[Nearly six years after he cheated death, Mr. Khalid, 48, is facing long odds again, but of his own choosing. He is stepping out from the shadowy world of espionage that shaped him from a young age, and into the messy field of Afghan politics in the hopes of becoming president.]
By
Mujib Mashal
 |
|
Six
years after he was gravely injured by a Taliban bomber, Asadullah Khalid, a
former
Afghan
intelligence chief, is entering presidential politics as a party leader.
Credit
Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
|
KABUL,
Afghanistan — During his two
years of recovery at Walter Reed, the American military’s pre-eminent medical
facility, Asadullah Khalid was known as the miracle patient.
Mr. Khalid barely survived a Taliban
assassination attempt in 2012, when he was the Afghan intelligence chief. A
disguised suicide bomber had just finished lunch with Mr. Khalid, sitting right
across from him, and set off his explosives at point-blank range as the dishes
were being taken away.
Mr. Khalid’s torso was ripped apart, and it
took dozens of operations before he could begin learning to walk again. His
first three steps, he said, were the most painful moments he can remember.
Nearly six years after he cheated death, Mr.
Khalid, 48, is facing long odds again, but of his own choosing. He is stepping
out from the shadowy world of espionage that shaped him from a young age, and
into the messy field of Afghan politics in the hopes of becoming president.
In recent weeks, he marshaled crowds of
mostly young supporters at a rally in Kabul, the Afghan capital, and in Khost,
in the southeast, to mark the creation of a political party that he hopes can
become a factor in the presidential election next spring.
Mr. Khalid has been many things: a wunderkind
operative and money man for the mujahedeen as they fought Afghanistan’s
Communist regime in the 1980s; a provincial governor and staunch ally of the
Americans as he hunted Taliban militants after the invasion; a feared spy chief
followed by dark whispers about torture. Above all, he has been a survivor.
Now, he has also become a troubling
development for Afghanistan’s struggling president, Ashraf Ghani.
“Can we keep quiet any longer about these two
doctors?” Mr. Khalid said at the rally, referring to Mr. Ghani, a doctor of
anthropology, and his coalition partner Abdullah Abdullah, an ophthalmologist.
In the absence of strong political parties,
presidential hopes in Afghanistan live or die on an array of scattershot
coalitions, each usually with a member of the Pashtun ethnic majority as its
leader.
With the vote just months away, that
coalition-building, and the jockeying among Pashtun public figures to lead
them, is at a full sprint. The incumbent, Mr. Ghani, has declared that he will
seek re-election, but his struggle on every front, from deteriorating security
to the disintegration of the coalition that got him elected, has given hope to
his potential opponents.
Presidential candidates won’t be registered
until after the parliamentary elections in October. But many members of Mr.
Ghani’s coalition are already positioning to rally behind others or throw their
own hats in the ring. The latest of those defections is Hanif Atmar, Mr.
Ghani’s influential national security adviser, who quit last week amid signs he
is considering a run.
Several of the potential first-time
contenders are, like Mr. Khalid, former security ministers. Although his
chances are unclear, Mr. Khalid has in his favor his perceived closeness to the
C.I.A. and other American officials (former President Barack Obama visited him
in the hospital and kept an interest in his recovery), and an ease with the
former Afghan warlords who are the current power brokers in the country’s
politics.
His comeback has been a long road. His took
his first physical steps years after the bombing, and his first political steps
came years after his discharge from the Walter Reed National Military Medical
Center outside Washington.
Largely at the urging of Americans, he helped
mediate between Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah when the two men, opponents in the
bitterly contested 2014 elections, were at each other’s throats within a
government that was supposed to be shared between them.
Then, over the past two years, he began
working quietly to establish his party, Omid e Saba, as a grass-roots network
of a new generation with him as its leader, as opposed to what he sees as Mr. Ghani’s
largely centralized decision making and his tug of war with older political
parties turning dynastic.
But as he tries to shape a new identity, his
past looms large.
He not only came of age under the wings of
some of the most controversial warlords associated with the past decades of the
Afghan war, but he is also accused of having acted much like them when he
became a young governor. Human rights organizations say that when Mr. Khalid
ran the provinces of Ghazni and then Kandahar, he maintained private prisons
where forces under his command tortured detainees.
Mr. Khalid has long denied those accusations.
“In the provinces, the governor is the
overall in charge,” Mr. Khalid said. “If you have the police prison, and the
police forces are your guards, what is the need for private prisons?”
In Afghanistan’s deteriorating security
environment, where a resurgent Taliban is engineering deadly bombing attacks
seemingly daily, politics is often a deadly business. Mr. Khalid’s opening
rally, and its preparations, had the secrecy of an intelligence operation and
the color and chaos of a summer camp.
He kept his program so under wraps that even
the thousands of young people who arrived from more than a dozen provinces did
not know where the Aug. 2 rally would be held until the last minute. He was
preoccupied with security — trying to keep the rally as short as possible, and
learning from recent attacks by making sure the crowd was dismissed gradually
so suicide bombers wouldn’t target them on their way out the secured location.
Preparations on the eve of the rally ran late
into the night at his home in Kabul, where Mr. Khalid finalized the details of
the program with four other speakers. The master of ceremonies, a young man
from the north, read the opening of his prepared remarks.
“Ministers, members of Parliament,
excellencies,” he started.
Mr. Khalid cut him off. “There will be no
excellencies, no ministers or M.P.s,” he said.
The young man seemed dismayed and confused.
“Is Mr. Karzai not coming?” he asked,
referring to Hamid Karzai, who was president when Mr. Khalid was spy chief. It
was a sudden reminder that Mr. Khalid must struggle even within his own party
to craft an identity independent of others he has long been associated with.
“Man,” Mr. Khalid asked with a smile, “if Mr.
Karzai comes, then what will be left for you and me?”
Mr. Khalid is a product of Afghanistan’s
history of turmoil over the past four decades, thrust into a life of weapons,
money and secretive missions from a young age.
His father was a member of Parliament from
Ghazni Province during the Afghan monarchy. When Asadullah was in the 10th
grade in the 1980s, he and three of his classmates from their Kabul school were
jailed by the Communist regime for involvement with parties seeking to
overthrow the government.
His father negotiated his release. Agents
delivered him to the office of the country’s intelligence chief — the same
office Mr. Khalid would occupy decades later. With Mr. Khalid’s father sitting
across his desk, the head of intelligence and the future president, Mohammad
Najibullah, whom Mr. Khalid would help the mujahedeen rebels overthrow, told
Asadullah he was free.
“What about my friends?” Mr. Khalid remembers
asking.
As Mr. Najibullah wrote down the names of his
friends and promised their release, Mr. Khalid noticed the spy chief was
writing with a pencil. He pointed that out. “I was a stubborn young man,” he
said.
Soon after his release, Mr. Khalid joined the
Islamist resistance, which operated out of Pakistan. He and his family opposed
the Communist government, but he says they were not cut out for the ideology
that bound the resistance. After his uncle, who was leading a tribal militia
that was part of the resistance, was killed, the tribe chose Mr. Khalid, still
in his teens, to be their leader.
Over the years, he became one of the most
trusted lieutenants of Abdul Rab Rasoul Sayyaf, a hard-core Islamist closely
allied with the Arab contingent that would later be led by Osama bin Laden. Mr.
Khalid served as Mr. Sayyaf’s liaison with foreign countries and often handled
his money.
In the early 1990s, after the mujahedeen
overran the Communist government and took charge in Kabul, Mr. Khalid had a
brief taste of normalcy. He became a political science student, his university
entrance secured by a special order of the new prime minister.
Meanwhile, his former sponsor, Mr. Sayyaf,
became a central part of the clash between warlords that wrecked Kabul and
traumatized the country, ending when the Taliban overran Kabul in 1996.
Mr. Khalid is aware that his years working
with Mr. Sayyaf are a legacy that must be overcome, if he is to seek office.
“We do not want to go back to the 1990s,” Mr.
Khalid declared during the rally — essentially denouncing a past he was part
of.