The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  Abdul Ghaffar Khan followed Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, an unusual move for a Pashtun whose culture is steeped in war and blood feuds. He is famous among Pashtuns for his opposition to the creation of Pakistan. The British had divided the Pashtun tribal lands in order to defend the empire’s northwest frontier, and Pashtuns had never accepted the artificially drawn Durand Line. The creation of Pakistan in 1947 absorbed a large part of the Pashtun lands, reinforcing the division. Roughly 26 million Pashtuns now reside in Pakistan and 14 million in Afghanistan. Ghaffar Khan opposed the partition of India and wanted an autonomous Pashtun state within an independent India, if not full statehood separate from Pakistan. He persisted with his campaign despite repeated spells in prison under the British and Pakistani governments. Karzai knew Ghaffar Khan, who died in 1988 in Peshawar at the age of ninety-eight, and admired his stance. It is one of the reasons Pakistani military leaders always mistrusted Karzai.

  The invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Army in 1979 brought war to his country, and nonviolence no longer seemed an option. Karzai began to work for the Afghan resistance. He joined his father and worked for the Afghan National Liberation Front, one of the seven mujahideen parties. It was led by the widely respected religious scholar Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, who headed the first mujahideen government in 1992 and became leader of the Senate after the fall of the Taliban. His party was traditionalist and promonarchist but considered one of the more moderate. Karzai helped raise funds and channel weapons to the mujahideen, and acted as a liaison between the mujahideen and intelligence officials in the CIA, ISI, and security organizations from other countries. He became a spokesman for the party and worked with the Western journalists who traveled through Pakistan to cover the war in Afghanistan with the mujahideen.

  Toward the end of the decade, when the Soviet Army withdrew from Afghanistan, Karzai became more and more involved in political affairs. He lived in Peshawar, the northwest frontier town that was the main hub of mujahideen activity in the 1980s. He used to visit the Pearl Continental Hotel to swim lengths in its pool and meet with Western aid officials, journalists, and diplomats. He was never a fighter but made occasional forays into Afghanistan with the mujahideen. He was a genial, well-spoken figure and popular among Western journalists, not least because of his easy English and relaxed manners. Few imagined him as a future president.

  In 1992, when the mujahideen overthrew the government of the Communist leader Najibullah and took power in Kabul, Mojaddedi became interim president and Karzai joined the new government as a deputy foreign minister. He survived barely two years in the job as the mujahideen factions began tearing the government and capital apart. The ISI’s favorite commander, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was firing rockets from his base on the south side of the capital in anger at having failed to seize control in Kabul. Karzai tried to mediate between Hekmatyar and those in government in Kabul.

  Karzai came under suspicion for his efforts and was detained by intelligence officials. Only when a rocket slammed into the building where he was being interrogated did Karzai manage to escape. One of the intelligence officials interrogating him was Mohammad Qasim Fahim, a compact, thuggish Panjsheri commander, whom Karzai chose later to serve as his vice president. It was only one of the many ironies of Afghan political life. That early encounter was indicative of the future relationship: Fahim was the man with muscle, Karzai the fast talker.

  Karzai abandoned his job and left for Pakistan in 1994. Disillusioned with the factional fighting in Kabul, he was drawn to support the Taliban when they first emerged in southern Afghanistan that same year. He knew many of the men who started the movement since they were mujahideen from his own province of Kandahar, and they seemed to want to end the violence and lawlessness. He supported them with money and even considered taking the post of ambassador to the United Nations representing the Taliban government—until he was deterred by atrocities committed by the Taliban and the growing influence of Pakistan’s ISI over the movement. Karzai turned to work on a political plan with Abdul Haq and supporters of the former monarch to call a loya jirga, a grand tribal assembly, to reinstate King Zahir Shah as leader of Afghanistan.

  The plan was not new, but as the Taliban campaign grew increasingly bloody, the group worked to raise support with several international conferences through the late 1990s. When Karzai’s father was assassinated in 1999, some of his associates thought the younger Karzai had been the real target of the Taliban. By now he was the more politically active member of the family. Karzai was undeterred. He spoke out against the malign influence of the ISI and Arab fundamentalists, who were increasingly dominating Afghanistan. He journeyed north to talk to Ahmed Shah Massoud and consulted him about raising a resistance force in southern Afghanistan. His work brought him into disfavor with the ISI. Just days before the 9/11 attacks, Karzai was informed by the Pakistani authorities that his visa allowing him to reside in Pakistan would not be renewed.

  Karzai showed a sure political touch in the days after 9/11. He spoke often to the world media, denouncing the attacks, railing against the Arabs and al Qaeda that had hijacked his country, and calling on his people to reject their extremist agenda. Karzai knew he had to be among his people after 9/11 and persuade them to work with the United States and the world community, and to rise up against the Taliban. His understanding of how to manage an uprising was dangerously limited, but his political instincts were sound. Thanks to his visits with Massoud in the north, with the former king Zahir Shah and his circle in Rome, as well as with tribal and mujahideen leaders all over the country, he was known and accepted by the various parties at the United Nations–sponsored Bonn conference, which agreed on a transitional process for the post-Taliban era. The most powerful faction in the north, the Northern Alliance, recognized that a Pashtun leader would be more acceptable to the majority of Afghans, and saw Karzai as someone they could work with, perhaps because he was not a powerful figure. When he was named the leader of the interim government in December 2001, most ordinary Afghans had never heard of him, but he was familiar to all the political and mujahideen leaders as well as to Western diplomats and intelligence agencies.

  He arrived in Kabul on December 13 by American helicopter with his uncle and a small entourage of unarmed men. “We did not even have a knife,” Hafizullah Khan recalled, so strict were the American flight rules. The Kandaharis had offered to muster thousands of armed men by road to provide him with protection, but Karzai had declined, aware that the Northern Alliance, led by his former interrogator, General Fahim, had taken control of the capital. “He said if we go there with this force there will be some unfriendliness,” Hafizullah Khan said. “He did the right thing. Fahim controlled everything, and there was no way there would not have been clashes between us. We did not bring anything with us and in the end we got all the weapons and planes for the government. This also brought unity among Afghans.” The passengers felt some nervousness stepping out to greet the Northern Alliance, but the welcome was effusive. “The Northerners were so happy. They welcomed us and Karzai sat with the leaders and we sat with others.”

  Karzai undoubtedly smoothed the transition of late 2001 with his diplomacy. He shuttled around the city calling on the various United Front leaders who had already taken over ministries and barracks in the capital to enlist their support. He soothed those who were unhappy at being excluded from the Bonn conference, not least President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was being made to step down in favor of Karzai. The two men lived uncomfortably alongside each other in the presidential palace compound, Karzai in the courtyard of the former royal palace and Rabbani in the more modern president’s residence, until Karzai’s inauguration. Yet it was to Karzai’s credit that he kept Rabbani on his side. The elder statesman became a source of advice and support to Karzai over the next ten years, until his assassination by a suicide bomber in 2011.

  Karzai’s great strength was personal relations. He spent hours and hours receiving tribal delegations from
all over the country, which in the Afghan tradition came to show their respect and loyalty to the new leader. They urged him to keep the foreign peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan and even to expand them across the country, to ensure stability and prevent a return to civil war. He balanced the mujahideen factions, which had reasserted themselves after the collapse of the Taliban, dividing government and security posts to give each ethnic group a share of power. Many Afghans have criticized Karzai and his Western backers for bringing back the warlords and commanders, men who have been accused of human rights abuses. Yet the Bush administration saw the coalition as important for stability. They did not want Afghans fighting each other. It became Karzai’s signature approach to politics. He wanted to represent all Afghans, including the Taliban, and he wanted to bring them inside the tent. It was a form of tribal politics, something he had learned at his father’s knee, a consultative system designed to keep the peace between conflicting interests. It was as much about his own survival as that of the country. Karzai parceled out cabinet posts, governorships, and security positions in Afghanistan’s provinces, and even created two extra provinces to please the Hazaras and Panjsheris, both powerful mujahideen factions. This was where Karzai excelled—at internal politicking. He worked tirelessly at it, paying great attention to detail. “He was probably the best tactician I have ever seen in negotiating his way around, even in hard negotiations and getting his own way,” a former cabinet minister told me. Karzai never showed the same interest in managing the country, the minister bemoaned. “He never had time for details on governance, rule of law, security, but he always had time for details on politics.”4

  Karzai often promised too much, and supporters fell out with him when he did not fulfill his promises. Yet he survived by keeping the most powerful factions on his side, working with him for more than a decade. He deflected all challengers to his position as president and avoided any internal coup, which, considering the short tenures and brutal ends of most of his predecessors in the Arg, the former royal palace, was something of an achievement. Virtually every Afghan leader in the twentieth century had been forced from power, overthrown, or assassinated.

  Karzai undoubtedly drew strength from having the most powerful players at his back, the U.S. Army. They helped remove some troublemakers and bring others to heel. The powerful warlord Ismail Khan, who ran western Afghanistan as his own fiefdom, was undermined by a local uprising and then persuaded to accept the offer of a cabinet post in the capital, which removed him from his stronghold. Afghans understood that the United States had orchestrated his fall. The leaders of the uprising told me later that they were doing the bidding of the United States. I was sitting with the American ambassador Zalmai Khalilzad when Ismail Khan called him in the middle of the crisis to ask him what he should do.

  Karzai kept unsavory characters close because he needed the political and militia power they commanded as faction leaders. Abdul Rasul Sayyaf was one such person. Sayyaf was an imposing Pashtun, over six feet tall, with a broad chest and terrifying reputation for the slaughter committed by his mujahideen. Human rights groups accused his forces of mass murders in the 1990s. A professor of Islamic law who trained in Egypt and speaks Arabic, he was one of the founding members, along with Burhanuddin Rabbani, of the Islamist movement in Afghanistan in 1973. He had close ties to Arab groups but was threatened by the Taliban and fought against them. After 2001, Sayyaf won a seat in parliament from his native region of Paghman, west of Kabul. Karzai often consulted him and other jihadi leaders on important political issues, such as relations with the West and negotiations with the Taliban. Karzai has been much criticized for giving Sayyaf respect and influence when he has been accused of land-grabbing and mafia-like criminality since 2001. Critics charge that the influence of such warlords has prevented any form of transitional justice for all the war crimes committed over thirty years in Afghanistan. Far from committing to reforms to prevent such impunity and corruption, legislators passed an amnesty law for Afghan political leaders that Karzai later approved.

  Sayyaf was at the forefront of pushing the amnesty bill through. His command of language and erudition in the Islamic faith were far higher than that of the president, and he could usually persuade the younger Karzai. In the larger scheme, Sayyaf commanded a powerful constituency of supporters, and was important to Karzai’s hold on political power, human rights notwithstanding.

  For the same reason, Karzai brought Marshall Fahim back in as a running mate for the 2009 elections. Under international pressure, Karzai had dropped Fahim in 2004 because of his links to armed militias. By this time, though, the two families had business ties. Fahim’s brother, Haseen Fahim, was a business associate of Karzai’s brother, Mahmoud Karzai. They were shareholders in the Kabul Bank, which became the center of the country’s biggest financial scandal in 2010 when hundreds of millions of dollars went missing. Before the scandal broke, while business was still good, Mahmoud Karzai persuaded his brother to ask Fahim back to be his vice presidential candidate for the 2009 presidential elections. Despite his unpopularity with many Afghans, Fahim still possessed enough political clout and money to deliver votes for Karzai and dilute support for the main Northern Alliance candidate, Abdullah Abdullah. Even more important for Karzai, Fahim had proved that he could cause more trouble for the president left out of power than in.

  A woman candidate for parliament told me she had asked Karzai why he had chosen to bring Fahim back in as vice president after he had been successfully sidelined. Karzai replied that many of Fahim’s jihadi supporters had been upset at his removal and caused trouble. Certainly crime, kidnapping, and riots had all risen sharply in the capital in the years that Fahim was out of power, and they largely subsided after his reinstatement. Karzai was bringing his rivals inside the tent, but he was sullying his own threshold by doing so.

  Karzai also arranged the return of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the most brutal of all the warlords, to ensure the support of the Uzbek and Turkmen vote. By 2008, Dostum was a dissolute and sick man, a diabetic and alcoholic who had beaten and abused political rivals and even his own officials, in order to retain dominance of his political party, Junbesh-e-Milli, and the Uzbek ethnic minority. When he nearly killed a political rival in his house in Kabul, and police surrounded the marble-clad mini-palace, Turkey offered to take him abroad to dry him out and keep him out of Afghanistan to defuse the situation. Karzai did not want to arrest Dostum, but he had gone too far, too many times, for Karzai’s Western allies and United Nations officials.

  Karzai brought Dostum back days before the 2009 election, just in time to announce his return and to tell his followers to vote for Karzai. He was given the symbolic post of chief of staff for defense to the president, and an office in the palace that he barely ever used. There was little protest from the U.S. administration. Turkey, a loyal and useful partner in the U.S.-led coalition, had lobbied for it. Although their militias had been disbanded, figures like Sayyaf, Dostum, and Fahim could rely on an army of supporters—former fighters, students, party workers—who could cause trouble but also deliver votes. Karzai needed these men politically, and he did what he felt he had to do in order to survive. It helped to secure his election though he lost the support of the educated elite and reformers, and the growing middle class.

  For many of his own supporters, Karzai’s greatest failing has been just that: He has allowed some of the worst war criminals and mafia bosses access to power. Members of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, which is independently funded though the commissioners are appointed by the president, blame Karzai for not having the vision to remove the warlords and institute a process of transitional justice to bring accountability for the decades of war crimes in Afghanistan. The Afghan people have suffered massacres, disappearances, summary executions, and indiscriminate bombardments for thirty years. The period after 2001 offered a unique chance to break the cycle of violence that has wracked Afghanistan since the Communist revolution of 1978. Yet
apart from bringing freedom of speech and opening up education, the Karzai era has made poor progress in advancing human rights and justice. Simar Samar, the founder and head of the human rights commission since 2002, said Karzai would complain that he did not have the power to move against the warlords. She never accepted that, and told me that both Karzai and the Bush administration had lacked the political will to prosecute war criminals. “The situation wasn’t easy. We all know that,” she said. “And there was not enough support from the international community for transitional justice.” But Karzai could have done more, she said. “I think he should have used his own power and that of his office.”5

  In the end, though, Karzai decided not to fight the strongmen, and chose to tolerate the corruption that swelled to obscene proportions under his administration. Even his close associates agreed that Karzai had been too soft. His foreign minister, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, told me once that corruption could be controlled with a firmer hand. Hedayat Amin Arsala, who has served at minister level in all of Karzai’s governments, concurred: “A stronger, willing hand, yes.” Of the president he said, “At times he is too nice a person.”

  With those who were less threatening, Karzai showed a deft political hand. He undermined parliament to ensure it did not become a base of opposition to him. He co-opted parliamentarians, buying some, sidelining others, and ignored the votes that did not suit him. He retained ministers even when parliament had voted against their appointment, and it was common knowledge that he or his ministers paid bribes to legislators to win the confirmations he wanted. According to several Afghan officials, the going rate was ten thousand dollars per legislator per vote by 2012.

  In 2009, with the presidential elections approaching, forty candidates entered the race against Karzai. Most had no hope of winning but wanted a moment of fame or to pull themselves up the career ladder. Democracy might be new to Afghanistan, but politics was as old as the hills. “Politics runs in their blood,” Richard C. Holbrooke said admiringly in the run-up to the election.6