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When I met the late Kandahar Mayor Ghulam Hamidi in December 2010, he struck me as the sort of quietly decent, competent civil servant that are so woefully scarce in Afghanistan. A white-haired, bespectacled man who looked like the accountant he was, he spoke fluent, rapidfire English like the American citizen he also was. His daughter, Rangina—a fiery, charismatic University of Virginia graduate who runs a women’s embroidery cooperative in Kandahar—was terribly worried about the danger he faced, telling me that the Taliban already controlled the city. She explained that he would answer his own phone, because the two deputy mayors had been killed and he couldn’t find anyone who wanted the job.

Ghulam told me not to come into the city to see him; he’d meet me at the airport. He traveled in an armored SUV, but with just one following car of bodyguards, and told me apologetically that he’d only started using bodyguards when a previous attempt to kill him blew up his car and killed two men.

Rangina warned her father that he was a stooge for the Karzai family, but while he acknowledged the criticism to me, he countered, “I am here for Kandahar’s 800,000 citizens and not for [President Karzai’s Kandahar-based brothers] Ahmad Wali Karzai or Qayoum. I tell the truth to Mr. Karzai,” he said, referring to the president.

I believed him. Though it was clear that he was close to the Karzais—he was friends with Qayoum since second grade—Ghulam was more technocrat than politician. During a three-and-a-half-hour interview, I saw that he was passionate about delivering city services, from trash collection to electricity, and proud of his achievements in increasing tax collections and the city’s budget.

He was eloquent on Kandahar’s Byzantine politics, discussing feuds not only between the Ghilzais and the Durrani confederation he and the Karzais and the royal family belong to, but within the Durrani tribes, and with the Barakzais, who belong to neither group.

He reserved a special venom for the Kandahar police, whom he said are thugs brought by local warlords to the Kandahar Provincial Training Center to be clothed in uniforms and receive weapons. He called General Nasrullah Zarifi, who runs the center, “a thief training thieves.” Ghulam charged that Zarifi—a favorite of the American military when I met him—was “selling kebabs on the street” nine years ago, but now the owner of a 45-house development.

As this suggests, Ghulam let no one off the hook. Afghans are quintessential moral flexibilists, to put it nicely, and Ghulam’s take-no-prisoners attitude stood out just as much as it would have in Daley’s Chicago. He was, perhaps, protected by the Karzais; he was also a second cousin of the weak (if well-intentioned) governor of Kandahar, Tooryalai Wesa. Ghulam seemed to believe that if he did his job, enforcing the law equally for all, he would survive. Or perhaps he was just insanely, quietly, brave.

But in recent weekls, something like a mafia war has erupted in Afghanistan’s south, taking the lives of Ahmad Wali Karzai and another thug, former Uruzgan governor Jan Mohamed. Assassinations are nothing new in the Kandahar area—hundreds of tribal elders have died in the last five years or so—but the targets now are bigger. And perhaps Ghulam seemed easier to get rid of now, or perhaps he made one too many enemy. Perhaps the Karzais finally lost their use for him.

Don’t believe the claims that the Taliban killed Ghulam Hamidi. It was never that simple. He hardly mentioned the Taliban to me. The United States probably bears as much of the responsibility for his death as any insurgent cell or local powerbroker, because we dumped oceans of cash on an already volatile city, pouring gasoline on the fire raging there. We raised the stakes and let “our” thugs steal. We made existing warlords like Ahmad Wali Karzai and his rival Gul Agha Sherzai (whom Ghulam hated) much bigger, and let them know they could get away with anything, even murder.

We wasted billions in Kandahar, and no one was more upset than Ghulam. I thought it funny at the time that he was angry that the Canadian provincial reconstruction team had overpaid for the solar-power street lights they put up in Kandahar. It seemed a minor issue. But accountants attend to minor issues as well as big ones. A lot of money and people have been wasted in Kandahar, and last week Ghulam Hamidi, a decent man, became one of them.