Within the U.S. government, there is growing recognition that our expenditures in Afghanistan have been self-defeating. Illustration by Yarek Waszul

America’s war in Afghanistan, which is now in its fifteenth year, presents a mystery: how could so much money, power, and good will have achieved so little? Congress has appropriated almost eight hundred billion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan; a hundred and thirteen billion has gone to reconstruction, more than was spent on the Marshall Plan, in postwar Europe. General David Petraeus, a principal architect of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, encouraged the practice of pumping money into the economy of Afghanistan, where the per-capita G.D.P. at the time of the invasion was around a hundred and twenty dollars. He believed that money had helped buy peace during his command of American forces in Iraq. “Employ money as a weapons system,” Petraeus wrote in 2008. “Money can be ‘ammunition.’ ”

The result was a war waged as much by for-profit companies as by the military. Political debate in Washington has focussed on the number of troops deployed in Afghanistan and the losses that they have sustained. To minimize casualties, the military outsourced any task that it could: maintenance, cooking and laundry, overland logistics, even security. Since 2007, there have regularly been more contractors than U.S. forces in Afghanistan; today, they outnumber them three to one.

One result has been forms of corruption so extreme that the military has, in some cases, funded its own enemy. When a House committee investigated the trucking system that supplied American forces, it found that the system had “fueled a vast protection racket run by a shadowy network of warlords, strongmen, commanders, corrupt Afghan officials, and perhaps others.” Its report concluded that “protection payments for safe passage are a significant potential source of funding for the Taliban.” The system risked “undermining the U.S. strategy for achieving its goals in Afghanistan.”

The system has also made a few individuals very rich. Hikmatullah Shadman, an Afghan trucking-company owner, earned more than a hundred and sixty million dollars while contracting for the United States military; for the past three years, he has been battling to save much of his fortune in a federal court in Washington, D.C. In United States of America v. Sum of $70,990,605, et al., the Justice Department has accused Hikmat, as he’s known, of bribing contractors and soldiers to award him contracts. Hikmat has maintained his innocence, even as eight soldiers have pleaded guilty in related criminal cases. Several members of the Special Forces who have not been accused of wrongdoing have defended him. In a deposition, Major Jerry (Rusty) Bradley, a veteran Special Forces officer, said, “The only way to right a wrong of this magnitude is to be willing to draw your sword and defend everything that you believe in.”

I first met Hikmat in June, 2014, at his office in downtown Kabul, on a main road crowded with taxis and venders hawking stewed chickpeas. The compound once belonged to Ahmad Zahir, a famous pop singer of the nineteen-seventies. We sat in a living room that, with its low ceiling, floral wall print, and paper lanterns, resembled a California den from that period.

Hikmat, who is in his late twenties, looks disarmingly young and gentle. Slim, with a high brow that he often furrows, he countered the charges against him in grave, deliberate English. “The people who did this investigation were sitting in air-conditioned rooms,” he told me. “They don’t know what was happening in the field.” He offered to explain how he had made his fortune. “I was part of the Special Forces family,” he said. “I was trained by them.”

Before the Americans came, Hikmat lived with his father, a schoolteacher; his mother; and five siblings in a four-room mud-walled house in one of the oldest parts of Kandahar City, in southern Afghanistan. In the summer of 2001, Hikmat was fourteen years old, and he and his friends chafed at the narrowness of life under the Taliban. No one had a telephone, televisions were banned, and there was rarely any electricity. Sometimes, Hikmat recalled, the Taliban would round up the schoolboys and take them to see executions at the city’s soccer stadium. “There was a black umbrella on top of us,” he said. “We were not connected to the world.”

Eager for a glimpse of life outside Afghanistan, Hikmat would watch movies at the house of a Hindu friend, on a tiny, illicit television with the volume turned low and the blinds pulled down. They liked Bollywood dramas and Hollywood action films, and would try out the foreign-sounding names: Van Damme, Bruce Lee, Rambo. At home, in the evenings, Hikmat’s father listened to the BBC’s Pashto service while taking notes on world events in a diary. “My father was always studying at night,” Hikmat said. “He was always working.”

On September 11, 2001, Hikmat came home to find his parents sitting by the radio, stunned by the news from New York. Like many Afghans, they didn’t understand why their country was said to be responsible, but it soon became clear that the Americans would attack. Hikmat imagined that, like the action heroes in his films, they would come on foot, in a spray of bullets. He was so excited, he said, that he sneaked out and wrote in chalk on the wall of a mosque, “Long live Bush.”

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The Americans came in B-52s instead, raining bombs on the Taliban and the Arab foreign fighters who had become their allies. Hikmat and his family fled across the border to Karachi, in Pakistan. Kabul fell in November, but Kandahar held out until December 7th, when a convoy of Afghan militiamen, led by the warlord Gul Agha Sherzai, entered the city, accompanied by C.I.A. advisers and U.S. Special Forces. Hikmat’s family rushed back to Kandahar. The next day, residents celebrated and played music in the streets. For the first time in years, videocassettes were sold openly. When a convoy of Special Forces drove through town, with soldiers as muscled and heavily armed as Rambo, Hikmat joined the crowd that was walking alongside them, waving and smiling. On the radio, the country’s new leader, forty-three-year-old Hamid Karzai, a former diplomat, promised a bright future of peace and development; after decades of war and isolation, the economy was reviving in Kandahar.

But, that winter, Hikmat’s father fell ill with stomach cancer, and died soon afterward. To support his mother and sisters, Hikmat tended a French-fry and juice stand. In June, 2002, he found work cleaning and making repairs at a Special Forces base that the Americans had set up at Kandahar’s airport.

Sami Ghairatmal, a childhood friend, told me that Hikmat was always driven to improve himself. “He studied more than us,” he said. “He learned good and fluent English.” After the project at the base ended, a friend of Hikmat’s who was working as a security guard for the U.S. military asked Hikmat to see him about another job. Borrowing his brother’s motorcycle, Hikmat drove out to the former compound of the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, in the hills north of the city. Both the C.I.A. and the Special Forces had set up at the compound, which they called Camp Gecko, after the noisy lizards that lived there. The roof was destroyed, but workers were putting up new buildings. Eventually, the complex had a cafeteria with a fireplace, a fountain with catfish, and a swimming pool.