There are good reasons that Karzai is guarded like a national treasure. Simply put, the future of Afghanistan rests in his hands. No other leader has his popularity, his charisma, his democratic vision, commitment and good intentions–not to mention his all-important support from the United States and Europe. But the 45-year-old president needs more than a bevy of bodyguards to succeed. Working from his small, denlike office, Karzai wrestles daily with a daunting array of challenges. Rivals seek to undercut him. Aid has been slow in coming, national reconstruction lags. Despite his best efforts, security is slowly deteriorating, especially outside the capital. Reinvigorated Taliban forces have unleashed a spate of hit-and-run guerrilla attacks in southern Afghanistan in recent months. Rapacious regional warlords–the same strongmen who helped the U.S. military rout the Taliban and its Qaeda allies–continue to skirmish with each other, amass tremendous personal fortunes (much of it from drugs) and flout Karzai’s authority. “If he can’t deliver improved security and economic benefits soon, many Afghans may start thinking that things weren’t so bad under the Taliban after all,” says a Western diplomat in Kabul.
That may be an exaggeration. But no one knows better than Karzai that time isn’t on his side. Recently NEWSWEEK spent three days watching him skillfully cajole, negotiate and lunch with a diverse group of Afghans, from powerful warlords and long-whiskered Islamic clerics to a veritable army of ethnic and tribal leaders, civil servants seeking pay, angry students, Western diplomats and American military advisers. More than a year into office, the president knows what needs to be done. “The common Afghan is for change,” Karzai says. “That’s the race right now: to give Afghans tangible change in their lives.”
The problem, of course, is that so far he hasn’t delivered. Everyone is to blame–Karzai himself, the United States, international donors, meddlesome neighboring powers, history, the very scale of the problems facing Afghanistan. Washington decided soon after the Taliban’s fall to focus almost exclusively on the military pursuit of Mullah Mohammed Omar’s routed, ragtag army and fleeing Qaeda fighters. In doing so, though, it inadvertently undermined the new government it was seeking to establish. To secure the help of regional warlords in its battle against terrorism, the United States lavished small fortunes on the commanders of the Northern Alliance–among them, Gen. Mohammed Fahim, Atta Mohammed and Ismail Khan–as well as Abdul Rashid Dostum in the north and Gul Agha Sherzai in the south. With U.S. backing, Fahim and his small but powerful clan of ethnic Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley were handed control of the most powerful political portfolios in Kabul, including Defense. The Americans basically “ditched Karzai,” says Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid.
With strong ties to external powers like Russia, Iran and Pakistan, the warlords are thus easily able to flout Karzai’s paper presidential mandate, and by now they may have grown too strong for him to move decisively against them. Karzai erred badly, as well. Much like his late father, head of the important Populzai clan, he has tried to rule by consensus and compromise. But fractious and bellicose Afghanistan is a tough place, where threats of force are often more effective than diplomacy. Time –and again, Karzai has sought to reason with the warlords, accepting assurances that they would obey him and abide by the nation’s new laws. He pleaded with them to end their internecine turf fights, stop building up personal militias, respect human rights and turn over customs revenues that they’ve been illegally collecting at the country’s borders–worth an estimated $600 million yearly, or roughly the total of Karzai’s federal budget. Nothing has come of it. “He was much too delicate and tentative,” says a U.S. diplomat in Kabul.
Karzai senses he must change tactics, and fast. “Now I’m telling them, ‘Gentlemen, you have had enough chances’,” he says, showing an unusual flash of anger. “The Afghan people are getting hurt and I will push aside every consideration to protect them.” To hammer that hard-line message home, he invited a group of 12 key governors to Kabul late last month for talks. The no-more-Mr.-Nice-Guy message seems to have gotten through. In a tense, two-day meeting, the governors agreed to turn over customs revenues, end their feuding and stop building up their armies. Now Karzai waits to see whether–or how long–they will keep their word.
Will he do as well with his professed friends, the internationals? Few donor nations have stood by Karzai when it counted. Last year at the Tokyo Conference, the international community pledged $5.25 billion over the next five years, just over one third of the funds that Karzai’s economic planners believe is necessary to get the war-shattered country back on its feet. It’s simply not enough. Some 60 percent of the just over $1 billion in aid delivered last year went for emergency humanitarian relief for drought victims and resettling refugees, rather than reconstruction. Karzai, though, is careful not to blame his international allies, especially the United States. After all, he is beholden to Washington for everything–development money, his country’s security, even his own life.
And so it goes, a daily round of partial successes and failures. Karzai remains indefatigable as ever, working more than 12-hour days yet always finding time to schedule one more late-night meeting. He rarely relaxes, save for a break from 2 to 4 p.m. when he naps and catches up on his reading. Three times a day he walks some 50 yards to the palace’s green-domed mosque for prayers. If a mullah is not present, he leads the faithful. Not until 9 or 10 at night does he return home to his wife, an Afghan gynecologist whom he married four years ago. They have no children.
Karzai is under no illusions about his own power. He may be talking tough to the warlords these days, but he is not about to jettison his brand of rule by consensus, as opposed to fiat. By nature, he is slow to anger, quick to hear others’ points of view –and patient in coping with the enormous difficulties that hem him in on every front. “The president’s style has been to listen to arguments, synthesize discussions and reach decisions through consensus,” says his U.S.-educated Central Bank governor Anwar Ulhaq Ahadi. Indeed, under the circumstances, what choice does he have but to work through compromise and conciliation? “By doing so, he’s kept the nation together and himself alive,” says one Western diplomat in Kabul, putting things bluntly.
It’s debatable, given all this, how far Karzai can go in forcing the warlords to do his bidding. But, as he says, he has to try. The turning point, Karzai tells news-week, came in April, when 13 civilians were killed and seven wounded in clashes between two rival northern warlords, Dostum and Atta Mohammed, in Mai-mana, the capital of Faryab province. Only three weeks earlier Karzai’s blood had boiled when he learned that Ismail Khan’s forces had killed 38 civilians and burned 761 homes in neighboring Badghis province. Among the dead were three women and 12 children who drowned when they jumped into a river to escape being captured, raped and killed by the warlord’s marauding militias. “A 2-year-old girl jumped into the river and is pulled out dead,” says Karzai, shaking his head in angry astonishment. “For me, that was the decisive moment. I said, ‘Hell, it looks like my tolerant and softly, softly approach is not working’.”
That’s when he summoned the warlords to Kabul. Banking on his popularity and the power of the bully pulpit, he went on television last month and threatened to resign. Unless his orders were respected, he declared, he would disband his cabinet and call a nationwide loya jirga, or tribal council meeting, to select a new leader. The showdown tactics appear to have worked, at least for now. At the two-day meeting, the country’s 12 most powerful governors and military commanders agreed to a laundry list of Karzai’s demands, including handing over the tax and custom duties that Karzai needs to run his government, pay salaries and finance reconstruction and social investments. The warlords also agreed to stop recruiting soldiers for their private militias, to no longer simultaneously hold administrative and military posts and to conduct no military operations without the approval of the Ministry of Defense.
Karzai has shown his teeth in other ways. Over the past two months he has removed the governors of four provinces–Kunar, Badakhshan, Parwan and Paktia–on grounds of incompetence and corruption. Coming out of Karzai’s recent round table, Dostum was slapped down, too. Just after the meeting, Karzai stripped him of his title of deputy Defense minister and special representative to the north, placing him in a “consultative role” to the president without any executive powers. Clearly Karzai has taken Dostum down a peg as an example to the other strongmen of what will happen if they fail to cooperate. Sources close to Karzai are suggesting that Gul Agha Sher-zai, the governor of Kandahar, may be next on the presidential hit list. “He is corrupt, sinful and morally reprehensible,” says another Western diplomat in Kabul.
Still, many Afghans and foreign diplomats are skeptical that Karzai will be able to get the warlords to comply with the letter of any agreement. “He’ll probably get his money for a month or two,” says one Western diplomat, “but then he’ll have to start threatening them all over again.” Karzai knows his limitations. “Do I have the military power to do that? No,” he says frankly. Nor can he move against several of the most powerful warlords at once–not, at least, without risking having them gang up on him. “He can only turn his words and determination into action if the United States and the international community give him the security and economic backing he needs,” says Paul O’Brien, CARE’s advocacy director in Kabul.
Unfortunately, the international aid Karzai desperately needs to show his beleaguered nation as a peace dividend simply hasn’t been forthcoming. “The U.S. and the international community are trying to fulfill their commitments to Afghanistan on the cheap,” says O’Brien. Karzai tactfully says he is satisfied with the “considerable” political support he has received from the United States, Europe and the United Nations, but he acknowledges “mixed feelings” about the level of international assistance. The World Bank determined in early 2002 that Afghanistan needed at least $10 billion in economic assistance over the next five years. Karzai’s Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani counters that Afghanistan requires $15 billion. Obviously, the $5.25 billion pledged in Tokyo last year falls far short of both marks.
You can gauge the depth of Karzai’s economic troubles by comparing the aid Afghanistan has received with the assistance given elsewhere. According to a recent report by CARE, Afghanistan will receive the lowest per capita amount of foreign economic assistance delivered to post-conflict countries. For example, Kosovo receives some $250 per capita in international aid annually; the comparable figure in Afghanistan is just $42–and Kosovo is vastly more prosperous and stable. Ghani says flatly that the current foreign-aid levels simply aren’t enough. Without an annual international aid commitment of at least $3 billion over the next five years, he warns, “Afghanistan could easily disintegrate once again into a narcoterrorist state, producing ever-increasing amounts of opium and terrorists.”
That prospect weighs heavily on Karzai. “I feel the people’s criticism so strongly,” he says. “People come and tell me, ‘What the hell are you doing? Why don’t you free us from this oppression? How long can this go on?’ I have to deliver for them.” And, ironically, it is these same people who are his greatest source of strength. “Afghans still see him as the only person who can deliver reconstruction money from the West and change their lives for the better,” says Ahmed Rashid. “None of the warlords or any other Afghan has that clout.”
So what will be Karzai’s next move? “If somebody or some groups resist me,” he responds, “I’ll go back to the Afghan people and say, ‘What do you want me to do?’ If Afghans say they want me to use force, I will.” That question may be better left unanswered.
