Licensed to Kill by Robert Young Pelton Page A

he leaves the room for good, Haji turns to me and asks through the interpreter, “What’s wrong with your friend?”
    The same scene repeats at each breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three days. Two of Haji’s sons and an ever-changing parade of locals who come to ask favors from the elder usually join us. Haji’s brother visits with his three-year-old grandson and asks me to come by to try to fix his satellite phone—a phone that still makes free calls courtesy of the CIA. The Contractor mostly stays silent. He seems genuinely interested in the conversations but doesn’t seem to know how to interact with Afghans who aren’t informers. The Contractor continues to refuse to eat even a grain of rice, and I come to dread Haji’s stone-faced looks in my direction. Haji even tries shopping for us himself, apologizing for not having eggs at one breakfast because it is too cold for the chickens to lay. The Contractor, meanwhile, gets by on Atkins Bars and sips of bottled water pulled from his pack at daybreak and before bedtime.
    Haji had welcomed the Contractor, but the feeling was different than when I had been staying there alone. It was an official sort of hospitality now, one designed to discharge Haji’s responsibilities in order to communicate something to someone most Afghans in the area would consider the enemy. Haji adamantly wanted his opinion of a recent bombing to reach someone at a level of authority inside the American forts. So finally, on the third day with the Contractor, he breaks out of Pashtun protocol, speaking frankly to tell his mysterious American guest about the increasing frustration that the tribal elders have with the Americans. He has received word that a family of eight has been killed in the nearby town of Seyyed Karam. He doesn’t explain how he knows the details of their deaths so soon.
    â€œA local thug lived there for eighteen years and has been threatening to rocket the meeting in Kabul,” he tells us. “An informer called the Americans, but by the time the air attack took place, the man was long gone. Instead another man and his family were hiding out in the house because the man had killed someone in a property dispute. He, his wife, and his six children were found buried under a wall.”
    Haji explains that the people in town are upset. Not about the fugitive, since this was perceived as an odd form of justice, but for the man’s innocent wife and children who had no quarrel with the Americans or townspeople.
    â€œThis man could have been arrested with a minimum of violence, but the Americans chose to attack the house with aircraft and weapons designed to destroy tanks.”
    What’s going on is clear to Haji. “The informers are making money from both sides.” The Contractor says he understands, and the meal ends in silence.
    After breakfast, I thank Haji for his hospitality. He talks to me like a clucking mother hen, pushing me to get a move on and to stop messing around with my camera. Once we get out in the daylight, he rushes us to get in the car and drive away, lest we are spotted outside of his compound. He trusts the discretion of the locals who have come by to visit over the past few days, but if word had gotten around that he had some unidentified Americans staying with him, unfriendlies could be watching the compound. Across the horizon, the rotors of Blackhawks slice through the crisp morning air.
    On our way back toward the border, the Contractor wants to stop in at another base and talk to someone from OGA (other government agencies), a euphemistic term used to describe high-level clandestine operators who don’t fit into the traditional military structure. He seems eager to pass along Haji’s complaints about the Americans’ use of excessive force and reliance on paid snitches. I stay outside.
    After just a few minutes, he emerges, shaking his head. “Seems like the OGA guy wouldn’t