the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

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 eective 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
ghting 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 ocials. Regardless, the wild-