A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  Those low expectations, plus the work of his family, seemed to be about all Karzai had going for him. I stood with a man in a roadside gravel lot outside the eastern city of Jalalabad as he pointed to the spot where his three cousins had died in a suicide car bomb. He lived with his four children in a mud home without electricity and was praying for a president who could bring peace and security. He would be voting, again, for Karzai. “We don’t have any alternative,” the man told me. “We are afraid of what the other candidates might do.”

  For all his faults, Karzai was widely recognized as a master of tactical maneuvering and political games. He didn’t take vacations or have many hobbies. Outsmarting his rivals, keeping both his enemies and his loyal aides off balance, was his daily passion. One small example took place before the election. On February 28, 2009, Karzai issued a decree establishing the date of the vote. By that time he had already agreed publicly that the election should be held in late August. But his surprise decree, announcing that the vote should be held “in accordance with the constitution,” meant, without saying it directly, that the election should occur within two months, before his first full term ended, in May. It was a timeline that nearly everyone, not least the U.S. government, considered impossible.

  The new American troops Obama had ordered up, in part to secure the elections, would not arrive in Afghanistan until summer. The Afghan government had to hire 165,000 election workers and secure some seven thousand polling centers. These staffers needed to find three thousand donkeys to haul ballot boxes in from remote mountains. And even if the donkeys could be procured, the snows in those mountains would not have melted enough by then to be passable.

  But Karzai’s decree was, it turned out, just a parry against his rivals in the Northern Alliance (then known as the United Front). They had been insisting that Karzai step down at the end of his term and establish a caretaker government if the election was to be held anytime after May. Even his first vice president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, had defected and was openly criticizing him. Karzai had no intention of allowing an interim government to take over for any period of time. And he knew that it would be even harder for his rivals to win on short notice. To place a Tajik candidate in a palace ruled for most of the country’s modern history by a Pashtun was a long shot even under the best circumstances.

  Almost instantly, his rivals abandoned their position that an August election would be unconstitutional and began arguing in favor of Karzai’s earlier platform. Four days after Karzai’s decree, the date went back to August 20, as Karzai had wanted all along. His gambit had exposed the opposition as solely interested in inflicting political damage, all while affirming the constitution. The U.S. embassy marveled at Karzai’s maneuvers, writing that the opposition “seriously underestimated Karzai’s skill as a political strategist and have fallen behind in their efforts to remove him from power.”

  “As messy and convoluted as this has been so far,” a diplomat cabled back to Washington, “it’s likely to look tame in comparison to what comes next as the Afghans get into politicking in their national style.”

  It was a forty-one-way race among old and young, men and women, warlords and technocrats, those who lived in lavish fortress-castles and a guy who was working out of a roadside tent. There were clerics, widows, and an erstwhile Taliban commander with the nom de guerre Mullah Rocketi, for his prowess with missiles. The candidates traveled by helicopter, in armed convoys, in cargo planes supplied by the U.S. military. A retired Air Force colonel campaigned on a bicycle.

  The official American policy vis-à-vis the election, as outlined in cable after cable, was to be impartial. But none of the Afghans believed it, and the American diplomats weren’t helping themselves make the point. The U.S. embassy was buying commercial airline tickets to fly Karzai’s opponents to campaign events and also allowing candidates to use its airplanes. Two months before the vote, Ambassador Eikenberry spoke at televised press conferences alongside Abdullah, the most prominent challenger; Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister; and other opposition candidates, prompting Karzai’s foreign minister to call him to complain. The effect of his appearances was not subtle. At one of them, Eikenberry told the country why he was meeting the candidates: “We would like to know what their views are on poor governance, because we know that poor governance leads to insecurity.” The election, he said, “is a chance for the people of Afghanistan to give the government a report card for its performance over the last five years.”

  Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative to the region, held Karzai in even lower regard and had disparaged him to other Afghan politicians for years. Abdullah remembered talking with Holbrooke at a conference in Bali about Karzai’s bizarre behavior. Holbrooke, then chairman of the Asia Society, had recently visited the western Afghan city of Herat to check up on one of his pet projects, the restoration of the ancient minarets tilting in neglect downtown. In his meeting with Karzai afterward, Holbrooke told Abdullah, the president had lied to him about the state of the restoration, then shouted some orders into the phone, and ultimately got distracted by a bird outside his palace window. Holbrooke was not impressed with the performance. Holbrooke’s “conclusion out of this was that Karzai was a person who was telling a lie before your eyes, and he knows that you know that he’s lying, but still he lies,” Abdullah recalled. Holbrooke had published an op-ed piece in The Washington Post—just months before he’d rejoined the government—that criticized Karzai’s handling of the warlord Dostum, who had allegedly sodomized a neighbor with a bottle and then escaped to Turkey while Karzai failed to arrest him. “Excuses were made,” Holbrooke wrote, “but none justified his open disregard for justice.”

  In the election run-up, Holbrooke was hardly more discreet, and he encouraged other candidates to challenge Karzai. Holbrooke felt Afghanistan needed a leader with a different set of skills, less a tribal peacemaker and more an executive who could run a bureaucracy. He joked to Abdullah, a famously dapper diplomat, about how nice it would be to have a president of Afghanistan “with a three-piece suit.” Holbrooke talked to European diplomats about the possibility of giving Karzai a prominent position at a foreign university, or with the United Nations. In a meeting with Afghan and foreign election official monitors in Kabul, Holbrooke let slip “I hate that guy” when the topic of Karzai came up. In a mid-February meeting at Ambassador Eikenberry’s residence, Holbrooke asked his fellow diplomats if they could live with Karzai for another five years. “Who would be the best candidate to replace Karzai?” he asked. He then suggested Haneef Atmar, the popular Pashtun interior minister. The United Nations envoy at the time, Kai Eide, later wrote that he took Holbrooke’s comments as an “attempt to sideline Karzai.” Holbrooke had also urged the parliamentarian Mirwais Yasini to join the race—a fact Yasini would mention to other American diplomats.

  When I asked Yasini about this later, he said Holbrooke and others “didn’t promise any financial support,” but they gave the distinct impression they were not happy with Karzai. “And not only them, the whole world was giving that impression.” Holbrooke’s handpicked ally with the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith, was openly hostile to the prospect of a second Karzai term. One of his advisers, Jane Marriott, described to me their approach, in proper British understatement, as “actively impartial.” But it was far more than that. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates would later write that Holbrooke had concluded that Karzai “had to go.”

  Credit 2.2

  Ambassador Eikenberry, left, speaks with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke on a flight from Marja back to the Camp Leatherneck base on June 21, 2010.

  Holbrooke had already had a legendary diplomatic career before taking on the Afghan war, from a young dynamo in Vietnam to the bullying negotiator in Bosnia. He seemed to revel in his persona, and to believe his own devotion to his ideas enough to justify them. But I’d seen him be brusque and uncurious, even nod off in mid-conversation with an Afghan governor. He didn’t offer the deference th
at Afghan leaders seemed to crave. His angling against President Karzai also veered into the wider family. Before the vote, Holbrooke tried to persuade both Eikenberry and McChrystal that Ahmed Wali Karzai should be dropped from the payroll of the CIA, which had been his patron for the duration of the war. What was left unsaid by Holbrooke was that casting out Ahmed Wali would debilitate President Karzai in the Pashtun south. And even though such proposals would die, Holbrooke’s maneuvers would invariably trickle back to the palace, where Karzai would dutifully catalog them in his overflowing file of grievances.

  “Would Holbrooke have found it a much better scenario if Karzai lost the election?” one of Holbrooke’s advisers said. “Absolutely.” Just two months before the vote, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent a cable to Kabul with a message that seemed to vastly misinterpret the political climate. Addressing diplomats there, she wrote, “despite your best efforts, there remains an Afghan and international perception that the U.S. and most of the international community are supporting Karzai’s candidacy. Unless Afghans find not only our words but our deeds credible, they will vote for the candidate they think will win and we support. We need to do everything we can to rebalance a playing field increasingly viewed as tilted towards Karzai.”

  Since Karzai’s first election in 2004, when the United States had essentially functioned as his campaign manager, and when his victory had been hailed by Vice President Dick Cheney as a major moment “in the history of human freedom,” the playing field had tilted, if anything, steeply away from him. As early as the spring of 2007, European officials had proposed to Karzai that he promote himself out of his job—to a ceremonial position as head of state or king and let a prime minister assume the real work of governing. In battles with American officials, Karzai was already a scarred veteran. They had fought over what to do about Pakistan—Karzai thought the U.S. military should pursue al-Qaeda and the Taliban there, rather than in Afghanistan. The United States needed to send Pakistan an ultimatum to stop “using Islamic radicalism as an instrument of policy,” Karzai had told Obama, then a senator, over lunch in Kabul in July 2008. “Softly, softly, won’t work.”

  U.S. officials also disagreed on whom Karzai should appoint as governors—the American government believed some of them were drug traffickers. Eighteen months before the election, embassy staffers were describing the country’s “endemic corruption and widespread frustration over the Karzai government’s failure to meet expectations.” Civilian casualties, private security mercenaries, air strikes, Afghan prisoners in U.S.-run jails—all the political battles to come had already, to one degree or another, been fought. “He had raised objections to nighttime raids on houses, men going into women’s quarters, the use of dogs, the random international feeling that it [the U.S.-led military coalition] could arrest anybody they thought should be arrested, regardless of whether they were a tribal chieftain,” William Wood, the U.S. ambassador who preceded Eikenberry, told me. “He had a long list of recurring complaints, which I have to say we have not responded to very satisfactorily.

  “Certainly I had failed in my primary assignment from the Bush administration, which was to develop a more workable relationship with Karzai,” Wood said. “I like to think it deteriorated more slowly with me than it otherwise would have, but the relationship wasn’t a good one.” An American bombing in the village of Azizabad a year before the election killed nearly one hundred people, so infuriating Karzai that he wouldn’t allow Wood to see him for fifteen days. “It was completely unprecedented,” Wood said. “It was effectively the end of my ability to influence Karzai.”

  Now Hillary Clinton’s orders were to push the anti-Karzai agenda even harder. Some within the embassy noticed that this could be problematic. Just two weeks after her memo, the embassy’s political officer, Alan Yu, warned Eikenberry that he should tone down his public profile in the election. “You’ve already had meetings, including significant media coverage, with these candidates,” Yu wrote. From now on, he suggested, meet them at your residence, and don’t allow reporters in. “Continued high-profile media with these candidates risks shifting the story to defiance of Karzai instead of promoting U.S. policy of neither supporting nor opposing any legitimate candidate.”

  A month before the vote, Eikenberry wrote back to Washington that “Karzai clearly expected (or hoped) to receive the same U.S. support for his candidacy that he received in the 2004 election, and interprets our neutral stance in this election as evidence that the U.S. is ‘against’ him.” Before that first election, the U.S. embassy, then led by Zalmay Khalilzad, would parade Karzai around the country to events where he could cut a ribbon on an American-funded school or clinic in order to demonstrate to villagers how much better off they were with Karzai in the palace. The embassy had little time for rival candidates. One American diplomat recalled struggling to arrange a meeting for another Afghan politician who wanted to explore running against Karzai. “I got stonewalled,” the diplomat said. “The order to the political section was that the presidential candidate was Karzai and no one else. They were not to meet with others.”

  “Did we help him win the election?” Colonel David Lamm, who was the chief of staff for the U.S. military commander in Kabul at the time, asked me. “Yeah. You’re damn right. He was our guy. And we wanted him to win. He was a very honorable guy. All of us thought highly of him.”

  Before the second election, Karzai’s rivals could sense that the political winds had tacked sharply since the last go-round and aggressively courted U.S. support. The former World Bank official and Columbia University–educated finance minister, Ashraf Ghani, had taken on political operative James Carville as an adviser and was running as the data-driven pragmatic problem solver to Karzai’s heart-on-his-sleeve haplessness. Abdullah’s campaign mantra was all about “hope” and “change.” Several opposition candidates flew to Washington for Obama’s inauguration, while Karzai was left feeling slighted that he didn’t get invited. When Obama had visited Afghanistan as a presidential candidate himself, he had stopped in to visit Karzai’s old Kandahar rival Gul Agha Sherzai, then the governor of Nangarhar Province. Sherzai took that as a personal endorsement. As he mulled over whether to run for president, Sherzai told the local American diplomats stationed at the base in Nangarhar that he would challenge Karzai if he got a green light from the States. “A general can lose a battle and come back to win the war. A businessman can lose his money but earn it back. In politics, you get one chance. I would be surer of taking the chance if the U.S. supported me,” Sherzai said. That support had been critical for Karzai earlier in the war, he noted. “You were like an eagle that flew out of the sky and landed on his forehead. After that everyone knew that this was who we needed to support. I am waiting for the eagle to land on my forehead.”

  Credit 2.3

  Hamid Karzai speaks to the press during an inauguration ceremony after winning his first presidential election, December 7, 2004.

  The Obama administration’s approach to handling Afghan politics worsened Karzai’s sense of alienation. There had been periods of frequent personal contact between Bush and Karzai via videoconferencing that, Obama’s representatives told Karzai, would become much less common. Obama might visit Afghanistan; he might not. There would be no coddling. The administration wanted to work around Karzai as much as possible, building up the provincial and district leaders, although two-thirds of the country’s district governors didn’t even have office buildings and all of them answered to Karzai. Eikenberry and Holbrooke, the chosen representatives of the U.S. government, would deliver the messages, not the president. The Afghans saw this distancing as odd, given the fact that Obama was about to invest vastly more time, money, and lives in the war. What American officials saw as a bureaucratic reordering was interpreted by the palace as a personal and intentional slight.

  “President Karzai would not understand why he had to deal with an ambassador,” Said Tayeb Jawad, who was Karzai’s ambassador to Washington at the time, told
me. Jawad began to notice real political consequences beyond hurt feelings. Lower-ranking diplomats on both sides had a harder time communicating informally, fewer chances to have coffee the day before a meeting and talk about what was coming up. “If you take away that operating level of the working relationship, every meeting turns into a surprise,” Jawad said. “For Holbrooke, it was an issue of centralizing authority and making people go through him. He made that point many times: ‘Those days are gone.’ ”

  Karl Eikenberry’s views on Karzai were more nuanced than Holbrooke’s, but the Afghan leader was no less an obsession for him. Eikenberry had already spent as much or more time with Karzai than any American official. He had arrived during the first year of the war, a former Army Ranger risen to major general, in charge of building a new Afghan army from the scraps of civil war militias. He had returned to Kabul in 2005 for a second tour, spending eighteen months as the top U.S. military commander. He retired from the military as a three-star general to take his first civilian job as ambassador, but he did not seem particularly comfortable in the role. He was earnest, analytical, sober, a workhorse in gold-button blue blazers and sensible shoes. In public settings or surrounded by reporters, he came across as stilted, almost robotic. Asked even benign questions, he would compress his attention inward as he scrutinized each word before freeing it from his teeth. The awkwardness made him an easy target for mockery by his staff. And lots of his subordinates resented his exacting demands. I had seen him stop a visiting State Department staffer outside an embassy elevator to grill him about his itinerary back to Washington, upset that he had not chosen cheaper flights to save taxpayer money. He had barred a female diplomat from a meeting at the palace because he felt her pants revealed too much ankle and might be offensive to Afghans. After a riotous embassy Mardi Gras party that ended with smashed liquor bottles and the deputy Turkish ambassador peeing on the wall of the chancery, he banned parties for months.