Arg
49 twelve Arg Arg was the presidential palace. It was orderly, quiet, graced with gardens and flower beds, located just a few hundred meters from the city center: yet it seemed light years away. It looked like heaven and had an esoteric atmosphere that had nothing to do with the capital’s jumble of crooked buildings and dusty streets. The palace stood in the diplomatic district, close to ISAF headquarters and the American, Italian, Indian, and Spanish embassies. Seen from the outside it gave the impression of a timeless place, unchanging and immune to conflict. Ample, perfectly paved avenues, lined with red rose bushes and trees, led to the large front door, with dozens of plainclothes agents standing guard. On special occasions, like the national holiday or the arrival of guests, colored flags and pickets of honor would appear. Peter Levi, who visited Arg when King Zaher lived there, described it as a sort of comic Wagnerian palace, recalling that during World War II it was protected by Afghan guards with Hitler-style mustaches and a kind of German military helmet. An accurate recollection: Afghans are Aryans and they had sympathized with European totalitarianism in the first half of the twentieth century . Perhaps this was why these grey stone pavilions always emanated something tragic and incommunicable, not only for the conspiracies, coups, and settling of scores they had witnessed. “Where there’s a beautiful garden, there will soon be a tragedy,” Francesca told me on Skype when I described my first visit to the palace. When I asked her—the thriller aficionado—what she meant, she shrugged and replied with words that explained everything clearly: “I’m just saying that you should never trust the beauty of a garden. It always precedes 12-2423-0 ch12.indd 49 6/3/13 1:51 PM 50 Afghan Lessons something terrible and painful. The shinier and fresher the grass, the stronger the scent of the flowers, the more we’ll have to suffer. Basically, evil is on its way, it’s just a matter of time.” Then she laughed, as if she was joking, but I’d taken her words seriously. i visited the palace frequently, each time with the trepidation of not knowing what might happen. In addition to meetings with the president, I also went to talk with his national security adviser, Doctor Rassoul, one of Karzai’s closest aides. When I accompanied NATO’s secretary general or Atlantic Alliance Parliamentary Assembly delegations to see the president, the meetings took place in a large hall on the first floor; if a working breakfast or lunch was scheduled, we would go down to the ground floor to a rectangular room, furnished with a long, narrow table. During the meetings, the president sat on an easy chair next to the guest, with the fireplace behind him. He often wore the Uzbek cloak called a chapan, and held a karakul, the woolen hat used by dignitaries. When this happened, I told myself every time that there was no doubt he was the world’s most elegant political leader. The other delegation members would be seated on sofas facing each other. A waiter served black or green tea, or coffee, and placed small plates of almonds and pistachios on side tables. Other people usually attended the meetings, including the foreign affairs and defense ministers, as well as the homeland security adviser, who would sit next to the president , opposite the guest delegation. The others would be accommodated at the bottom end of the room, about fifteen meters from the area of the main conversation. Of course, the level of discussion was inversely proportional to the number of those present: the larger the number of people in the room, the more difficult it was to go into depth. There may have been a number of reasons inducing Karzai to surround himself with all that staff. Sometimes it was clear he wanted as many witnesses as possible for his anti-Western barbs; at other times it was a way of avoiding face-to-face contact with the other party, for fear of being put under pressure. So, if any plain speaking was to be done, it was preferable to move to the president’s small study for a talk in private, or to wait until the end of the meeting and take advantage of the walk to the press conference room that Karzai would make on foot with his guest. 12-2423-0 ch12.indd 50...
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