A Kingdom of Their Own Read online

Karzai became Afghanistan’s leader three months after September 11, and for a few years he was held up as an exceptional statesman. He had corralled a coalition of ethnic rivals and kept them from warring with each other. He’d created a government out of mostly nothing, planted democratic seeds in a country where dynasty or brute force had normally prevailed. He was an eager partner in whatever designs American officials had on his country, the suave and modern face of a backward nation. None of that had been enough to halt his steadily slipping authority. By the summer of 2009, the Taliban’s fighters were running a parallel government that ruled rural villages and towns across the Pashtun provinces in the south and east. In the months prior, suicide attackers had detonated car bombs outside American military bases in Kabul, laid siege to the Justice Ministry building, and fired rockets at the U.S. embassy. American soldiers were dying at a rate of nearly two per day, higher than in any month in the eight previous years of fighting. “I won’t say that things are all on the right track,” General David McKiernan had noted six months earlier, just before he was ousted from command in Kabul. “So the idea that it might get worse before it gets better is certainly a possibility.”

  In his first election, in 2004, Karzai had run without any serious challenger and with the full support of the United States, but the shine had long since worn off. His Afghan opponents, energized by his perceived weakness and growing alienation from the United States, campaigned with relentless attacks against his family and administration. His most prominent adversary, Abdullah Abdullah, who had once been Karzai’s foreign minister, was barnstorming the country in creaky Russian helicopters, presenting himself as a pan-ethnic savior-in-waiting, a distinction, in earlier days, that Karzai had claimed for himself. Over American protest, Karzai had made the desperate decision to welcome back two of the country’s most loathed warlords. He had chosen as his running mate Mohammad Qasim Fahim, the pug-faced battle-ax of the Northern Alliance, to win ethnic Tajik support, and he’d cajoled Abdul Rashid Dostum, a drunk plunderer most famous for baking Taliban prisoners alive in a shipping container, into returning from Turkey and helping him win the Uzbek vote. Even more worrying for those around him, Karzai no longer had America at his back. President Obama had cut the avuncular link that Karzai had established with President Bush. The White House wanted a new approach to this failing war, and coddling a man increasingly considered an ungrateful and ineffectual tribal chieftain was not how it intended to find one. American officials believed that Karzai tolerated flagrant government corruption and had failed to extend his administration very far beyond the walls of his palace. “On all fronts,” a senior American official declared not long after Obama took office, “Hamid Karzai has plateaued as a leader.”

  As election day approached, American diplomats and spies were hearing that Karzai’s supporters were preparing to keep him in power by any means. Candidates, local election officials, and informants were reporting back to the American embassy a range of voting scams in the works. Carney wrote to Ambassador Eikenberry on the afternoon of August 17: “We have information about wholesale fraud planned in Kandahar,” where Ahmed Wali Karzai ran the province. The next day Eikenberry was to meet President Karzai to discuss the vote. The situation could be so bad, Carney predicted, that a large-scale quarantine of ballots might be required, “with possible voiding of ballots of Pashtun areas,” which could drop Karzai below the 50 percent threshold needed to win in the first round of voting. Such a dirty election, Carney wrote, “could force a second round. It would weaken Karzai domestically. It would be horrendous internationally, and risk continuation in the coalition from a number of key allies. It would require a strong response from us.”

  The Obama administration was not well positioned for a strong response. Nine months earlier, the president had been sworn in to office on promises to end the Iraq war and train the country’s attention on this one. That spring, fewer than forty thousand American troops were deployed to Afghanistan, about a third of those stationed in Iraq. Years of American military neglect and a reenergized insurgency, its leaders based safely across the border in Pakistan, had overwhelmed Afghanistan’s young and ill-trained army and police force. The incoming commander, General Stanley McChrystal, would describe, in his initial assessment that summer, a war being lost—“a resilient and growing insurgency,” “a crisis of confidence among Afghans” about the U.S. mission and Karzai’s government, and an overall situation that was, in his understatement, “deteriorating.” The Taliban had developed a full complement of guerrilla tactics—buried bombs, lobbed rockets, trip-wire mines, ambushes, potshots, pressure-plate IEDs, car bombs, suicide vests—and at nearly six hundred attacks per week, the pace of violence was faster than ever before.

  In response, the tenor of the American mission had changed. Men with heavyweight reputations assumed jobs across the battlefield. Karl Eikenberry, an earnest and determined former three-star general who had already served two military tours in Kabul, had begun a hiring spree that would triple the size of the embassy. Holbrooke, a diplomatic star since Vietnam, had created a rump bureau within the State Department to plan the war effort and was in constant circulation with his entourage between Kabul, Islamabad, and the capitals of Europe. Two months before the election, McChrystal, a gaunt and ascetic former black ops commander famous for his one-meal-a-day regimen and innovations on the art of killing, had taken over as battlefield commander. Overseeing all of it from U.S. Central Command in Tampa was the celebrity general David Petraeus. There was a sense of momentum, even excitement, and a curious optimism, which years of evidence to the contrary had not dispelled, that a foreign ground war against Islamic militants could be won if only the proper “resources” were brought to bear. “It was night and day,” said a staffer in the U.S. embassy in Kabul who lived through the transition. “You had all of the sort of military might, intel might, diplomatic might literally grinding like an old fire truck off of Iraq and onto Afghanistan. There was a mentality of: the grown-ups have arrived. Time to knock all this shit off.”

  Within three weeks of moving into the Oval Office, Obama had ordered seventeen thousand more troops to Afghanistan, and less than a year later he would up that by another thirty-three thousand. The U.S. embassy, in a collection of mustard-colored concrete office buildings and white metal trailers, would bring in hundreds of staffers, becoming the country’s largest diplomatic mission, with a budget exceeding $4 billion per year, or more than four times Afghanistan’s domestic revenue. In the months before the election, despite trouble all around, the cables the U.S. embassy sent home brimmed with the can-do spirit of the moment: “The government and the public here have welcomed the United States’ new strategic purpose: strengthen security, build access to justice and broader governance capacity at both the national and local levels, and develop the economy.”

  With the stakes in the war growing so rapidly, Carney wasn’t the only one worried about the consequences of a fraudulent election. Afghanistan’s defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, had told Americans that if the elections fail, they should “not waste any more blood or treasure here.” From his makeshift office in the election team trailer, he typed out his e-mail to Eikenberry, urging him to warn Karzai, once again, to play fair.

  “Wholesale electoral fraud risks the very partnership we are embarked on,” Carney wrote. “I believe you should tell him we have good information on attempts by his supporters to engage in fraud with ballot boxes. If this happens, it will be detected and the consequences are incalculable.”

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  Each morning, Hamid Karzai awoke in his second-floor bedroom in Palace Number 2, his residence within the presidential complex in downtown Kabul, where he lived with his wife, Zeenat Quraishi, a gynecologist, and their young son, Mirwais. The house had been built in the 1960s for one of the sons of the last king, Zahir Shah, and was a rather bland, unlavish two-story building with no central air-conditioning. On normal mornings, Karzai dressed in a simple, collarless tunic, white,
gray, or black, buttoned at the neck and falling to his knees, over matching billowy pants, and a dark vest or blazer. Much had been made of his more ceremonial wardrobe, used for speeches, meetings with dignitaries, and travels abroad, since he had become president.

  When thrust into the world’s spotlight, he had debated with his aides what type of image to portray to his rural, undereducated citizenry. Afghans were then largely unfamiliar with telephones, television, and the Internet, a nation of illiterate peasant farmers in mud huts emerging from a regime where they had been forced to give up music, movies, raising pigeons, and flying kites, where the women could not work outside the home and the men had to grow beards, where adultery or unfaithfulness or any number of sins against the Islamic dictates established by the Taliban could be punished by severed hands, rifle execution, or public stoning. Hamid Karzai wanted a new image for a new day, different from the kohl-eyed and flower-decorated flowing locks of the defeated mullah leaders, something for each of the many warring tribes and ethnic groups that made up Afghanistan. He adopted the peaked lamb’s-wool cap of the Tajiks and the iridescent green-and-blue striped cape of the Uzbeks. Among Pashtuns, he often added a turban. His costumes left a startling impression. “He looked like he’d just come off the Serengeti,” one Washington staffer recalled about the first time he saw Karzai move through the halls of Congress. “I expected to see lions and tigers walking behind him.” Early on, Karzai had considered a more sober, business-suit attire, befitting his position as a leader in the modern world. But after the designer Tom Ford described him as “the chicest man on the planet,” his costume was set. He wanted to be seen, above all, as a man of his country. He once told an American visitor, “I’m the Tom, Dick, and Harry of Afghanistan.”

  In the morning, Karzai would step out of the steel-plated front door of his residence, his personal bodyguards following closely behind, and onto his circular gravel driveway, where he strode around a small fishpond for exercise in the evenings, and make the short walk to his office in the Gul Khana, or Flower House. The presidential palace, known as the Arg (the name means “citadel”) was a collection of aged stone buildings and quiet gardens behind ramparts and turrets designed by British architects 130 years earlier to withstand the types of assaults that the country’s rulers were always enduring. The moat that had once surrounded the castle walls had disappeared, and razor wire and gun emplacements had replaced the cannon mounts for protection, but many of the old structures remained inside. More than one thousand people worked within the grounds—cooks, gardeners, tea boys, clerks, advisers, accountants, doctors, a palace poet—and another thousand were devoted to guarding it. There were stately houses for visitors and great ceremonial halls, separate stone buildings for the National Security Council, for the office of administrative affairs, for the Presidential Protection Service guards. There were cafeterias, a mosque, a Victorian mansion, and grounds lit by wrought-iron lanterns at night. Karzai’s office faced a wide plaza of stone slabs interspersed with fountains, lawns, tall firs. For all the elaborate fortifications, the entrance to his office building was a simple screen door, a guard posted on either side, epaulets on their shoulders. It had two levels, with white columns running along the second-floor balcony. To the left of the lobby, a multicolored marble-floored solarium offered views of the grounds, and ahead, a wide, red-carpeted stairway led up to the dark wood of the cabinet meeting room, at one end, and his office, at the other.

  Credit 2.1

  Afghan interim president Hamid Karzai is an animal lover. At his home in Kabul, he keeps several pet antelope that formerly belonged to the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. July 11, 2003

  The palace had, by virtue of its exotic history and its great contrast from the loud, congested, dusty potholed chaos outside its walls—a perpetual gridlock of begging children, armor-plated convoys, crutch-wielding amputees, Toyota Corollas, and donkey carts—a hidden, somewhat magical allure. Its courtyard was wide, green, calm, with tailored lawns. Dark-suited aides strolled the footpaths in quiet council, heads bent, thumbing their prayer beads. The presidential guards stood at attention wearing earpieces with cords diving into their collars. On some afternoons, you could see waiters flapping out white tablecloths for a lunch under the trees. Karzai considered the palace a showcase of his country’s wonders. Karzai kept several antelope, once owned by Mullah Omar, as pets in his backyard. Karzai housed goats and kittens in his residence and kept a coat hanger, made from the horn of a Marco Polo sheep, in his office. At the entrance to the Gul Khana, Karzai posted a Sikh man wearing a dastar, to highlight Afghanistan’s ethnic diversity. As part of the palace welcoming committee, Karzai also employed a giant, a seven-foot-tall Afghan man who palace staff chose to believe was the tallest man in the world. He had been found by Norwegian soldiers on patrol in Faryab Province and brought to Kabul, where his job, in his own words, was to “walk around the palace and be tall.” The giant napped on the floor, because the Afghans could not find a bed to fit him. General McChrystal once bought him two pairs of size 17 shoes, earning his gratitude to America. There were also, apparently, three midgets wandering around, and though I never saw them, one former British ambassador insisted they lived in a tree.

  Years of stalemate guerrilla war had won Karzai the reputation as a weak leader. To outsiders, he was the tinfoil-crowned “mayor of Kabul,” the ungrateful puppet imprisoned within his own palace walls, swiping from his cage at the many foreign hands that fed him. This was never quite the case. It was true he couldn’t claim to have quelled the insurgency or established a humming civil service. Even in Kabul, the most modern, developed city in the country, only a third of the roughly five million residents received electricity, and that only sporadically; one in ten residents had access to the city’s water supply.

  And yet Karzai had considerable powers at his disposal. The position of president, atop the highly centralized government designed in part by the United States, came with considerable authority, and the courts and the squabbling parliament had not matured enough to check his authority. He ruled, essentially, by decree. Each day his aides brought him dozens of orders to sign: military promotions, execution orders, land transfers, medals of honor. His edicts could free convicted murderers or sentence men to death. He could shut down companies, impose new taxes. He established special commissions to investigate American air strikes and special courts to rule on financial scandals. He traded government sinecures for political support. He ordered money to be given to the families of bombing victims, declared national days of mourning, convened emergency sessions of parliament. He proclaimed that female newscasters must wear head scarves, that hunting with falcons was illegal, that Afghan hounds were a national treasure and could not be removed from the country. He decided, to the dismay of some of his more business-minded brothers, that the weekend would be Thursday and Friday.

  His decrees created new penalties for rape and child marriage; they established commercial laws about arbitration, corporations, partnerships, mediation. He mandated that schools be built for nomads in all thirty-four provinces. He appointed all of the provincial governors and the district governors below them, the members of the human rights commission. He created a multimillion-dollar discretionary fund for governors and allowed them to form their own militias. He had personal authority over much of the nation’s budget, according to his former intelligence chief, and could choose which villages received foreign aid. He micromanaged a country of thirty million people. It was a job he enjoyed and felt destined to continue.

  Even so, he’d run a lackluster campaign. He had acted as if he were above the fray, the foreordained leader of Afghanistan, the father of a great Pashtun nation. He had skipped the candidates’ debates and attended his first one in a Kabul auditorium just four days before the election, where he said Afghanistan had been totally lost and “I saved it.” He released a seven-page platform that was filled with bland pabulum and priorities such as “peace and tranquility.” Just three months be
fore the election, his campaign headquarters in a rented three-story home near the U.S. embassy had the “feel and resources of a sleepy mayoral election-level campaign office in the U.S.,” as one American visitor described it. Karzai had stayed mostly inside the palace, leaving the work of rounding up votes from tribal and religious leaders to his family.

  In Kandahar, his half brother Ahmed Wali had been meeting southern Afghanistan’s tribal strongmen on a daily basis and promising favors in return for their support. Rival candidates said Ahmed Wali warned them against even campaigning there, with ominous suggestions that it would lead to violence. Two young Karzai nephews had arranged for pro-Karzai Pashto text messages to be sent en masse to cell phones in Kandahar. In Kabul, his elder brother Mahmood Karzai had opened a parallel campaign headquarters and held fund-raisers for his business cronies, including the shareholders of one of his companies, Kabul Bank.

  Despite the growing insurgency and his own limited efforts, Karzai was still the favorite to win. Polls showed him ahead, although with less than a 50 percent majority. These polls reflected the surprising conclusions that most Afghans, across ethnic groups, felt Karzai was doing a good job. The violence and government corruption that so preoccupied American officials apparently did not seem, when compared to the brutalities of recent Afghan civil wars, particularly grave to many of its citizens. During Karzai’s tenure, daily life for many citizens, particularly in the cities, had improved. Under the Taliban, Afghans would have to drive to Pakistan to make a phone call. Now many had cell phones, Internet access, and television with an American Idol knockoff show, Afghan Star. The time of rival commanders strafing Kabul with rocket fire during the early 1990s civil war was not yet forgotten; the bullet-pocked buildings around Kabul still showed those scars. But now roads were being paved, new businesses opening; jobs could be found in private security, logistics, shipping—the whole wartime profiteering bonanza.