Afghanistan's Karzai faces disaffection in a nation hungry for progress. Many see him as a shadow of a president, and they fear a slide back to the Taliban.
By Paul Watson
Los Angeles Times, 12 November 2006
TRIBAL elders pleaded with Hamid Karzai to intervene in a land feud with their neighbors. But it was too dangerous for the president of Afghanistan to travel south to the heart of the Taliban insurgency, so Karzai invited them up to Kabul for lunch.
At least 120 men arrived, making their way past razor wire strung out a mile from the palace doors. After being repeatedly frisked and scanned, they finally passed through the palace gates.
The desert dust still clung to their plastic sandals and tattered clothes as they sat down under vaulted ceilings and crystal chandeliers. Waiters in black uniforms served up platters of roast chicken legs and heaping plates of pulau rice with raisins, almonds and pistachios.
The elders of the Tokhi and Hotak tribes, ethnic Pashtuns from Zabol province, ate their meal off fine china and washed it down with tumblers of doogh, a salty yogurt drink sprinkled with chopped mint.
Karzai, 48, himself the son of a Pashtun chief, assured them that he would try to find a solution to their 40-year-old argument with the Nasir tribe.
"My father spent all of his life solving tribal problems, and I was with him the whole time," he said. The elders muttered skeptically.
Most presidents don't concern themselves with tribal disputes, but Karzai, like Afghan kings of old, makes local quarrels part of his daily routine.
Five years after the fall of Kabul, aides say he is turning to tradition as he struggles to build a stable democracy on a foundation of war, corruption, foreign interference and religious extremism. Critics counter that he is retreating behind the walls of his 19th century palace and losing touch with a country sinking deeper into trouble.
But Karzai's foreign backers have left him with little real power, and his weak, corruption-riddled government lacks direct control over billions of dollars in development aid, money meant to help Karzai win Afghan support for his administration.
After the United States joined forces with Afghanistan's Northern Alliance militia to oust the Taliban regime, it pledged to help rebuild the country and chose Karzai to lead the effort. Since then, foreign donors have spent at least $16 billion in Afghanistan; more than $10.3 billion of that has come from the United States.
Afghanistan has made enormous progress in some areas. With hopes for a better future soaring, its citizens defied insurgent threats to elect Karzai to a full term two years ago and to choose a parliament last year. The elections were the freest and fairest in the country's history.
Under Karzai, more than 90% of Afghan children are in school, compared with fewer than 20% during Taliban rule. A multinational effort is training an army that is halfway to its goal of 70,000 soldiers in uniform, as it strives to overcome ethnic divisions, equipment problems and low morale. Parliament is gradually asserting its authority. A full quarter of the members are women.
But the progress has not met the rising expectations of Karzai's countrymen. Many see the nation slipping back into the grip of violence, corruption and extremism from which the West promised to liberate them.
On paper, the post-Taliban constitution gives Afghanistan's president ample power. But parliament wrangled with Karzai for months over his Cabinet picks and rejected his nominee to head the Supreme Court.
He has had better success shuffling provincial governors, but several are still regarded as corrupt and ineffective. Central government influence remains weak in large parts of the country.
Perhaps Karzai's greatest strength is giving pep talks to Afghans at news conferences and in speeches, urging them to unite and solve their problems. Still, many say they would prefer honest justice, jobs and peace to fine words.
From ethnic minorities in the north to his fellow Pashtuns in the south, Karzai faces the same growing disaffection.
Sitting on a curb in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, Sanam Shah spoke of the Karzai era's mixed blessings. A mother of eight and an ethnic Uzbek, she suffers kidney and digestive problems and traveled from her desert village of Andkhoi to find a good doctor.
Foreign aid has delivered new equipment to her local clinic, but none of the employees are properly trained to use it, she said, speaking through the mesh of her white burka veil. "I think Karzai is doing a fine job, but nothing has changed in my life," she said.
Hundreds of miles to the south in Lowgar, the owner of a two-pump gas station, a Pashtun, said he was unemployed under the Taliban but was able start his own business when U.S. aid rebuilt the highway.
But the Taliban are back, scaring off customers by ambushing cars at night, said Hekmatullah, who, like many Afghans, uses one name.
"Power is back in the hands of those who had it before, like warlords, the Taliban and thieves," he said. "Nobody pays attention to poor people like us."
In the eyes of Afghans, the restrictions on Karzai's authority imposed by foreign governments make him a shadow of a president with only the trappings of power: photo opportunities, ribbon cuttings, bodyguards with wraparound sunglasses who carry M-4 assault rifles and whisper into microphones in the sleeves of their dark suits.
Although Karzai is officially commander in chief, he has no control over the foreign troops fighting the Taliban insurgency and little over his own army, which answers to the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. His defense minister's main job is cajoling donors into providing the army with better equipment.
Karzai repeatedly has demanded changes in tactics, but each time foreign troops accidentally kill Afghan civilians, he loses credibility with his people.
In the meantime, the insurgency has spread across more than half the country, with fighters advancing northward from strongholds in the east and pushing all the way to the Iranian border in the west. Government officials say the militants in villages and districts near Kabul, the capital, are laying the groundwork for future offensives.
Former mujahedin retain ties to their old commanders, and many are ready to fight again if democracy falters.
Corruption in the courts and police has made many Afghans nostalgic for the Taliban's ruthless justice. The threat of violence has forced hundreds of schools to close and left others without enough books or teachers.
The country's gross domestic product has doubled since Karzai came to office, but the drug trade is the largest employer and source of income. Drugs account for half of Afghanistan's economy and create what the United Nations calls a "narco society."
Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid aimed at persuading farmers to grow legal crops, this year's opium harvest is expected to set a record. It's up 50% from last year, to an estimated 6,700 tons, the U.N. said in early September.
Though reconstruction spending could help the government draw support away from drug lords, the Taliban and other foes, only a quarter of public spending goes through the Afghan government, World Bank figures show.
U.S. money supports a wide variety of projects to improve agriculture and government institutions, support schools and clinics, and rebuild roads, bridges, canals and other infrastructure destroyed by war. But unlike Britain and a few other countries, the United States has not demonstrated confidence in Karzai's government by giving it direct control of the funds.
William Byrd, senior economic advisor at the World Bank office in Kabul, said more of the money should be channeled through the government, allowing Afghans to learn to handle it and showing respect for the country's sovereignty.
"The only way to get these government systems going is to start working with them, and in them, rather than on parallel tracks outside," he said.
Aid groups and their contractors are also guilty of corruption, but they aren't accountable to Afghan voters, said Jawed Ludin, Karzai's chief of staff.
"Democracy is about the empowerment of people," Ludin said in an interview. "To make democracy in Afghanistan real, we should give the Afghan people the sense that they can control things, that they can implement their own decisions."
Journey from Pakistan
UNTIL the war to oust the Taliban five years ago, Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders were comfortably entrenched in Afghanistan and Karzai was living in exile in Pakistan, trying to organize opposition.
Karzai shared a Pashtun heritage with most of the Taliban. His father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, was chief of the Popalzai tribe. Karzai inherited that post when his father was killed in 1999 in what was widely regarded as a warning from the Taliban to Pashtuns who opposed them.
In October 2001, with the war underway, Karzai entered southern Afghanistan with a small group of armed men, including U.S. Special Forces, to rally tribal leaders on the mullahs' home turf.
For those Afghans suspicious of U.S. intentions, Karzai's close ties to the U.S. military were an issue from the start. When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced that an American chopper had rescued Karzai from a firefight with the Taliban, Karzai insisted that he had walked away from the battle and never left Afghanistan.
Still, Ludin now cites that incursion into the Taliban heartland as a sad irony.
"The president and American Special Forces were going in a leisurely fashion from village to village in 2001, and they were welcomed everywhere," Ludin said. "And everywhere they went, the Taliban were driven away from those villages, districts and provinces without a fight."
Five years later, President Karzai can't risk a visit to his home region. "Now these same areas are seen as hotbeds of the Taliban and terrorism," Ludin said. "Today, if the president wants to go to Kandahar, he needs massive security arrangements."
Ludin blames Pakistan for reviving an insurgency that once looked to be on its last legs.
After they were ousted from power in 2001, the Taliban retreated to bases in Pakistan, where the military's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency had once nurtured them. From there, the Taliban and its allies regrouped in eastern and southern Afghanistan, U.S. military intelligence documents say.
Washington today regards Pakistan as a key ally in fighting terrorism, but many Afghans suspect the country of playing a double game, cooperating with the United States while fostering the Taliban insurgency.
Karzai wants the U.S. to do more to stop the insurgency at its roots in Pakistan, but Washington strongly supports Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Karzai's frustration over tactics used by the U.S. and allied military forces, including the continued bombing of civilian areas, is raw. Senior Afghan officials are surprisingly frank about the dangers of foreign military dominance.
Despite the success in uniting Afghanistan's fractured ethnic groups into a national army, a senior aide to Karzai, speaking on condition of anonymity, called the army a "sort of lame-duck institution" without the capacity to make decisions.
"It will fall the instant that the U.S. military is not behind it," the official said.
An open tent
KARZAI lives and works in an 83-acre compound called the Arg-e-Shahi, or Citadel of the King, which was built in 1880 to replace a royal fortress destroyed by British troops. Three miles and a world away, one of his chief critics, Ramazan Bashar Dost, holds court in a large canvas tent in Kabul's main park. Outside, noisy children chase soccer balls in the swirling dust.
Each afternoon, Dost, a member of Afghanistan's parliament, sits next to a small, round folding table, framed by two yellow tent poles sunk into a dirt floor honeycombed with cracks. He listens quietly as Afghans vent their anger over corruption, unemployment and other ills.
Dost has become a kind of anti-Karzai, a French-educated intellectual who presides over a humble court of last resort where anyone is free to take a seat and gripe or ask for help, no appointment required. He is in high demand as ordinary Afghans wait their turn to complain about big issues such as corruption and foreign interference, or something as small as bullies at school.
Dozens duck through the tent flap each day, joining a circle of people waiting on plastic patio chairs in the dim light of a bare bulb. Some of Dost's visitors are fellow intellectuals who come to debate policy; others are activists who lobby for legislative agendas. But, like most of the people clamoring for Karzai's time, the majority in Dost's tent are seeking solutions to personal problems.
A few bedsheet banners hang on the tent's faded yellow walls. One explains the meaning of democracy in Dari, one of Afghanistan's main languages.
"Demo = people, cracy = government," it explains. "The famous definition by Abraham Lincoln is government of the people, for the people and by the people."
Dost resigned as planning minister last year after Karzai refused to let him shut down most nongovernmental aid agencies, which Dost claimed were embezzling money. The controversy made Dost one of Afghanistan's most admired politicians.
He offers a sympathetic ear to Afghans who feel wronged by the system. Even if Dost can't solve their problems, the visitors seem to leave feeling they've accomplished something. At least he sat and listened, which is more than most felt they got from bureaucrats.
Afghans also rely on Dost to tell uncomfortable truths if he can't pressure Afghan officials to do so first. As an example, he cites the roughly $60,000 a month the government had been paying two German experts to fix the national airline, Ariana. "Ariana has become worse. It is more dangerous," he said.
Meanwhile, the families of men who died fighting the Soviets in the 1980s get no more than $6 a month in compensation. "The Afghan people see this gap between $6 and $60,000 and they say they cannot accept this impossible situation," Dost said.
Examples like that are, "in my opinion, the biggest reason why the Taliban have become so strong in Afghanistan," he said. "Now the Afghan people have lost their trust in the international community."
Karzai's leadership style is making matters worse, Dost said. "He has a tribal image of the state. He believes that he's not a president of a country, but he's a father of a family, or a chief of a tribe."
One summer evening, a 22-year-old orphan came to ask Dost's help in finding money to launch an agency for street children and other orphans. Another young man wanted Dost to arrange a transfer to a safer high school because thugs were threatening him.
Dost took notes and gave the men slips of paper with the phone numbers of government officials who might help. But he didn't hold out much hope.
"For Afghan people, democracy means you can do anything you want," Dost said. "There are no rules, no laws, no justice or authority. When you have power now in Afghanistan, then you have the money, and you can have everything."
Behind palace walls
IN contrast to Dost's tent, Karzai's door is difficult to pass through. Few Afghans are allowed onto the palace grounds, and those who are must make their way through at least five high-security layers. Dogs sniff for explosives. Guards scrutinize pens, key chains and other everyday items.
A suspected Taliban militant tried to assassinate Karzai in 2002 as he waved from an open-roofed car in Kandahar, his hometown. Karzai's American guards killed the would-be assassin. Now his trips outside Kabul are infrequent.
Karzai allowed an intimate look behind the scenes on two difficult days this summer as he toiled in his palace. He declined to sit for an interview, but he allowed a reporter and photographer to watch him maneuver the shifting sands of Afghan politics, culture and war.
The president's office is in the two-story Gul Khana, or House of Flowers, whose outer walls have softball-sized patches where masons have filled in hundreds of shrapnel holes from Afghanistan's long years of war. He lives there with his wife, Zinat, an OB-GYN who stays mostly out of the public eye. They have no children.
His is a draining schedule. Karzai, who earned a degree in political science in India, works seven days a week, 12 hours a day, normally starting with a briefing from his intelligence chief.
On a routine day this summer, he met with French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie. That was followed by a meeting with his two vice presidents and other senior officials to discuss Cabinet nominations.
Karzai sat in a high-backed chair behind a large wooden desk that had a small globe of colored stone in one corner. His officials sat at a glass-topped boardroom table, polished to such a gloss that it mirrored Karzai.
Then Karzai had lunch with the elders from Zabol.
The petitioners were reaching for the toothpicks when Mohammed Nabi Tokhi, a retired senator who is said to be more than 100 years old, rose from his seat next to Karzai.
His fiery eyes were magnified by the thick lenses of black-rimmed glasses. Tottering to a microphone stand, he said a prayer for the president and then railed against the Nasir tribe, whom he accused of stealing about 2,500 acres of Tokhi land in the 1960s.
"They are a faithless tribe, a tribe of cowards," he said, his voice rising. "There is no way that we and the Nasirs will ever be able to live together in one area."
There was little Karzai could do that wouldn't anger one side. So he passed the problem to a special commission and urged his bickering fellow Pashtuns to talk to each other.
"No matter what you say," he told the Zabol elders, "you have to accept one thing: The Nasiris are also an Afghan tribe and they have equal rights with other tribes, don't they? Are they the sons of this nation or not?"
"Yes," a few men replied. Others grumbled or pushed past Karzai's guards to press their own petitions into his hands.
Afterward, Karzai retreated to his inner office, where he usually has some quiet time each afternoon. Typically he settles into a leather armchair to watch news on a large flat-screen TV or read a book before returning to his official schedule, which often runs until 10 p.m.
The next day, Karzai received a delegation of about 30 villagers from Oruzgan province, where U.S. bombers had killed about 60 civilians along with scores of Taliban fighters.
Over green tea and sponge cake, Karzai related how Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar had once asked him to join the regime as foreign minister. Karzai said he saw the Taliban, then backed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, as a foreign tool and wrote to Omar, "This nation has never been a slave and will never be a slave."
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Karzai said, he was sitting on a mountain in Oruzgan when his hand-held satellite phone rang. The call was from an aide to Omar who said the chief wanted to speak to him on a field radio. Karzai told him that he didn't have a radio and that his phone's battery was dying.
"Then this guy told me, 'Mullah Omar is asking, "What do you want?" ' I said: 'Hey man! I want my country!' " Karzai recounted. " 'Kick the foreigners out of this nation.' "
Afghanistan's enemies are still allied with foreigners, Karzai told the elders. Then he turned to look into the eyes of Abdul Rauf, a shy 7-year-old who had lost his family in the American bombing.
"He saw his father and mother dying but couldn't do anything. He is just a child," an elder said as Karzai sadly shook his head.
"The enemies are coming from Pakistan," the president said, "and the international community is bombarding them. And, caught in between, we suffer, not Pakistan."
It was time for Karzai to go. He told the elders the future was in their hands.
"They should not bombard us like this!" one shouted back.
"Definitely! You are right," Karzai replied. "Don't call me the president. Call me your small brother, call me your son. I am your servant, not your president. If you need anything just tell me."
"The first need of the people is security," another elder interrupted. "And security comes when the nation and the government get together."
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Citation: Paul Watson. "Steering his nation without a rudder," Los Angeles Times, 12 November 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-karzai12nov12,0,6094060.story
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