Warlord or Druglord?

By Bill Powell

For a week and a half in April 2005, one of the favorite warlords of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was sitting in a room at the Embassy Suites Hotel in lower Manhattan, not far from where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood. But Haji Bashar Noorzai, the burly, bearded leader of one of Afghanistan's largest and most troublesome tribes, was not on a mission to case New York City for a terrorist attack. On the contrary, Noorzai, a confidant of the fugitive Taliban overlord, who is a well-known ally of Osama bin Laden's, says he had been invited to Manhattan to prove that he could be of value in America's war on terrorism. "I did not want to be considered an enemy of the United States," Noorzai told TIME. "I wanted to help the Americans and to help the new government in Afghanistan."

For several days he hunkered down in that hotel room and was bombarded with questions by U.S. government agents. What was going on in the war in Afghanistan? Where was Mullah Omar? Where was bin Laden? What was the state of opium and heroin production in the tribal lands Noorzai commanded--the very region of Afghanistan where support for the Taliban remains strongest? Noorzai believed he had answered everything to the agents' satisfaction, that he had convinced them that he could help counter the Taliban's resurgent influence in his home province and that he could be an asset to the U.S.

He was wrong.

As he got up to leave, ready to be escorted to the airport to catch a flight back to Pakistan, one of the agents in the room told him he wasn't going anywhere. That agent, who worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), told him that a grand jury had issued a sealed indictment against Noorzai 3 1/2 months earlier and that he was now under arrest for conspiring to smuggle narcotics into the U.S. from Afghanistan. An awkward silence ensued as the words were translated into his native Pashtu. "I did not believe it," Noorzai later told TIME from his prison cell. "I thought they were joking." The previous August, an American agent he had met with said the trip to the U.S. would be "like a vacation."

Today, Noorzai, 43, sits in a small cell in the high-security section of Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center, awaiting a trial that may still be months away. But whatever his fate, the Case of the Cooperative Kingpin raises larger questions about America's needs, goals and instincts in fighting its two shadow wars: the war on terrorism and the war on drugs. The question that continues to haunt U.S. policymakers in this long struggle is, When do you bend the rules for one to help the other? Afghanistan is where these two battles converge, as the runoff from the $3 billion opium trade helps pay for the guns and bombs being deployed against U.S. and NATO forces.

Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is a war fought backward, not a massive invasion on the front end but a minimalist effort that now demands a massive rescue operation. The situation in Afghanistan, a larger country with a bigger population than Iraq's, is so serious that the number of U.S. forces in the country has jumped more than 50% in the past year, to 27,000, a much bigger surge in percentage terms than is being argued over for Iraq. There are six times the number of soldiers as in 2002 when U.S. forces were staking out bin Laden in Tora Bora. Only now the enemy is not just the Taliban and al-Qaeda but also the proxy army of warlords that the U.S. helped enrich and empower--an army that America once hoped would be critical in the struggle against terrorism.

It is in this context that U.S. officials argue over who's a friend, who's an enemy and how you can tell them apart. Drug enforcement officials claim Noorzai's capture as a major prize. Afghanistan is the world's largest source of heroin, and his arrest, says DEA administrator Karen Tandy, "sent shock waves through other Taliban-connected traffickers." But Noorzai was also a powerful leader of a million-member tribe who had offered to help bring stability to a region that is spinning out of control. Because he is in a jail cell, he is not feeding the U.S. and the Afghan governments information; he is not cajoling his tribe to abandon the Taliban and pursue political reconciliation; he is not reaching out to his remaining contacts in the Taliban to push them to cease their struggle. And he is hardly in a position to help persuade his followers to abandon opium production, when the amount of land devoted to growing poppies has risen 60%.

Valuable intelligence assets are seldom paragons, and the best are valuable precisely because they have traveled down the darker alleys and know where opportunities and danger lie. However unsavory the resume, says Alexis Debat, senior fellow at the Nixon Center and an expert in counterterrorism in South Asia, "it is always a smarter move to leave someone in place as long as you are getting reliable information." Noorzai's story is both a symbol and an example of this critical debate over means and ends. In addition to speaking to Noorzai exclusively in a two-hour phone interview granted after a court hearing, TIME has reviewed hundreds of pages of transcripts of secret meetings between him and U.S. government agents. They reveal an extraordinary saga of intrigue, espionage and, from Noorzai's perspective, betrayal. Awaiting trial in New York City, Noorzai says the U.S. and NATO forces occupying Afghanistan have made "a lot of errors." His arrest, he asserts, "was one of them."

The Devolution of Afghanistan into druglord-run provinces is a direct, if unintentional, result of five years of U.S. management of the Afghan war. When the U.S. invaded in October 2001, it was with a small number of mostly special-forces soldiers; the strategy all but ensured that the U.S. would have to outsource the messy and labor-intensive duties of maintaining order in a power vacuum. This meant using, and paying, the existing warlords to do the U.S.'s dirty work against Mullah Omar's Taliban and bin Laden's al-Qaeda.

Notwithstanding the fact that both men escaped, the plan appeared to work well enough at first. The U.S. never needed to increase the number of forces serving; instead it just paid off and armed the warlords. This temporarily slowed the opium traffic, since the U.S. payroll was more efficient, less risky and paid in hard currency. But when the flow of money slowed and the warlords returned to opium cultivation as the U.S. turned its attention toward Iraq, whole provinces were back in the drug business and officials in Washington began to be worried the Taliban would reap the benefit. If it were a sovereign state, just the southern province of Helmand--a Taliban stronghold--would be the second largest source of opium in the world. The rest of Afghanistan would be the first. "The drug trade," Debat observes, "is the blood of the insurgency in Afghanistan."

Today opium cultivation in Afghanistan is a growth industry. What crude oil is to the Middle East, poppies are to Afghanistan. A senior Afghan official estimates that 30% of the country's farmers now grow poppies, while the U.N. estimates that the area under cultivation increased 59% in the past year. Experts suggest that the drug situation in Afghanistan is moving from one that was manageable to one that is verging on being out of control.

One of the beneficiaries of that growth industry, according to the DEA, is Noorzai. He inherited not only his land but also his trade from his father. Several sources in Afghanistan claim that Noorzai's father was a successful drug smuggler. "This was definitely the family business," a Western official says. The tribal chief's family had had its vicissitudes: the communists who ruled Afghanistan till 1989 had stripped them of their land, and the teenage Noorzai went off to fight alongside the mujahedin in their war against the occupying Soviet forces. After the Soviets left, Noorzai made several thousand dollars recovering Stinger missiles at the behest of U.S. agents. After the war, Noorzai allegedly returned to the family trade. By 1993 the DEA was describing Noorzai as a "wealthy heroin warlord and well-known drug trafficker."

When the Taliban came to power in 1996, according to the DEA, Noorzai reached the peak of his influence. While Taliban leader Mullah Omar's tribal background is not known, he was always reliably supported by the Noorzai tribe. Even when the ruling Taliban was cracking down on the opium trade, Noorzai's closeness to the regime allowed Noorzai to become one of just four big traffickers permitted to grow and process poppies, according to Jamil Karzai, a current member of the Afghan parliament and a second cousin of President Hamid Karzai's. In 1997, the DEA says, Noorzai's organization had successfully shipped 57 kilos of heroin, most likely through Pakistan and then Eastern Europe, to the streets of New York City. Noorzai denies all charges.

Noorzai's position as tribal leader was more than an honorific. Leadership is not simply inherited: while descent is important, a chief usually emerges by consensus, recognized for his military prowess, his charisma, and his skill with money and negotiation. Noorzai needed all those qualities when the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001. He immediately understood that the U.S. would retaliate and that the Taliban's days were numbered. That day Noorzai was at one of his homes in the Pakistani border city of Quetta, a two-story fortresslike structure. He left quickly for Afghanistan to prepare for the coming trouble and then returned to Pakistan just before the U.S. assault began. He was not wrong to sense personal risk: his closeness to Mullah Omar led to Noorzai's designation as a "high-value military target" by the U.S.

A month after the U.S. invasion, Noorzai sent word via one of his relatives, a man named Khalid Pashtoon, to say he wanted to meet with the U.S. military. It is a testament to either craftiness or desperation that Noorzai turned to Pashtoon, who despite the family tie was a key aide to a rival tribal chief who often clashed with Noorzai. But that enemy was one of America's chief allies in the south of the country. The seeming alliance did the trick. In November 2001, instead of being targeted, Noorzai was meeting with the Americans.

Noorzai has a flair for the dramatic gesture. In January 2002, to convince the Americans that he wanted to work with them and demonstrate not only his worth but his influence over his tribe, he delivered 15 trucks loaded with weaponry, including about 400 antiaircraft missiles, that the Taliban had concealed in his tribal villages. The gesture apparently had the desired effect. Over the next few months, Noorzai said he met with U.S. military and intelligence officers five times. The purpose, he says: "To make the situation in Afghanistan stable and also to help the Americans negotiate with the moderate members of the Taliban to reconcile with the [new] government."

Toward that end, Noorzai says, he played a critical role in delivering up the Taliban Foreign Minister, who had fled, like much of the leadership, to Quetta following the invasion. In February 2002, Mullah Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil's surrender made headlines around the world. Noorzai says he had invited his childhood friend to talk to the Americans, believing him to be the sort of "moderate" that Washington was seeking to work with. Noorzai says, however, that this would lead to his first betrayal by the Americans. Instead of incorporating his friend into the Afghan government, the Americans took Muttawakil to the U.S.-run prison at Guantanamo Bay. He would not be freed for 21 months. Noorzai was furious.

A second and similar incident followed a few months later. Noorzai says he had persuaded a former mujahedin fighter named Haji Birqet Khan, 75, who was close to the Taliban, to come out of hiding in Pakistan and meet with the Americans. But days after Birqet and Noorzai got together in Kandahar, U.S. attack helicopters swooped in and bombarded Birqet's home, killing him and two of his grandchildren. The U.S. claimed it had got wind of a plot by Noorzai and Birqet to attack American forces. Noorzai says that report was erroneous. "He was an innocent man, a tribal leader who had come back to help," Noorzai says.

Noorzai had seen more than enough. "I thought I would be next," he says. He ceased to aid the Americans and fled to Pakistan, where he stayed for the next two years.

In early 2004, however, Noorzai says, President Karzai's brother phoned to lobby him to talk to the Americans again. "'You are a tribal leader,'" Noorzai said Wali Karzai told him. "'You can help.'" Separately, Noorzai got a call from Saitullah Khan Babar, a friend and former officer in Pakistan's military intelligence service, the ISI. The Americans, Babar told Noorzai, had proposed a meeting in Dubai, neutral turf. Warily, Noorzai agreed.

In early April 2004, he traveled to Dubai to meet with two Americans at a JW Marriott hotel. One identified himself as "Mike," from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the other "Brian," from the FBI. That day, as they would three more times over the next five months, they spent hours grilling Noorzai, trying to find out what he knew about several subjects, including, as Noorzai puts it, "the powder business." According to transcripts TIME has reviewed, the agents were occasionally frustrated by the talks. They pressed Noorzai on how much drug money went to finance al-Qaeda. "None," Noorzai replied. "But the entire world says the opposite," Mike responded. Noorzai stood his ground: "I do not believe it."

A friend who had accompanied Noorzai to the meetings interjected, "You should tell them whatever you know. They want to know how much you know. Do you understand?" Noorzai replied, "I am telling them as much as I know, but I'm not going to say something baseless." The Americans then asked what he knew about al-Qaeda's high command. The answers were not illuminating. Bin Laden? Noorzai admitted to "seeing" him only once, in Kandahar in the late 1990s. What about 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Or Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's chief of military operations? "I'm telling you," Noorzai responded irritably, "I don't know any of the Arabs."

Nor would Noorzai provide any confirmation for his interrogators' obvious suspicions that he was in the drug business. When pressed about how he made his living, Noorzai said he inherited land in Kandahar from his father and grandfather and owns two large outdoor markets that generate up to $100,000 a year and that if sold would net about $2 million. He flatly denied U.S. intelligence claims that he had received $500 million in Taliban funds from Mullah Omar for safekeeping.

Noorzai did, however, provide information on individuals who might be helping to steer money to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In a transcript, he says he would continue to do so. There is no question that elements of what he says--if true--would be extremely useful to American interests. He talks in some detail about current members of the Afghan government and other prominent Afghans he suspects are involved in the drug trade--even while insisting that he was not.

That was not what the Americans believed. On June 1, 2004, the White House put out a press release listing the top 10 international drug kingpins, who "present a threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States." Robert Charles, then Assistant Secretary of State, recalls that when he saw the draft list, he asked, "Why don't we have any Afghan drug lords on the list?" An interagency debate ensued, then a scramble to come up with names. Several popped up. And so, on the final list, coming in at No. 10 was the name "Haji Bashir [sic] Noorzai."

Noorzai was the smallest of the big fish, but only because the list included Latin American heavyweights at the time considered the most powerful and dangerous crime families on the planet. It is possible, a sign of either immense confidence or sloppiness, that Noorzai did not know he had made the top 10 kingpin list that was posted on international law-enforcement websites. But a simple Google search might have warned him off his next move.

Back in Dubai for more talks in August, the Americans made a dramatic proposal. They told Noorzai they would like him to meet more senior officials and that the U.S. was the place to do it. Noorzai responded cautiously: only, he says in a transcript, "if they make sure we become free people and don't capture us." The agent named Brian tried to allay Noorzai's fears: "After this meeting, the immediate threat to apprehend [you] will be diminished." Brian then told Noorzai if he didn't want to go to the U.S., the meeting could take place in Dubai or Pakistan.

Brian emphasized the benefits of Noorzai's turning over good intelligence: "Any high-quality information [you] can provide us ... on money movements, on other key people we should be talking to ... the more cooperation we get from [you], the more [you're] going to be seen as a tremendous asset in this effort back in the United States." Noorzai clearly thought he could offer all that. "I'm not afraid of you [Americans] now," he told his inquisitors. "When do we go to America?"

Had he known more about American politics and the eternal tensions between branches of government, he might not have been so ready to hop on a plane. Given his new ranking as a kingpin, it would have been potential political suicide for any U.S. official to make a public deal with him. Prosecutors and agents bargain with traffickers all the time, but for lighter sentences, better jails or better food. Once Noorzai was officially a villain on a wanted poster, his value as an asset was falling fast.

In New York City, Noorzai says, he thought everything was going well--up until the point that he was arrested. He says he wasn't bothered that the U.S. agents had taken away his cell phone. Or that they had told his friend Babar, the former ISI colonel who accompanied him to Manhattan, that Noorzai was "not being cooperative." Noorzai thought it was curious that each day, when the interrogations began, the agents would read him his rights. He says he had no idea why his interrogators kept saying he had a right to counsel and the right to remain silent. One official with knowledge of the case against Noorzai told TIME that he was "lured" to the U.S., implying that the goal the entire time had been simple: get him to New York City in order to arrest him. This suggests that all the meetings in 2004 had been part of a grand deception, designed to convince him that he was being looked at as a political asset and not as a potential criminal detainee. The idea is that by the time he got to New York, the jig was up, and the feds were just trying to wring every last bit out of him before the arrest.

But could it be that senior officials in Washington were still debating whether Noorzai was an intelligence asset worth preserving? "It is conceivable," says a former intelligence analyst, "that he could have provided a stabilizing role in the south." Many questions remain unanswered about the conversations that took place among DEA, FBI and DIA officials who dealt with him. Two sources have hinted at tensions among the agencies but decline to explain when and how these were resolved. As a former senior DEA official put it, "It was a very, very sensitive case."

Even if Noorzai wasn't fully reliable, it's fair to ask why his offer wasn't taken up. Washington may have scored a public victory in the war on drugs with his arrest. But some officials in Kabul and Washington now quietly wonder whether giving him a shot at what he said he could deliver--the allegiance of his tribe--might have been the smarter option. The government has not said that his arrest will diminish the heroin trade in Afghanistan. Indeed, the war against drugs and the war against the Taliban have to be seen as a single conflict--not separate objectives. "All of a piece," says a senior Western diplomat. "You can't separate narcotics from security from governance."

In Afghanistan, a weak government has produced a security vacuum that in turn inhibits economic development and diversification, forcing impoverished farmers to grow lucrative crops like the opium poppy for cash. Any deliberate crop destruction carried out by the Afghan government often drives poor farmers to sympathize with the insurgency. Just two weeks ago, despite international pressure, President Karzai said Afghanistan would not carry out chemical spraying of poppy crops, given the intense level of opposition among farmers.

Now, in the Taliban's traditional stronghold in the south--where Noorzai's tribe lives--the radical Islamic group is actively encouraging poppy cultivation on a grand scale, a dramatic shift from its days in power when its puritanical tenets forbade drugs and drug trafficking. Why the change? As a Western diplomat in Kabul puts it, "It takes money to fund an insurgency." Of the $3 billion earned last year by Afghan narcotraffickers, roughly $800 million trickles down to the Afghan farmers who grow the crop. According to a senior Western official in Kabul, a small portion of that sum is "more than enough to finance" the insurgency--and the Taliban gets more than a small portion. "The more money the traffickers make, the more they can give to the Taliban, the more weapons the insurgents can buy and the more dangerous the insurgency becomes," says Kamal Sadaat, head of Afghanistan's antinarcotics police force.

"God willing, I look forward to my trial," Noorzai says in detention in New York City. He will have a lawyer with an imposing 6-ft. 5-in. frame and a high-profile list of legal contests, if not victories. Ivan Fisher made his name defending Jack Henry Abbott, a convicted killer whose gritty prison memoir, In the Belly of the Beast, was famously championed by Norman Mailer. Fisher is no stranger to bad guys. In the 1990s, Fisher defended Haji Ayub Afridi, a man widely believed to be one of Pakistan's major narcotraffickers, as well as someone who was thought to have worked closely with the CIA during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Afridi served 3 1/2 years for drug trafficking, a verdict that at the time was considered a defeat for the prosecution. Fisher does not apologize for his current client. This case, he asserts, "is about the [Bush Administration's] incompetence in waging the war on terror in Afghanistan. Haji Bashar Noorzai wanted to be an ally, not an enemy."

The prosecution remains silent about its plans, but sources say the government will insist on the importance of the Noorzai catch. He is, says a Western official with detailed knowledge of the case, the "Pablo Escobar of Afghanistan"--a reference to the notorious druglord of Colombia. Fisher says his client won't cop a plea, even though the documents TIME has seen indicate he might be able to implicate major figures in Afghanistan. A former DEA official counsels patience in the quest for justice: "It's a long, hard slog. You've got to give it years. We were starting from the ground up here."

The trial can be seen as a test case for the costs and benefits of arresting and prosecuting a man like Noorzai. Does the potential cost to the battle against terrorism in Afghanistan outweigh the benefit to the war on drugs? These are the kind of wrenching questions that the U.S. must weigh in its new twilight struggle for stability both at home and abroad.

For his part, Noorzai insists that his offer to help stabilize Afghanistan was sincere. He is also certain that he offered his help to the right people: "I still believe American and NATO forces are the only ones who can help Afghanistan rebuild." They will just have to do it without him.

With reporting by Aryn Baker / Kabul, Ghulam Hasnain / Quetta, Brian Bennett, Elaine Shannon / Washington