The Wrong Enemy

by Carlotta Gall

  Karzai sought reelection by doing what he knew best, working his form of tribal politics. Not only did he choose Fahim to be his running mate to split the Tajik vote, but he induced at least six candidates to withdraw from the race in his favor. He persuaded a likely formidable opponent, the powerful governor of Nangarhar, Gul Agha Shirzai, against even entering the race. Shirzai was the man who had seized control of Kandahar in 2001 against Karzai’s wishes, and he was now preparing to run against Karzai for president. He came from a large Pashtun tribe, the Barakzai, and his candidacy would have been very damaging to Karzai. On the eve of the deadline for nominations, Karzai wooed his rival. He invited Shirzai to the palace and played on his Pashtun sensibility. We should not divide the Pashtuns at this critical time, and not split the Pashtun vote and let a Tajik win the presidency, Karzai told him. We should stay together and keep the Pashtun strong. Then Karzai pulled out his trump card. Karzai’s wife entered the room with their young son Mirwais. She placed the child on Shirzai’s knee. Would Shirzai turf her and little Mirwais out of their home? she asked. Shirzai never registered his candidacy.

  Karzai refused to form his own political party or to allow party lists in elections. He did not even build a team around him, preferring to keep vertical relationships with his ministers and officials so that they relied only on the president for their position. The presidential palace became a place of intrigue and suspicion. His concentration on internal politics came at the expense of any strategic vision, one of his former ambassadors said. “He kept a tribal strategy of having no strategy and defeating everyone,” said Sayed Tayeb Jawad, who served as Afghan ambassador to the United States for seven years from 2003.

  Unfortunately, Karzai cared only about tactics, not strategy, in everything, including foreign policy and directing the country, Jawad said. Ten years after taking power, Karzai was still focused on tactical issues, denouncing every night raid and every incident of civilian casualties but offering little in the way of strategic thinking. Discussion around the withdrawal of NATO troops in 2014 was reduced to a purely tactical target of timing and numbers, he added. Karzai had retained aides with a similar narrow vision who see relations with Iran and Pakistan through the old prism. “They think that if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan will treat us better. That’s not true. Only if we have strong relations with the U.S. will they treat us better,” he said.7

  For all his skill at politics, Karzai proved a poor administrator. Problems were already emerging in his first term. The public was disillusioned with the growing insecurity and lawlessness, the creeping corruption and general impunity. The abject poverty of the Taliban years had been alleviated with the end of the war, the influx of food assistance, and health and employment programs, but social problems were aggravated by a growing disparity between the rich and poor.

  “He’s a horrible manager,” one military commander told me of the president. A foreign advisor assisting with palace media communications said to me that he had never seen a more dysfunctional government office. The president issued orders, and his staff simply ignored them. Western diplomats and military commanders all saw the problems and tried to devise ways to mitigate the malfunctions. Zalmai Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador from 2003 to 2005, was described as “Karzai’s CEO” by my New York Times colleague Amy Waldman, because of his assiduous guidance of Karzai’s agenda, decision-making, and public appearances. The British helped set up and fund Karzai’s National Security Council in the early days of his administration. Yet when British General David Richards arrived to command NATO forces in 2006, he described the lack of coordination among the Afghan government, the foreign military, and Western donors as “anarchy.”

  General Richards decided that Karzai needed a war cabinet. He formed the Policy Action Group, comprising the top Afghan and Western figures on intelligence and security, to provide “joined-up, timely, and coordinated government action” on crucial issues.8 It was designed to help Karzai, but it was a symbolic rebuke. After Richards departed in 2008, the group fell by the wayside because it, too, had become unwieldy and inefficient.

  Karzai became a micromanager, personally appointing district administrators and security officers, and even selecting the principal of a Kandahar high school. He often managed the provinces through his own allies, undermining appointed officials. He was constantly in touch with tribal elders and other contacts. Once I was interviewing a provincial governor when President Karzai called to tell him there were forty members of the Taliban sheltering in a school in a village in his province, ordering him to take action. The governor had not even been informed about the Taliban sighting, but the president was already exercised over it. Karzai also fell into the trap of favoring his own tribe, the Populzai, for appointments. When the head of Kandahar’s education department, a Populzai, was removed because his claim of a master’s degree was revealed to be false, he appealed to Karzai who promptly made him head of the transport department, a lucrative job for a dishonest official.

  Reformists in the government and among foreign donors tried to instill a system of merit and appointments according to qualifications, but it was an uphill battle in Afghanistan, where ministers and department heads often gave jobs to people from their own faction and tribe, following the lead of their president. As the favored few became rich and powerful, social problems became aggravated. There were grotesque displays of wealth in the gaudy villas built on prime government land that the cabinet doled out to themselves. The land grab happened early in Karzai’s administration when he was out of the country one week. The area, called Sherpur, soon became the butt of jokes, nicknamed Sher Chur, which means “Lions’ Loot.” Yet it encapsulated what was going wrong in Karzai’s Afghanistan. When he returned, he was urged by a member of the cabinet to reverse the decree that handed out the land. It had been approved by the cabinet and signed by Vice President Marshall Fahim at a cabinet meeting. Yet Karzai preferred to avoid conflict. He persuaded the ministers to make a nominal payment for the land instead. Only three of them had declined the offer of land.

  The resentment among the wider public over such illegal appropriations—which were happening all over the city and country—exploded one summer’s day in May 2006. The brakes of an American military truck failed on a steep hill at the northern entrance to Kabul, sending it plowing into cars and people at a busy intersection. The American soldiers tried to help the wounded, but an angry crowd gathered and the military convoy pulled out, firing into the air, then into the crowd. It all happened in the working-class district of Khairkhana, populated by northerners from the Panjsher Valley and the Shomali Plain. They were not generally anti-American, but many were poor and jobless. The incident unleashed tremendous anger and pent-up resentment of the foreign presence and Karzai government. Crowds of men rioted across the city, looting foreign relief organizations and offices, smashing government billboards and police kiosks, and chanting “Death to Karzai” and “Death to America.” The police melted away rather than fight the crowd. One group of armed men made it all the way across town to Pashtunistan Square and fired shots at the presidential palace. Finally, the defense minister ordered the army into the streets. By then the rioters had exhausted themselves, and the spasm came to an end. The rampage was a warning for many that the people’s patience with the government was running out, but Karzai suspected a conspiracy.

  Corruption was fast becoming the issue that most angered the public in the Karzai era. There had always been an element of what Westerners considered corruption in Afghan society. This was a society that functioned on patronage, a duty to help your relatives and clan, and the everyday use of bakshish—whether a tip or a bribe. Yet the combination of Karzai’s poor management and the influx of vast sums of assistance, often poorly administered by donors, created the most corrupt regime Afghans had ever seen. The mujahideen commanders who came into government brought an unbridled sense of entitlement to take property, ministries, and jobs. There were plenty of honorable
mujahideen, but after so many years of hardship, fighting to free their country, many believed they deserved some reward. Afghans returning from abroad after twenty years as refugees showed a similar desire to make money. While many returned from America and Europe to help their country, there were also opportunists who abused their positions of power to get rich.

  By Karzai’s second term in 2010, Afghanistan ranked as the second most corrupt country in the Transparency International Scale, tied with Myanmar. Only Somalia was lower. The amount of money floating around Kabul was extraordinary. When the biggest financial scandal in Afghanistan’s history erupted, the numbers were barely comprehensible to ordinary Afghans, whose average income was just two dollars a day. Kabul Bank was suddenly missing over $900 million in loans, most of them unsecured. Karzai’s brother, Mahmoud Karzai, a shareholder in the bank, and family members of Karzai’s vice president, Marshall Fahim, among many others in the inner circle of power, were directly involved in taking millions of dollars in loans from the bank. As customers began a run on the bank, the Afghan government, which could not even support its own budget, had to delve into its reserves to shore up the bank. Three years later, only between $200 and $400 million had been recovered. A number of bank officials were found guilty of mismanagement, but the shareholders and defaulters who had stolen the money were never charged with any crimes.

  Karzai’s supporters say the president is not personally corrupt. Yet he has tolerated and benefited from crooked dealings. His brothers, and indeed loans from Kabul Bank, bankrolled his election campaigns. He has shown leniency to members of his administration accused of corruption. He has sprung people from jail to serve his political interests.9 In some cases, Karzai does not even seem to see it as corruption. When U.S. officials leaked to the New York Times that his chief of staff, Umar Daudzai, was receiving bagfuls of cash from the Iranian government for the presidential palace, Karzai brushed it off as a necessary way of doing business in his cash-strapped country. He added that the United States also gave him money. Three years later, he admitted to having received bags of cash from the CIA for over a decade. The presidential slush fund—millions of dollars—was used to maintain the political support of all manner of groups and factions, and to secure Karzai’s two elections.

  The issue that consumed Karzai more than any other in his second term was the Taliban. He hated the term “insurgency.” At first he also refused to call insurgents “Taliban.” He did not want to believe they were the rump Taliban movement. He referred instead to terrorism, and to people sent by the ISI and al Qaeda from outside, to attack his country.

  His government had always invited former Taliban members to return home. Afghanistan was their country, and they had a right to live there in peace. The former president Sibghatullah Mojaddedi ran a reconciliation commission to enable them to return, though few ranking figures took up the offer. Karzai maintained contacts with a number of Taliban figures and supporters. By 2008, he had begun more serious efforts to make peace with the Taliban. Two things influenced him. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the renegade mujahideen leader who was close to the ISI and had been allied to the Taliban, sent Karzai two letters offering peace negotiations. The former president and deadly enemy of Hekmatyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, advised Karzai to explore the offer. The Americans gave the go-ahead for talks, too, even though Hekmatyar was on their list of wanted terrorists. Hekmatyar’s forces were small, with influence in the northeastern provinces of Kunar, Laghman, Baghlan, and Kapisa, but they were enough of an irritation to make the overture worth pursuing.

  Then in July 2008, American jets accidentally bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan. It was one of the most shocking bombings of the war: a village wedding in the mountains, on a summer’s day, in a remote, sparsely inhabited area close to the Pakistani border. The whole village, one extended family, was traveling on foot, accompanying the bride from her mountain hamlet to her new home in the groom’s village. They had stopped to rest on a grassy slope when U.S. jets bombed them. The planes first hit a group of children who had run ahead, then circled back and hit the main group of mostly women and children, the bride among them. She escaped injury and fled, only to be struck down and killed by a third bomb. The U.S. coalition insisted it had struck a group of insurgents, but a government investigation found forty-seven civilians, all from one family, had died in the bombing.

  Karzai rarely traveled around the country, but he flew to the village of Deh Bala and spent two hours with a gathering of one hundred elders and grieving relatives. It was there that a mullah spoke out, reminding the president that the job of the Caliph or ruler was to protect his people. Then a tribal elder stood and addressed Karzai: “For how long will you be attending funerals and shedding tears? You are the president. Change the situation.”10

  Umar Daudzai, the president’s chief of staff, was with Karzai that day and said the villagers’ admonitions hit home. From that moment, Karzai hammered the United States over civilian casualties. His protests became more and more strident. He began to demand Afghan control over detainees, night raids, and armed security companies. In 2013, he banned Afghan forces from requesting NATO air support while on operations.

  Karzai became convinced that the United States was not going to win the war against the Taliban. He had long realized that no administration in Washington was going to make Pakistan cease its support for the Taliban. Pakistan continued to ignore U.S. requests that it do more against the militants on its soil, and the United States was evidently not prepared to use greater pressure. Pakistan was, after all, a nuclear-armed country of 180 million Muslims, and in the scale of things more important than much smaller, impoverished Afghanistan. In 2006, a Western diplomat in Kabul told me how bitter Karzai felt because the Bush administration had promised to handle Pakistan but never had. “Karzai has been let down. He was told two to three years ago to pipe down on the Taliban, that the U.S. would ensure that cross-border diversions and cases of insurgency were dealt with, and the international community would ensure it would not get worse. Two years later things are a lot worse,” he told me.11

  By 2009, Karzai had come to the conclusion that peace was the only way forward—peace with the Taliban and with Pakistan.

  Summer 2009. Shortly after General Stanley McChrystal took over as commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, Ambassador Eikenberry went with him to see President Karzai. The Taliban’s growing control over large areas of Afghanistan was reaching crisis proportions. President Obama would soon trigger a three-month review of strategic options, and General McChrystal wanted to argue for a substantial increase in U.S. forces. McChrystal’s assessment was that if they did not stop the Taliban’s momentum, in a year the war would be unwinnable. He was proposing the introduction of a new operational culture, that of a counterinsurgency campaign as opposed to the more narrow focus on counterterrorism. Counterinsurgency would mean flooding southern Afghanistan with tens of thousands of extra troops and police to tamp down the violence, break the Taliban’s intimidation of the population, and give the government and the people enough security and confidence to get to work. But it would dramatically scale up the war.

  Karzai was reluctant. He disliked the idea of counterinsurgency. To him, the answer was not more fighting in Afghan towns and villages. The answers were at the source of terror in Pakistan, in the sanctuaries, training camps, and madrassas that were motivating young men to take up arms, and in the offices of the ISI that were sponsoring them. Moreover, if he faced an insurgency, that meant Afghans were rebelling against the government, and against him. Bringing in more foreign troops to counter the insurgency would further undermine the legitimacy of his government. His administration would be seen as a puppet government, and the Taliban would be seen as fighting on the right side, for independence and religion. The Taliban had long labeled Karzai a puppet and likened him to Shah Shuja, the Afghan king who had served under British patronage in the nineteenth century. The counterinsurgency would only reinforce th
at image.

  Karzai and his staff proposed an Afghan solution to dilute the Taliban influence by working to reinstate traditional tribal leadership through development and employment programs. They wanted $25 million for a pilot project. Karzai also mistrusted McChrystal’s plan to arm local militias. “He was ready to listen,” Umar Daudzai told me. “But he asked: ‘It was a surge for what, and to kill whom?’”

  General McChrystal worked hard to gain Karzai’s trust and eventually won his agreement for a surge and counterinsurgency campaign. McChrystal was the only ISAF commander who told Karzai that he felt he had two commanders in chief, President Obama and President Karzai. He did a lot to mend the broken relationship. McChrystal wanted Karzai to join him in leading the fight against the Taliban and turning the population away from the Taliban and toward a shared future, much as he had done in 2001.

  But this time Karzai was a reluctant commander in chief. Publicly he barely supported the tough fight ahead, nor did he offer much support to his own troops. He rarely if ever visited Afghan troops or police, and rarely commended them for their bravery. He became increasingly distressed with each new case of civilian casualties and railed against the bombardments and night raids that caused them, even though McChrystal did more than any other commander to reduce civilian casualties. Karzai continued to call for peace, just as his soldiers and police were mobilizing for their biggest effort since 2001. He even went through a phase of appealing to the Taliban to put down their arms, addressing them as “Talib Jan” or “Dear Talib,” until the fierce anti-Taliban jihadi leader, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, told him to stop using the epithet.