A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  The Arg had been built under Abdur Rahman, a king who wore knee-high leather boots and a fur hat. Construction on the palace had started after 1880, when British troops damaged the Bala Hissar, a fortress across town that had served as the palace, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. For the king, referred to as the Iron Amir, this lack of lodgings insulted both his pride and his comfort. “Until the time that I built a new palace for myself, I lived in tents and in borrowed mud-houses belonging to my subjects,” he wrote in a memoir.

  The Iron Amir’s palace included a complex of government offices and halls for public gatherings—gardens, as he wrote, nearly as large as the whole surrounding city of Kabul. All of it was enclosed by walls and a moat. The king’s government kept twenty-four thousand horses, plus various camels and elephants, for dragging machinery and heavy guns. He employed footmen to deliver flowers to the various rooms, ushers to hand fruit to palace officials, water and tea boys, gardeners and barbers, draftsmen and sappers, a court astrologer, professional chess and backgammon players, a personal reader of bedtime stories, plus a man known as an arz begi, whose job was to loudly shout out any complaints that visitors might have. From his new palace, the Iron Amir expected anything but a middling future for his beloved country. All would be triumph or disaster. “There is no doubt that Afghanistan is a country that will either rise to be a very strong, famous kingdom, or will be swept altogether from the surface of the earth,” he wrote. “The latter state of things would come about if the country came under the rule of an inexperienced and weak [king]. In this case the country would become divided, and the very name of the kingdom of Afghanistan would cease to exist.”

  The fate of all those who followed the Iron Amir, weak or strong, was one long, bloody scroll of violent death, often at the hands of a relative. In the twentieth century alone, leaders left the throne in the following ways: pistol shot to the head (Habibullah, 1919); forcibly deposed after eight days (Habibullah’s younger brother Nasrullah, 1919); chased out of Kabul by cavalry (Habibullah’s son Amanullah, 1929); airlifted out of Kabul by the Royal Air Force after three days (Habibullah’s son Inayatullah, 1929); shot by firing squad (Bacha-e-Saqao, 1929); shot by a student attending an afternoon award ceremony in the palace garden (King Mohammed Nadir Shah, 1933); ousted while in Europe for an eye operation (King Zahir Shah, 1973); shot in a palace hallway (President Mohammed Daoud Khan, 1978); suffocated with a pillow (President Nur Mohammad Taraki, 1979); either shot while drinking a cocktail in the palace or slain by grenade fragments (Hafizullah Amin, 1979); forced out by Mikhail Gorbachev (Babrak Karmal, 1986); resigned after Soviet withdrawal then later tortured, castrated, shot, tied to a vehicle and dragged around the palace grounds by the Taliban, then hanged from a traffic police booth, with Pakistani rupees, American dollars, and cigarettes stuffed into his mouth and nostrils (Mohammad Najibullah, 1996).

  The Taliban announced their arrival in Kabul with this last flourish of brutality. But the group kept its capital in the southern city of Kandahar, and those officials who occupied the Kabul palace imitated the ascetic lifestyle of their leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. When meeting in the Arg, the mullahs would unroll mattresses and arrange pillows on the floor for their discussions. As Karzai’s team explored the palace, they found a certain faded elegance in those first weeks, with its candle sconces on the walls, exposed ceiling beams, dark wood walls, and crystal chandeliers. The palace housed the national treasury, rooms filled with old maps and documents, and a famous collection of loot known as the Bactrian Hoard, a collection of more than twenty thousand items of gold, ivory, and gems.

  Shah Wali Karzai, who’d joined his elder brother, lived for several months in the palace. The Taliban’s handiwork was hard to miss. The pre-Taliban president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, had returned to the presidential residence and was showing no intention of leaving, so Hamid Karzai and Shah Wali slept in one of King Zahir Shah’s old rooms. It was known as the Peacock Room, for the hundreds of birds that decorated its silk wallpaper. The Taliban had painted white blotches over each bird’s head to hide such an indecent display. In a painting of a man with a cow, they’d scratched out the faces of both. Stone lions guarding the entrance of the palace had been decapitated. A large wooden boat, a gift for the monarchy, remained dry-docked inside the palace. Shah Wali noticed that the Taliban censors had somehow overlooked the cross on its prow. One day, Shah Wali got dispatched by his elder brother to buy two pickup trucks for the palace, so they wouldn’t be stranded inside. “We looked everywhere,” he said. “We couldn’t find anything to buy.”

  To many of the exiled Afghans who had grown up in the monarchy’s relative calm, the city they returned to in the winter of 2001 seemed unrecognizable. Bullet-pocked and rocket-strafed husks stood in place of once elegant homes and shops and universities. The boulevards were cratered, trees razed. Shops and restaurants were closed and empty. It was a town of wood smoke, wheelbarrows, donkey carts. It smelled of the open sewage that trickled into the gutters. On the streets, there seemed to be as many stray dogs as cars. On his first evening back in Kabul, Mohammed Amin Farhang, who would become commerce minister in Karzai’s government, stayed at the Intercontinental Hotel, perched on a hill overlooking the capital. “I looked out my window and I saw very few lights in the entire city,” he recalled. “On the streets, people had long beards. They had depressing faces. They were not smiling.”

  Said Tayeb Jawad, who quit his law practice in San Francisco to join Karzai as his spokesman, later becoming chief of staff, almost got attacked by a pack of stray dogs while walking home from the palace one night. “The city was full of them,” he said. “Nobody was in the city.”

  The CIA was handing out millions of dollars in Rubbermaid plastic tubs to the regional warlords they had worked with to drive out the Taliban, but the Afghan government had hardly any money. On their way out of Kabul, the Taliban looted the vault of the Central Bank. The financial system was chaos; there were four different currencies in use throughout the country. Ryan Crocker, the veteran American diplomat appointed on January 2, 2002, as the embassy’s first chargé d’affaires, spent one freezing January night—the glass had been blown out of the windows—huddled on a satellite phone, trying to get several million dollars unfrozen out of the Federal Reserve to give Karzai’s government some seed money.

  “We basically need billions of dollars,” Karzai said that week.

  The palace had no computers. The cell phone network had not been built, and the landline system had been destroyed. Press aides would travel by bicycle to deliver handwritten stories to the state news agency. In the frigid palace, note takers fumbled as they tried to write with gloves on. The earliest meetings of the cabinet were recorded on stationery left behind by the Taliban, with their emblem of two swords curled around a sprig of wheat, and the sun rising behind a Koran. Karzai’s first inaugural speech was penned by the glow of a flashlight. When the cabinet convened, the twenty-six ministers, five vice presidents, and Karzai’s staff sat in a ragtag collection of different types of seating. The security guards wore camouflage clothes and sandals.

  “It was like Flintstone-istan,” one aide said.

  At the United States embassy just down the road, which had been closed since 1989, the arriving diplomats had walked into their own Cold War time capsule. The main chancery building had no heat, electricity, or water. “Pictures of Ronald Reagan and George Shultz adorned the walls. Warm beer and Coca-Cola sat in the refrigerator, and a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s stood on the bar in the basement,” James Dobbins wrote in his memoir. The small State Department team was sleeping in an underground bunker heated by kerosene stoves, waiting in long lines each morning for the toilet, and sharing a single computer and telephone. Couriers from the palace ran back and forth down the street delivering messages. In a vault they found a folded American flag and a note from Sergeant James M. Blake, one of the departing Marines from the earlier decade. “Take care of the flag. For those of us here it mean
s a lot,” the note read. “We Kabul Marines endured, as I am sure you will.”

  The United States made clear in those first months that it would not be pouring money into the Afghan government for major infrastructure improvements, though it was obvious that the war-ravaged country would benefit from some investment. Ambassador Robert Finn argued for ambitious infrastructure projects, such as rebuilding the country’s major highway, the “ring road” that connected major cities, but the Bush administration refused. The United States donated $297 million to Afghanistan in 2002, about half of what Europe gave. “Nation building” for the Bush administration was a slur. Condoleezza Rice had written before the 2000 elections that the U.S. military “is not a civilian police force. It is not a political referee. And it is most certainly not designed to build a civilian society.” Karzai, therefore, did not have at his disposal vast sums or patronage projects with which to buy off his enemies or win support for his government.

  Four days after Karzai’s arrival, on December 16, under an overcast sky, a small gathering convened to reopen the embassy. Dobbins stood at a podium in a tan trench coat. “We are here,” he told the small crowd. “And we are here to stay.”

  —

  Karzai’s early months were a whirlwind of meetings with foreign visitors and local well-wishers. Wrapped in robes and blankets, Karzai met an unending stream of Afghan and foreign dignitaries. (The Northern Alliance would later scoff that Karzai would have frozen without its blankets.)

  “Everything had to be done, and almost all of it had to be done by Karzai,” Crocker said.

  The smallest details were his responsibility. During one breakfast meeting, Karzai mentioned to Crocker that Afghanistan needed a flag. Neither the horizontally striped tricolor flag of the pre-Taliban Rabbani government—green, white, and black behind an emblem of crossed curving swords—nor the Taliban’s spare white banner was acceptable. He asked Crocker what it should look like.

  “Sir, that is well beyond my pay grade,” Crocker remembers telling him.

  Karzai thought that it should look something like the monarchical flag that flew during King Zahir Shah’s reign, but not exactly. As Crocker watched, Karzai sketched out a design on a napkin.

  To the governments of the West, Karzai touched down heaven-sent. He was urbane, peace-loving, eloquent in several tongues, amenable to modernity, democracy, rights for women, with none of the barefoot bizarreness of other Afghan longbeards, none of their outlandish rap sheets of baking, impaling, and raping their enemies. He enjoyed poetry, literature, strategic discussions of geopolitics. He had charm, charisma, a flair for the stage. He was lauded in dozens of articles in the American press for his “deft diplomatic and political touch,” for his vision as a “courageous Afghan leader,” for being “elegant and eloquent,” “brave, even heroic,” a “Western favorite,” with “good intentions.”

  So much had to be built anew, but in those first months Karzai presented himself to foreign diplomats as calm and optimistic. He would hardly miss a chance to regale his visitors with his unabashed support for the American project in Afghanistan. “There was only admiration for the Americans,” Javed Ludin, one of Karzai’s first spokesmen, told me. “Simply in every conversation—for a time it became too repetitive—when he spoke to the Afghan people, in his office or outside, he would always talk about America.” Karzai himself would recall this period as the “golden age” of his relations with the Americans.

  Those who met him came away impressed with his energy and enthusiasm. “He was open. He was honest. And he was very keen to work with the international community,” recalled John McColl, a British Army general who was the first commander of the International Security Assistance Force. “He was delighted that we would be there.”

  Karzai received delegations every day from around Afghanistan, many of them asking for foreign troops for their village or province. While the country was relatively secure at the time, they worried that new gangs or militias would fill the void left by the Taliban, and they believed that foreign troops could best keep them safe. Karzai supported this view and often begged visiting American officials to send more troops. McColl wanted to expand ISAF quickly and deploy to other major cities to secure the country and prevent a resurgence of the Taliban. Instead, the American footprint remained about the same for years. Graphs showing the U.S. troop presence are largely flat for the first several years of the war; the troop line wouldn’t shoot up dramatically until after Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

  “I’m afraid the United States lead is critical in all these things,” McColl said. “It shouldn’t be the case, but I regret that it is. And at that stage, the American view was that American forces don’t do nation building.”

  The most important job for the Kabul-based peacekeeping mission was to ensure that Karzai and his fledgling coalition government remained intact. Karzai knew he was a man surrounded. Most of the power the Bonn conference had allotted to the new Afghan government had gone to the Northern Alliance. The four most important ministries—defense, interior, intelligence, and foreign—were controlled by the Northern Alliance, and all by lieutenants of the slain Ahmad Shah Massoud. “They were dominating and no one else’s views mattered,” one of Karzai’s aides said.

  The commander Mohammad Fahim’s fifteen thousand Northern Alliance militiamen had become the nation’s military, and Karzai, even as commander in chief, did not have de facto control over them. For this reason, among others, Karzai had welcomed the arrival of ISAF to Kabul. These coalition troops could keep the peace in the capital, preventing power grabs by the Northern Alliance or any Taliban return, while American troops conducted their cave-bombing campaign against al-Qaeda. Karzai constantly asked for more American troops to be deployed to more Afghan cities.

  The palace staff was frightened of Fahim. He was brusque and bullying and would talk brashly about his power over Karzai. He sometimes sat in Karzai’s chair in the palace office, even while Karzai was present. Fahim’s office was outside the palace, and whenever he wanted to see Karzai, his convoy would breeze through the palace gates and deposit him directly outside Karzai’s office. He acted like the warlord of Kabul.

  During the loya jirga—the June 2002 conference stipulated by the Bonn meetings to select the transitional government—Afghans brokered deals for cabinet seats. Fahim had mentioned to a fellow Panjshiri that if Karzai’s demands were unacceptable to the Northern Alliance, he could have one of his loyal guards in the palace kill Karzai. It was just Fahim’s dark sense of humor, some of his friends believed, but the sentiment reflected the precarious nature of Karzai’s hold on the government. At night, when Pashtun staffers left their offices and walked across the darkened palace grounds, Tajik guards would cock their guns from the shadows, “just to intimidate you,” one staffer recalled.

  “There were continuously threats,” Jawad, the chief of staff, said. “There was always a threat of assassination of the president….It was not coming from outside the palace, it was inside.”

  When the Americans started supplying cash to the palace, used to pay salaries and other expenses, Fahim’s men demanded that Jawad give them a cut. He refused. One of Fahim’s outraged guards told him, “You better give us this money or you won’t be living the next day.” Fahim was well known in the government for demanding that his men receive prompt payment. He would get infuriated if there were any interruptions. “I will cut you in pieces, like meat in a butcher shop,” Fahim raged to bureaucrats in the Finance Ministry.

  Karzai believed that four of his own bodyguards had been designated to kill him whenever Fahim gave the signal. He mentioned this several times to Robert Finn, the first American ambassador in Kabul during the war. “He knew he was in an uneasy situation,” Finn told me. “This was a world in which people got killed all the time, and they deal with that, and live with that. That was one of the reasons why he kept them close to him, and didn’t want to piss them off.”

  Karzai’s desire to transcend e
thnicity, to unite Afghans and move past the brutalities of the civil war, was also central to his political identity. He always opposed political parties, fearing that such factionalism could lead to more bloodshed. Once the spigots of American foreign aid began to ease open, one of the first priorities for Karzai and the United States was to rebuild the Kabul–Kandahar Highway, a three-hundred-mile portion of the ring road, initially built in the 1960s with American financing, that linked Afghanistan’s two most important cities. At the start of the war, it could take two jarring days to traverse the potholed moonscape. “You were likely to get hit by bandits along the way,” recalled James Bever, the head of the Kabul office of the U.S. Agency for International Development at the time. “You were likely to lose not your muffler but your entire axle, if the car wasn’t washed out in a flood.” For Karzai, the road represented a tangible demonstration of his goal for national unity, by physically connecting southern Pashtuns and northern Tajiks.

  After the $500 million project was deemed completed, in December 2003, shrinking the journey between cities to six hours, Bever sat down with Karzai to plan the next phase of the road-building effort. Bever wanted to focus on cities in the south and east, where the Taliban insurgency was showing signs of life. Karzai picked up a pen and drew lines on a map in the country’s north and west. Karzai insisted the roads should go to provinces such as Faryab and Badakshan, even the Panjshir Valley. “I wanted to focus more of our assistance effort where more of our troubles were,” Bever recalled. “He said that was not sufficient. He said, This can’t be just about the Pashtuns. We’ve got a country to build.”

  They also had a palace to build. Karzai’s security guards would find people climbing over the walls—when they didn’t just walk through the holes—to use the palace as their toilet. “A mess, an insecure mess. It was so horrible and so hard for us to secure,” recalled Mohammad Latifi, one of Karzai’s first bodyguards. “We had to go through so much to block these people. All the warlords, generals, saying, ‘I’m going. You cannot block me.’ It took a lot of hard work.” The wiring in Karzai’s home was so shoddy that part of the kitchen caught fire in 2003; the palace staff brought fire extinguishers from the National Security Council offices to douse the blaze. “Your house is not a security risk,” an adviser told Karzai. “It’s a fire risk.”