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Afghan election candidate rejects deal with Karzai
August 6, 2009
(AFP) – KABUL — One of the leading candidates for presidential elections in two weeks, Ashraf Ghani, said Thursday he had been asked several times by Hamid Karzai's team to withdraw in favour of the incumbent.
Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan's Unlikely Politician
August 5, 2009 By Abubakar Siddique Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
On the campaign trail, Ashraf Ghani swaps his suit and tie for a traditional tunic, loose trousers, and the white Afghan shawl that Afghan men commonly wrap around their chests.
Afghan Province Now Hopeful of Participating in Presidential Polls
By Ravi Khanna VOA News Washington 06 August 2009
Afghan authorities plan to establish nearly 7,000 polling centers across the country for next month's presidential polls. Though Afghanistan's election commission is concerned over security at the polls
New NATO chief makes surprise visit to Afghanistan
Los Angeles Times By Henry Chu August 6, 2009
London - Former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen lands in Kabul to meet with military and political officials and reinforce the message that the war remains NATO's top priority.
Nato in pledge on Afghan deaths
Thursday, 6 August 2009 BBC News
New Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said he is determined to reduce civilian casualties in Afghanistan to an absolute minimum.
Pentagon delays assessment report on Afghanistan strategy
WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Defense Department said on Wednesday that a review of the U.S. and NATO's strategy on Afghanistan expected to be released next week has been delayed.
Afghan election may go to second round - UK ambassador
Reuters By Adrian Croft 08/05/2009
LONDON - Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election could go to a second round after a campaign that has been more competitive than expected, Britain's ambassador in Kabul said on Wednesday.
Afghan officials confident vote will be safe
Canwest News Service By Matthew Fisher 08/05/2009
CAMP HERO - Afghan election officials were still unsure on Tuesday whether voters would be able to cast their ballots for president on Aug. 20 in two "Taliban-controlled districts" of Kandahar,
U.S. faces 'difficult' mission in training Afghans
THE WASHINGTON TIMES By Jessica Weinstein Thursday, August 6, 2009
BARAKI BARAK, Afghanistan | Olive-green hulks of old Soviet tanks loomed above the dusty valley where American soldiers and Afghan National Police (ANP) gathered on a recent Saturday
Analysis: "Reward the peaceful and poppy-free" Afghan provinces
KABUL, 6 August 2009 (IRIN) - Development aid should be targeted at stable provinces in central Afghanistan where projects can be more successful and effective than in conflict zones, says the UN.
Obama faces huge bill on Afghan security
FT.com - Asian World News By Daniel Dombey August 6 2009
Washington - The US will have to provide billions more dollars in coming years to finance a huge increase in the size of Afghanistan's security forces, officials and analysts warn.
Commentary: Get to know the real Afghanistan
CNN 6 Aug 2009
KABUL, Afghanistan - In my Afghanistan, the days are compiled images of Afghans living their simple lives.
PAKISTAN: Ruined Farmers Say Children Won't Go to School
By Ashfaq Yusufzai IPS-Inter Press Service
PESHAWAR, Aug 6 (IPS) - Fertile Swat's famous orchards of peach, plum and apple were just starting to ripen when the Pakistan military launched an air and land attack on Taliban fighters in end-April, uprooting tens of thousands of civilians.
Karzai in His Labyrinth
The New York Times By ELIZABETH RUBIN August 4, 2009
On a sunny June morning in Kabul, I sat among hundreds of turbaned men from Afghanistan’s Helmand and Kandahar provinces in a chandeliered wedding hall where they had gathered for a campaign rally to re-elect President Hamid Karzai.
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Afghan election candidate rejects deal with Karzai
August 6, 2009
(AFP) – KABUL — One of the leading candidates for presidential elections in two weeks, Ashraf Ghani, said Thursday he had been asked several times by Hamid Karzai's team to withdraw in favour of the incumbent.
Ghani, a former finance minister in Karzai's post-Taliban cabinet, said one of the positions he had been offered in return for dropping out of the race was that of chief executive -- a new post described as similar to prime minister.
But Ghani said he was not going to pull out of the August 20 election, for which 41 names will appear on the ballot paper with only a handful considered serious contenders.
"I am totally ready and the reason for our strength is that Karzai every day requests us to negotiate with him," he said.
The calls had been made through members of Karzai's cabinet as well as some international authorities acting as messengers, the academic said.
"My terms are clear and are that I will not step in the (presidential) palace until the elections take place," he said.
Karzai, who has been in power since US-led troops overthrew the Taliban regime in 2001, is considered a favourite although he might not win the 51 percent of the ballot required to avoid a run-off.
Another strong candidate is Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's former foreign minister.
The Afghan president has been criticised for securing ballots through backroom deals with potential rivals and factional strongmen who would bring with them thousands of followers.
The election comes with Afghanistan gripped by the deadliest violence since the ousted Taliban rose up against Karzai's government. More than 100,000 mostly Western troops are in the country to help quell unrest.
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Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan's Unlikely Politician
August 5, 2009 By Abubakar Siddique Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
On the campaign trail, Ashraf Ghani swaps his suit and tie for a traditional tunic, loose trousers, and the white Afghan shawl that Afghan men commonly wrap around their chests.
The look is part of a carefully cultivated image transformation for the technocrat-turned-politician.
The former academic and World Bank executive, who was once in the running to head the UN and the World Bank, is introducing a new kind of politics in Afghanistan.
In a country ravaged by foreign invasions and internal friction, Ghani is running his presidential campaign on a broad reform agenda with a manifesto of a prosperous, peaceful future.
Ghani delivers a consistent message: "I want to give the people of Afghanistan a clear choice between a just order that I want to preside over, versus the corrupt order that the president and his entourage has turned Afghanistan into," he tells RFE/RL.
Ghani recalls a stern message from a young Afghan that led him to run for the country's highest office.
"Last year, I had a meeting with a number of young people and one of them said, 'On the day of judgment, I am going to take you by your lapel and shake you.' And I said, 'What have I done?'" he recalls.
"And he said: 'You are being silent. You are not challenging oppression when you see it all around you. You are not speaking and standing up as an alternative.' That statement is what has compelled me to run."
Working For Development
Ghani, 60, had a long and illustrious career as an academic at the University of California, Berkeley, and at John Hopkins University. In 1991, he headed to the World Bank as a lead anthropologist, where he grappled with complex development issues for the next decade.
But Afghanistan remained his constant passion, and he was a constant fixture at Afghanistan-related events in Washington.
A member of a prominent family within the large and influential Ahmedzai Pashtun tribe southeast of Kabul that historically provided Afghan kings with competent administrators and generals, Ghani stayed away from the deeply divisive and factionalized Afghan politics during the Soviet occupation and the subsequent civil war.
World Bank official and personal friend Scott Guggenheim has known Ghani for 25 years. Having worked for Ghani in Kabul, Guggenheim describes him as "an Afghan nationalist" whose decision to leave an international career for one in Afghan politics can be attributed to his wish to see his war-ravaged country succeed.
"Ashraf could have stayed in the United Nations or the World Bank and could have moved pretty high up -- right," Guggenheim says. "But ever since I have known him, his eyes have been towards Afghanistan. He wants Afghanistan to succeed."
The international focus that fell upon Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks led veteran Algerian diplomat and peacemaker Lakhdar Brahimi to return as a special UN envoy to Afghanistan for a second stint. Ghani was one of his key advisers in late 1990s, and later emerged as a central figure in the UN Strategy Group for Afghanistan.
This small group of expert advisers to the UN helped draft the UN Security Council resolutions and the Bonn accords that led the foundations of a new political system in Afghanistan.
Joining The Government
Calling this an "open moment," Ghani moved to Kabul as a UN official. But once there Brahimi encouraged him to enter the Afghan government and he soon became a key adviser to President Hamid Karzai and later served as his finance minister. In these roles, he become the point man for everything economy and reconstruction.
British lawyer and academic Clare Lockhart, who co-authored a book on stabilizing failed states with him, is a longtime friend of Ghani's. She describes Ghani as somebody "who combines intellectual curiosity and wisdom and vigor with immense moral commitment to public service."
And Lockhart is all praise for his dedication to work. "He worked nonstop round the clock except, of course, on the day of rest on Friday to respect the religious customs. But apart from that [he] would work 18 to 20 hours a day," she said of his days as Afghanistan's economic manger.
"And also within the ministry he increasingly built a team to which he could delegate their true legal function."
During his three years in the government and the cabinet, Ghani led the "reformist" camp of educated Afghans, who faced constant battles with warlords and militia commanders who suspected that efforts toward reform were intended to curtail their newfound powers.
Ghani introduced a new currency, a new banking system, imposed taxes on the rich, and engaged in complex negotiations with warlords to convince them to divert customs revenues from personal coffers to the national exchequer.
Ghani prepared polished plans for national development, while reining in aid agencies that looked at Afghanistan as a gold rush with aid dollars pouring in. He stubbornly blocked proposals to incorporate factional militias into the new Afghan National Army and fought hard to promote transparency.
Rasul Amin, a former Kabul University professor and a former education minister in Karzai's first transitional administration, calls Ghani "a man of ideas." He now sees Ghani as able to form a competent administration "to work on the Afghan state and Afghanistan's nation building."
On The Campaign Trail
The critical challenge for Ghani, who is considered to be among the top three presidential contenders, is to rebrand his image to appeal to ordinary Afghans.
Ghani who claims to have spent 14 years researching and writing "the socioeconomic and political history of the last 500 years of this country," says the last year has been a unique learning experience.
"I have at least seen 100,000 Afghans across all 34 provinces in individual, small group discussions. I have listened to them and I reflect both their pain and frustrations but also their hopes and aspirations," he says of the campaign trail that took him to all corners of Afghanistan.
"I have a 10-year complete plan of action to address their needs and a 20-year framework that can provide the foundation for a prosperous stable Afghanistan."
Ghani's campaign is advised by American political strategist James Carville, who played a key role in former U.S. President Bill Clinton's 1992 victory. But some Afghan observers remain skeptical that his modern campaign can work in Afghanistan's political scene, which centers around regional and tribal alliances headed by strongmen who are more often than not militia commanders.
Hajji Sayed Daud, a Kabul-based Afghan political commentator who has known Ghani since his days as a lecturer at Kabul University in mid-1970s, says that, like other Western-trained Afghan technocrats, Ghani has major vulnerabilities.
Daud says that they "lacked a political agenda because they did not have a political party or political past and were not related to political people. And they were counting on the international forces, the UN, and America. And even now they lack what you will call a political organization in their campaigns."
Ghani's supporters, however, see this as his main strength.
Ajmal Abidy is a 30-year-old Afghan professional who left his job with an international aid project to volunteer for Ghani's campaign. Having lived in exile during the Soviet occupation and Taliban rule in neighboring Pakistan, he sees in Ghani's leadership hope for his country and a clean break from corruption.
"Afghanistan needs a strong, determined, and serious leader who has the energy to extract this country from the current crisis," Abidy says, echoing a common sentiment among educated Afghans.
He says Afghans need a leader "who can sympathize with our country and its people and can do something to alleviate their suffering -- and Dr. Ashraf Ghani has all these qualities."
Radio Free Afghanistan correspondent Hamid Mohmand contributed to this piece
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Afghan Province Now Hopeful of Participating in Presidential Polls
By Ravi Khanna VOA News Washington 06 August 2009
Afghan authorities plan to establish nearly 7,000 polling centers across the country for next month's presidential polls. Though Afghanistan's election commission is concerned over security at the polls, voters in the southern Helmand province are hopeful now that US and British military operations against the Taliban have been successful.
Last month, US Marines launched Operation Strike of the Sword in Afghanistan's volatile southern Helmand province to flush out the Taliban before this month's presidential election. And three weeks later, dozens of Afghan men lined up to register to vote.
The U.S. operation followed a similar push by the British operation called Panther's Claw. "I am very happy I'm able to register here and will be able to vote in the election. I hope there are no security problems here. I just want peace to vote for anyone who I decide," said Abdul Hakim, a resident of the village of Babaji in Helmand.
"Six months ago there was fighting here, there was no security. A lot of people fled the area," said 35-year-old Abdul Samad, another resident of the village.
The mud-brick Helmand village of Babaji and its surrounding farms and irrigation canals were long a safe haven for Taliban insurgents.
Hundreds of British soldiers faced stiff resistance as they advanced south towards Babaji and the Helmand River, a strategic and lush area north of the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.
July has become the deadliest month for foreign forces in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001. Twenty British soldiers and at least 35 US soldiers and marines were killed in July.
"But this election will take place on schedule. And Helmand will be able to participate thanks to this offensive that General Nicholson and his colleagues are directing," said President Obama's special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke.
Major Paddy Ginn, the British officer in charge of the area, sums up the situation in Helmand. "When the Taliban are here they support the Taliban, when we're here they're very friendly and supportive towards us. What we've got to do now is to tip them over the balance so they see that the long-term future, the long-term solution, is not with the Taliban but the long-term solution is with the governance of Afghanistan," he said.
Tony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says what is being done in Helmand may become a model for what the US and NATO forces want to do in Afghanistan. "We may not have the perfect approach to shape clear, hold and build in Helmand, but it is a major initiative against a very real enemy where we will hold and we will eventually build. We may not have the phasing right this time around, but at least there is a clear effort to get it right and a clear intention to fix it," he said.
Experts say if the Helmand experiment fails it will be a learning experience that can be fixed over time. They say if the Obama administration provides the resources, a timeframe of 12 to 18 months to make real progress is very realistic.
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New NATO chief makes surprise visit to Afghanistan
Los Angeles Times By Henry Chu August 6, 2009
London - Former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen lands in Kabul to meet with military and political officials and reinforce the message that the war remains NATO's top priority.
The new head of NATO paid a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Wednesday to reinforce his message that the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda remains the alliance's top priority.
But whether he can get the nations he represents to line up behind him and commit resources to the same agenda is looking increasingly doubtful as the body count, both military and civilian, continues to climb.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen landed in Kabul, the Afghan capital, for meetings with military leaders, diplomats and candidates in Afghanistan's upcoming presidential election. It's the former Danish prime minister's first trip as secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a post he assumed Monday.
His choice of Afghanistan for his maiden voyage was clearly meant to put an exclamation point on Rasmussen's declaration that the conflict there is NATO's most important operation, a must-win if the alliance is to remain relevant to global security.
"That starts with succeeding in Afghanistan," Rasmussen told reporters after formally taking office.
NATO must "help prevent Afghanistan from becoming again the Grand Central Station of international terrorism," he said, adding: "The moral argument is also powerful: Anyone who believes in basic human rights, including women's rights, should support this mission."
Such support, though, is in dwindling supply throughout much of Europe.
After the deadliest month for Western troops in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion nearly eight years ago, public opposition to the war has intensified on this side of the Atlantic.
That has been especially true here in Britain, America's staunchest ally, which suffered the loss of eight troops within a 24-hour period. Public and parliamentary outcries have erupted over whether British troops are adequately equipped. News that the head of the British army had to ride in an American helicopter on a recent visit because British choppers were unavailable only fueled the anger.
Afghan civilians too are being felled by violence. On Wednesday, the U.S. military said it was investigating allegations that three children and a man were killed by allied military action outside Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
The rising death toll, which has put 2009 on track to be the deadliest year of the war for Western troops, has aggravated Rasmussen's task of keeping NATO members committed to the war, let alone persuading them to put more boots on the ground, as the Obama administration has lobbied for.
"That's not going to be forthcoming," Lisa Aronsson, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based security think tank, said bluntly. "The casualty rate in July is really hitting home for Europeans. They're already financially strapped; they're already giving what they can.
"If Obama couldn't do it, considering the political capital he had at the beginning of the year, it's going to be difficult" for Rasmussen, Aronsson said.
His immediate predecessor as NATO secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer of the Netherlands, likewise called Afghanistan the alliance's No. 1 priority and repeatedly urged member nations to ramp up their resources there. But he left office frustrated on that score, and little suggests that Rasmussen, despite his diplomatic contacts and higher profile as a former head of government, will have any more success.
Of the 64,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, about half are from the U.S. and most of the rest from other NATO countries. Those that have seen the most fighting have been the Americans, British, Canadians and Dutch.
The reluctance of some heavyweight European nations such as Germany to send more soldiers and allow them a more active combat role is a particularly bitter irony for Obama. His popularity in this region was built in large part on his stance against the "bad war" in Iraq, yet now the "good war" in Afghanistan is increasingly turning into a poisoned chalice as well.
To buoy support, Rasmussen has emphasized that the battle against Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism is as crucial to Europe's security as it is to America's. Many Europeans have yet to be convinced of that, despite successful terrorist attacks on the London and Madrid transport systems and reports of thwarted attacks elsewhere.
Perhaps in a nod to hard political realities, Rasmussen may be shifting toward highlighting the need for civilian expertise in rebuilding Afghanistan, given that military reinforcements from Europe are unlikely, Aronsson said.
"Afghanistan needs more trainers; it means more civilian support, and more help for the Afghans to build their institutions," Rasmussen said at his news conference Monday. "NATO -- by which I mean both sides of the Atlantic -- will do its full part, but we can't do it alone. This has to be an international team effort."
But he added: "Let no Taliban propagandist try to sell my message as a run for the exit. It is not. We will support the Afghan people for as long as it takes. Let me repeat that: for as long as it takes."
henry.chu@latimes.com
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Nato in pledge on Afghan deaths
Thursday, 6 August 2009 BBC News
New Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has said he is determined to reduce civilian casualties in Afghanistan to an absolute minimum.
On his first visit to Kabul in the job, Mr Rasmussen told Afghan President Hamid Karzai Nato's aim was to hand over security gradually to the Afghans.
The Nato chief is now in Kandahar, and has been briefed by senior commanders on fighting in Helmand province.
Mr Rasmussen said forthcoming elections must be as inclusive as possible.
A BBC correspondent says this has been the most violent year since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001.
The BBC's Adam Mynott, who is travelling with Mr Rasmussen, says casting a vote in the presidential election on 20 August will amount to defying the Taliban, who have called for a boycott.
Fury in Kandahar
Shortly after landing at Kabul airport amid very tight security, Mr Rasmussen - who replaced Jaap de Hoop Scheffer as Nato chief on 1 August - went to the presidential palace to meet Mr Karzai, and the pair spoke for an hour.
Former Danish Prime Minister Mr Rasmussen said that although some civilian deaths caused by Nato action were inevitable and regrettable, he was determined to reduce such fatalities - a cause of bitter resentment in Afghanistan.
He told a news conference: "My criteria for success is that we can gradually hand over responsibility of security to the Afghans themselves."
But as he spoke, there was fury in southern Afghanistan in the Kandahar area, after three children and a man were killed in an air strike by international forces.
Angry villagers shouted "death to America, death to infidels", as they displayed the bodies in the back of a truck, reported the Associated Press news agency.
Mr Rasmussen said Nato had no interest in who won the forthcoming polls, but he added the process should be as inclusive as possible.
President Karzai - who is seeking re-election - said he had a message for the Taliban.
"Attacking election sites or intimidating people is not only not serving Afghanistan, it is actually working against Afghan people and their very immediate interests for a better life," he said.
Mr Karzai said recently he was prepared to talk to Taliban leaders. He said this was not a new position and he was prepared to enter talks with any group, provided they were not agents of al-Qaeda or terrorists.
Some 65,000 troops from 42 nations serve in a Nato-led force that correspondents say has been hamstrung by disputes over the need for more soldiers.
July was the bloodiest month for the US and Nato in the nearly eight-year war, and the UN says civilian deaths soared by almost a quarter in the first half of 2009.
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Pentagon delays assessment report on Afghanistan strategy
WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Defense Department said on Wednesday that a review of the U.S. and NATO's strategy on Afghanistan expected to be released next week has been delayed.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told a press conference that the report would not be made public until early September instead of mid-August.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates originally asked his new commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, to submit the report of the assessment on the Afghanistan war within 60 days after he took over the command in June.
But the deadline was changed after Gates met with his top commanders in charge of the Afghanistan war in Europe over weekend.
Morrell also said that the report would not issue advice on troop levels for Afghanistan as it was speculated earlier.
"The assessment will focus on the situation on the ground and the way ahead but will not offer specific resource requests or recommendations," said the spokesman, adding that any request for more troops would be issued separately.
President Barack Obama has ordered an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan earlier this year, which will make the total number reach 68,000.
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Afghan election may go to second round - UK ambassador
Reuters By Adrian Croft 08/05/2009
LONDON - Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election could go to a second round after a campaign that has been more competitive than expected, Britain's ambassador in Kabul said on Wednesday.
President Hamid Karzai is viewed as favourite to win re-election, but Ambassador Mark Sedwill made clear he had doubts over whether any candidate could achieve the 50 percent of the vote needed to win in the first round.
"I think it's genuinely in the balance as to whether there will be a second round," Sedwill said in a news conference by video link from Kabul.
A shortage of polling or canvassing data made it hard to tell how candidates were doing, he said.
Karzai faces 36 challengers with former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah and ex-finance minister Ashraf Ghani among few serious contenders. If a second round is needed, it will be held in early October.
Sedwill said several of the candidates had run very energetic campaigns.
"The competitiveness of the campaign has taken many of us here by surprise," he said, noting there had been televised debates between candidates and huge election rallies.
Between 15 and 17 million Afghans are registered to vote, British officials say.
Election experts believed the Afghan poll was being held in "probably the most challenging circumstances for elections that they have ever encountered", Sedwill said. Taliban insurgents have vowed to disrupt the election and have called on Afghans to boycott the ballot.
Violence across Afghanistan this year has reached its worst levels since U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban in 2001 and escalated further after U.S. and British troops launched offensives in southern Helmand over the past two months.
The south is Karzai's traditional powerbase and if turnout there is depressed by violence it could hurt his vote.
NOT PERFECT
An Afghan government map obtained by Reuters on Wednesday showed almost half the country at high risk of attack by insurgents or under "enemy control".
Apart from security problems, Afghanistan is among the poorest countries in the world and two thirds of the population are illiterate, Sedwill said.
"We have to recognise that these elections are therefore going to be pretty rough and ready in places. They won't be perfect," he said.
The test of success would be whether they were credible, secure and inclusive enough, said Sedwill. On polling day, community defence groups and Afghan security forces will provide security at polling stations, with international forces taking a relatively low profile, he said.
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Afghan officials confident vote will be safe
Canwest News Service By Matthew Fisher 08/05/2009
CAMP HERO - Afghan election officials were still unsure on Tuesday whether voters would be able to cast their ballots for president on Aug. 20 in two "Taliban-controlled districts" of Kandahar, but they were confident that Afghan, Canadian and American forces could protect voters everywhere else in the war-plagued province.
"This is a critical moment for us. We have to persuade the public to come to polling stations to vote for their leaders," Ali Kazai, who heads the Independent Election Commission office for Kandahar, told Afghan and NATO officers responsible for the four southern provinces.
They were gathered at an Afghan army base near Kandahar City to conduct a rehearsal of potential election day security scenarios.
President Hamid Karzai is heavily favoured to win, but as much as 10% of the electorate may not be able to vote because it has been too dangerous for election organizers to register them. Most of the voters who may be disenfranchised live in the southern province of Helmand or in Paktika in the east, but the Taliban may also prevent about five per cent of the voters in neighbouring Kandahar from going to the polls.
Ghorak and Mianeshin were the two of 17 provincial districts in Kandahar that "aren't under government control," Mr. Kazai said, and because of this "we're still working out whether polling stations will be open there or not."
The more problematic of the two districts was Ghorak on the Helmand border, where about 8,600 Kandaharis lived, according to Brig.-Gen. Abdul Bashir Salizai, commander of Afghan army troops who work alongside Canadian mentors in this province.
"We are trying to open the polling stations," he said. "If we cannot do it we will try to find a way to do it outside."
Pre-election security planning has been so thorough, the general said, that he was confidently predicting "no trouble" on voting day. "The reason it will be quiet is that we have the Afghan army and police and all our foreign friends.
"You can see how seriously we are taking this election by who showed up today. Every general in the south, whether Afghan or coalition, is here."
The Taliban have threatened to sabotage voting. In letters sent during the past week, according to Reuters, villagers in some parts of the country were warned to boycott the voting process and "join the jihad in the trenches" or face serious consequences.
"My request to the public is to come down to vote and not be intimidated by the enemy or their propaganda," Mr. Kazai said. "Afghanistan has suffered so long. Now is the time to build the country."
Tuesday's election security rehearsal took place with the Afghan generals seated around a floor map of the four southern provinces with most of the NATO commanders, including Canada's Brig.-Gen. Jon Vance, sitting behind them. The seating arrangement underscored how, unlike during the first Afghan presidential election five years, Afghans are now running the voting process and overseeing election day security.
Brig-Gen. Stir Mohammed Zazai, commander of the Afghan army's 205 Hero Corps, warned the audience: "The eyes of the world are watching to see if we can provide security. When people speak of the elections everybody says the most volatile area is the south. If there are problems, we must talk about them."
In what was described as a "war game," each of the four Afghan provincial brigadier generals was given three different violent crises that might arise because of the Taliban on election day and then asked to explain how he would direct his troops to respond to them.
"The rehearsal is helping them prepare for the possibility of trouble," said Col. Greg Burt of Corner Book, N.L., who runs Canada's army mentoring team in Kandahar.
"It is their plan. We are only here to help facilitate it."
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U.S. faces 'difficult' mission in training Afghans
THE WASHINGTON TIMES By Jessica Weinstein Thursday, August 6, 2009
BARAKI BARAK, Afghanistan | Olive-green hulks of old Soviet tanks loomed above the dusty valley where American soldiers and Afghan National Police (ANP) gathered on a recent Saturday in this country's latest experience of foreign military mentoring.
Under a glaring sun that already was withering at midmorning, eight Afghan police officers looked on as 14 Americans from the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division hauled great pieces of plywood and paper and assembled a series of targets. Only one Afghan seemed eager to help. Another didn't even wear boots, arriving in sandals with his AK-47 slung laxly across his shoulders.
When the Afghans were finished shooting, the targets were littered with bullet holes but just a third of the ammunition appeared to have hit the mark.
"It's very difficult," said Sgt. James Ramirez, a military police officer with the 3rd Squadron, 71st Cavalry Regiment.
The commander of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has made the training of Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) a major objective for all U.S. military in the country, not just police mentors.
In an assessment due to be released later this month, Gen. McChrystal is expected to call for doubling ANSF strength by 2011. The Afghan National Army (ANA) is to have up to 240,000 men and the ANP 160,000.
This will require not only a significantly larger commitment of coalition money and manpower but also cooperation from the Afghan government.
"The long pole [in turning around Afghanistan] is the police force," Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told editors and reporters of The Washington Times on Wednesday. Afghan police, he said, are "terribly corrupt," and the U.S.-led coalition has not had sufficient trainers to deal with the problem.
"Improving the police is the number one thing we can do from a security standpoint," said Maj. Todd Polk, commander of Able Troop, 3rd Squadron, 71st Cavalry, which includes a police mentor team.
Military police from the 10th Mountain Division have been working with about 30 ANP officers since January in Baraki Barak, a town of about 150,000 some 50 miles south of Kabul. However, some of the Afghan officers have never attended one of the country's nine police-training academies. Some arrive for U.S. mentoring having never learned how to fire or even carry a weapon.
"They actually have to be dedicated, pay attention and have the discipline to be able to handle [the training] on top of their regular missions and patrols that they're doing," Sgt. Joe McAuliff said.
It's a lot to ask of recruits, many just 18 years old.
"They can be their own worst enemy," Maj. Polk said. "You patrol with the ANP, and guys just don't seem very professional. If we have them search the house, they're taking stuff [from] the house. It's up to us to make them as professional as possible, to teach them the rule of law, show them how to do a proper search and then hold them accountable."
"It's going to take time," agreed Lt. Rudolf Zombek. "Things are not going to improve from the 14th century to the 21st century overnight."
Lt. Zombek sees progress but said he thinks support from the central government is key.
For example, fuel rationing forces the ANP to choose between patrolling and powering its police station. So far, the police have chosen to patrol.
"They need to make sure they can pay for all of this," Lt. Zombek said. "Because we're demanding that they go from no system to having an American system. ... I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's very difficult."
With a backlog at Afghan police academies, Col. David Haight, commander of 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, is working to get Czech and Turkish provincial reconstruction teams certified to train recruits. He also demands that Afghan forces always accompany his soldiers on patrol.
Col. Haight, who served under Gen. McChrystal three times in Iraq in Special Forces operations and is familiar with the general's thinking, says developing the ANP is critical if Afghanistan -- at war since the 1979 Soviet invasion -- is ever to stand on its own.
"I believe that strategically, developing the police is even more important than the army," he said. "They are the first line of representation that we see of the Afghan government."
Historically, ANP officers have not patrolled their own provinces. The Afghan government was responsible for this policy, which was meant to keep tribal loyalties from breeding corruption and favoritism.
However, the result has been that police are less invested in the security of their areas of responsibility and have minimal respect from the people they are supposed to protect.
"The people have to see not just one good event," Col. Haight said. "They have to see consistent, good service by the police over a period of weeks, months, years before they'll trust them."
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Analysis: "Reward the peaceful and poppy-free" Afghan provinces
KABUL, 6 August 2009 (IRIN) - Development aid should be targeted at stable provinces in central Afghanistan where projects can be more successful and effective than in conflict zones, says the UN.
"We focus too much on conflict provinces and we spend enormous amounts of money there and it does not have much impact because of the conflict," said the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan, Kai Eide, during a recent visit to Bamyan Province.
"The balance [of aid spending by donors] is wrong," he said, adding that development aid had little impact in the insecure provinces but significant effect in stable provinces like Bamyan.
"I am afraid that if we don't spend more money in stable provinces we will also see instabilities here. It should be a warning signal to us all [and] teach us a lesson [to] direct money to the stable provinces," Eide said.
More than 60 multilateral donors have spent about US$36 billion on development, reconstruction and humanitarian projects in Afghanistan since 2002, according to the Ministry of Finance (MoF).
While there is a lack of reliable statistics on aid expenditure, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) says there has been a major disparity in aid spending across the country.
Kabul, for instance, has received almost 20 percent of the development funding while the provinces of Daikundi, Faran and Sar-e-Pol have together received less than 1 percent, UNAMA officials told IRIN.
Kabul is not considered an insecure and poppy-producing province but the southern Helmand Province has been both insecure and the top opium poppy-producing province in the country.
The case of Bamyan and Helmand
The governor of Bamyan, Habiba Sarabi, echoed Eide's concerns.
There are 26 NATO-led Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan and each one of them is headed by the largest troop-contributing nation in a province, according to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
Sarabi said better-funded PRTs - led by the US and the UK - spend more funds in the provinces apparently in a bid to win local support.
Her views were backed by a UNAMA spokesman.
"It is recognized that some donors do have a preference for supporting projects and programmes in areas where they may have military deployments," Eide's spokesman, Aleem Siddique, told IRIN.
Some independent aid agencies criticize the involvement of PRTs in development and humanitarian work, which sometimes blurs the identities of military actors and civilian aid workers.
The PRT in Bamyan is led by New Zealand, which, according to Sarabi, has a relatively smaller development budget than the British PRT in Helmand.
For an estimated population of 500,000, Bamyan received more than $47 million development assistance in 2008 (about $94 per person), according to Sarabi.
MoF records in Kabul show Bamyan received $63 million development funds in 2008 ($126 per person). However, Sarabi said $15 million was earmarked for a 123km highway which connects Bamyan, Wardak and Parwan provinces and therefore the amount must not be accounted for her province alone.
In Helmand, with an estimated population of one million, the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) spent about £20.6 million (about $35 million) on development projects in 2008 and the first six months of 2009 ($23.35 per person per annum).
Neither the MoF nor the provincial administration had figures for the total development budget for Helmand in 2008 but officials said the UK was the single largest donor to the province.
DFID - whose development projects are integrated with the British PRT in Helmand - earmarked £72 million (about $107.6 million) to the volatile province between 2009 and 2013.
"DFID programmes in Helmand are effective, despite the challenging security situation," Mike Hollis, DFID's programme and strategy coordinator, told IRIN, rejecting criticisms of aid ineffectiveness in the insecure areas.
Development dilemma
The conflict is primarily focused on the south and east of the country.
However, there are strong reservations about the use of development aid in insecure areas.
"Don't reward insecure and poppy-producing provinces. reward the peaceful and poppy-free Bamyan," said Sarabi.
"In this region you can have tremendous impact with much less money than what is being spent with little impact in the conflict provinces," said Eide.
There are also those who say the conflict cannot and will not be curbed by military means alone and more development tools must be used to address the core sources of the conflict.
"A campaign against extremism will not succeed with bullets or bombs alone. So to advance security, opportunity and justice - not just in Kabul, but from the bottom up in the provinces - we need agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers," said US President Barrack Obama in his remarks on a new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Amid the controversy whether more development aid should be used as conflict management tool or more aid should be given to stable provinces for poverty alleviation, some experts advocate "a balanced" development approach which can address the most pressing needs of people in stable and insecure areas alike.
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Obama faces huge bill on Afghan security
FT.com - Asian World News By Daniel Dombey August 6 2009
Washington - The US will have to provide billions more dollars in coming years to finance a huge increase in the size of Afghanistan's security forces, officials and analysts warn.
General Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of US and Nato forces in the country, is in the final stages of a review of policy in which he is expected to conclude that the Afghan army and police force should be increased to a combined total of 400,000.
"Afghan national security forces probably need to grow to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 400,000, which is currently being looked at by the McChrystal review," retired General Jack Keane, one of the architects of the surge in Iraq, told the FT, in comments backed up by serving military officials.
Republican senator John McCain has said: "From everything I've seen, it looks like the Afghan army has to increase significantly. And that's going to be a huge cost."
At present, the Afghan national army and police are respectively about 86,000 and 80,000 strong. Current US strategy seeks to increase the army to about 134,000 - a goal that will be almost doubled if Gen McChrystal endorses the total 400,000 mark. US officials argue that boosting the size of Afghan forces is essential to holding the territory long term and to addressing questions about the sustainability of the war effort.
"It's apparent that the current level of the security forces of Afghanistan is not going to be sufficient in the long run," Richard Holbrooke, US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said last week, adding that the US would look at the issue with the country's government after Afghan presidential elections on August 20.
But the sheer size of the contribution needed - an estimated $20bn (13.98bn, $11.89bn) over five years to set up the new security force - raises questions about sustainability itself.
Afghanistan cannot provide such funds on its own. But the US's partners have made only limited impact on the requirements.
At an April Nato summit, US allies offered $100m to an Afghan National Security Forces trust fund, including a $57m pledge by Germany. In February, Japan offered to pay the salaries of police officers for six months.
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Commentary: Get to know the real Afghanistan
CNN 6 Aug 2009
KABUL, Afghanistan - In my Afghanistan, the days are compiled images of Afghans living their simple lives.
My Afghanistan is a kaleidoscope of real people, from the stick-thin bearded Paghmani man, an imposing 6-foot-5, rhythmically lifting rocks, 12 hours a day, seven days a week for $4 a day, his shalwar kameez billowing in the hot summer breezes; to the grin of the boy in his blue shirt as he labors to cut the alfalfa after school to feed the flock of big-bottomed sheep.
To the kiss of the old widow, her family gone, whose feet hurt incessantly; she's forgotten the English she once knew when she worked for the government. And of course, to the communities my organization works with to help them better their lives through direct education and training programs.
A Pashtun orphan, about 11, enters my office with a plate of freshly picked summer apricots. He was rescued from a madrassa that trained him how to throw grenades and to be a suicide bomber. He spends time with me when he gets a chance, tidying my desk, pulling my papers out of the copier and stacking them.
We can't speak much as I do not know Pashtun and he hasn't yet learned Dari or English, but he tucks his head into the crook of my neck for a couple of minutes watching me type. In these gentle moments, he begins to unwind and I experience the fragile connection that is being created between our worlds.
Living and working in Afghanistan for nearly five years now, I do not recognize most of what the international news accounts of this area report as anything remotely close to my experience.
A visiting journalist recently observed with some surprise that "parts of Afghanistan are at war and parts are peaceful." Indeed, like Ireland and many other sites of civil unrest in the world, there are pockets of peace and pockets of war.
The things that concern me most as I go about my day-to-day activities are not suicide bombers, kidnappings, and the "insurgency." These are all just a backdrop to the much more textured story that is Afghanistan, though it rarely touches the lives of the 2,500 or so foreign aid workers who live and work in Kabul. Yet these stories of violence dominate the news outside and thus color the way the world imagines Afghanistan.
Internationals living in the country are constantly bombarded with "threat alerts" and rarely visit the desperately poor Afghan communities their projects are ostensibly attempting to help. This is what concerns me: how my country is spending development dollars here without really being here.
The results of the fear that dominates the management of most development projects are an incompletely informed group of international professionals working in Afghanistan who can literally spend years here without seeing the country but through the windows of their armored cars.
Living as they do under cloistered, fearful conditions behind razor-wired walls, venturing out only to a select list of "secure" locations, they make often questionable decisions on spending, frequently without the input of Afghan nationals. From this entrenched, isolated position, they are managing hundreds of millions of dollars of international development funds.
When news reports talk about Afghanistan's high levels of corruption, they do not lift the veils to see that the development projects themselves are actually enabling it with security conditions that resemble apartheid.
While folks at home are hunkering down, Afghanistan projects are concerned with tripling their monthly "burn rates" and managing projects remotely -- projects that almost certainly are less than the books indicate, or worse, have been paid for several times over by different organizations.
It is time for those controlling the funding investment in this country to listen to their citizens, especially Afghan-Americans and other Americans like me and my family who live and work here. We are the people on the front lines, and connected as we are to the community here, we have much to offer in the way of supporting the success of the donor efforts.
The good news is that there are more than a few Americans in this country who have the privilege of experiencing the Afghan people the way I do. But so far, my attempts to connect them with the American mission here as the new administration "rethinks" the strategy for Afghanistan have been unsuccessful as calls and e-mails to the ambassador have gone unanswered.
There is a story of a young American worker for a nongovernmental organization who stopped on the road recently to pull out a van that was stuck in the snow, having veered into the oncoming lane when the sun was going down.
In the car were two women, three small children and an elderly man, plus the two men who were attempting to dig out the wheels with sticks. It took less than 10 minutes to pull them out, and they were grateful for the help... they'd been there for nearly four hours and many trucks and security vehicles had passed them without offering a helping hand. They thought they would either freeze or be pushed over the brink of the cliff once it darkened. I know that story is true because the young man is my son Reese and I was with him.
I propose a simple and very Afghan solution to the Afghanistan dilemma: We need to be good neighbors. Offer help. Be visible. Take some risks to communicate with ordinary people.
My young Pashtun orphan, trained to kill, is now growing up in an institution where he mixes with internationals, with the very "infidels" he was previously conditioned to hate. ... Are these not the ways for us to build bridges into this community? With shared meals instead of divisive policies? These are not new thoughts, but they are often unspoken and certainly not practiced in America's Afghanistan, which is a world divided by sandbags, concrete T-beams and armed guards.
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PAKISTAN: Ruined Farmers Say Children Won't Go to School
By Ashfaq Yusufzai IPS-Inter Press Service
PESHAWAR, Aug 6 (IPS) - Fertile Swat's famous orchards of peach, plum and apple were just starting to ripen when the Pakistan military launched an air and land attack on Taliban fighters in end-April, uprooting tens of thousands of civilians.
More than two million refugees fled the mountainous Malakand region in the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP), spread over six districts including Swat - the biggest exodus of internally displaced peoples (IDPs) after Rwanda in the nineties, according to the United Nations.
In early July, Pakistan's Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani announced the successful completion of the military operation in Swat, the worst affected district, and urged the refugees to return home.
Thousands of farmers among the IDPs who took the buses and trucks laid on by the authorities to their villages in Swat, Buner, Shangla and Dir have sent back reports of widespread destruction of crops and infrastructure.
"I have a three-acre peach orchard," says Wali, a farmer from Charbagh in Swat district. "I wasn't able to pick a single fruit because of the military operation. Now we have arrived to find all the fruit has rotted," he told IPS over the phone.
Wali, who did not want to give his first name, said he would not be able to send his three children - two girls and a boy - back to school because he had no money.
Farming families were amongst the worst affected by the militancy - Taliban fighters ran a parallel administration in Swat - and the army's operation to flush out armed militants, says Sher Mohammad Khan, director-general of NWFP's agriculture and livestock department.
The total estimated losses add up to more than one billion dollars in the six militancy-plagued districts, he says. Farmers in Swat, Buner, Shangla, Upper Dir and Lower Dir need immediate financial support for rehabilitation, he adds.
In 2008, Swat had produced 143,324 tonnes of fruit (peaches, plums, pears, grapes, citrus fruits, apples and apricots) and 128,018 tonnes of vegetables (onions, garlic, potato, tomato and other greens). Fruit farming was spread over 13,119 hectares and vegetables on 10,240 hectares in 2007-08.
The government has approved 30 million dollars for the rehabilitation of farmers in the conflict-riddled districts by providing them with soft loans, seeds, plants, fertilisers and livestock among other things.
"But the government has no money and is looking for support from donor organisations," says Fawad Ali, the government's focal person for rehabilitation and recovery of the farmers.
The World Bank and Asian Development Bank have together with the government begun a data collection survey to estimate the total loss of livelihoods in the conflict-affected districts. The U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has expressed willingness to assist farmers with technical support.
"About one million people in the conflict districts are dependent on farming. What would they do if the government failed to help them?" asks Mohammad Ayaz, 38, who left Mardan for his native Swat district on Aug. 5.
He says he has no money to buy seeds and other necessities to make his 10-acre land cultivable. "My land located in Kabal Swat has been severely bombed by the army. It was my only source of income," he says, despairingly.
By his side is Rahim Gul of Saidu Sharif, Swat, who is equally concerned about his agricultural land and the loss of 50 heads of cattle.
"I paid for my daughter's university education out of the money generated from farming. Now, I fear, my daughter won't be able to complete her degree in political science," he told IPS.
His daughter, Jamila Gul, wants the government and the U.N. to bear the expense of her education.
"We should not be at the receiving end of the conflict. It's the U.S. which is behind the (military) campaign against the militants and it should make arrangements for the education of students in the conflict region," she says in an interview with IPS.
This correspondent also spoke over the phone to Jamila's classmate, Najma Bibi, who had returned with her family to Swat.
"The situation here is pathetic. Shops have run out of foodstuff and other articles. Prices are sky-high. Schools have opened but there is no infrastructure," she said. "People here are stuck," she observes.
Naseem Shah, 55, of Matta, Swat, says he has not been able to go to his home in Matta, because the area has not been cleared of militants.
"People told me my two tractors and wheat threshers have been completely destroyed. I am thinking of staying back in Mardan and starting a small business here," he says. Until last year, Shah was earning about 10,000 dollars a year from his farm. Unless there is immediate government help, the future is very bleak for farming families. (END/2009)
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Karzai in His Labyrinth
The New York Times By ELIZABETH RUBIN August 4, 2009
On a sunny June morning in Kabul, I sat among hundreds of turbaned men from Afghanistan’s Helmand and Kandahar provinces in a chandeliered wedding hall where they had gathered for a campaign rally to re-elect President Hamid Karzai. War was raging in Helmand and Kandahar. And yet there was an atmosphere of burlesque about the place. Waiters hammed up their service, skidding across the floor balancing mounds of rice, bananas and chicken, whirling shopping carts of Coke and Fanta. The organizer of the event and master of ceremonies was none other than Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the five-foot-tall ex-governor of Helmand and probably the country’s most infamous drug trafficker. From a velvet couch he barked out to the speakers: “Not so many poems! Keep your speeches short!” — but no one was listening.
At my table, an elderly Helmandi engineer described how awful things were in his region — families killed in coalition airstrikes, villages overrun by the Taliban. So why more Karzai? “If we choose someone else, it will only get worse,” he said through an interpreter. Another man said that at least Karzai had brought education and unity. “They are all lying,” a third said in English. He was the son of a prominent Kandahari elder who, a year before, was assassinated outside the family’s house. He’d also lost his uncle, brother and 45 other members of his extended family, he told me. He blamed the government. He was shaking his head at the spectacle in the wedding hall. “I told the men at my table, ‘You just came to show your faces on camera so if Karzai wins he will give you privileges.’ ” He laughed and said, “They told me they just came for lunch.” I asked what he thought would happen during the election in Kandahar. “Fraud,” he said. He himself claimed to have made 8,000 fake voter-registration cards. They were selling for $20.
After lunch, in a downstairs room filled with mannequins in pink and green wedding gowns, I had a chat with Akhundzada, the ex-governor. He is campaigning in the south for Karzai. First he wanted to explain that the nine tons of drugs found in his compound in 2005 were planted there by the British to frame him. Then he changed tack: “If people think I was a smuggler, O.K. But at least I spent the money on government and soldiers! Now the money goes to the Taliban and kills British and Americans and Afghan soldiers.” This is the same logic that Karzai used to try to get Akhundzada reinstalled as governor of Helmand. The British would not accept it. This seemed distinctly unfair to Akhundzada, given the other characters on the political stage: “They don’t take Fahim out of elections? Dostum is not criminal? Mohaqiq is not criminal? Just me?”
It was a comical and sinister and telling performance — a prominent Karzai backer damning key members of the president’s re-election team (locally dubbed “the warlord ticket”). The ethnic-Tajik Muhammad Fahim is running as Karzai’s first vice president (having previously served in the same post and as defense minister); the ethnic-Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum is returning from Turkey to deliver Uzbek votes to Karzai; and the ethnic-Hazara politician Muhammad Mohaqiq is a key Karzai ally to whom Karzai pledged five ministerial posts.
“I swear,” Akhundzada went on, eyes agog, “I have not killed a cat in all my life.” With that he took off with his rifle-toting guards and disappeared into his armored S.U.V.
Karzai applauds himself for his big-tent, forgive-and-forget approach. But his opponents are thrashing him for it. “If the goal is to consolidate a group of drug dealers as the government of Afghanistan so that you have relative peace, then what is the vision?” asked Ashraf Ghani when we met at his gracious villa on the southwestern edge of Kabul in February, a few months before he decided to run for president himself. “Is that what the 20-year-old girl who wants to become a computer engineer or doctor has in mind? Or the 22-year-old Afghan who won two gold medals in computers? Can they become stakeholders in an Afghanistan run by Sher Muhammad Akhundzada?”
The presidential campaign has put Karzai’s style of politics on trial. There are 41 candidates running in Afghanistan’s second-ever presidential elections, which take place on Aug. 20. Karzai’s main competitors are two of his former ministers — Ghani, who was finance minister from 2002 to 2004 and an adviser to the World Bank for 10 years; and Abdullah Abdullah, an ophthalmologist who became a close adviser to the legendary mujahedin commander Ahmed Shah Massoud (assassinated by Al Qaeda just before the 9/11 attacks) and served as foreign minister under Karzai until 2006. When I asked Abdullah what he’d do to stop drug smuggling, he said, “I wouldn’t let my brother touch it.” He was referring to Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half-brother, who is accused of running Kandahar like a mafia don and overseeing one of the local drug cartels. “Seriously, you lose your legitimacy if the perception is that your brother is doing it and benefiting from millions of dollars.”
Ghani, on his Web site, has branded the Karzais a mafia family, “Karzai Incorporated.” “The largest threat to Afghanistan now is this government,” he told me recently. “Just take one figure: last fiscal year from March 2007 to 2008, the Ministry of Finance collected 40 billion Afghanis, which is equivalent to around $800 million. The same ministry declares that the real revenue should have been 120 billion Afghanis. They are acknowledging that, due to corruption, 80 billion is being lost.” That, he said, worked out to $1.6 billion. “We go beg the entire world: ‘Please give us budget support; we need to pay our poor teachers and civil servants.’ If the revenue was collected we wouldn’t have needed a cent from the international community for the budget.”
Does Karzai care? Is this what he wants? “I don’t think so,” Ghani said. “But I don’t judge a president by his desires. I judge a president by his record and his company. We ranked 117 on Transparency International in 2005. Now we rank 176, the fifth-most-corrupt country on earth. It happened under his watch. And then he wants to run for office for another five years? Based on what? And the team he put together: isn’t it a declaration of war against the people of Afghanistan?”
Over the winter I spent several days in the presidential palace, the Arg, with Karzai and his entourage. I was hoping to find out who Karzai really is. Does he condone the venality of his friends and family? Is he unable to stop it? Is this just what life is in a country long torn by war? Did the West misjudge his character — or did it make it impossible for him to rule? Is he just in love with power and pomp? And why, with all the accusations of criminality, the unfulfilled promises, his plummeting popularity, would Hamid Karzai even want to run again?
I put this last question to him on a gloomy afternoon over tea at the Arg palace, where he lives and works and is confined much of the year. The question appeared to stump him. He said he had tried and failed to find a suitable replacement. Then he said, in his practiced English: “I don’t know what happened. I decided to run.” Then he said: “Look, I will tell you. But then I’ll leave it up to you whether you want to print it or not.” I was expecting some shocking revelation. But instead he fumbled about and said, “When needed, my extreme toughness with our allies is an asset I want the Afghan people to have if they choose so.” And, “The second reason, I don’t know how to put this. . . . I feel for the Afghan people, and they know that.” It all sounded so cryptic. As his train of thought neared its destination, he suddenly said: “I’m a very, very, very simple person. I have no property. I have no money. I have no love for luxury. If I find someone tomorrow that will combine all these three. . . . ” He sighed and took a deep breath. “I’m an exhausted person. I’ve not begun this seven years ago. I’ve begun this when I was 22. I’ve not had a private life since then. I deserve one. I long for one.” He lingered on the O of his longing. “The moment I get this choice, I would leave.”
It was clear that Karzai believes in the image he has fashioned of himself as protector and father of the Afghan nation. Or does he? Karzai is a theatrical man — a ham, even — funny and charming. He flourished in the adulation of his early years as head of state, when the fashion designer Tom Ford dubbed him the chicest man on the planet. His theatrical qualities have carried him along for some time. But what he actually believes is often hard to pin down. And lately the wear and tear of performance is beginning to show, like the creases in a fading diva. His friends told me he has health problems. He’s skin and bones. He always has a cold or a cough and takes effervescent vitamin-C tablets compulsively, which he did as we spoke. “He is stressed, short of patience, short of temper,” a friend said. He snaps easily. Promotes flatterers. Kills the messenger. Hugs his enemies. Abuses his friends. And his twitching eye — a nervous tic, they say — is unusually active.
Still, Karzai seems to feel he has a mission. Friends say he knows how bad his reputation is and wants to redeem his legacy. When I asked who his role model is, he said without hesitation, “Gandhi.” Ever since his days as a university student in India he has been fascinated by the man’s life and his ideas of nonviolent liberation. Karzai clearly abhors violence. Tears came to his eyes whenever we spoke about civilian casualties. He once had an aide, in the middle of the night, go buy back a child bride whose parents had given her away to repay a debt. Karzai and his aristocratic Pashtun family revere Ghaffar Khan, the nonviolent Pashtun leader who lived from 1890 to 1988. Through his charisma and belief in education, Ghaffar Khan mobilized a pacific movement known as the Red Shirts, first against the British and then against Pakistan. It was a remarkable feat, given the warrior nature of the Pashtun tribesmen. Khan became known as the “frontier Gandhi.”
Gandhi is also a model for Karzai, he told me, in terms of tolerance. “You can’t imagine how much I’ve tolerated,” he said, glaring from under his brow and leaning into his desk where he keeps two photographs, one of his 2-year-old son, Mirwais, and the other of the late King Zahir Shah. “I was like a person carrying a very delicate jar, a vase, in my hands, a very precious, delicate one that is so valuable that you don’t want it to drop, and you are walking through storms, through rains, through wind, through excesses of all kinds,” he said, elongating his vowels and carrying himself away in the drama of his metaphor. “You fall but you keep the vase, delicately holding it so it doesn’t break. That’s how Afghanistan was,” he said. “Carrying it for so long you have to be very accommodating. That weakens you.”
What accommodations? The warlords? The foreigners?
“Everything,” he said. “Everything, everything, everything! I had to balance the U.S. and Iran in Afghanistan. I had to balance other countries in here. I had to balance Europe. I had to balance the Muslim world. I had to make Afghanistan a country where all work together for it. And that I have managed. Fortunately. But, you know, at great personal stress and cost.”
The cost? Loneliness. A man painted into a corner. Every day he wakes to another round of punches from the world’s diplomats and news media. He studies the press clippings, CNN, the BBC, the local news channels, ravenously and angrily. They blame him and his brothers and his ministers for the country’s corruption, for the insurgency eating away at the nation, for running a narco-state (in Hillary Clinton’s phrase) and even for the food shortages facing eight million Afghans. In January, when Karzai lashed out at one of his vice presidents in a cabinet meeting, accusing him of conspiring with foreigners, then threatened to go to the mountains to fight the invaders himself, word went around that Karzai was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
It wasn’t hard to see why. “No one is on his side,” a foreign observer told me with mild pity. “He’s trapped in the palace, trapped by his family.” When a bomb went off at the German Embassy in January, all the windows of his house were blown out. “And little Mirwais,” he said, “was running around the house going bam-bam-bang-bang! Nobody had told Karzai. He was in his office. He got home and they were mending the windows.”
The president’s residence sits within the Arg palace grounds along a tree-lined path behind the Gul Khanna (the House of Flowers), where Karzai has his office. At the end of the workday, the president takes a brisk 10-minute walk. When I followed after him one cold evening, 10 men or more covered him as he walked along. His cellphone rang. He slipped aside. The men tried to stay near. Assassins have repeatedly tried to kill Karzai. A bullet just missed him in Kandahar in 2002. In 2007, he was rocketed during a speech in Ghazni, between Kabul and Kandahar — but he stayed onstage. He insisted on holding an Independence Day parade last year despite security warnings. And sure enough, a well-trained hit squad fired on the parade, killing several officials and narrowly missing the president. For the last two years security has been so tight, friends say, that the president is getting what they call the Arg syndrome. Sometimes at night he has been known to slip out of the palace with a bodyguard in a beat-up car just to drive around Kabul and see what’s going on. He will express surprise, delight, even, at the new buildings and sights.
I recently asked an old friend of Karzai’s why Karzai would choose as his running mate Muhammad Fahim, a controversial figure who has been accused of multiple human rights abuses over many years. “Karzai believes that his two greatest mistakes as president were the removals of Sher Muhammad Akhundzada and Marshal Fahim,” he said. Both happened under intense Western pressure. The reason he regretted their removal was not that he thought they were honest statesmen but that he found they were more trouble out of office. Fahim’s removal lost him mujahedin support, and Akhundzada’s removal triggered the fall of Helmand Province to the Taliban.
To understand why everyone was so shocked that Karzai chose Fahim as his running mate, you need to know a little of the personal history between the two men. It shows how warlordism does and doesn’t work — and, in a sense, what Karzai will forgive to stay in power. Back in 1994, the mujahedin factions who fought off the Soviets were supposed to be cooperating in a coalition government. Instead they were deep in a civil war, rocketing one another and Kabul to smithereens.
One of these factions belonged to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, today an outlawed insurgent but then prime minister and head of a large, mostly ethnic-Pashtun political party. Another belonged to the man who was then Afghanistan’s president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, leader of a largely Tajik party. In this government, Karzai was deputy foreign minister and trying, as is his wont, to play conciliator between the factions. But Rabbani and his men began to suspect that Karzai was plotting something with Hekmatyar. Rabbani’s head of intelligence was none other than Muhammad Fahim. Karzai was hauled into an interrogation center in Kabul from which few returned alive. But just as the interrogation got under way, a rocket slammed into the roof of the building. Karzai fled to Pakistan.
In 1996, after the Taliban captured Kabul and threw out the mujahedin factions, Karzai briefly considered becoming an ambassador for the Taliban government. After all, the Taliban were mostly, like Karzai, Kandahari Pashtuns; he knew many of them. But the position went to someone else. From that time until 2001, he joined a broad coalition of friends and enemies seeking a grand loya jirga, or tribal council, to bring peace to Afghanistan.
With the overthrow of the Taliban, the ethnic Tajiks who made up the bulk of the Northern Alliance considered themselves the victors. At the Bonn Conference held in Germany in December 2001 to create the future Afghan government, the Northern Alliance Tajiks demanded and got the most important ministries. Given Afghanistan’s demographics, everyone knew they needed an ethnic Pashtun as president, and Abdullah Abdullah, who was then with the Northern Alliance, pressed the case for Karzai. He seemed the perfect choice at the time, Abdullah recently told me: a Pashtun from a landed family in Kandahar, known to the Northern Alliance through years of jihad and then various peace processes. “After fighting all those years against the Taliban, who were a southern Pashtun movement,” Abdullah told me recently, “for the north to push for someone from the south was breaking the ice and a milestone that we could build a future on.”
Karzai’s personal tale didn’t hurt. Two weeks after 9/11, he hopped on the back of a friend’s motorcycle in Quetta, Pakistan, and journeyed into the Taliban-infested Afghan mountains to persuade the tribes to revolt. He had no gunmen with him. Just a satellite phone from the C.I.A. and faith in his powers of persuasion. He and the men he gathered were chased by the Taliban but fought them off. “They called for help to the C.I.A.,” recalls Jason Amerine, who was a Special Forces captain assigned to make contact with Karzai. Navy Seals landed, pulled Karzai and tribal leaders out and flew them to a base in Pakistan. Even then, Karzai understood that appearances mean everything in a part of the world where conspiracy is taken as truth. He was willing to fudge the facts to seal the legend of his heroism. Live on the BBC, he insisted he was somewhere in Afghanistan. In fact, he was with Amerine in Pakistan. Nevertheless he did persuade the very reluctant Americans to help him return to Taliban land. “Karzai was such a dark horse in all this that there was no real reason for anyone to risk it,” Amerine said. “He had no guys in the south. His plan was very idealistic: ‘If we show up, the south will rise.’ ” In the end, Afghans did rise against the Taliban, including in the south. Karzai was right. And his legend stuck.
So it was that on a cold December evening in 2001, Hamid Karzai flew from Kandahar to Kabul to become the interim leader of the new Afghanistan. He had just a few men with him, including his uncle Aziz and his younger half-brother, Shawali, when he stepped onto the tarmac. There to greet him was Fahim, brow furrowed, as it always is, along with more than a hundred of his soldier-bodyguards.
“Where are all your men?” he asked Karzai.
“You are my men,” Karzai said to Fahim and his band of Northern Alliance fighters. “All of you who are Afghans are my men.”
Fahim was stunned. No tribesmen? No bodyguards? No soldiers? A civilian leader all alone? A southern Pashtun aristocrat putting himself in the hands of the Tajik northerners? Karzai entrusting his life to his former tormentor? It was a gesture of infinite faith.
From that day onward, Fahim became a thorn in Karzai’s side, always reminding Karzai that his life depended on him. After Karzai’s Pashtun vice president, Haji Qadir, was assassinated in July 2002, Karzai so distrusted Fahim’s bodyguards (Fahim was then in charge of the army) that he accepted protection from U.S. forces. Cabinet meetings featured regular clashes between the so-called warlords on one hand and the technocrats — or dogwashers, as the educated Afghan returnees were known — on the other. In particular, men like Fahim and Ashraf Ghani (then minister of finance) were at each other’s throats. And Karzai was once again in the middle.
Zia Mojadedi, an old friend of Karzai’s and now the ambassador to Poland, put much of the blame for the dysfunctional cabinet on the international community. “Most of the NATO members have a gentleman in the cabinet,” he told me. “Each one defends his own man. And those who make donations are the ones deciding. So he was confused.” One famous example is Dostum, the Uzbek warlord from the north. After he beat up and detained a political rival, he drank himself into a wild state and, in King Kong fashion, took up a position on the roof of his garish mansion in Kabul, baiting the police and vowing that they’d never take him alive. Karzai wanted to arrest him. But the Turks, who are major donors and are ethnically related to the Uzbeks, vehemently opposed the move. Finally a deal was worked out for Dostum to go for some rest and rehab in Turkey.
For years everyone was telling Karzai to get rid of Zarar Ahmad Muqbil, his minister of the interior, whom senior U.N. officials accused of taking kickbacks from organized-crime rings within the ministry. But the Americans loved him on account of the glowing reports submitted by his American mentor. The internationals referred to her as “Rosa Klebb,” after the infamous Russian counterintelligence agent in the Ian Fleming novel “From Russia With Love,” who sported a venom-laden dart in her shoe. Even Karzai used to tease Muqbil, saying to him, “How is your godmother?”
“In a microcosm, the problem with the whole of Afghanistan was Muqbil,” says Jawed Ludin, Karzai’s former chief of staff, who watched the whole fiasco with Zarar Muqbil unfold firsthand. “To what extent do you blame Karzai? On the one hand, the British ambassador and friends would tell him Zarar was incompetent and should be removed. On the other, the American would praise him and say he’s doing a fine job. And the Americans were the largest donor to police reform.”
Karzai told me, “I was a president without any resources directly in my control.” It was a defensive response, but it was also true. According to one palace official: “Early as 2003, in discussions with Donald Rumsfeld, Karzai would say: ‘Look, we cannot live with this situation, when you think I am the president, but I am not. We cannot leave Dostum in the north, Shirzai in Kandahar, Ismail Khan in Herat.’ And you know what Rumsfeld said? ‘Look, Mr. President, they are our friends, and we do not want a green-on-green situation.’ I didn’t know this phrase then.” Green on green: friendly soldier against friendly soldier.
Later that year, Karzai threatened to resign if the warlords who were hogging all the customs revenue didn’t turn their dividends over to the central government. A compromise was reached: the first of many. Karzai began to make peace, accommodating jihadis, Communists, technocrats, dogwashers, war criminals, democrats. All had a place in Karzai’s big tent. The next two years could be called Karzai’s honeymoon period. Two pillars were essential to his stability — Lakhdar Brahimi, the wise old Algerian resistance leader and diplomat who headed up the U.N. mission, and Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American steeped in the traditions both of Afghan tribal horse-trading and American bureaucracy. They could help Karzai make tough decisions and back them up with American muscle.
Then, in 2004, he won the first presidential elections ever held in Afghanistan. Brahimi and Khalilzad left — and by 2005, most of the reformers around Karzai either walked away or were not invited back into his cabinet. Among those who left was Ashraf Ghani. “In 2005, Karzai could have taken the country in any direction he wished,” Ghani told me. “His legitimacy knew no bounds.” What happened? “He failed to lead,” Ghani said.
Or maybe he led the only way he knew how. At heart, Karzai is a Pashtun tribal leader, just like his father was. What are the responsibilities of the tribal leader? To protect his property (livestock and women), his land and his people. If one of your people is put in jail, whether he lays mines, steals or murders, you’re obliged to get him out and let the tribe deal with him. If the law helps your case, great. If not, tradition will do. That tradition is evident all over the campaign trail, where Karzai has even released criminals from prison so they can campaign for him.
When Karzai’s father was killed in Pakistan in 1999, his family and tribesmen decided that, because his older brothers were living in America, Hamid would take over as a leader of the tribe and, in keeping with tradition, they placed the turban on his head. When he assumed the presidency, he took what he knew from tribal leadership and applied it to his method of rule. He sees himself as the tribal leader of all Afghans. As such he’s the last resort for those seeking to rectify injustice. “In his dream he is a king,” one friend says.
Other close friends of Karzai describe his leadership style as a kind of three-card monte where you never know which card will appear. One card is tribal. “His father was head of the tribe, and in tribal culture you depend on loyalty of individuals rather than institutions,” said Ali Jalali, his former interior minister and a friend from refugee days in Pakistan. “You always try to be a patron to people close and loyal to you.” The second is the factional politics of resistance in Peshawar, where mujahedin leaders organized their resistance to the Soviet occupation. “Jihadi politics is mostly wheeling, dealing, no strategy, all tactical,” Jalali continued. “Please people here. Break promises there.” And the third is democracy. He cherishes the values of democracy but has no faith in its institutions. “How he reconciles these competing demands creates his style of leadership,” Jalali said. In reality, said another friend, “he sees human rights, freedom of the press, the law, the constitution as chains around his hands and legs.”
He is in his element playing Solomon, hosting elders for lunch in the palatial dining hall. They request a dam or a road or the release from custody of a tribesman accused of terrorism or kidnapping. If they are important politically — and, in the case of a prisoner, can vouch for his future behavior — Karzai often agrees, in kingly fashion.
He resists looking deeply into the consequences of his decisions. Last year, Karzai’s wife, Zeenat, a gynecologist, saw a report on television about the rape of a very young girl and her family’s futile quest for justice. Karzai was horrified. He had the police and prosecutor fired. He put the fight against rape on the national agenda.
Not long after, the other Karzai, the political animal, meddled in an obscure case in which a woman named Sara was raped by three men who were brothers. The evidence was overwhelming, and the brothers’ conviction was upheld to the highest court. But Karzai issued a decree releasing them. Sara went mad, and her husband was murdered.
I asked Karzai in February: “Why did you do that?”
“The story turned out to be different,” he said. He couldn’t remember the details and asked an aide to look into it.
In fact, the brothers reported to a local strongman, Mawlawi Islam, who was a member of Parliament and an important ally of Karzai’s. Islam’s son, who works in the Arg palace, told me that he had asked the palace staff to examine the case. The palace’s administrative office then developed another story — told to Karzai, and later to me — claiming Sara’s rape never took place and adding that her son had raped the wife of one of the convicted brothers. It became so convoluted that Karzai probably didn’t know the details. Still, he signed a decree releasing the brothers in the name of Islamic mercy for their mother.
“We have a saying, When you come to power your eyes go blind, your ears go deaf and you don’t know anything anymore,” an old Kandahari friend of the president’s told me.
Hence, perhaps, Karzai’s willful blindness about what his own brothers are up to. In explaining Karzai’s relationship to his brothers, Karzai’s family and friends allude to his outcast childhood — of the seven sons, he was not one of his father’s favorites, they say. “The mad one,” that’s how his father called him. The pet name stuck. A quiet boy, a dreamer, an odd one who could scare the other boys with his strange faces and moods, who loved to jump on his horse in jeans and cowboy boots and ride around as if in an American movie.
Amin Arsala, an avuncular former diplomat and adviser to Karzai who considered running for president, often warned Karzai about his brothers ruining his reputation. But either he cannot or will not stand up to them. There’s a revolving door of diplomats, politicians and tribal leaders who all see Karzai, complain about his brothers and then leave, knowing he’ll do nothing.
Qayum, an older brother, has spent most of his life in America running Afghan restaurants and, during the days of jihad, he introduced Karzai to U.S. government officials. He is a political guru for Karzai, though he complains Karzai doesn’t listen to him. He resigned as a member of Parliament for Kandahar and spends much of his time in Saudi Arabia, trying to bring the Taliban in from the cold. Mahmoud is the hotblooded business mogul, vice chairman of the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce. He says he wants to promote free-market capitalism and complained to me one morning at his home in Kabul that his brother doesn’t understand economics and can’t run the government. “It’s mujahedin,” he told me, “it’s personal relationships, cash basis, no institutions.”
Many Afghans consider Mahmoud a bully who has muscled his way into the biggest business projects. He has 50 percent of Afghanistan’s Toyota distributions by way of Jack Kemp, who introduced Mahmoud to Toyota executives. Karzai was unhappy about his family’s involvement in such dealings, recalled Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the American ambassador at the time, adding, “He had the Japanese ambassador summoned to the palace to tell him, ‘Don’t give the dealership to my brother Mahmoud.’ ” But the Japanese listened to Kemp, not Karzai. Mahmoud is a major shareholder in Kabul Bank and, according to The New York Times, purchased the shares with a loan issued by the bank’s founder. And he persuaded the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a U.S. government agency, to offer him loans for a real estate development in Kandahar that everyone considers at once lovely and dodgy. Nice homes, grounds, guards, school. But it was government land purchased by the Karzais at $250 a jereb and sold at $28,000 a jereb.
Karzai’s response? “My brother is an American businessman,” he told me. “Business has got nothing to do with me. I don’t know if he has shares in the Kabul Bank, but if he has, what can I do?” This habit of saying “What can I do?” is precisely what has undermined Karzai among many Afghans.
The brother who really gives the president heartburn is Ahmed Wali, his younger half-brother. A possibly apocryphal story that Afghans and diplomats love to repeat involves the president asking Ahmed Wali: “Are you engaged with the drug networks? Are you aiding x, y and z?” In the story, Ahmed Wali storms out of the meeting saying: “Well, Hamid, at least I’m only ruining Kandahar. You’re ruining the whole country.”
To me, Karzai claimed that after an article about his brother and drugs appeared in The New York Times: “I called the U.S. government and intelligence here to ask them, and they said: ‘Totally wrong. We are sorry for that article.’ ” (A State Department spokesman would not comment on whether this conversation even took place.)
Then he added, “So I’ve done my job on that.”
Yet on every trip I’ve made to Kandahar, I have heard another story about Ahmed Wali and drugs. Some of the people who have recounted the incidents are now dead. Like Malim Akbar Khakrezwal, an elder of the Alakozai tribe. In 2006, he took me around the fertile lands of his district, which are now infiltrated by Taliban. He told me that when he was provincial-intelligence chief, he captured 1,400 kilograms of opium belonging to Jan Muhammad, then governor of Uruzgan and a very close friend of the president. Jan Muhammad told Akbar to release the opium, and he refused. “My brother called me and said, ‘We are not able to fight these big people,’ ” Akbar told me. “ ‘We are weak. Release them.’ So I went to Ahmed Wali and said: ‘You are my commander; what should I do with this opium? Should I give it back to Jan Muhammad?’ ‘Yes. Give it back,’ he said. Twenty days later I was released from my position.” Last year he was assassinated.
A Western intelligence official who has spent much of the last seven years in Kandahar and, for obvious reasons, wanted to remain anonymous, told me: “The Karzai family has opium and blood on their hands. They systematically install low-level officials up to provincial governors to make sure that, from the farm gate, in bulk, the opium is moved unfettered. When history analyzes this period and looks at this family, it will uncover a litany of extensive corruption that was tolerated because the West tolerated this family.”
Perhaps. Or not. As many Afghans have pointed out, U.S. history is full of robber barons and of families who made their fortunes during Prohibition, and in the words of Ashraf Ghani “turned very decent as families.”
“Karzai should see this as ‘Godfather II,’ ” a U.N. official says. “You got to get out of the business and go legit.”
This winter, as the stakes became higher and the new Obama administration appeared to snub Karzai, his theatrics began to take a more menacing turn. He was becoming less decisive and more distrustful of his advisers. He saw plots in every corner, interpreting the moves of Afghans, Americans and especially the British as proof that “they” were trying to unseat him. And in fact they were and maybe still are. The new U.S. ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, barely a month into his term, made a point of showing up at news conferences with other presidential candidates, including Ghani and Abdullah. Karzai threw a kind of presidential tantrum at his own press conference and accused the foreigners of intervening in Afghanistan’s national sovereignty (which, as financiers, administrators and protectors, they do every day). “That is of immense sensitivity to the people of Afghanistan and to myself, and that is something that we will fight tooth and nail,” Karzai said.
The American tactic seemingly worked. Afghans began talking overnight about how the Americans had adopted a new candidate — either Ghani or Abdullah. And while few Afghans knew much about either rival, thanks to Karzai’s anger at Eikenberry, the names of Ghani and Abdullah were mentioned over and over in the news.
Paranoid people usually do, of course, have enemies. Diplomats smile over meals with Karzai, bring him gifts from abroad and then send reports home saying he’s unsteady. One diplomat seasoned in the Middle East and Asia told me, “He’s the most conspiratorial leader I’ve ever met.” Perhaps. But you have to see his presidency from Karzai’s point of view.
If there was a clear turning point, a moment when the Karzai government began to lose its grip, it was in the spring of 2006. On a sunny morning at the end of that May, on the northern outskirts of Kabul, an American soldier in a convoy lost control of his truck and careered into rush-hour traffic. Five people were killed. Many more were wounded. Afghans began pelting the American vehicles with stones. The Americans fired in the air. By the time word spread across Kabul, the story had ballooned into a massacre of civilians by drunken American soldiers. Waves of young Afghan men set buildings ablaze, attacking anyone and anything associated with foreigners and the government. They shouted, “Down with America,” and “Down with Karzai,” as they burned a billboard-size portrait of the president. Even medical students joined the mob. The police were nowhere to be seen; or if they were, it was as ordinary rioters who’d thrown off their uniforms.
The mob raged on for six hours. A dozen people were killed and a hundred wounded. The defense minister finally deployed troops onto the streets. Karzai ordered a curfew and went on TV to reassure the population.
Inside the Arg palace, no one was reassured, least of all Karzai. “He was shocked at how vulnerable we all were,” Jawed Ludin, then Karzai’s chief of staff, told me not long ago. “And he was angry with the Afghan police and international security forces.” This wasn’t the Taliban. This wasn’t Pakistan. It was a public revolt. And there were no government institutions that could stop it.
Karzai began to suspect a plot to unseat him. “He knew that Marshal Fahim was unhappy with him ever since he was removed as vice president and minister of defense,” one palace official recalls. Karzai was desperate to find out whether the riots were spontaneous or whether Fahim orchestrated them. For hours on end, he sat in a room behind his office watching footage collected from various sources. Much of it showed the mob arriving at Parliament. Why, Karzai wondered, did Yunous Qanooni, the speaker of the Parliament, send out a delegation to negotiate with the rioters as if they were a legitimate group and not a bunch of hooligans? Qanooni and Fahim (both Tajiks from the Northern Alliance) must have been up to something. But what?
“Every Pashtun was convinced it was a Tajik plot led by the Northern Alliance,” Ronald Neumann, the U.S. ambassador at the time, told me. Most Kabulis agreed. Some medical students, who happily participated in the mayhem, told me that Northern Alliance commanders were “among us.” A British adviser to the government told me: “I was with Rabbani’s son in his hotel while he claimed to be organizing the riots from his mobile phone and boasting about it. It was completely bizarre.” Whether or not it was organized, the students and young men happily joined in the fray to let off four years of pent-up frustration. They were fed up with the arrogance of American soldiers. They were fed up with hearing about the billions of aid dollars that came to Afghanistan and went into the pockets of American contractors and their Afghan partners. And they were terrified by the return of the Taliban, not just in the south but sneaking around various neighborhoods of Kabul.
Karzai couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone. And when he didn’t get to the bottom of it, he suspected his own intelligence apparatus. Amrullah Saleh, his head of intelligence, had been Fahim’s translator back in the anti-Soviet days of jihad. Saleh was America’s man, not Karzai’s choice. Frustrated and rash, Karzai questioned Saleh’s loyalty in front of other officials. Saleh submitted his resignation (which was not accepted). It wasn’t the first and certainly wouldn’t be the last time Saleh tried to resign.
And what about the Americans? The C.I.A.’s station chief in Kabul at the time was a friend of Karzai’s from their days together in the Uruzgan mountains fighting the Taliban. Karzai met with him and Ambassador Neumann. Karzai was livid and unnerved. If the riots were spontaneous, Karzai told them, he should resign. It means they don’t want you here and they don’t want me, and I don’t want to remain the president. I want to leave.
The station chief was firm, according to a source who was present. No, Mr. President, you are not leaving.
“I felt really bad for him,” Jawed Ludin recalled. Karzai was so alone. He continued to watch the riot footage in his back room, trying to glean the plot. “I realized that, at that time, he had no dependable instrument of power,” Ludin said. “He didn’t have the money, the police, the intelligence. He had nothing.”
It was Karzai’s Nixon moment. People inside and outside the palace spoke of life “before the 8th of Jowza” (the date of the riots) and “after the 8th of Jowza.” That is, before May 29, 2006, and after.
Whom could he trust? All he could do was begin recasting the play, substituting Pashtun jihadi commanders for non-Pashtun ones. He began to surround himself with the former loyalists of his old friend Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. This was the same commander whom the Americans named, in 2003, as a “specially designated global terrorist.” This was the man who had recently declared himself an open ally of Al Qaeda. But while Karzai’s new cohort might still have had loyalties to Hekmatyar, they could at least be organized, disciplined and trusted to a certain extent.
The riots woke Karzai up to the fact that, in choosing not to have a political party, he had completely isolated himself. He had no constituency. He had thought he could be a symbol of unity for all Afghans, but even a Mandela or a Gandhi needed a party or a grass-roots movement. Karzai had little more than his own family and weekly video conferences with President George Bush. So the Pashtun jihadis gradually became his constituency and insurance policy.
The riots coincided with the resurgence of the Taliban, the American withdrawal from the south and the slow arrival of disjointed NATO forces. Every NATO country came with its own mandate and its own rules of engagement. And most of them thought they were deploying to a peacekeeping mission. Meanwhile, elements in the Pakistani military-intelligence agency were sending in suicide bombers and Taliban foot soldiers to take over Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan, Zabul. Such a chaotic scene needed a firm, decisive and confident hand.
In 2005 Sima Simar, the chairwoman of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, who knew Karzai from exile days in Pakistan, along with Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, presented Karzai with a survey titled “A Call for Justice.” The findings were astounding. Seventy percent of Afghans said they had suffered direct losses, injuries and violations over two decades of war. They wanted war criminals brought to justice and barred from public office. Karzai told Arbour at the time: “Madam High Commissioner, I know justice is very important. Human beings are prisoners of their memories. If you don’t deal with them properly you cannot get rid of them.”
“He spoke like Mandela, Martin Luther King,” recalled Nader Nadery, a member of the commission that had been fighting to get Karzai to support dealing with the crimes of the past. Karzai appointed a special committee to create an action plan for transitional justice — including ministers and judicial advisers who would work alongside the U.N. By late 2006, they had arrived at a compromise plan. There would be a vetting process, truth commissions and even the possibility of tribunals.
On Dec. 10, 2006, Karzai attended the international Human Rights Day event at the national television and radio hall in Kabul. Nadery showed a documentary in the middle of the event — a collection of harrowing tales by survivors of war crimes from the last two decades. The film silenced the hall. Karzai then got up and set aside his prepared speech.
He spoke about the courage of a girl in the film who jumped from the fifth floor to save her honor because warlords wanted to rape her. He spoke of the mass graves and massacres and announced that he was launching the long-awaited action plan for peace, reconciliation and justice. And from now on, this day would be reserved to give dignity to the victims.
Karzai then moved from the sufferings of the past to the present. Not only did he have no power to stop the warlords, he said, “we can’t prevent the terrorists from coming from Pakistan. And we can’t prevent the coalition from bombing the civilians. And our children are dying because of this.” He told the story of a 2-year-old girl from Kandahar who’d just been brought to the palace. A NATO airstrike killed her entire family and left her paralyzed. The toll of the year, his helplessness, the dying children — it was all too much. The president’s voice broke, his lips trembled and he began to cry. He took a handkerchief from under his glass to dry his eyes. “Cruelty at the highest level,” he quivered. “The cruelty is too much.”
The president, too, was suffering. Everyone in the hall was weeping.
A few days later, Human Rights Watch released a report documenting 22 years of war crimes by the communists, the mujahedin and the Taliban. The list included current and former government officials like Rabbani, Fahim, Dostum.
The warlords smelled a plot. Using their parliamentary power, they drafted legislation to give themselves amnesty for all past crimes. They bused their supporters in from all over the country. Ten thousand people gathered in Ghazi Stadium, the site of the Taliban’s notorious public executions. They waved placards, “Long Live Dostum,” “Death to America,” “Death to Human Rights,” “Death to Dogwashers.” Most of the leaders of the civil-war factions showed up for the fun.
“After that, Karzai became afraid,” Nadery said. Though he never rejected the amnesty law, he also never signed it. It was another turning point in Karzai’s presidency. Rangin Spanta, who was part of the transitional-justice action committee and is now foreign minister, told me he tried to resign: “Karzai rejected my resignation. ‘You must be quiet,’ he said. ‘Let us look forward, because the balance of power is not in our interest.’ ” Maybe. But there are more Afghans who were victims of the warlords than who supported them. And most of those warlords — Sayyaf, Dostum, Fahim, Khalili, Mohaqiq — went on to join Karzai’s presidential re-election campaign.
When I asked Karzai about the return of warlords to power, he said: “It’s a great thing to talk about the kind of justice that is ideal and that we all should have. But do we have the means? Do we have the luxury of that?”
By late 2007, Karzai’s turn toward accommodation with warlords, tribalism and semiretired jihadis — and away from the international community — seems to have been completed. The palace had become like a Shakespearean stage, its officials, like so many Iagos, filling Karzai’s mind with plots and treachery. The British and the Americans, worried that Afghanistan was sinking beyond repair, conceived the position of a civilian czar who could coordinate the U.N. mission and the NATO mission and possibly bring some order into the chaos of the Arg palace. The man they chose was the British diplomat Paddy Ashdown, who had been the international community’s high representative to Bosnia until 2006. Karzai was at first intrigued by the idea and even accepted it. But the Iagos in the palace feared they would lose their gatekeeping status and the money they earned from it. They persuaded Karzai that the choice of Ashdown, who was born in British India to a colonial family and who had served as a British spy, was evidence of a British conspiracy.
Karzai has a complicated relationship with the British. He favors English shoes. He was a fan of “Last of the Summer Wine,” a three-decades-long BBC sitcom about the madcap adventures of elderly friends in the Yorkshire countryside. He has a romantic fascination with British royalty and rearranged his schedule to attend the Prince of Wales’s 60th birthday. Most of the other attendees were real royalty. “He thinks the Prince of Wales is a sensitive man, who understands him and Islam and the region,” one diplomat explained. On another occasion he visited the prince’s house in Scotland, seizing the chance to break out of his palace prison and stride across the moors for hours. Perhaps it reminded him of his days at college in Simla, where he used to walk for miles across the Indian hills.
“Maybe he just pretends to be a great lover of English culture,” the diplomat told me. “He thinks they’re in league with the Pakistanis and that they are two-faced and tricky and if they wanted to they could defeat the Taliban but they don’t because they want to keep their troops there.”
Karzai believes that evidence for a British conspiracy can be found in the story of Musa Qala, a collection of villages in the deserts of Helmand and a crossroads in the drug-transport routes. The tale has become a “Rashomon”-like parable. For Karzai it is a story of British duplicity. For the British it is a story of Karzai’s treachery and American bullying. And for the Americans it’s a story of European appeasement and Karzai’s madness.
In October 2006, after months of fighting between the British and Taliban that had left everyone exhausted and bloodied, all sides agreed on a truce. The British and the Taliban pulled back. The elders promised to keep the Taliban out. But almost immediately there were problems. The Taliban began creeping in. The town fell again. The Americans accused the British of wimping out of a fight. They pressured Karzai to distance himself from the whole scenario.
Gen. David Richards, the British officer in charge of NATO forces in Afghanistan, was caught in the middle of it all. Karzai liked and trusted Richards and appreciated his style. “He’d sometimes get me over three or four times a day to talk about all sorts of things, not just military,” Richards recalled. Karzai gave Richards and Helmand’s governor, Muhammad Daud, who helped organize the truce, his blessing. “The U.S. military and, I suspect, the C.I.A. were pretty hostile to it from the outset,” Richards told me. Gen. Dan McNeill of the U.S. Army made no secret of his feelings. Later, when he replaced Richards, he vowed that there’d be no “Musa Qalas” on his watch. And to drive the point home, McNeill began bombing targets around the district as soon as he took over from Richards.
Karzai was, of course, caught in the middle between the British and the Americans. The Americans had more money, more troops, more power. To make matters worse, on the heels of Musa Qala, General Richards flew to Islamabad to see Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. “I delivered Musharraf a pretty sharp message that we expected him to do more to help, but I think Karzai believed that I was getting too close to Musharraf,” Richards told me. Richards began passing notes between the two hostile presidents, trying to get them to work with each other.
The palace advisers seized on those visits as proof that the British were going to sell out Afghanistan. They told Karzai that Richards and Musharraf didn’t talk about Afghanistan at all. They talked about London and terrorism. Look at Helmand, they’d say. It used to be so peaceful. Until the British forced you to remove Sher Muhammad Akhundzada. Whom did they replace him with? Muhammad Daud, plucked from the National Security Council. Who constructed the National Security Council? The British. Who paid for it? The British. Who has advisers there? The British.
The advisers pushed Karzai closer to the edge. Look around you, closer to home, they said. Is that not a coup in the works? Jawed Ludin, the chief of staff, and Hanif Atmar, minister of education, had both studied in Britain. They have nightly dinners and meetings with the minister of defense, the minister of foreign affairs. . . .
One day in front of several people inside the palace, Karzai turned accusingly on Ludin and Atmar: There’s news the British are conspiring against us, against me personally. There’s news that you are meeting very frequently. What is happening? Why are you meeting?
They replied that they were just getting together socially.
Karzai said he didn’t believe them, according to an Afghan official present at the incident.
The next day Karzai regretted his words, as he often does. He apologized. It was too late. Both men submitted their resignations. Ludin became ambassador to Norway. Atmar stayed on as minister for education, but he and the president hardly spoke for months until Karzai appointed him as the new minister of the interior. These rifts have since healed and Karzai’s men have rallied for the presidential campaign.
“Every conceivable lie is told to the president to alienate him from his friends,” Ashraf Ghani told me. “He accused me in front of Secretary Rice and the British secretary of joining Ashdown in a conspiracy to unseat him. I had a family illness in Dubai around the clock. I met with Paddy Ashdown once in my life. Yet the Afghan government for a week was concentrating on an alleged conspiracy.”
By the end of 2007, Karzai’s worst fears seemed to come to fruition. The new governor of Helmand, an old friend of Karzai’s father, claimed to have uncovered a plot by the British for a Taliban training camp. The allegations were so far-fetched that the entire diplomatic community began to think Karzai had gone mad. In reality, Michael Semple, then the European Union’s political adviser, had come up with a plan for a Taliban re-education camp in Helmand, and several of Karzai’s advisers had agreed to it. Yet, in front of his security team, Karzai accused the British of total treachery.
According to one diplomat, the British responded that they had been trying to pursue reconciliation and had documents approving the project signed by Afghanistan’s ministry of the interior and by its intelligence service. Karzai’s advisers squirmed and said nothing. Apparently no one had dared to tell Karzai about the camp.
The damage was done. Enraged, Karzai had Michael Semple and Mervyn Patterson, two of the foreigners most knowledgeable about Afghanistan, thrown out of the country and an Afghan general imprisoned.
I asked Karzai if he really believes, as so many Afghans do, that the British and Americans don’t want the Taliban defeated. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I wonder. After all, I am also an Afghan. So I have to believe in what the majority of the Afghan people believe in.” And that the British want the Taliban to take over Helmand and Kandahar? “The Taliban are already in Helmand,” he said with a knowing look.
“In my experience of working in 21 countries, one thing I’ve learned,” the American election guru James Carville told me over the phone in his Southern drawl, “unpopular incumbents do not do well in anything approaching a fair election.” Carville has taken on the job of consulting for Ashraf Ghani’s campaign. It’s not for the money, he told me. It’s more for sentimental reasons. “I really want to help,” he said. “This is an instance where you know in your heart the difference in Afghanistan in five years under Ashraf or under Karzai will be really profound for the average person’s life.”
The consensus in Afghanistan is that if the Aug. 20 elections are somehow fair — which is impossible to guarantee — there will most likely be a runoff in a second round. That is what the opposition is counting on. Despite the belief across the country that the Americans or someone else will decide who becomes president, I found people in remote corners campaigning for Abdullah, Ghani, Karzai and others.
Karzai remains well ahead. What happens if he wins? “What will you do then?” I asked an American working for the Obama administration.
“The first step is to shift away from the weekly pat on the back he got from Bush but not be as removed as Obama was,” he said. “Then if we can reduce his paranoia and if he has a renewed mandate and if we get the good Karzai, the charming Karzai. . . . ” It was a lot of ifs.
As for Karzai, he has patched up his relations with his ministers, his staff, his enemies and various opponents, promising more positions than he can possibly fill. What is most disturbing to Afghans, however, is the criminal personalities he has brought into his campaign. They dominate both politics and the economy: the glitzy new Kabul neighborhood of Sherpur, with its “narcotecture” palaces, has become their home and the symbol of their power. In Sherpur’s shadow, as I sloshed through the streets of the other Kabul, past refugees in muddy tents and a woman left like detritus on the road, quivering, I wondered how Afghanistan’s warlords, steeped in the jihadi tradition of intimidation, could ever bring peace, or economic hope, to the Afghan people. “With enough resources,” the American official said, “a lot of these guys can clean up their act.”
That is not the belief of Dr. Azam Dadfar, the minister of higher education and one of the few psychiatrists in the country trained in psychoanalysis. In the 1980s he ran a trauma clinic in the Peshawar refugee camps. Today, he said, out of these decades of war, a new Afghan character type has emerged — a borderline personality characteristic of jihadis. “Multiple-personality disorder is a coping mechanism,” he said, speaking about the whole generation of men who grew up in jihad. “A young man who lost his father, his home, he looks to become the cleverest, the most criminal, the lion. In the jungle, there are no values but self-preservation. There’s no law. And this character learns to lie even to himself.”
Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer and Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has reported extensively on Afghanistan for the magazine, most recently from the Korengal Valley in “Battle Company Is Out There.”
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