane, he should have chartered one and ordered for a prompt and on-schedule return of the aircraft.

One of Atash’s achievements as President of Ariana was negotiating the purchase and lease of four B737-200 and tow B757-200 planes from BoeingÑa transaction that had been advocated by Khalilzad, then U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, and Minister Qasimi. The deal even had the support of President Bush and the White House, which encouraged Boeing to help Ariana. For one thing, Ariana’s fleet of aircraft were seriously outdated and unsafe, mechanical anachronisms from the days of Soviet satrapy. Coordinating a deal with Boeing would not only be a win for the airline, but also for the country, which was desperately seeking foreign investment. However, Atash hit another snag: when the two leased B757 planes were painted with Ariana’s logo and delivered, they were grounded in Europe due to an extant EU blacklist, on which Ariana had also been placed. Boeing regarded the leases as effective upon the planes’ transfer dates, and proceeded to invoice for Ariana $6 million, which included the down payment, lease fees and Boeing’s costs. When the Afghan government did not take action to transfer the planes to Kabul, they remained in a warehouse in Europe. Atash worked tirelessly to address this problem, but when it became apparent that the Boeing deal had become another political pawn, he spoke with Boeing officials and got the American avionics giant to agree to waive the $6 million owed by Ariana. A letter sent to Atash from Lee D. Monson, a Vice President for Boeing, signals Ariana’s “unprecedented levels of financial concessions combined with greater levels of support” and expresses the wish to “see the 757’s being the foundation for the introduction of the 737.” Atash had resolved one potentially fatal conflict with a major Western manufacturer, only to broker the preliminaries for further transactions with it. And here his problems began in earnest.

Atash told me that throughout his tenure at Ariana, he’d been tipped off by sympathetic parties as to how unpopular he was within the government. In 2006, a one-inch-thick report was brought to him by a man with ties to the Afghan secret police, containing biographical information and details of Atash’s alleged activities since returning to Afghanistan that had been blacked outÑa sign that this material hadn’t just been gathering passively, but that it’d been reviewed and vetted. Among the baseless charges leveled against him were “misappropriating funds” and “womanizing.” Atash at one point even went to the home of a friend of a friend, where he spoke with the former Communist era security official, someone who had impressive contacts in Kabul and knew the price for allowing a secret police dossier like this to grow much thicker. He suggested Atash rebut the charges using the same covert means; i.e., starting smear campaigns against his accusers and exploiting the very conduits of state power against which he’d declared himself an enemy. Ariana, in fact, had its own security apparatus, which might have made a powerful counterweight. But Atash demurred, saying this particular recourse was “medicine you cannot take.”

The gravamen of Atash’s politically motivated rap sheet, which fully came to light in April 2007, was that he had received $30 million in illicit payoffs from BoeingÑan amount that was roughly 10% of the total deal price. After Qasimi had stepped down as transport minister, his replacement, Ahmad Jawed, told the Financial Times in 2007 that Atash had “profited” from the transaction, an accusation that had the disastrous concomitant of implicating executives of one the largest and most respected aircraft manufacturers in the world. Apart from offering to have his personal finances audited, and otherwise agreeing preemptively to any and all requests in the pending corruption investigation, Atash obtained a letter of exoneration in late August 2006 from Lee D. Monson, the same Boeing Vice President who had written the earlier letter, stating that Boeing “must comply with the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and as such we do not pay any agent fees or commissions to Afghanistan.” This was one way to ensure that Boeing would never again do business with Ariana, or with any Afghan entity, an outcome Atash believes his rivals intended when they began their smear campaign against him. “If Ariana failed, the other national airlinesÑand the ministers attached to themÑwould succeed.”

Attorney General Sabet was at the center of the effort to ensure that, at the very least, Atash failed. Misusing the state’s judicial powers for political gain or oppression were not new in Afghanistan or other states riddled with corruption. In the course of 15 months, beginning in May 2006, Sabet instituted five separate travel bans on Ariana’s president, who naturally spent much of his time abroad, as well as leveled a slew of petty charges against him, including “embezzlement” relating to the price of a single plane ticket for which an Ariana passenger had refused payment. Sabet also repeatedly broke the law by speaking about details of Atash’s indictments to the Afghan media, thus compromising any pretense of a fair trial.

The firing of Timor Shah Stanekzai was now being avenged. Zabiullah Esmati led  the investigation, but did not come up with any evidence of wrongdoing.   However,  he was also a personal friend of Stanekzai and seemed committed to continue. In the summer of 2006, Esmati approached Atash with a tidy quid pro quo: rehire Stanekzai and all pending charges against him would be “torn up.” Once again, Atash refused a bribe from a high-placed figure, but this only infuriated Esmati, who then took to Afghan television to peddle false embezzlement accusations against him. 

In addition to his mounting legal headaches, Atash faced an attempted coup from within his own company. But the irony was: he no longer wanted to be president. By late 2006, Atash had begun drafting his resignation letter, figuring that the mounting legal scandals he was facing would preoccupy him and make his continuance as the head of Ariana all but impossible. In August 2006, he traveled to Washington, D.C. to finalize an investment proposal between Ariana and a host of U.S., Canadian and European investors that would total anywhere between $300 and $700 million. He attended a signing ceremony at the Embassy of Afghanistan, alongside Afghan Ambassador Said Tayeb Jawad, of a Memorandum of Understanding that signaled the initial stages of what would be the largest private finance investment in Afghanistan’s history. Seeing an opportunity to undercut an absentee rival, Abdul Ahad Mansuri, then Ariana’s Vice President, set up a meeting with Karzai and the Economic Committee of the Cabinet while Atash was stateside. He accused his superior of “mismanaging” the airline and stealing company funds. Mansuri went public with his charges and openly campaigned among Ariana’s employees to become Atash’s replacement in an election that was supported by the airline’s board of directors, including then Minister of Transport Ehsan Jawed, Minister of Commerce Amin Farhang, and Minister of Finance Anwar ul-Haq Ahadi. (This election would have violated company bylaws since the sitting president is also a board member, and Atash was never informed directly about the election.)

Having nonetheless caught wind of what was transpiring back home, Atash, still in the U.S., had his attorney daughter Mariam A. Nawabi, contact Karzai’s Chief of Staff Jawed Ludin, who assured her that Karzai wanted to meet personally with Atash upon his return to Afghanistan. Atash wanted to offer his resignation to Karzai in person and a meeting with President Karzai was confirmed. Upon reaching Kabul, he found that no meeting had been scheduled and that he was subsequently banned from leaving the country. He sat before the Anti-Corruption Commission, still headed by his foe Zabiullah Esmati, and was questioned for five hours. Many Commission members found that there was no evidence substantiating corruption charges against him. Nevertheless, a few days later, Atash formally resigned his post before the board of directors, who then voted for Mansuri to be the next president of Ariana. 

Throughout these internal corporate machinations, a number of Ariana employees had been badmouthing Atash to members of Karzai’s cabinet. Three of those employees told the administration that Atash had pocketed the $6 million from the Boeing deal, a baseless allegation since those funds had never been paid by Ariana. A Boeing executive, Nadim Fatallah, even traveled to Kabul, testified before the Anti-Corruption Commission and personally proffered the documents showing that that money had been waived at Atash’s request. None of this was sufficient to stop the efforts to blacken Atash’s reputation and have him arrested. The three government ministers, serving on the Board of Ariana went to Karzai to petition him to jail Atash even as the investigation was still underway and he had been bound for a month in Afghanistan at the say-so of Sabet, who threatened (illegally) to keep him there indefinitely. (Sabet also dispatched letters and subpoenas to Atash’s vacated office at Ariana, where he would not be able to receive them, his purpose being, as Atash believes, to try him in absentia and thus drum up support for the prosecution, a rather bold maneuver given that the attorney general was the one who had stripped Atash of his right to travel and most certainly knew he was still in Afghanistan.)   Atash had been in the country for months during the fruitless legal proceedings, and says he cooperated fully despite the obvious lack of due process.

Then he began receiving anonymous death threats, and was even subject to a direct attempt at blackmail by an Afghan judge. In September 2006, Judge Ansarullah Mawlawizadah, who had direct jurisdiction over the case, said he would imprison Atash for 12 years, hoping to benefit from the threat by intimidating the defendant to make a payoff. At the request of Atash, the case was appealed to the Afghan Supreme Court, presided over by the well-respected Chief Justice Abdul Salam Azimi. The Court threw out the case for lack of evidence and summarily fired Judge Mawlawizadah, and sent its conclusions clearing Atash of all charges of wrong-doing to Sabet’s office, which nonetheless continued its campaign against him.

Realizing he’d been targeted by a relentless propaganda machine, Atash decided to leave Afghanistan. The details of his departure he wishes to keep private for fear of reprisal against those who assisted him. Despite being exonerated by the country’s highest court, the Karzai government placed his name on an extradition list, which the United States has so far failed to recognize.

Since returning to Washington, Atash has devoted himself to his private enterprises and lobbying for reform of the political establishment in Kabul; a theme that has not found much favor in a climate where a reassessment of the US/NATO military strategy is thought to be the only solution for rescuing the project of reconstruction. But with upcoming elections in Afghanistan, Atash says it’s crucial that the incoming Obama administration gel to the fact that without a kind of soft regime change aimed at rooting out compromised state officials who have double or triple interests, the international community may yet find itself faced with another failed state on its hands. Last September, Atash drafted a white paper entitled, “Afghanistan: Strategy and Approach” which he’s circulated among his contacts in Washington. Although his suggestions are presented in broad strokes, they reflect the current disconnect between Western observers who fret only about the “re-Talibanization” of Afghanistan, but not about the non-Taliban degeneracy to which the country has succumbedÑusually with the complicity of ostensible Western allies. Among Atash’s diagnosis of the myriad failures of U.S./NATO policy has been the “[e]mpowering [of] a weak leader who could not take a strong stance on major issues which needed immediate action,” a characterization of Hamid Karzai that has been increasingly written about in major media publications.

Part of the problem Atash and others like him have encountered is an understandable reluctance among many Afghan officials and returning expats in the post-Taliban state to speak out and take action against the systemic corruption in their country. Many find it easier just to look the other way. In researching this article, I was refused on-the-record statements by a host of individuals, all fearful of what might happen to their friends and family back home if they spoke their minds. Some even went so far as to speculate that Atash was endangering himself all over again by seeking to publicize his story. Without any evidence but bent on teaching others a lesson who want to bring transparency to governance in Afghanistan, a propaganda campaign was started again, but this time online. Both Atash and his daughter Mariam have showed me emails they’ve received from fake addresses that feature false statements, threats, news clippings and websites recycling the nastiest innuendo about Atash.

When asked if he felt he wouldn’t be better off quitting the Afghan political debate entirely, given what he and his family have already been through, Atash replied by quoting an old Persian proverb which runs: “If you see a blind man walking into a well and you remain silent, it’s a grave sin.” For 18 months of his time and efforts, he did not receive a dime of compensation from the government he served faithfully.  Atash believes the personal struggle he endured to bring reform and transparency to governance was worth the sacrifice as it is important in building democracy. As for Karzai, who has extended family in the U.S. with whom Atash is on congenial social terms, he says: “I wish him well, and I wish he did the right thing. I pray to God he does that now.”