Afghan Lessons: Culture, Diplomacy, and Counterinsurgency

Karzai

110 twenty-seven Karzai Hamid Karzai is an extraordinary politician in the literal sense. His manner, his dialectic skill, his wit, his command of the English language had no equal on the Afghan scene and it made him a unique character. He had an answer to everything and you couldn’t catch him off guard. Even when he wasn’t telling the whole truth, his aplomb was impeccable as he tried to make you believe some total nonsense. At the time when the international press was accusing his brother, Wali Karzai, of trafficking, a member of parliament from an EU state asked him how the corruption phenomenon could be stemmed, and for twenty minutes Karzai regaled him with a story of an Afghan policeman who earned one hundred U.S. dollars a month, had six children to feed, and didn’t know how to keep the wolf from the door. The president concluded his story saying, “I’d like to see you manage on a hundred dollars a month with a family to support . . . preaching to those who earn one hundred dollars a month is easy, but it’s not right. . . .” And before the parliamentarian could react, Karzai had deftly moved the conversation on to the need for the international community to invest more resources in training the Afghan police force. Clearly, the parliamentarian had meant another kind of corruption, and Karzai had understood him perfectly, but with his policeman story he’d managed to change the subject. When we left the presidential palace, the European MP asked what could be done to increase pay for Afghan policemen, and I told him that the Japanese had taken care of it, earmarking several million dollars to increase police salaries. The MP was of the opinion that Karzai was not fit to govern and incapable of creating an efficient administrative machine, yet there was no one else like him in 27-2423-0 ch27.indd 110 6/3/13 1:55 PM Karzai 111 Afghanistan—the same conclusion everyone else always came to when they met him for the first time. By now I’d gotten to know Karzai pretty well, and even though I hadn’t developed an outright personal relationship with him, I participated in many meetings. I had talked with him, eaten at his table and, most of all, I’d listened carefully. It was a known fact that he knew how to keep his ship afloat better than many others, otherwise he wouldn’t have stayed at its helm for so long. But it wasn’t just a matter of political instinct; there was something more, a special talent for converting his weakness into strength. On several occasions he’d been considered a goner, politically isolated on both the domestic and the international fronts, yet he came up trumps every time, calling his opponent’s bluff or pulling out of his sleeve an alliance judged impossible just the day before. Through spring and summer 2009 this had happened at least three times. He had literally split the enemy camp in two by offering the vice presidency to Fahim, one of the Northern Front’s most iconic figures; then he managed to stay in office until the elections despite various interpretations of the constitution that required he resign from the presidency three months before; and on the eve of the vote he was able to patch up an alliance with General Dostum by the skin of his teeth, crucial for ensuring the Uzbek vote in the north. “He’s a tactical genius,” I heard some diplomats commenting, as if they were talking about Metternich. “Yes, but his actions seem more like those of someone living hand to mouth than someone who has a real strategy in mind for the country,” answered those whose brains weren’t quite melted by the heat of the Afghan summer. Karzai had a complicated relationship with NATO and in particular with the United States: the issue of civilian casualties was just the tip of the iceberg, while under the surface there was the problem of failing mutual trust. Karzai had begun to lose confidence in the West soon after 2001, when George Bush denied the reinforcements needed to wield a death blow to the Taliban and was insufficiently decisive with Pervez Musharraf when Mullah Omar and his faction were regrouping in enclaves on Pakistani territory. The West lost confidence in Karzai a little later, when it began to realize that corruption was endemic and...