Above: Warlord Mullah Naqib shakes hands with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in March, less than two months after the Kandahar elder helped free the main suspect in Glyn Berry’s death.

The key to Mohammed's release was Mullah Naqib, an important ally of the Afghan government who has been commanding respect in Kandahar since his days fighting the Russians. In a country where blood is everything, Mohammed was lucky enough to be born a member of the old warlord's tribe.

It's a measure of Naqib's standing - and a reminder that loyalty is a complicated thing in Afghanistan - that just months after Berry's death, the warlord stood on the grounds of a military base in Kandahar and shook hands with another Canadian, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was making a quick visit in March.

In an interview, Naqib warmly remembered his meeting with Harper, saying the prime minister extended a friendly invitation to visit Canada. "He said, 'Please come to my country,' " Naqib recalled, chuckling.

How a Canadian's death slipped through Afghan's courts
By Graeme Smith - Monday, December 11th 2006.

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN - When an explosion shook the city of Kandahar in the early afternoon of Jan. 15, Afghan police hurried to the scene to find Canadian troops pulling comrades out of ruined military vehicles. The suicide blast injured three soldiers and killed Canadian diplomat Glyn Berry, the 59-year-old political director of the local reconstruction team.

As a helicopter roared away with the injured, criminal investigators from the Afghan National Police kept their eyes on the ground, picking their way through the twisted metal and charred flesh. They wrote down identification numbers from the engine block and chassis of the bomber's minivan, a silver Toyota Town Ace. They also noted the license plate number, 312.

The last known owner of plate 312, a man named Pir Mohammed, was arrested as the main suspect in Mr. Berry's death. Police say they grew more suspicious after they raided his home, finding a cache of weapons, documents in Arabic, and a photo of a reputed Taliban leader.

But after less than two days in custody, Mr. Mohammed walked out the front door of the investigators' office and disappeared. Why?

The explanation sounds all too familiar to those versed in Afghanistan's tribal politics. Mr. Mohammed had friends in high places, powerful men who gave him freedom before police were satisfied they had properly investigated him.

The key to Mr. Mohammed's release was the warlord Mullah Naqib, an important ally of the Afghan government who has been commanding respect in Kandahar since his days fighting the Russians. In a country where blood is everything, Mr. Mohammed was lucky enough to be born a member of the old warlord's tribe.

It's a measure of Mr. Naqib's standing -- and a reminder that loyalty is a complicated thing in Afghanistan -- that just months after Mr. Berry's death, the warlord stood on the grounds of a military base in Kandahar and shook hands with another Canadian, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was making a quick visit in March.

In an interview, Mr. Naqib warmly remembered his meeting with Mr. Harper, saying the Prime Minister extended a friendly invitation to visit Canada. "He said, 'Please come to my country,' " Mr. Naqib recalled, chuckling.

The evidence against Mr. Mohammed is far from conclusive, and it's not clear whether he was involved in the bombing. But the story of how he avoided police scrutiny serves as a warning about the strong hand of warlords and tribal elders in Afghanistan's weak justice system, even in a case of the highest importance to Canada.

"It's very important to search for this perpetrator," said Captain Sher Ali Farhad, 38, the Afghan officer who led the criminal investigation. "If you find him, you will find the source of suicide bombers. . . . Also, this suspect had very strong powers behind him. The Canadians must understand this."

Mr. Farhad said he arrived at the scene about 15 minutes after the blast, and soon grasped its importance. A high-profile Canadian official had been killed just a few weeks before thousands of Canadian troops were scheduled to arrive in Kandahar and take charge of the province's security. The Taliban were announcing they were ready for war.

Working quickly, Mr. Farhad's team took the vehicle's identification numbers to the local traffic department and tracked down the registered owner. That owner showed them letters certifying that he sold the vehicle to a second man, Abdul Razaq. In turn, Mr. Razaq told investigators he sold the minivan to Mr. Mohammed. He had documentation of the sale and a witness to support his story, so investigators went looking for Mr. Mohammed.

They caught up with him the next morning, behind the wheel of another silver Town Ace, almost identical to the blunt-nosed minivan used by the suicide bomber.

Police raided Mr. Mohammed's home later the same day, seizing a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a Kalashnikov rifle, ammunition and a few other items they found suspicious.

The man's home appeared to serve as an auto-body workshop -- car parts were strewn around the courtyard, mostly bumpers, roof racks, and other details that Mr. Farhad speculated could be used for disguising cars.

Farhad transferred the suspect to the custody of the ANP's counterterrorism unit the same afternoon, and wrote up his findings.

Two days later, on the morning of Jan. 18, Mohammed strode back through the front door of the criminal investigation office, a free man.

"He seemed very confident and happy," Farhad said. "He was not afraid. ... I was very surprised to see him."

The former suspect declared that he was missing his cell phone, and asked whether he'd lost it somewhere in Farhad's department. When he learned the phone had been given to the counterterrorism authorities, he walked out and hasn't been seen since.

That display of confidence ended the criminal investigation into Mohammed. Police said it would have been useless to continue building a case against somebody so well connected.

Military police also conducted a separate probe, with an RCMP officer helping them collect information from the Afghan police, but spokesmen for the Canadian military, Foreign Affairs and RCMP all declined to comment about the result of their investigations.

Police sources in Kandahar said Mohammed belongs to a family of respected Islamic teachers who are members of the Alokozai tribe, so he naturally looked for help to the tribe's most powerful leader: Naqib.

Asked whether he intervened on Mr. Mohammed's behalf, the grey-bearded warrior said proudly that it had been his duty.

"I am helping people, only innocent people," Naqib said. "Tribal leaders, they all know who is innocent and who is guilty. ... I've never made a mistake."

In this case, Naqib said he was approached by Mohammed's elders and asked for help. He made some inquiries, he said, and determined that Mohammed wasn't a member of the Taliban.

The evidence against Mohammed was also very flimsy, Naqib added. Vehicle papers are a formality sometimes overlooked in Afghanistan, he said, so Mohammed's claim that he sold the minivan to somebody he met at a bus station is a credible alibi.If police discovered weapons at Mr. Mohammed's house, Mr. Naqib said, that's entirely normal for the slums around Kandahar, where self-defense can require heavy arms.

After Mohammed's arrest, Naqib said, he led a delegation of elders to see Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and chairman of the provincial council. They discussed the matter, he said, and Ahmed Wali Karzai made a recommendation to Governor Asadullah Khalid. The governor called the police chief and Mohammed was freed.

Speaking with his usual bluntness and good humor, Naqib said the police are so badly corrupted that tribal elders such as himself are forced to serve as informal watchdogs of the justice system.

Col. Gary Stafford, a former Toronto police officer now helping the North Atlantic Treaty Organization train a new generation of Afghan police in Kandahar, said the international community's efforts at police reform are intended not only to fix the system's internal problems, but to make it less vulnerable to outside interference.

"I've heard of that incident you're talking about, and therein lies the problem," Stafford said.

he government has recently reformed its laws, he said, giving control of the police to the Interior Ministry instead of provincial governors. Pay mechanisms are also getting an overhaul so officers can collect their salaries from a bank instead of relying on local bosses. If the government would also ban governors or warlords from paying bonuses to the police, he added, the three measures would help centralize authority in Kabul, reducing the influence of regional powerbrokers.

"It's a frustrating process," Col. Stafford said.

By Sima Wali - December 19th 2002.

Although women have made major strides towards equality in the 21st century, we also see a lingering tendency in the West to restrain these advances around the world. Let's turn to history for a moment.

Often dismissed as an anomaly, Afghan civil society blossomed under King Amanullah from 1919 to 1929. Declaring his independence from Britain in his inaugural address, Amanullah's sought to abolish slavery, discourage the veil, empower women, and introduce secular education for girls. Afghanis generally accepted these reforms as in keeping with Islamic law.

But Britain's colonial gatekeepers opposed a secular, democratic Afghanistan. They, in the words of former U.S. Ambassador Leon Poullada, "saw a modernizing of Afghanistan as a threat to British rule in India since it offered an example of the kind of progress free Asians could achieve..."

Afghanistan is still viewed through a colonial lens. Despite real changes that have occurred during the last two centuries, the Victorian mentality -- immortalized by story-tellers like Rudyard Kipling -- obscures the many ways Afghanistan citizens strive for modernity.

During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, America's journalists reconstituted the old British myths of "fierce tribal Afghan warriors," and today this faux mythologizing is reaching new heights, burying the real yearnings of Afghanistan's people. The movie Charlie Wilson's War now being filmed in Morocco may well further engrain these powerful misconceptions in the psyche of Americans and the world.

Governments and civil society must work to overcome such false image making. We must demand a genuine, honest 21st century mythology from our storytellers. We must stretch our imaginations and construct images of a future that we can all live within. We must appreciate that most of Afghanistan's men and women yearn for modernity, not tribal war.