A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  When I asked Karzai about this later, he said the same thing. “Kerry swore on the Bible,” Karzai said, “over there.” He pointed to the chair in his office next to the fireplace. “He was sitting in that chair. Yes. He swore on the Bible.”

  Karzai finally appeared for the press conference at four-thirty p.m. Grim, tired, he stood at the podium flanked by Kerry, Eikenberry, and Kai Eide. British ambassador Mark Sedwill, who had been hoping to avoid participating in the bizarre public spectacle, got ordered by London otherwise and rushed over late to join the crowd. Lined up behind Karzai, the foreigners looked like the very thing he had accused them of being: puppet masters meddling in his sovereign government.

  “Afghanistan’s elections have unfortunately been defamed, and any results we got from the first round of elections would not have ensured legitimacy in the system,” Karzai told those in the room. “Now, it may be in my personal interest if I now insist that I won the first-round elections, but the interests of the people of Afghanistan are more important. Therefore, we are now going to hold second-round elections.”

  The second round never happened.

  After the press conference, Abdullah Abdullah, perhaps fearing an unwinnable vote or perhaps, as he said, convinced that the system was so rotten it could not be trusted, decided to drop out of the race. That left Karzai—damaged, discredited, feeling betrayed—a winner by default.

  Ten weeks passed between the vote and the final announcement that the election was over. During that period, Karzai willfully disregarded the obvious and voluminous evidence that his supporters had tried to cheat him to victory, as Abdullah’s supporters had also, to a lesser extent. His approach was self-serving, to say the least. But the United States acted with ugly hypocrisy, touting the rhetoric of democracy while scheming against the favored candidate. It managed to humiliate Karzai but not defeat him. That period transformed Karzai into the president he would become. The years preceding the election had been marked by a slow erosion of interaction, friendship, and trust between the American and Afghan governments that culminated in the collapse of relations during the months of the disputed vote. As Waheed Omar later described it, the election was “the wound that never healed.”

  After watching the final announcement at the palace, Kevin Brady, an embassy press officer, sent an e-mail to Tim Carney and the elections team.

  “No second round, as you know by now. Articles 156 and 49 (?) cited as reasons, plus security, costs, and ony [sic] one candidate,” he wrote. “Intl journalists here just shaking heads; afghans hungry for more q and a. Over.”

  3

  SO MUCH IN LOVE

  HAMID KARZAI TOOK UP RESIDENCE as Afghanistan’s new leader on the chilly night of December 12, 2001, when he was twelve days shy of his forty-fourth birthday. He had long since gone bald, and his beard had flecks of gray, but he moved with youthful vigor. He had married two years earlier, at an unusually advanced age for an Afghan, but still had no children. Before the airplanes flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Karzai had had no inclination that he would soon be ruling a country he had not lived in for years. A relatively novice politician, Hamid had not distinguished himself in battle, as other, more venerated leaders had done. He was living in a salmon-pink house in an upscale suburb of Quetta, in western Pakistan, a critic of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the hard-line Islamic groups that the Pakistani government supported and the Western world ignored. His father had been murdered, and he feared Pakistan would revoke his visa.

  Karzai and his seven siblings were among the millions of diaspora Afghans scattered into exile by the Soviet invasion, the civil war, and the Taliban regime. They came from a prominent family distinguished not so much by their wealth as by their political and diplomatic posts, their leadership of the Popalzai tribe, and their favor under the former king Zahir Shah, who had ruled for forty years before being overthrown and exiled to a villa outside Rome. Their stature was comparable to that of other political families abroad, and in a region where violence and religious intransigence were celebrated, the Karzais were moderates, open to compromise. They wanted the return of the exiled king. They tried to interest the United States and other countries of the West in the brutalities of the Taliban regime. They wished for Afghanistan to rediscover the peaceful times they remembered from childhood.

  But for most of them, the turmoil of Afghan politics, and the hope of returning to their country, had faded into the background of their daily lives. Since moving to the United States in the late 1960s, Hamid’s elder brothers Mahmood and Qayum had established a network of successful Afghan restaurants in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. The family’s lone sister, Fawzia Royan, along with her husband, managed one of their restaurants, the Helmand, not far from the Harvard campus. The oldest brother, Abdul Ahmed, had trained as a mechanical engineer and worked at BWI Airport, in Baltimore. The youngest brother, Abdul Wali, had earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University and taught biochemistry at SUNY Stony Brook, on Long Island. Several of the siblings had become American citizens, along with their children. They had spouses who sold insurance, worked in department stores. They were accustomed to their suburban lives.

  Among the siblings, Hamid had stayed the most politically active during his exile years, but even he could not expect that in the condensed frenzy of three months, he would be transformed from an obscure exiled Afghan diplomat into the country’s wartime head of state. This brief period has also been the most thoroughly documented of Karzai’s public life. Books such as The Only Thing Worth Dying For, by Eric Blehm, and A Man and a Motorcycle: How Hamid Karzai Came to Power, by Bette Dam, have chronicled in minute detail Karzai’s post–September 11 journey into Afghanistan. But in light of the years of attacks that followed, it’s important to revisit that period, if just to remember that Karzai’s success in those first days, and his very survival, was vouchsafed by the United States.

  After the terrorist attacks, Jason Amerine, a thin, bearded, quietly intense thirty-year-old U.S. Special Forces captain from Honolulu, received his orders while at an Uzbek air base known as Karshi-Khanabad. The mission was both simple and grandiose: meet up with an Afghan rebel commander and topple the Taliban. Other CIA and Special Forces teams had been assigned to the rebels in northern Afghanistan, and air strikes had been pounding Taliban positions for a few weeks. But no one had yet tried to mobilize the Pashtuns in the south to take on their fellow tribesmen in the Taliban. Amerine’s Special Forces A-team, Operational Detachment Alpha 574, consisted of himself and ten other people. The Afghan commander they would be meeting, he was told, was Abdul Haq, about whom Amerine knew nothing. The plan was “to link up with these bloodthirsty warlords and do what we can to work with them.” Haq was a Pashtun who had earned his fame, and lost a foot, as a mujahedeen commander against the Soviets. He was charismatic, thrived in the spotlight, and cultivated the press; his nickname was “Hollywood Haq.” As an offering to a fellow warrior, Amerine’s team brought a large blade for Haq. A BFK, he called it: big fucking knife.

  “It was just: ‘Give us our warlord and we’ll go.’ ”

  Then suddenly Haq was dead, surrounded by the Taliban and unceremoniously murdered along with nineteen other people. So Amerine’s team got assigned a new warlord equally unknown to him: Hamid Karzai. Then Amerine was told Karzai was dead. Then the news changed again: Karzai was alive, but in trouble. It turned out that Karzai at that moment was being airlifted out of Afghanistan by a team of Navy SEALs. Since September 11, Karzai had been in contact with CIA officers about his plans to spread the word among Pashtun tribes that the time had come to rise up against the Taliban. In early October 2001, Karzai, unarmed and with a CIA-donated satellite phone, had ridden a motorcycle into Afghanistan with three companions to foment rebellion. But his war party got surrounded in the mountains of Uruzgan. The Bush administration, afraid that another Pashtun opposition leader would be killed, like Haq, sent soldiers to rescue him. Karzai and Amerine ended up f
inally convening at a CIA safe house across the border in the Jacobabad district of Sindh Province, Pakistan, to prepare for another attempt. When Amerine met Karzai for the first time, on the morning of November 3, he knew he would not be giving this man a knife.

  “He’s not a warlord in any way. He came off as very intelligent, soft-spoken, almost scholarly,” he said. “I thought, Okay, this is going to be very different than my initial assumptions.”

  Karzai had no military expertise. After leaving Afghanistan for college in India, he had gravitated to Pakistan during the Soviet war in the early 1980s; there he taught English and got involved with Afghan rebel groups. Living first in the northern city of Peshawar, Karzai worked as a political adviser and spokesman for Sibghatullah Mojaddedi (who Eikenberry would have a showdown with years later), the leader of the Afghan National Liberation Front (ANLF), one of the seven Afghan rebel factions that relied on American money and weapons to fight the Soviets. Karzai got the position through the influence of his father, Abdul Ahad, who was also working with the group.

  On the spectrum of these Afghan cold warriors, the ANLF was weak. It received a fraction of the CIA-funneled largesse that other, more radical Islamist parties were given. Karzai nevertheless became well known in the foreign embassies in Pakistan and on the wider diplomatic circuit because he spoke fluent English and presented a modern, worldly image to foreigners, unlike many Afghan leaders, who looked as if they’d stepped with their sandals and robes out of biblical times. In his meetings with Western diplomats at the time, Karzai tended to wear blue blazers, ties, and slacks. In his spare hours, he could be found riding his bicycle or swimming laps in the Pearl Continental Hotel’s swimming pool.

  “What you have to remember about Hamid is, he was just a nice guy,” said Larry Crandall, who was the USAID director in Pakistan in the mid-1980s and met with Karzai frequently. “And the way we thought of him then was as somebody you could always invite, if you had politicians in town, and we had them coming through all the time in Islamabad then….We often had to bring Afghans to them, because they didn’t always want to go down to Peshawar or Quetta. And Hamid was always available and he was articulate, somewhat knowledgeable, and presentable. He wouldn’t say horrible egregious things in front of them like some of them would.”

  Karzai had worked for Mojaddedi essentially as a public relations officer, meeting with foreign journalists, writing speeches, translating, dining with diplomats. He coordinated humanitarian aid and helped with day-to-day logistics for his boss. He and his father were moderately important in the anti-Soviet resistance, and foreign visitors often sought them out to hear their views on the war across the border. Hamid, in particular, made a good impression on many of the foreigners he met at the time. The journalist Edward Girardet wrote of his “charming, salon demeanor.” Steve Coll wrote in his book Ghost Wars that Karzai was a “born diplomat, rarely confrontational and always willing to gather in a circle and talk.” Francesc Vendrell, a Spanish diplomat who was the United Nations envoy to Afghanistan before September 11, described him to me as “bubbling with ideas.”

  “Hamid Karzai represented for me all that was larger than life in the Afghan character,” the journalist Robert D. Kaplan wrote in his book Soldiers of God about meeting the thirty-year-old Karzai. “He was tall and clean-shaven, with a long nose and big black eyes. His thin bald head gave him the look of an eagle. Wearing a sparkling white shalwar kameez, he affected the dignity, courtly manners, and high breeding for which the Popalzai are known throughout Afghanistan.” Kaplan found Karzai’s fluency with East and West beguiling, how he could sit on the floor speaking Pashto to a Kandahari relative with a copy of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss by his side. With his immaculate diction tinged with a British accent, he could play “foreign wazir” to Americans better than almost anyone, recalled Richard Smyth, a diplomat in the U.S. consulate in Peshawar in the early 1990s. There were, however, several more dominant Afghan strongmen. “The Karzais were known, but major players? Not really,” Smyth recalled.

  Although Hamid had been an early supporter of the Taliban movement, which had emerged in 1994 as a response to the predations of warlord militias, he gradually turned against its rulers, until he advocated for their overthrow. He became known among the Afghan diaspora as an astute politician and anti-Taliban advocate who lobbied for the return of the exiled king and the congregation of a traditional council, or loya jirga, to select a new government. He’d canvassed the State Department, hat in hand, begging for some type of help to drive out this regime. He had met with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the guerrilla commander of the Northern Alliance, which amounted to what little military opposition there was to the Taliban, and discussed plans for a “Southern Alliance” of Pashtuns to join the fight. Karzai had testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in July 2000 about the flourishing terrorist haven that his country had become. Before September 11, these types of appeals tended to fall on deaf ears. U.S. foreign policy was oriented elsewhere, and fixing such a war-torn, backward nation as Afghanistan was not high on anyone’s to-do list.

  Karzai had just come out of a meeting at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad when his brother Ahmed Wali phoned him with the news that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Hamid was on the way to his mosque to pray when Ahmed Wali called back about the second plane. Hamid would recall later that he felt certain from these first moments that al-Qaeda had been behind the attack and that they would change Afghanistan’s fate forever. He heard his brother shouting joyously to the family guards. The brothers quickly assumed that al-Qaeda, working from Afghanistan, had planned the terrorist operation, and that the United States would be forced to respond. “The Taliban are finished,” Ahmed Wali said.

  By the time Jason Amerine arrived in Pakistan, Karzai had already been working with a CIA paramilitary team led by a man named Greg, who wore his brown hair swept back and had a thick handlebar mustache. Amerine’s Special Forces team and Greg spent a few days in early November with Karzai in Pakistan, planning the logistics of their mission. Their goal was to capture Tarin Kowt, a town about seventy-five miles north of Kandahar in Uruzgan Province, where Karzai had tribal support, and spread their guerrilla movement out from there, with the ultimate goal of seizing Kandahar and the rest of the Pashtun south.

  At the time, the Americans didn’t know whether Karzai had popular support within Afghanistan, how a well-spoken exile politician would relate to poor Pashtun farmers. Amerine’s superior, Colonel John Mulholland, commander of the 5th Special Forces Group, didn’t want to approve the mission until Karzai could prove he had three hundred men under arms to accompany him. The CIA team was also hesitant to go and discussed flying a Predator drone over Afghanistan to essentially do a head count to confirm whether Karzai could rally enough fighters. There was a feeling the Northern Alliance would win the war on its own and there would be no need for a fight in the south. But Amerine worried that the Northern Alliance sweeping south could provoke further civil war, and he also risked losing Karzai, who was itching to get into Afghanistan. “Hamid was going to go in without anybody. He said, ‘I need to go in. If you guys aren’t going to go, I’m going to leave this area and do it myself.’ ”

  Karzai told Amerine, “If I go in, three hundred men will arrive.”

  “Good enough for me,” Amerine replied.

  On November 14, 2001, five Black Hawk helicopters carrying the Special Forces and CIA teams, plus Karzai and his men, drifted down in single file into a darkened Afghan valley lit by four signal fires, raising a billow of dust as they descended. Karzai stepped onto the valley floor in gleaming white leather tennis shoes given to him by the CIA. Within three weeks, their war against the Taliban was largely over. In the interim, Amerine learned that Karzai had been right and tribesmen had flocked to him to offer their support, while the Taliban had melted away under the barrage of air strikes, targets that Amerine and Karzai often called in together. Tarin Kowt fell. Kandahar w
ould soon follow. Taliban foot soldiers surrendered to Karzai. Residents tore down the white Taliban flags. During this period, Amerine remembers, Karzai seemed to hold no vengeance toward his enemies; anyone who surrendered was welcomed to end his fight peacefully. “He was happy to send everybody home,” Amerine recalled. “Hundreds or thousands. If they surrendered to him, he sent them home. Their leader would come to him and he’d say okay, ‘Welcome back.’ ”

  When they had a moment to talk about anything beyond the immediate present, Karzai spoke of his dream of the loya jirga, not of any personal ambitions. “The best person for the job is not for me to decide,” Karzai told Amerine. “That is for the Afghan people to consider. I want to see the people voting, as in the United States.”

  —

  Karzai was not, at the time, the only or obvious choice to be the country’s leader, even among his friends. The most famous Afghan battling the Taliban was Ahmad Shah Massoud, the tall, photogenic, French-speaking rebel commander and poet known as the Lion of Panjshir, after the name of the narrow river valley north of Kabul that he and his men had held against years of ferocious Soviet onslaughts. His fighters formed the bulk of the ground forces resisting the Taliban. But Massoud was killed two days before September 11, by al-Qaeda operatives posing as video journalists, with a bomb hidden in their camera. His death, along with the demise of the other strong Pashtun candidate, Abdul Haq, elevated Karzai’s political stature by default. Even so, for the Afghan representatives who were convened by the United Nations in late November 2001 in Bonn, Germany, to form a new Afghan government Karzai still had competition.

  The conference took place at the luxurious Grandhotel Petersberg, on a pine-forested hill from which guests could see boats cruising down the Rhine. The participants included four main anti-Taliban Afghan factions and was overseen by the American envoy, James Dobbins, and the U.N. representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, with observer delegations from several other countries. The conference began during Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast during daylight hours, and so the power-sharing discussions would reach their greatest intensity after the evening iftar meal and rage late into the night.