The Afghanistan Papers

by Craig Whitlock

  On 9/11, Karzai was living in exile in Pakistan. The CIA had previously cultivated a limited relationship with him because of his opposition to the Taliban and their bond soon intensified.

  Though Karzai lacked credentials as a guerrilla, the spy agency encouraged him to cross into southern Afghanistan in October 2001 to lead an uprising against the Taliban as the U.S. Air Force began dropping bombs. Weeks later, the CIA dispatched a helicopter to rescue Karzai when he became pinned down in a skirmish. A CIA paramilitary officer and a Special Forces team stayed by his side after that.

  After the fall of the Taliban that winter, Afghanistan desperately needed a leader who could unite its belligerent factions. Karzai emerged as the consensus choice inside and outside the country. He was a Pashtun yet acceptable to the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara strongmen who led the Northern Alliance.

  He also drew support from all the foreign powers that gathered in Germany at the Bonn conference to help the Afghans plot their future. James Dobbins, the U.S. diplomat who guided the summit, said Pakistan’s ISI spy agency first floated Karzai’s name as a potential leader. Russia, Iran and the United States also approved—a rare moment of agreement among historic rivals.

  “Karzai was telegenic and cooperative and moderate and broadly popular,” Dobbins said in a diplomatic oral-history interview. “So he had an unusual ability to win the confidence of a wide variety of disparate governments and individuals.”

  He also grew increasingly beholden to the Americans. While the Bonn conference unfolded, Karzai remained in southern Afghanistan to help with mop-up operations against the Taliban. On December 5, 2001, a U.S. Air Force B-52 mistakenly dropped a bomb on his camp in Kandahar.

  A CIA officer, Greg “Spider” Vogle, dove on top of Karzai to shield him from the explosion. Both men survived, though three U.S. soldiers and five Afghans were killed.

  Hours after the blast, Karzai’s satellite phone rang. It was Lyse Doucet, a BBC journalist in Kabul whom he had known for years. The BBC had broadcast a news bulletin that the Bonn delegates had named Karzai as the interim head of Afghanistan’s government.

  “Hamid, what’s your reaction to being chosen as the new leader?” she shouted over the static-filled connection.

  This was news to Karzai. “Are you sure?” he asked. Doucet assured him she was.

  “That’s nice,” Karzai replied. He did not mention that he had just narrowly escaped death.

  A few weeks later, Karzai moved into the presidential palace. He knew he was entirely dependent on the Americans. In charge of a country in ruins, he had no security forces, no bureaucracy and no resources.

  “Just a cold, drafty palace to try and preside over,” Ryan Crocker, who served as acting U.S. ambassador in early 2002, said in a University of Virginia oral-history interview.

  Karzai invited Crocker to breakfast at the palace almost every day, offering a spread of freshly baked bread, cheese, honey and olives. Crocker jumped at the chance for a homemade meal; the U.S. embassy only had packets of nonperishable military rations. But he also knew that Karzai faced thousands of decisions—big and small—and hungered for guidance.

  One morning, Karzai brought up something unexpectedly.

  “We need a flag,” he said. “What do you think it should look like?”

  “That’s up to you,” Crocker replied.

  Karzai took out a napkin and started sketching a black, red and green flag with the national emblem—an image of a mosque—in the center.

  “The traditional colors, that means something to people,” Karzai explained as he drew. “We got to accept that we are the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, so we need to work in God somewhere.”

  Presto! A new flag for a reborn country—doodled on a napkin.

  Crocker admired Karzai for his personal courage and his determination to govern Afghanistan as a nation instead of as a feuding collection of tribes. But he questioned whether Karzai had the political instincts and capacity to rule effectively.

  Among his many duties, Karzai needed to handpick new governors for each of the country’s thirty-four provinces. “And he would ask me, ‘Who should be governor of Ghazni?’ Like I had a clue,” Crocker said. “And he made some really bad choices.”

  Karzai entrusted his life to the Americans. Taliban gunmen had assassinated his father in 1999 outside a mosque in Quetta, Pakistan. He knew the Taliban would redouble its efforts to kill him, too, but he lacked a reliable security force of his own. For his first few years in office, the U.S. government assigned a security detail to guard him around the clock.

  His enemies constantly had him in their sights. In September 2002, a Taliban infiltrator wearing an Afghan police uniform took aim at Karzai as he leaned out of a vehicle to greet supporters in Kandahar. The would-be assassin squeezed off four rounds before he was killed by U.S. Special Forces. Karzai avoided injury. But it was another close call.

  By October 2004, Afghanistan had stabilized enough to hold its first national election to choose a head of state. More than eight million people braved threats from the Taliban and a giant sandstorm in Kabul to cast ballots. Karzai won easily with 55 percent of the vote, beating a crowded field of seventeen other candidates.

  International observers judged the election free and fair. From the U.S. perspective, the Bush administration could not have hoped for a better political outcome to the war it had launched three years earlier. Hard-luck Afghanistan, once a communist vassal state, had transformed into a democracy and its grateful leader felt indebted to the United States.

  In December 2004, Rumsfeld and Cheney flew to Kabul to attend Karzai’s inaugural ceremony. Afterward, Rumsfeld raved about the event in a snowflake to Bush. “It was a day I will never forget,” Rumsfeld wrote, recapping how he and Cheney met with a rhapsodic Karzai right before the swearing-in. “He said, ‘Now life is working. Before the U.S. came to Afghanistan, we were like a still-life picture; when you arrived, everything came to life. With your help, we have come so far.’ ”

  The Bush administration designated Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-American diplomat, as its primary Karzai-charmer. Like Karzai, he was a Pashtun and the pair had known each other since the 1990s. The relationship intensified when Bush appointed Khalilzad as his special envoy to Afghanistan in 2002 and named him as U.S. ambassador one year later.

  Khalilzad spoke with Karzai multiple times a day and dined with him at the palace almost every evening. Unlike most Afghans, Karzai was punctual. Supper started precisely at 7:30 p.m. and he expected his guests to arrive thirty minutes early. The menu rarely changed: either chicken or lamb with rice, plus two vegetables. Afterward, they chatted for hours. By the time Khalilzad got back to the embassy, it was often past midnight.

  In 2005, the Bush administration decided to send Khalilzad to Baghdad to deal with the turmoil there as U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Karzai personally pleaded with White House officials to allow Khalilzad to remain in his post in Afghanistan, to no avail. At that point, U.S. officials had plenty of confidence in Karzai and saw him as an archetypal leader.

  “When I went to Iraq, Karzai was so popular,” Khalilzad recalled in a Lessons Learned interview. He said White House officials half-jokingly asked him, “ ‘Why can’t you try to find a Karzai-type figure in Iraq?’ ”

  But Karzai felt abandoned. He was accustomed to unceasing reassurance from the Americans. The Bush administration, for its part, wanted to normalize the relationship with an ambassador who would not have to dine with Karzai every day. Both sides struggled to adjust.

  Marin Strmecki, the Pentagon adviser, said Karzai needed to spend hours talking through his leadership dilemmas before he felt comfortable making tough decisions. It required a lot of hand-holding.

  Khalilzad’s successors lacked his patient touch and sometimes made ill-considered demands. When Ronald Neumann arrived as U.S. ambassador in 2005, he prodded Karzai to remove corrupt officials—including his half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the chief of the Kandahar provincia
l council.

  In January 2006, Newsweek published a story accusing Ahmed Wali Karzai of controlling the drug trade in southern Afghanistan. Enraged, Hamid Karzai summoned Neumann and the British ambassador to the palace. He threatened to file a libel suit and demanded to know if U.S. or British officials had any hard evidence against his brother.

  “We all said that we had numerous rumors and allegations to that effect that his brother is corrupt and a narco-trafficker but that we have never had clear evidence that one could take to court,” Richard Norland, the U.S. embassy’s deputy chief of mission, reported to Washington in a classified cable. The Americans didn’t back down. They told Karzai that perception was reality and he needed to deal with the problem.

  But the U.S. government was asking Karzai to clean up a mess of its own making. Behind the scenes, the CIA worked closely with Ahmed Wali Karzai and had helped turn him into a regional power broker. For years, the agency paid him to recruit and support a secretive paramilitary strike force, almost certainly with Hamid Karzai’s knowledge. Given that ongoing relationship, it took chutzpah for U.S. embassy officials to urge the Afghan president to punish his brother based on vague allegations of wrongdoing. Karzai never forgot it.

  “By targeting him, we were damaging our relations,” Todd Greentree, a Foreign Service officer who served for several years in Afghanistan, said in a diplomatic oral-history interview. “The wisdom of that was always pretty questionable.”

  As the insurgency worsened, Bush administration officials grew critical of Karzai’s ad hoc governing style. They groused that he acted more like a tribal leader than the president of a modern nation. They also worried that the Taliban was exploiting popular dissatisfaction with his government’s corruption and incompetence.

  U.S. officials had worked hard with Karzai to marginalize the influence of Afghanistan’s warlords, so they became exasperated when he brought the strongmen back in from the cold to forge alliances. To the White House, the one-time poster boy for democracy was losing his sheen.

  “Karzai was never sold on democracy and did not rely on democratic institutions, but instead relied on patronage,” Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser during his second term, said in a Lessons Learned interview. “My impression was that the warlords were back because Karzai wanted them back.”

  Yet Karzai held legitimate grievances of his own against the United States.

  The U.S. military controlled the skies of Afghanistan with squadrons of fighter aircraft, attack helicopters and armed drones. Even with advanced cameras and sensors, however, pinpointing individual targets on the ground was inherently difficult. Insurgents disguised their presence by moving in small groups and hiding in villages.

  As fighting with the Taliban escalated, so did the number of U.S. airstrikes that killed or wounded innocent civilians. U.S. commanders often worsened matters by reflexively branding civilians as terrorists when there was clear evidence to the contrary. Karzai had protested for years about errant airstrikes. But his objections grew louder and more public in 2008 when the United States tried to cover up a string of catastrophes.

  On July 6, Afghan witnesses reported that U.S. warplanes had mistakenly bombed a wedding party near a remote village in Nangahar province in eastern Afghanistan, killing dozens of women and children. The U.S. military issued a swift public denial, stating that it had struck “a large group of enemy fighters” on a mountain range in a “precision” attack.

  “Whenever we do an airstrike the first thing they’re going to cry is, ‘Airstrike killed civilians’ when the missile actually struck militant extremists we were targeting in the first place,” Army First Lt. Nathan Perry, a military spokesman, told the Associated Press at the time.

  Karzai ordered a government commission to investigate and it confirmed that the group was indeed a wedding party. Forty-seven people were killed, mostly children and women, including the bride. U.S. military officials retreated slightly. They said they regretted any civilian casualties and promised to conduct their own investigation. But they never publicized the findings.

  A month later, another bungled military operation exacerbated Karzai’s distrust. A combined force of U.S. and Afghan ground troops, a low-flying AC-130 gunship and a Reaper drone laid waste to the village of Azizabad in Herat province in western Afghanistan.

  The U.S. military said the operation targeted a “high-value” Taliban leader and stated there were no civilian fatalities. But it soon became apparent that something had gone seriously wrong. Within a day, military officials backtracked and admitted that five civilians had died. Even that proved to be a horrible undercount.

  Witnesses reported that as many as sixty children had died in the hours-long attack and were buried under rubble. The United Nations, Afghan government and an Afghan human-rights commission conducted separate investigations, drawing on photographs, videos and survivor statements. They concluded that between seventy-eight and ninety-two civilians—most of them children—had been killed.

  A furious Karzai visited the area and blasted the U.S. government for disregarding Afghan life. “I have been working day and night in the past five years to prevent such incidents, but I haven’t been successful,” he said. “If I had succeeded, the people of Azizabad wouldn’t be bathed in blood.”

  Still, U.S. military officials defended the operation and accused Afghan officials of spreading Taliban propaganda. The Pentagon conducted its own investigation. After several weeks, it concluded that twenty-two insurgents and thirty-three civilians were killed but justified the assault on the village, saying the attack was “in self-defense, necessary and proportional.”

  The U.S. investigation summarily dismissed evidence gathered by the Afghans and the United Nations as uncorroborated or tainted by people with “financial, political, and/or survival agendas.” Yet the military based its own findings in part on video filmed by a Fox News crew—led by Oliver North of Iran–Contra fame—that had embedded with U.S. forces during the attack on Azizabad.I

  In addition to the botched airstrikes, Karzai excoriated U.S. and NATO forces for conducting hundreds of intrusive night raids on Afghan homes as part of their insurgent-hunting operations. Like the airstrikes, the night raids sometimes went awry and Special Operations forces killed the wrong targets.

  In a Lessons Learned interview, an unnamed U.S. military officer said mistakes were so common that some Army units were “focused on consequence management, paying Afghans for damages and condolence payments.” The officer, who served in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan in 2008, recalled an incident when Army Rangers erroneously raided the home of an Afghan army colonel, killing him and his wife, a schoolteacher. “We killed our allies,” the U.S. officer said.

  In public, Bush administration officials expressed regret over the civilian casualties. In private, they seethed over Karzai’s blistering comments and pressed him to tone down his criticism.

  But Karzai wanted to demonstrate his independence, in part because he was keenly aware that the Taliban mocked him as an American stooge. He spoke out more about other sensitive issues that the U.S. military had downplayed or ignored.

  For example, he castigated Washington for taking a soft line with Pakistan and failing to eliminate the Taliban’s havens across the border. The criticisms had validity but his public potshots left U.S. officials indignant.

  “Every time we had a huge fight with Karzai or he blew up in public, in every single instance he had been talking to us for months in private about that problem,” Gates said. “We didn’t pay attention… Many of these things we could have prevented had we just been listening better.”

  On one hand, U.S. officials expected Karzai to be a self-reliant and resolute leader. On the other, they wanted a subservient partner to do their bidding. “I made this point time and again inside the administration,” Gates added. “People were just dissing Karzai: ‘He’s a crackpot.’ ‘He depends on us for everything.’ ‘He is a terrible ally.’ I’d say,
‘We’re not such a great ally, either. If we were, we’d be listening better, because he’s been telling all of us about this forever.’ ”

  By the time Obama moved into the White House, his administration had already decided to take a tough-love approach with the Afghan president.

  In early January 2009, Vice President–elect Joe Biden visited Kabul and met with Karzai and his cabinet in the palace for dinner. Biden and other U.S. officials goaded Karzai about his questionable political appointments, runaway government corruption and his brother’s underworld connections. Karzai pushed back about night raids and civilian casualties. At one point, Biden threw down his napkin and the evening ended in acrimony.

  One month later, Holbrooke flew to Kabul and met with Karzai in his second-floor office at the palace. Instead of trying to smooth things over from Biden’s quarrelsome dinner, Holbrooke hinted that the knives were out. Karzai vented his own resentments. As soon as Holbrooke left, Karzai called Kai Eide, the U.N. diplomat, to his office and told him: He wants to get rid of me and of you.

  Holbrooke wasn’t the only U.S. diplomat who thought Karzai was no longer up to the job. In July 2009, Karl Eikenberry, the new U.S. ambassador, sent a cable to Washington that presented “two contrasting portraits” of Karzai—both of which portended trouble. “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. “The other is that of an ever-shrewd politician who sees himself as a nationalist hero.”

  The bubbling feud soon boiled over. On August 20, 2009, Afghans returned to the polls for the second presidential election in the country’s history. But turnout plummeted and the credibility of the vote sank into doubt right away. Within hours, reports spread that Karzai’s supporters were systematically stuffing ballot boxes. Violence broke out across the country and more than two dozen civilians were killed.

  On the day after the election, Holbrooke met with Karzai and suggested a runoff would be necessary even before the results were counted. Karzai accused Holbrooke of undermining him and walked out.