A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  Karzai did not attend the conference, as he, Amerine, and the CIA team were still outside of Kandahar. Politically he was associated with the conference delegates known as the Rome Group, the collection of exiles loyal to the eighty-seven-year-old former king, Zahir Shah, who had ruled for forty years before his ouster in a coup d’état in 1973 and was still viewed by many Pashtuns as a symbol of traditional Afghan unity and more peaceful days. One of Karzai’s elder brothers, Qayum, attended the conference as an adviser to the Rome Group delegation. The Taliban were not invited to the meeting, and they had no voice in the creation of the new government, an omission that Brahimi would later describe as Afghanistan’s “original sin.” The others in attendance were mostly Afghan exiles based in Pakistan, those with ties to Iran, and leaders of the predominant Northern Alliance.

  During the Taliban’s rule, the Northern Alliance had been the only real on-the-ground opposition. The alliance of Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara rebels held shards of territory in northern Afghanistan, mostly in the mountains along the borders with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, funded and armed with the help of Russia and Iran. Their dwindling fortunes changed dramatically on September 11. Coordinating with an American bombing campaign, the Northern Alliance broke through Taliban lines the following month. Their soldiers routed them in northern cities such as Mazar-e-Sharif and flooded into Kabul against the wishes of the Bush administration, which wanted to forge a plan for a new government before Northern Alliance forces seized ministries and barracks and took the country for themselves. They would clearly be getting a large share of government posts, but the Americans didn’t want them to take everything. At the Bonn conference, Dobbins saw his primary mission as persuading the Northern Alliance leaders to “dissolve their administration and join other Taliban opponents in a more broadly based government.”

  The delegates were mainly in agreement that there should be an interim government for several months, followed by the loya jirga, to elect a transitional government for another period of time, while a new constitution could be written and, ultimately, democratic elections held for the first time in the country’s modern history. The more immediate decisions were thornier: whether foreign troops should participate in peacekeeping in Kabul and who should be the leader of the new government. Some hard-line Northern Alliance members—including the front’s leader, Burhanuddin Rabbani, the white-bearded former president, who promptly moved back into the palace in Kabul when the Taliban fled—demanded that any talks about new governments take place inside Afghanistan. They insisted that their own militiamen handle security in the capital, and they wanted their own representative in the palace. Others conceded that the best chance to avoid civil war was to have a Pashtun as the nominal face of the government.

  As the conference opened, attendees heard welcoming remarks from the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, and from Afghan representatives. When Brahimi leaned into the microphone to speak, he added a surprise announcement: “Someone else would like to talk to us, from Afghanistan.” A speaker that had been hanging from a wire in the center of the room above the tables crackled to life. The guests suddenly heard the congested voice of Hamid Karzai, sniffling through a cold, transmitted by his CIA-supplied satellite phone. At the moment, Karzai was sitting on a scrap of parachute on the floor of a mud hut in southern Afghanistan. He told the delegates to forget their differences and unite for the peace of the country.

  “We are one nation, one culture; we are united and not divided,” he said. “We all believe in Islam, but in an Islam of tolerance.

  “This meeting is a path towards salvation,” he added.

  The brief address shocked many of the Afghans present. The very fact that Karzai was addressing the conference, a speech arranged by Brahimi and the American representatives, was an unsubtle signal of how American preferences were coalescing around him. “It went over terribly badly with the Afghans,” recalled Francesc Vendrell. “It was quite obvious the international community had a plan.”

  Throughout the conference, the American team ended up playing a strong, arguably decisive role in Karzai becoming the new leader of Afghanistan. Some have claimed their support rose from old, clandestine links with the CIA dating back to Karzai’s days on the diplomatic circuit in Pakistan. This may have helped to some degree, as he was known and generally liked, but so were many Afghan cold warriors. The more decisive factor seems to be that he was benign—both to the Americans and their rivals. Dobbins heard positive comments about Karzai from both the Northern Alliance and one of its enemies, Pakistan’s intelligence service. Turkey didn’t have a problem with him. The Iranians weren’t opposed. The Russians spoke positively. During the conference, Dobbins spoke several times over the phone with Karzai. “He just indicated what he was doing in and around Kandahar,” Dobbins recalled. “He was not campaigning for the job. He wasn’t doing anything overt to push his own candidacy.”

  One of Karzai’s ethnic rivals, the Northern Alliance’s Abdullah Abdullah, lobbied for him. Abdullah knew Karzai from the early 1990s in Kabul, when Karzai worked as deputy foreign minister and Abdullah was a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, in the newly formed mujahedeen government after the Soviet war. They became better acquainted a few years later, as comrades in the lonely pre–September 11 struggle to get the world to pay attention to the brutalities of the Taliban regime. They would meet in the Roman villa of the exiled king, at United Nations general assemblies, in the offices of the Heritage Foundation, on Capitol Hill, in foreign embassies, at academic conferences. They were cut from the same cloth: refined men who traveled among rough fighters but were not fighters themselves. They were diplomats, politicians, strategists, both educated, fluent in English. Abdullah was a foreign policy adviser to the guerrilla commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, and Karzai represented the moderate Pashtuns allied with the former king. They recognized in themselves a common vision. “I found his ideas democratic, progressive, very bright, way above an ethnic line,” Abdullah told me years later.

  Abdullah remembered a pre–September 11 dinner at the Rosslyn, Virginia, condo of Omar Samad, a friend who ran a radio station for diaspora Afghans. At the time, Karzai and Abdullah agreed about many things. They knew that after the Soviet withdrawal, the infighting between ethnic groups and political parties had led to terrible violence and a sense of lawlessness that had helped the Taliban movement gain momentum as a force to restore order. They agreed that Ahmad Shah Massoud’s fighters, holed up in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul, could not defeat the Taliban and that Pashtun tribes from the south needed to get more involved. “They realized there was a real problem,” Samad said of the dinner meeting. “That armed resistance inside the country is absolutely essential, and how it should be expanded and should include more Pashtuns. We arrived at the point where we didn’t see any solution to the Taliban other than Massoud and the king’s people coming together.” During the dinner, Abdullah appreciated Karzai’s sense of nationalism and his arguments about transcending ethnic politics. “He was very charming,” Abdullah remembered. “Very impressive.”

  He added, “It was naïve of me to judge someone for the destiny of a nation from these things, but these were the things that had impressed me.”

  There were other reasons why Abdullah advocated for Karzai at the Bonn conference, including Karzai’s relative weakness (he had no militia to speak of) and his perceived malleability. Most important to Abdullah, Karzai was a Pashtun, and choosing someone from the majority ethnic group would avoid the perception among the rest of the world that “this was an ethnic war.” He recognized that if the Northern Alliance tried to keep all the governing positions for itself, there would be no hope for a consensus among the other elements in opposition to the Taliban. As opposed to the king, Karzai was also relatively young. “To have these new ideas, and being exposed to the world, was important,” Abdullah said. “And we knew also he had some link to the Americans. He had brothers there, family there.”

  “
In 2001,” Dobbins told me years later, “we wanted somebody who was a conciliator, somebody who would unify as much of the country as possible, somebody who would be regarded as broadly representative. We weren’t looking for a tough executive who’d make hard decisions, antagonize elements of his constituency, imprison corrupt supporters. We were looking for quite the opposite.”

  Karzai, then, was a compromise candidate known for compromising, the favorite of no Afghan group—even his own—but the least objectionable, and least threatening, to all. The diplomats at the Bonn conference felt pressure to choose the government quickly, to fill the vacuum left by the departing Taliban and then get back to hunting al-Qaeda terrorists. There were no methodical deliberations at the conference; nor did the Americans have knowledge of the leadership qualities of all potential candidates.

  After arranging for Karzai to speak at the conference, the Americans intervened on his behalf again when his own faction, the Rome Group, voted against him as its new leader. Many of these royalists felt he was too inexperienced to lead the nation. In a 9-to-2 vote, the delegation nominated Abdul Sattar Sirat, an Islamic scholar who had been justice minister decades earlier, under the king, and had more recently been teaching theology courses at a university in Saudi Arabia. Sirat had been a prodigy, the youngest member of the king’s cabinet.

  Hamid’s elder brother Qayum was dismayed to find the family’s presidential chances slipping away. He believed that Sirat had bought votes by promising cabinet seats. To his relief, the Americans preferred his brother for the role, and would not let him lose. Sirat did not meet the prevailing criteria of the moment: he had mixed Uzbek heritage, he had not been an important figure in the anti-Soviet jihad, and he was not on the ground fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. As Dobbins wrote, “Nothing in his appearance or background conveyed charisma, popular appeal, or leadership skills, all of which the next Afghan leader would need.” Dobbins, Brahimi, and their teams tried unsuccessfully to convince the other Afghan groups to veto Sirat. For one thing, the head of the Northern Alliance delegation, Yunus Qanooni, was related to Sirat by marriage. Sirat was also a leader of the Rome Group. Left with no choice, they resorted to demanding directly that Sirat step aside.

  “That was the beginning of Americans intervening in Afghanistan’s domestic affairs,” said Mohammed Amin Farhang, another Rome Group member. Some of the other foreign representatives at the conference thought the Americans had overstepped. “What are we even doing here,” Sirat told Brahimi in frustration. “It seems we have nothing to choose.”

  “Sirat has never forgiven the Americans,” Vendrell said.

  For all the rage, angst, and frustration that Karzai would cause American officials in the years to come, there is no one else to blame for his presence but themselves. The U.S. government paid him, armed him, protected him.

  On the morning of December 5, 2001, the day the Bonn conference delegates agreed on the chairman of the interim administration of the new Afghan government, an American B-52 Stratofortress bomber circled forty thousand feet above the Afghan town of Shah Wali Kot. Karzai was in that town, nearing the end of his effort to liberate the Pashtun south from the Taliban. A high-level Taliban delegation was on its way across the desert to discuss with Karzai the end of hostilities. Just before nine a.m., the pilot of the B-52, confused about his target, dropped a two-thousand-pound JDAM bomb that killed some fifty men from Karzai’s entourage and injured dozens more.

  The bomb exploded as Karzai, a tan wool blanket around his shoulders, was in a room with his CIA team leader, Greg. It shattered the windows, and shards of glass slashed into Karzai’s cheek and head. Thinking they were under attack, Greg dove on top of Karzai to protect him. Fifteen minutes after the explosion, Karzai’s satellite phone rang.

  “Congratulations, sir.” It was Lyse Doucet, a BBC reporter calling from Bonn. “You have just been named the chairman of the interim government.”

  —

  Hamid Karzai pulled up to the palace on December 12, 2001, in a convoy of SUVs driven by Americans. To get there, he had been flown by a U.S. military Chinook helicopter and then by C-130 cargo plane from Kandahar to Bagram Airfield, where the commander of the Northern Alliance forces, Mohammad Qasim Fahim, waited on the floodlit tarmac with two hundred of his soldiers. Bagram, an old Soviet base north of the capital, featured two intact buildings, a decrepit yellow control tower, and a small structure behind it with blown-out windows. When the cargo plane touched down, shortly after nine p.m., hundreds of Fahim’s soldiers broke from their formation and ran toward the plane like kids freed for recess, waving their rifles and jostling for a glimpse of their new leader.

  Karzai stepped out of the plane, into the chill mountain air, and looked at Fahim. Much had changed since their last run-in.

  In 1993, Fahim had controlled Afghanistan’s Soviet-created secret police. The decade-long Soviet conflict, the bloodiest Cold War battleground with the United States, killed nearly a million people, or about 6 percent of the nation’s population, and drove five million more into exile in Pakistan, Iran, and elsewhere. But the horror of urban warfare reached its peak in the years that followed. After the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991 and the fall, eleven weeks later, of their Afghan proxy, President Mohammad Najibullah, the front lines were drawn in the muddy blocks of the capital. Indiscriminate rocket barrages brought to Kabul a level of death and destruction these hardy survivors had not previously known. The commanders, who formed and betrayed alliances as casually as changing clothes, blocked medical and food supplies as residents perished by the thousands. Rival leaders President Burhanuddin Rabbani, the white-bearded Tajik, and Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a harder-line Islamist, traded bombardments, with Hekmatyar retreating to a base south of Kabul, in Char Asiab.

  Karzai at the time was deputy foreign minister, and for months he had navigated the dangerous roads between Kabul and Char Asiab in a vain attempt to mediate between Hekmatyar and Rabbani. The northerners suspected Hekmatyar of collusion with Pakistan’s intelligence service in supporting Pashtun-led plots against them. In early 1994, Fahim apparently received information that Karzai himself was a Pakistani spy, and sent intelligence officers to Karzai’s office in Kabul. Karzai was taken to a small, dingy interrogation room with a bare radiator, at the intelligence department. Over the course of several hours, two interrogators, including Muhammad Aref Sarwari, who would later lead Karzai’s own intelligence service for a time, grilled Karzai about his connections to Pakistan and his ties to Hekmatyar. Fahim may well have been in the room. Some say that Karzai was tortured. Luckily for Karzai, rockets happened to be pummeling the city that day, and one of them smashed into the roof of the building where Karzai was imprisoned. “I saw that the roof was not there,” Karzai said. “I saw that sunshine was coming in.”

  The commotion allowed him to escape. Reeling and bleeding, he ran home, changed his clothes, hailed a taxi, and fled the city, as well as the country.

  Now, seven years later, the fact that the first person he met was Fahim said a lot about where he stood in his native country. A man’s strength in Afghanistan was measured by the size of his militia. Karzai had shown up with none. He had come from Kandahar with his younger half brother Shah Wali, an aging uncle, and a few others. He had no weapons or bodyguards. Karzai and his small team immediately recognized the extreme vulnerability of their position. In his new political perch, he would be standing on the shoulders of his enemies. In order to survive, he became accustomed, quickly, to conceding to the demands of the more powerful Afghans.

  “Where are your men?” Fahim asked him on that airstrip, in an exchange that Karzai would recount for years to demonstrate the trust he laid at the feet of an ethnic rival.

  “You are my men,” Karzai replied.

  The convoy of SUVs whisked Karzai and his small entourage onto the rutted road that ran past the dark expanse of the Shomali Plain, past bomb craters, downed bridges, and derelict Soviet tanks. Karzai arrived in th
e darkened palace at midnight. The only guards were two Afghan men at the gate with rifles, plus a third man with a revolver, standing inside. All of them reported to the Northern Alliance, not to Karzai.

  Karzai had been given a title, chairman of the Afghanistan Interim Authority, a position stipulated by the terms of the agreement at Bonn to last six months; eventually, as noted earlier, democratic elections could be held.

  “I remember when he came in and we saw him first on TV after the Taliban were gone. We were so excited,” recalled Waheed Omar, who had studied in Britain and would later join his government as spokesman. “I think most of the Afghans, the majority, the absolute majority of the Afghans in the country, when they saw him for the first time, and when they saw him speak for the first time, they were so much in love with him. And I was one of the people who was in love with him.”

  Although Karzai was propped up publicly by America, he had few domestic levers to pull. After the five years of Taliban rule, and the urban fighting of the civil war before that, the presidential palace was in abject disrepair. The eighty-three-acre grounds were wild and overgrown, with feral dogs wandering in untended gardens. Turrets on the perimeter walls had crumbled. Rooftops were battered, and bullet holes speckled the armored glass. Cockroaches skittered through the kitchen. The plumbing was broken, and the president’s office smelled of sewage. That winter, a bitter chill suffused the rooms, with their vaulted halls and marble floors covered in worn and threadbare rugs. What water ran through the pipes was ice-cold. The power was often out.