But Eikenberry thought as deeply about the problem of Afghanistan and his personal responsibilities to it as anyone I met there. Before the war started, he’d given the place very little thought. He had originally been a China expert, with a master’s in East Asian studies from Harvard and course work toward a PhD at Stanford. He had studied in Hong Kong, spoke Mandarin well enough to receive an interpreter’s certification, had married a Chinese-born woman, Ching, and wrote papers for military journals with titles like “The Imjin War” and “The Campaigns of Cao Cao.” It wasn’t surprising that after a decade in Afghanistan, he knew the country well. By the end of his tenure as ambassador, he’d visited every one of the country’s provinces. He’d escaped mortar rounds in Nurestan, rockets in Wardak, and a grenade that landed within a hundred yards of him at a peace conference in Kabul. He seemed to hold genuine affection for Afghanistan. During his travels in the country, he would stop teachers, street vendors, and peasant farmers to query them about their thoughts and criticisms about their government, their views on the American presence, their aspirations.
He had analyzed U.S. failures in Afghanistan and could quickly summarize a decade of the war’s politics, much of which he witnessed firsthand. In the early years, when the mission was to kill the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the U.S. government had allied itself with brutal warlords and their militias. Attention drifted away toward Iraq in the middle period. In the later years, U.S. troops surged back in without knowing exactly what they were supposed to accomplish. He did not avoid blaming himself. “Look,” he told a group of diplomats and soldiers in Kandahar one day, “I served here in 2002, and I remember standing in front of a group of soldiers and occasionally civilians and saying, ‘Okay. Our job here is to get another first down. We’re not going to win this on our watch. But get another first down on your year.’ And I came back in 2005, and I recall saying, ‘Get another first down.’ And then I got back here in 2009 as the ambassador, and I started to say to groups, ‘Get another first down.’ And I realized, you know, where’s the goal line?
“And that Alice in Wonderland quote: If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will lead you there.”
As Eikenberry puzzled over Afghanistan, more often than not Hamid Karzai was the central riddle. The Karzai he first met was giddy, ebullient, naïvely idealistic. When he heard an idea, he liked it. Eikenberry remembers having to help persuade Karzai not to approve a United Nations war crimes special rapporteur to investigate the various Afghan warlords’ sordid pasts, because such an investigation could wipe out half his government. In one meeting, as the U.N.’s representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, outlined the risks with this approach, Karzai got wide-eyed, childlike. Really? Brahimi named a governor who could be accused of war crimes, and Karzai replied, “He’s a very big thief, but he’s not a war criminal.” Karzai seemed to feel as if his very presence in the palace was proof that everything was surmountable. “Don’t be distressed,” he said. “We’re such a good team.” Karzai told Brahimi, “Your Excellency, you are always worried about problems, and I like that about you. You see a big hole in the ground and point it out, and I jump over it.”
The early Karzai wasn’t yet burdened with the drudgery of building government institutions or the tragedies inherent in losing a guerrilla war. Heads of state from around the world would visit him in his palace, and they would sit as equals. To the Americans, Karzai would reminisce fondly about visiting his brothers in Maryland, about how he liked Starbucks coffee and country music. He found Thanksgiving a splendid holiday and believed that if they could just find some way to export Afghan pomegranates en masse, they would make a fine complement. He was prone to such grand pronouncements. “We want very soon to stand on our own feet, to become a donor country, rather than a recipient country,” he said two months after moving in to the palace. During one meeting with governors from Georgia, Kansas, and Mississippi, Karzai told them that Afghanistan before his presidency had been a “sad black-and-white movie.” It was now a film of “color and hopefulness.”
That was before thousands of other such meetings, before hundreds of congressional delegations, presidential visits, NATO conferences, United Nations resolutions, years of arguments and demands and negotiations, strategic assessments, pilot programs, policy reviews and re-reviews. Everything had been tried and then tried again. Karzai had heard from representatives of dozens of countries on how to rule Afghanistan. He’d been lectured on military operations from twelve ISAF commanders from seven different countries. He’d received the American president’s messages from five U.S. ambassadors. So many times, he had been ignored. Karzai did not have any authority over which roads American Humvees drove on, onto which homes F-16 fighter jets dropped their missiles, over whose farmland Predator drones spied. By the time Eikenberry moved in to the embassy, Karzai had become someone Eikenberry saw as “a pure survivalist.”
Karzai used to talk about his support for democracy or the need to decentralize authority in soaring terms, without yet having experienced the sacrifices this entailed. Eikenberry now felt that Karzai had no interest in working to strengthen parliament, the courts, the army and police—nothing except the office of the president. Karzai had once said the Afghan people were all that mattered and he was no fan of governments. Eikenberry remembered the time Karzai came back from a trip to China saying how well the country was doing without holding elections.
Before the election, Eikenberry was meeting with Karzai several times a week, and growing ever more worried about what he was hearing. He felt Karzai did not accept his responsibilities to America for the support he received, that he had little interest in building democratic institutions or a strong Afghan military. Karzai kept repeating in those meetings that the United States was not speaking clearly to Afghanistan about its intentions, and that the clarity of purpose America had once had after September 11 was now lost. He was suspicious that the United States simply wanted a weak Afghanistan so as to have a free hand to pursue its larger goals in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. He felt that the United States had failed by giving too much authority to cautious NATO allies in southern Afghanistan, and that it had not protected the country’s tribal leaders from assassinations by insurgents. Karzai spoke openly of the notion that America was secretly allied with Iran to support his rival Abdullah. At a meeting in front of Karzai’s national security aides, as well as General Stanley McChrystal, Karzai mentioned that America was against him. Eikenberry denied it and said “there was no overt or covert U.S. program to support any presidential candidate,” he wrote in a summary of the meeting. “I then asked Karzai if he took me at my word on this issue. Karzai, perhaps not wanting to back down in front of his advisors, said that he did not.”
Eikenberry was seeing flashes of two different Karzais. “The first is of a paranoid and weak individual unfamiliar with the basics of nation building and overly self-conscious that his time in the spotlight of glowing reviews from the international community has passed,” Eikenberry wrote to Washington just over a month before the vote. “The other is that of an ever-shrewd politician who sees himself as a nationalist hero who can save the country from being divided by the decentralization-focused agenda of Abdullah, other political rivals, neighboring countries, and the U.S. In order to recalibrate our relationship with Karzai, we must deal with and challenge both of these personalities.”
Eikenberry believed that Karzai was too thin-skinned but that he reflected the legitimate grievances of the Afghans about the mistakes made and aggravations caused by the foreign troops—“a vessel for his people’s anger,” as Eikenberry put it—and that the problems in the relationship would need to be dealt with if he prevailed in the election. “I will begin a frank, collaborative (and perhaps, at times, confrontational) dialogue with Karzai,” Eikenberry wrote back to his superiors in Washington. “No alternative approach is now evident.”
In Karzai’s mind, the bottom line for America was a bit different.
“They wanted me
out by all means,” he told me.
Ten days before Obama’s inauguration, his vice president–elect, Senator Joe Biden, and Republican senator Lindsey Graham, a reserve colonel who had worked as an Army lawyer, had dinner with Karzai at the presidential palace. It was an encounter that has been rehashed at length in the journalism of the war. Bob Woodward writes several pages of dialogue about the evening in his book Obama’s Wars. In some ways it was a typical encounter: talking points flying past each other, self-serving statements, frustration. Biden came with a message that Karzai needed to clean up his government and deliver services to the people and that he wouldn’t have the type of chummy relationship or easy access to Obama that he had enjoyed with Bush. Biden alluded to the drug-trafficking allegations against Ahmed Wali, in front of Karzai’s ministers. Karzai started getting defensive and said the only important issue was civilian casualties. Biden wanted Karzai to save his criticism for private meetings, not bash the United States in public. Karzai said he had a duty to speak up, that Afghans had lost faith in America’s war plan. Biden said they didn’t need to send any soldiers if Karzai didn’t want America’s help. Karzai said no one cared about Afghanistan. Biden chucked down his napkin.
This type of pressure tended to backfire. The Afghans present, even those with little sympathy for Karzai, found it offensive. They saw Biden as not just impolite but condescending. “He was talking as if he were negotiating with some wild mountain people who knew nothing. He was showing a lot of disrespect,” Amrullah Saleh, Karzai’s intelligence chief at the time, told me. “Biden’s way of conducting that talk was not diplomatic. It shattered the image of American grandness. Slamming a cup. It’s over. This is not Hollywood. These are negotiations. It’s real life. It’s not a movie. He was not professional. Whatever he wanted to convey, he couldn’t convey it. He just expressed his anger. Karzai’s reaction was very decent. Very brave. Very courageous. He kept his composure. He was much higher than Biden. Much higher.
“Even if you read books about the British going to the Mughal court three hundred years ago,” Saleh went on, “they would present gifts, they would start by compliments, talk about nature, enjoy a little food, and then be very gradual. But three hundred years later someone comes to your court, regardless of how powerful he is, and acts this way? At the end of the day, we are all human beings and we have pride. Your [American]pride is your economy. It’s your military. It’s your wonderful land. It’s your technological advances. It’s your universities. But don’t forget, our pride is our history, our religion, our country. So simply because we are poor, we should not be degraded in every meeting. And unfortunately in that particular meeting, the guy was looking at the American pride only, and we were like, What?”
Karzai enjoyed ceremony. That characteristic was hard to miss. Everything he does has a certain flourish. When you meet him, he doesn’t walk over to greet you but strides. He grips your hand with fervor. His eyes actually seem to twinkle. It struck me that what he liked most about being president was that it afforded so many opportunities to act grandly, to display gravitas. Every day at his palace he would have audiences, delegations of dozens of villagers from around the country coming to him with personal appeals for his help: the need for a school; a relative wrongly imprisoned; a dispute over property. In this way, the presidency of Afghanistan was a hybrid role—part modern head of state, part Pashtun tribal leader. Karzai embraced this aspect of his job. These gatherings gave him ground-level intelligence about how people felt about the war, but they also gave him the chance to preside. His voice had the timbre of oration even in conversation. He enjoyed riding the momentum of a sentence, indulging long, repetitive riffs and musings. He often ignored speeches written for him and improvised his remarks. “When I prepared talking points, he would disregard them totally,” Javed Ludin, a former Karzai spokesman and chief of staff, told me. “He had a flair for media.”
In one of our interviews in his office, apropos of nothing, Karzai started discussing climate change. “Really abusing Mother Earth,” he said, “in terrible, terrible ways. I don’t think the earth can cope with all the wrongdoing.” He asked me where I was from. “Seattle? Oh, Northwest. Nice place. It’s rising? The temperatures rising there as well? Too much smoke. Too much pollution. Too much mining activity, perhaps. Too much everything, huh? Too much cement around, too much asphalt around. Too many planes around. Too many cars around. Tremendous wastage of water. Tremendous wastage of water. I have tremendous difficulty at home telling everybody to use water, you know, miserly. They don’t understand. Even electricity they don’t understand. They keep switching the lights on, and I go and turn them off. They turn them on. I turn them off. They don’t know. We will learn in a terribly costly way for the next generation.”
Karzai wanted to be a great man, to have his views respected. Being embarrassed in front of his cabinet ministers by the U.S. vice president–elect was an affront to his sense of stature, a diminishing in the eyes of his peers. For all his eloquence in English and his worldly experience, people who met with him regularly felt that Karzai didn’t understand American politics that well. When he read a critical article in the U.S. press, he assumed it was essentially a public memo from the government, written by a reporter carrying out U.S. policy. “He does not understand Washington, our politics, our open system, where everybody runs their mouth all the time,” Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Kabul, told me. “The public criticism, Biden and the rest, this is inconceivable to an Afghan. That you would criticize a friend publicly like this, unless you intended to weaken them.”
This type of meeting set the tone for the relationship going into the most important phase of the war. Whatever interests the Afghan and U.S. governments might have had in common were strained through this filter of distrust and wounded pride. By this time, everyone knew everyone else so well. This had been going on for so long. These personal feuds began to feel like the only fight that mattered. “As soon as the Democrats won the election, they started treating President Karzai’s government not as a partner but as a client,” said Mohammed Amin Farhang, a cabinet minister in that government for seven years.
When I asked him about the dinner, Karzai remembered how Senator Graham had raised the issue of Afghan prisoners and said that the U.S. military would soon be taking in far more detainees. Karzai told him the Soviets had done the same thing and he would not allow it.
“You are one man,” Graham told him. “How can you stop us?”
In this exchange, Karzai said, he saw the “essence” of Obama’s government.
“They were there to give us a message,” he told me. “A threatening message.
“The U.S. government was trying to silence me. That’s what they keep telling me during these meetings. Not to go public on issues. And I remained committed to speaking publicly,” he said. “Corruption was there. True, sure. But they didn’t raise it because corruption was there. They raised it as a pressure tactic. And we knew that. So the main purpose all along of the pressure was to turn me silent on issues that we raised and were very important to us.
“It was actually funny,” Karzai said. “It amused me, you know, to hear that. Because the United States had troops here, had an engagement here, wanted a relationship with Afghanistan. And then to say that the contacts would not be as frequent didn’t go with the reality of the situation.
“So it was…I don’t know how to describe it. It sounded empty.
“I think they were trying again to use all that as a pressure tactic. They thought it mattered to us. It doesn’t matter for us in the sense of a person to person. But it does matter at the level of government to government. When you have such strong engagement on the ground with troops and people dying. You need to be in contact, frequently, to sort out issues, to clear up things. To me it sounded a bit naïve, that one would threaten loss of contact. Well, who loses? We don’t lose.”
—
Foreign countries had just paid $488 million fo
r the election, the United States contributing $263 million of that total. The Afghan government’s share was $1.5 million. More than ten thousand people on fifty-one different election observation teams from around the world were on the ground to monitor the polls; drones peered down from the skies. The official watchdog organization, the Electoral Complaints Commission, led by foreigners, had a staff of 220 people deployed around the country. The goal was to open more polling stations and have more people vote than in the previous election, in 2004, all while having more eyes on those polls to ensure that the election was carried out fairly.
It didn’t turn out that way. Only about 4.5 million Afghans voted, out of the more than 15 million who registered—half the turnout of Karzai’s win five years earlier. The Taliban launched more than four hundred attacks that day, the most of any day in the war. At least thirty people died. More than seven hundred of the polling centers failed to open. After all but the first hours of voting, when eager American and European offi cials declared the election a relative success—“I want to congratulate the Afghanistan people on carrying out this historic election,” Obama said from the South Lawn the day after the vote—Americans in Kabul and everyone else quickly realized that by any measure, the election had been a disaster.
The fraud that Tim Carney had worried about in his e-mail to Ambassador Eikenberry began to materialize in a bewildering diversity of methods and schemes. There were people who voted more than once, those who voted on behalf of others, whole sheaves of six hundred ballots with the same exact vote in the same exact pen. “Ghost” polling centers that never opened racked up votes. In voting rooms that opened, gunmen forced people to fill out ballots, or police took them home and checked the boxes themselves. Some voting booths were blown up or set on fire. The retrospective reports on the election showed the fraud had been conducted with such abandon, and so free from any worry about detection or consequence, that it suggested the whole democratic experiment was for show.
A Kingdom of Their Own Page 4
