A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  President Obama’s decision to ratchet up the war against the Taliban had been debated endlessly in Washington, as well as within the U.S. military command in Kabul, but it had been presented to President Karzai as basically a fait accompli. One of General Stanley McChrystal’s first orders from Defense Secretary Robert Gates had been to write a strategic assessment of the war, and McChrystal’s diagnosis was that the “overall situation is deteriorating,” with a “crisis of confidence” among Afghans, and a “resilient and growing insurgency.” McChrystal knew that the assessment would be the basis for requesting thousands of additional troops. The only question was how many. Karzai had strong misgivings about more troops.

  For years he had listened as delegations of elders from all corners of Afghanistan told woeful tales of slain sons and neighbors, bombed-out homes and trampled fields, women disgraced, men zip-tied and hooded, rooms ransacked and roads blocked, home invasions after midnight by bearded Americans and their terrifying attack dogs, the sad accumulation of fatal mistakes and outright atrocities entirely beyond his control. Karzai had explained his basic viewpoint countless times. He felt the war was headquartered and orchestrated in Pakistan by the ISI and its Taliban clients and that American violence in Afghan homes and villages served to swell the rebel ranks and prolong the war. He had said this to anyone who would listen.

  In late 2006, during a trip to Kandahar, Karzai told a crowd that the government of Pakistan “wants our children to serve as doormen at their hotels in Karachi instead of becoming doctors and engineers.” He went on: “Pakistan wants to rule a land where great empires of Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Britain, and the Soviet Union have been brought to their knees. Great empires have not been able to occupy this land; how can Pakistan dream of doing so?” When Obama was a senator visiting Kabul, Karzai insisted to him that if Pakistan stopped “using Islamic radicalism as an instrument of policy,” it would find a “true friend and ally” in Afghanistan. In June 2008, Karzai had threatened, at a press conference, to send his troops into Pakistan. “If these people in Pakistan give themselves the right to come and fight in Afghanistan, as was continuing for the last thirty years, so Afghanistan has the right to cross the border and destroy terrorist nests, spying, extremism, and killing, in order to defend itself, its schools, its people, and its life,” Karzai said. The American diplomats at the time took their normal stance and warned Karzai against publicly criticizing Pakistan. The next evening, at a dinner reception in the home of an Afghan official, one of Karzai’s national security aides, Daud Yaqub, told the deputy U.S. ambassador that Karzai “meant every word.

  “This wasn’t emotion or an attempt to deflect attention,” Yaqub told him. “The president genuinely feels this way and has for a long time.”

  But Karzai had long since lost any real desire to fight the Taliban inside his own country. He believed the collateral damage to civilian lives would exceed whatever might be won by attacking those foes. The Taliban spokesmen ridiculed Karzai relentlessly as an American stooge, a “captive in his palace.” He was far kinder toward them. Karzai tended to see the Taliban as fellow Pashtuns—he often called them “disenchanted” or “upset” brothers—and advocated reaching out to them for negotiations and reconciliation. He proposed hosting a peace conference in Kabul in 2010, at a time when the American position called only for attracting low-level insurgents to switch sides but not reaching out to the Taliban leadership. During one military briefing that spring, Karzai listened as McChrystal gravely informed him that Barg-e-Matal, an embattled town in a remote northern province, had fallen to the Taliban. “So it was liberated,” Karzai responded. In a moment of anger during the election crisis, Karzai had told a group of parliamentarians that if the international community kept pressuring him, he would join the Taliban himself.

  Americans in Kabul got outraged when they heard such comments. How could this man, installed and propped up and still alive only by the grace of the United States, be so ungrateful? Many people within Karzai’s government disagreed with his soft approach to the Taliban and thought he expressed far too much sympathy with the insurgency. Some of them believed that Karzai had not just lost faith in the U.S. military’s chances at winning the war but had actively begun to undermine American goals in an attempt to hasten the superpower’s withdrawal. “Almost every day the agenda has been: do something to defeat the West in Afghanistan,” one of his colleagues told me that spring. “We are trying on a daily basis to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan.”

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  Hamid Karzai’s views on the Taliban almost seemed to have come full circle from the spring of 1994, when he’d burst into Richard Smyth’s office at the American consulate in Peshawar saying, “Richie! Richie! I’ve got exciting news! A new group has formed in Afghanistan!”

  Back then, a small cabal of mullahs and religious students from Uruzgan and Kandahar Provinces had taken a stand against the warlords of their day. Most of the leaders of this inchoate rebellion, a one-eyed country cleric named Mullah Mohammed Omar among them, were not of Karzai’s social class, educational background, or branch of the Pashtun tribal tree. They tended to be poor men from rural areas and descendants of the Ghilzai side of the Pashtun schism. Within the early Taliban ranks, the Popalzais, Karzai’s tribe on the other side of the divide, were not completely shut out. Some of the movement’s senior leaders were family friends of the Karzais’, such as Mullah Mohammed Ghaus, who went on to be foreign minister in the Taliban regime. Another friend was Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwa, who would be the Taliban governor of Herat and then a Guantánamo prisoner, until he was released in May 2014 in the exchange for American prisoner of war Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl.

  At that time, Karzai considered the Taliban a positive development because he hoped they would end the brutal civil war. He also saw them as a hedge against his family’s other political rivals in Kandahar. Some have claimed that Karzai went as far as donating $50,000 and weapons to help the Taliban spread, although others in the family dispute this. It is true, however, that Karzai at that stage was urging Pakistan’s intelligence service to do more to support them.

  By October 1995, the Taliban movement had already spread far beyond Kandahar. That month, they captured the western city of Herat, near the Iranian border. Their arrival set off protests, and they angered city residents with their decree closing girls’ schools and firing female teachers and civil servants. A few days after the Taliban took the city—part of their rapid conquest of Afghanistan—Karzai met with political officers in the American consulate in Peshawar. The new Taliban governor of Herat, Mullah Yaar Mohammad, was Karzai’s friend, and although Karzai acknowledged that the people of the city were “not entirely happy,” he said the Taliban were “trying to be nice.” The governor was doing his best, Karzai assured the Americans. When the governor learned some Talibs were running around the city with scissors, threatening to give locals haircuts, Karzai said his friend had the “would-be barbers publicly beaten to belay fears that the Taliban planned to impose drastic change upon the Heratis.” The Taliban in Herat was a “Popalzai show,” Karzai noted. He had some mixed feelings about this. He was happy his tribesmen were leading the Taliban in the west, but he worried that they were being sent away from the highest ranks of Taliban leadership in Kandahar.

  The Taliban thought highly enough of Karzai that he was offered the job of ambassador to the United Nations in New York. Some who knew Karzai well in that period debate whether he accepted, but at least for a time, Karzai presented himself as the Taliban’s representative in his meetings with American diplomats. On December 10, 1996, three months after the Taliban had taken Kabul, Robin Raphel, the State Department’s assistant secretary responsible for Afghanistan and the region, met with “Taliban-designated UN rep Hamid Karzai” to give him a five-page letter outlining the State Department’s views on the new regime. In the letter, Raphel urged the Taliban to reassure Russia and Afghanistan’s northern neighbors about their “non-aggressive intenti
ons,” because “to many, the Taliban are an unknown entity, perhaps misunderstood and misperceived.

  “I note from your letter that you have chosen Mr. Hamid Karzai to be Afghanistan’s permanent representative to the United Nations in New York,” she wrote. “You should be aware that gaining acceptance of the Taliban’s credentials for Afghanistan at the U.N. may be difficult and protracted. Unfortunately, the Taliban’s gender policies have cost it the necessary support of the international community.”

  Karzai was not taking a particularly radical stance by supporting the Taliban at that stage. Many moderate Pashtuns also endorsed their cause. The early rhetoric from these humble clerics seemed to herald a better future: they professed a desire to collect the warlords’ weapons, hold a loya jirga to choose the next government, and perhaps reinstate the exiled king. That winter, Zalmay Khalilzad, an early Taliban supporter who had been working at the RAND Corporation, spent Christmas in Munich visiting his wife’s family. Hamid Karzai sought him out to ask for his advice about the Taliban’s job offer: Should he accept the U.N. post? Khalilzad inferred, from how Karzai was discussing the position, that the job hadn’t been offered to him in an authoritative way.

  Within a month, however, the issue was moot, as Karzai was out of the job. The Taliban had rescinded the offer, once again under mysterious circumstances. Karzai relatives believe that Mullah Omar and others got suspicious of Karzai after he visited with the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, an anti-Taliban fighter, trying to lobby his support. After that brush-off, Karzai drifted further away from the Taliban. In his diplomatic rounds, Karzai was also reporting growing tensions between the Taliban and his Popalzai tribe. On January 12, 1997, he told John Holzman, the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Islamabad, that the Taliban had beaten a senior Popalzai commander a few months earlier, and another one had been shot. They had also moved his friend Mullah Yaar Mohammad from the governorship of Herat to a less important post. Karzai said there was “little clarity” about the Taliban’s harboring of Osama bin Laden but that their support for radical Islamists in general “cuts across” the ranks of the movement. Karzai still felt the United States had to work with the Taliban, in order to moderate their views. And his tribe, he insisted, was still relevant in the movement. “The Popalzais are a formidable part of the Taliban, and they know this,” Karzai told Holzman.

  By the summer of 1998, as Mullah Omar was denouncing the American missile strikes on Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda training camps as “a brazen manifestation of enmity against the Afghan nation,” Karzai had turned completely against his former friends. He later claimed he discovered that the mullahs were being controlled by Pakistani intelligence and were aligned with Islamic radicals, and that the Taliban was not the homegrown nationalistic movement he had believed it to be. Eager to pass tips to the Americans, Karzai told U.S. diplomats in August 1998 that he had heard from several Taliban sources that bin Laden was “on the move,” fearing another American strike. Karzai said he and his father were in favor of the U.S. bombings, which he believed sent a strong message against terrorism.

  Hamid Karzai got married in 1999 in Quetta. At his wedding, Hamid’s father convened the relatives and other Pashtun leaders at a late-night meeting in the family compound. As his elder brother Qayum recalled in Ghost Wars, their father told them, “Our country is gone and it’s somebody else’s country now, and it [will] remain that way unless we [resist].” His father urged them to ally themselves with the Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. Hamid worked from the family compound that year to organize resistance to the Taliban among prominent Pashtun royalists. He coordinated meetings with tribal chiefs and even wrote to Mullah Omar, inviting him to attend but also warning that the Taliban must reform and “remove the foreigners that [are] with them here killing and destroying our country, ruining our lives.”

  In the remaining time before September 11, Karzai advocated for regime change. He begged American diplomats to pay more attention to the Taliban atrocities and asked for money and weapons to foment revolt. Bill Milam, a U.S. ambassador to Pakistan during this period, felt Karzai was being reckless. “His third question was always: Can I have some weapons?” Milam recalled. “I would tell him, I can give you a pen and paper.”

  Karzai’s anti-Taliban activism fell on deaf ears. “I would go every week to Islamabad,” he said. “I would go to the Americans, I would go to the French, I would go to the English, I would go to the Germans, I would go to the Italians…[and] tell them about the readiness of the Afghan people to move against the Taliban. They wouldn’t trust me. They wouldn’t believe me….They didn’t see it.”

  During the summer of 2000, Karzai testified before Congress about the miseries in his home country. “Our economy is in ruins,” he told the legislators. “Our people are pushed into destitution and despair. Our land is turned into a training camp for terrorists, gun-runners, drug dealers, and criminals. Our agriculture is destroyed because of land mines. Worst of all, Afghans are still dying in a foreign imposed war.

  “I was among the first to actively support the Taliban movement,” Karzai said. “I personally knew and worked with the majority of the leadership during the entire period of Jihad. They were neither radical nor against Afghan values and culture. They entertained no ambition to hold on to political power nor to remain involved in politics. Thus, my knowledge of and experience with the Afghan Taliban makes it very clear to me that the presence and militancy of terrorism in Afghanistan are not the product of Afghans, but rather the product of non-Afghans who have come to our country in disguise to appear as Afghans and as Taliban.”

  Karzai begged the United States to help. “The time to watch is over and the responsibility to act is long overdue,” he said. “Further delay will dramatically increase the political and economic cost of the resolution of the conflict in Afghanistan and the region.”

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  A couple of months before delivering his assessment of the war’s failings to his bosses in Washington, General Stanley McChrystal presented it to Karzai and other senior officials in a Cabinet Room briefing with a colorful PowerPoint deck. Karzai understood that this particular briefing was rather momentous. The slide show was supposed to convince him to accept, and endorse, thousands more American soldiers, as well as the attendant collateral damage that would accompany such an escalation. What would ultimately be one of Karzai’s most important decisions of his political life would be justified in two dozen slides. Karzai paid close attention. He even took notes.

  “Well, General, the first thing is, you called the situation dire,” Karzai said when it was over, as a person in the briefing recalled. “Is it really dire? What do you mean by ‘dire’?”

  Karzai wasn’t lacking in vocabulary; he spoke immaculate English with a patrician, vaguely British lilt. He was mulling the implications: How was “dire” different from “awful” or “grim” or “catastrophic.” What would that word do to Afghans’ confidence in him? The men debated the synonyms for a while before Karzai got stuck on another problematic word: “insurgency.”

  “We don’t have an insurgency in Afghanistan,” he insisted.

  A historian of Afghanistan, Thomas Barfield, has written that “nothing undermined the legitimacy of any Afghan government faster than the charge that it was beholden to foreign masters.” This was something that Karzai knew intuitively, and he returned to this point with anyone who would listen. It was one of his spiels. Afghanistan, in his mind, had a problem with “terrorism.” American troops were here to fight that. If there was an insurgency, that meant ordinary Afghans were fighting their own government, and that meant people saw his government as illegitimate. And if the American infidels were here fighting on behalf of this illegitimate government, that meant, he explained to McChrystal, that “I’m a puppet.” And if I’m a puppet, he went on, and you are infidels, then those fighting us can declare this a jihad. And in this country, jihad is politically and religiously accepted. And i
f that’s the case, we’re in trouble.

  “So this is not an insurgency,” Karzai said.

  After that briefing, Ambassador Eikenberry reported back to Washington. His message: We really do have a problem. Eikenberry was frustrated by the gulf separating how he and Karzai saw the war; he felt that the interests of Karzai and the United States were not aligned. After his two tours in the military, and then the chaos of the election, Eikenberry had become one of the war’s chief skeptics, and many of his misgivings had to do with Hamid Karzai.