:

He ruled over the crucial battleground of Kandahar during a period when the United States had more troops on the ground than in any other chapter of the war, ultimately rising to lieutenant general thanks to the backing of the United States. American generals cycling through Afghanistan made regular pilgrimages to visit him, praising his courage, his ferocious war fighting and the loyalty he commanded from his men, who were trained, armed and paid by the United States and its allies.The Americans were by his side until the very end. When he was gunned down by an undercover Taliban assassin in 2018, he was walking next to the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin S. Miller, who celebrated him as a “great friend” and “patriot.”

But to countless Afghan civilians under his reign, Raziq was something else entirely: America’s monster.

His battlefield prowess was built on years of torture, extrajudicial killings and the largest-known campaign of forced disappearances during America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan, a New York Times investigation into thousands of cases during his rule found.

The Times obtained hundreds of pages of documents written by the former American-backed government, more than a decade’s worth of hidden ledgers bearing clues to his campaign of abuse. He transformed the police into a fearsome combat force without constraints, and his officers abducted hundreds, if not thousands, of people to be killed or tortured in secret jails, The Times found. Most were never seen again.

The culture of lawlessness and impunity he created flew in the face of endless promises by American presidents, generals and ambassadors to uphold human rights and build a better Afghanistan.

And it helps explain why the United States lost the war.

The Times spent more than a year visiting parts of Afghanistan that were once active battlefields, trying to figure out what really happened during America’s longest war.

We interviewed many hundreds of people who said their fathers, husbands, sons and brothers had disappeared under Raziq, the police chief responsible for security across Kandahar Province, the birthplace of the Taliban. They saw his rule as little more than a brutal campaign against civilians, underwritten by the United States.

His acts not only discredited the American war effort — breeding profound resentment that pushed people to support the Taliban — but embodied it in many ways as well. Across Afghanistan, the United States elevated and empowered warlords, corrupt politicians and outright criminals to prosecute a war of military expediency in which the ends often justified the means.

The Taliban committed countless atrocities of their own against civilians, including suicide attacks, assassinations and kidnappings for ransom.

But it was a mistake to “keep a really bad criminal because he was helpful in fighting worse criminals,” said Gen. John R. Allen, who said he tried to limit cooperation with Raziq when he was overseeing coalition forces in the Afghan war from 2011 to 2013.

:

While Raziq’s tactics worked in some respects, beating back the Taliban in Kandahar and earning him the admiration of many who opposed them, the strategy came at a clear cost. It stirred such enmity in parts of the population that the Taliban turned his cruelty into a recruiting tool, broadcasting it to attract new fighters. Many Afghans came to revile the American-backed government and everything it represented.

“None of us supported the Taliban, at least not at first,” said Fazul Rahman, whose brother was abducted in front of witnesses during Raziq’s reign. “But when the government collapsed, I ran through the streets, rejoicing.”

Even some who cheered the ruthlessness Raziq wielded against his enemies lamented the broader corruption and criminality he helped enshrine, a key part of why the Afghan government collapsed in 2021. After his death, his commanders expanded their predation further, extorting ordinary people and stealing from their own men’s wages and supplies.

Many American commanders, diplomats and their allies in Afghanistan knew at the time they were bankrolling a war that strayed far outside international law.

Most American leaders — including more than a dozen interviewed by The Times — said that Raziq had been seen as the only partner capable of beating back the Taliban in the heartland of the insurgency, where a pitched battle for dominance was underway.

The United Nations, human rights groups and news outlets raised serious concerns about Raziq and his forces, but independent investigations were limited, especially with the region so impenetrable during the war.

To determine the extent of the abuses, The Times combed through more than 50,000 handwritten complaints that had been scrawled into the Kandahar governor’s ledgers from 2011 through the end of the war in 2021. In them, we found the rudimentary details of almost 2,200 cases of suspected disappearances.

From there, we went to hundreds of homes across Kandahar and tracked down nearly 1,000 people who said their loved ones had disappeared, been killed or been taken by government security forces.

All together, The Times collected detailed evidence of 368 cases of forced disappearances and dozens of extrajudicial killings attributed to American-backed forces in Kandahar. We counted only cases that were corroborated by at least two people, many of them eyewitnesses to the abductions, and they were often documented with police reports, affidavits and other government records as well.

What is clear, however, is who was responsible: Only the American-backed government consistently engaged in forced disappearances in Kandahar, former officials, combatants and families of the victims said.

The Taliban didn’t need to disappear people — they just killed them where they found them,” said Hasti Mohammad, a former government official in charge of the Panjwai district in Kandahar. “The government disappeared people because what they were doing was illegal. They were hiding from the law.”

:

We would ask ourselves: ‘Are we creating something here that we may regret later?’” said Col. Robert Waltemeyer, a former Special Forces officer who worked with Raziq.

But there was no one better at fighting the Taliban, he said, adding that he never witnessed Raziq do anything illegal. When the United States sent tens of thousands of American soldiers to Afghanistan during the so-called surge announced in 2009, hoping to wrest control of the south, Raziq was central to the effort.

“He was probably the most important person in the entire surge,” Waltemeyer said.

The United States pushed for Raziq to lead the police forces who fought alongside American troops, he said, because “he showed up, and his troops showed up, to fight, not just to watch the Americans fight.”

In effect, Waltemeyer said, “We created Raziq.”

“You look at every U.S. war and it’s the same,” he said. “We create regrets.”

To Fazul and everyone else present, the culprits were obvious: the police. Under Raziq, Kandahar’s security forces had become notorious for snatching anyone they suspected of working with Taliban insurgents. Many simply disappeared. Others turned up as mutilated corpses, discarded in the streets. A lucky few were released alive, bearing wounds and accounts of torture.

Some of the missing were, in fact, Taliban, their families said. Others, their relatives insisted, were not. Many were simply part of the working class: mechanics, tailors and taxi drivers who had nothing to do with the war, their families said.

Inside a shipping container, a group of men, some in police uniform, took turns beating him, he said. They stuffed a plastic bag into his mouth and poured water over his face, nearly suffocating him. Most shamefully, he said, they twisted his genitals, permanently damaging them.

The police told him to make a confession, and recorded it, he said: “After I confessed, they didn’t torture me anymore.”

Eventually, Nisar’s father, Mohammad Fazluddin, received a phone call from a police officer, he said, demanding the equivalent of $900 — a staggering amount — to release his son. Mohammad agreed, dropping off the money at an auto repair shop as instructed, and his son was let go, he said.

In private, the families said, some of the police acknowledged they had taken their loved ones. So, Fazul and the others buttonholed every official possible.

They insisted there was nothing they could do, he said.

“They all knew exactly what was happening,” Fazul said. “They said: ‘We have nothing to do with this. This is Abdul Raziq’s work.’”

Disappearances were hardly new in Kandahar, a place ravaged by more than four decades of war. Even Raziq had lost someone.

His father had been a driver, often going to the border with Pakistan. One day, while Raziq was still a boy, his father disappeared on a routine trip, vanishing in the vast desert.

His family, members of the Achakzai tribe, blamed their longtime rivals: the Noorzai. The two tribes had been locked in a deadly feud that stretched back decades, long before the Taliban came to power.

“He was killed because he was Achakzai,” Tadin Khan, Raziq’s younger brother, told The Times. “His body disappeared.”

Raziq went on to author the most brutal campaign of enforced disappearances in his country in decades. And it often targeted this rival tribe, the Noorzai, many of whom supported the Taliban.

That is something the Americans generally failed to understand: A tribal and family dynamic, not just a hatred of the Taliban, animated Raziq’s war. In fact, the cluster of villages where Raziq summoned the crowd, killed the two prisoners and then threatened the onlookers was mostly made up of Noorzai.

By 2010, as the Taliban gained ground across the south, Raziq had held back the insurgents in the areas around his home district, called Spin Boldak. American commanders knew he was corrupt, running a mafia-style racket on trade across the border. He was suspected of being involved in the poppy trade.

The Americans wanted a partner who was unafraid to confront the Taliban head-on, like Raziq. Yet they were also debating what to do about “bad actors” who undermined the legitimacy of the Afghan government, also like Raziq.

“There were lots of conversations about whether we should mentor Raziq or imprison him,” recalled Green, the American officer, who had investigated him for other issues, including graft.

The Americans chose the former. They needed him.

Deeming the court system corrupt, Raziq ordered his commanders to kill suspected Taliban, former officers and officials said. Those who refused to kill captives were dismissed.

“He told me: ‘Why are you bringing these Taliban to the station? Why aren’t you killing them? What are you afraid of?’” said one former city district chief who, like some others, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.

The victims were taken for a “sand picnic” and dumped in remote areas, down wells or where the shifting desert sands would cover them, according to former police officers and internal United Nations reports.

or the perpetrators, disappearances carry a cruel logic. Though they can be crimes against humanity, there is little evidence without a body, especially when someone is snatched without witnesses or by officers in civilian clothes and cars.

Yet the disappearances inflicted unique wounds for many Afghans. Often, wives were told they could not remarry until their husbands were proved dead. Some with young children were left unable to support themselves.

The shock came on Oct. 18, 2018: Raziq was gunned down by a Taliban assassin who had infiltrated the governor’s guards.

The Taliban crowed.

When the war began, Fazul and the others imagined the Americans would bring investment and opportunity. They envisioned good jobs, better homes, prosperity. But their good will evaporated quickly as their loved ones disappeared.

It was not that everyone embraced the Taliban, residents said; they just came to detest the Afghan government and the Americans who propped it up.

That erosion of support — not just among the families of the missing, but also among many Afghans disenchanted by the broader corruption and unchecked abuses of the Americans and their Afghan partners — was part of the collapse of Kandahar, as it was elsewhere in the country.

After years of pressure from the United States, prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have said they are de-prioritizing investigations into abuses committed by American-backed forces. The United Nations has focused on abuses carried out by the new Taliban government, accusing it of its own campaign of extrajudicial killings and torture.

To commemorate Raziq, the former Afghan government had begun erecting a mausoleum for him, a giant, mosque-like structure beside the governor’s palace, a memorial fit for a national hero. Many see him that way, as a champion of those who oppose the Taliban.

Rather than destroy it, the Taliban have surrounded the edifice with concrete blast walls, careful not to antagonize the large swathe of the population that still reveres the general. It is blocked but visible, its dome and minarets peeking over the barrier.

There are no monuments to the missing. Of the 17 people on his original list, Fazul knows of only three who came home alive.

“I still have hope that he will return, even though I know he is probably dead,” said Malika, Fazul and Ahmad’s mother. “My tears have not dried since he disappeared.”