Taliban (27 page)

In November 2009 the NGO Transparency International published its annual Corruption Perceptions Index, which measures the perceived level of public-sector corruption in 180 countries around the world. Afghanistan came in 179th. This was three
places lower than in 2008, lower even than Haiti, Iraq and Myanmar; only Somalia was worse. Everyone agreed that corruption was the disease killing the country. The Taliban argued that they and not the Karzais were the cure, and even their opponents had to concede that they could hardly do any worse.

Eight months into his new term, Karzai had attempted just one reform: the emasculation of the Election Complaints Commission, the one institution that had tried to keep the electoral fraud in check. In the past, three of the five commissioners had been selected by the United Nations. Karzai now proposed, by presidential decree, to appoint all five of them himself. He needed the endorsement of Parliament to turn his decree into law, however, and his MPs refused to grant this. Karzai’s self-interest was too brazen even for them. The presidential response was bizarre. Instead of rounding on his MPs he lashed out at the West, declaring that it was not Afghans but foreigners who had perpetrated the greatest fraud of 2009. In three successive outbursts he specifically accused the US, Britain, the UN, the EU, CNN, the BBC and several Western newspapers of conniving at his removal from power while claiming to uphold the principles of democracy.

The strings controlling this puppet were tangled. Sometimes when an arm was pulled, a leg kicked. It had happened before, as in 2007 when Karzai launched an emotional tirade against misapplied ISAF airpower, and wept on camera for the innocent Afghan children that had been killed. He himself had almost been killed in 2001 when a US Special Forces air controller accidentally guided a 2,000lb bomb on to the spot where he was standing; the nervous tic that appeared in his eye at times of stress was a legacy of his injuries. But this incident was even more serious. By revealing his true feelings towards his American backers, Karzai insulted
the memories of the hundreds of foreign soldiers who had died in support of his government, and was in danger of alienating not just the long-suffering State Department but, far graver, American public opinion. On John Stewart’s
Daily Show
, the satirical television ‘news show with attitude’, Karzai was being called a ‘turncloak’. Had the President really ‘lost it’, as his main rival for the presidency Dr Abdullah claimed?

Not everyone thought Karzai’s accusation was unjustified. Even Kai Eide, the former UN envoy, thought there had been undue foreign interference in the 2009 election process – a view that won him few friends among the international community, some of whom took to nicknaming him ‘Al Kai-Eide’. He singled out the decision by US Special Representative Richard Holbrooke to urge a large number of Afghans, including senior presidential advisers, to run against Karzai. Holbrooke spoke at the time of creating a ‘fair playing field’, but it didn’t seem very fair to most Afghans, and to the President least of all. ‘People should listen to what [Karzai] is saying,’ said one of the President’s aides. ‘These are issues he has had on his mind for a long, long time.’
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In his first outburst, Karzai accused the foreigners of ‘pursuing their own interests’ while claiming to want to help Afghanistan, adding that ‘a very thin curtain distinguishes between cooperation and assistance with the invasion’. His terminology was highly provocative. As he well knew, the foreigners were no longer ‘invaders’ but had stayed on at his government’s express invitation, and with a mandate from the UN. In the same speech he warned of the possibility of ‘national resistance’. What did that mean: was he talking about the threat of jihad that Mullah Zaeef had spoken of? Later, in a speech to MPs in Kandahar, Karzai offered a clarification of sorts: ‘If I come under foreign pressure, I might join the Taliban,’ he said.

A Taliban spokesman was quick to scoff at the suggestion. ‘If he really wants to join [. . .] he should face justice first,’ said Zabiullah Mujahid. ‘He should face justice for bringing foreign troops to Afghanistan. He should face justice for all the crime that has happened during his rule, and for the corruption and for what is going on now. Then we’ll decide whether we will join with him or not.’
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This rebuff wasn’t of much comfort to Washington, however. A White House spokesman described Karzai’s remarks as ‘genuinely troubling’.

The Americans could hardly forget that their strategic partner had once been a supporter of their great enemy. In 1995 Mullah Omar even offered him the post of ambassador to the UN, although Karzai turned it down and later broke with the movement, telling friends that he suspected – accurately – that it was being manipulated by the ISI.
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But this did not necessarily mean he was unsympathetic towards their goals. ‘There were many wonderful people in the Taliban,’ he told the
Washington Post
in 1998.
⁶
When Karzai described the Taliban as his ‘disenchanted brothers’, as he did at the London Conference twelve years later, did he mean the term ‘brothers’ literally? His own sense of disenchantment was certainly now more than clear.

In 2009 as the world waited for Obama’s response to McChrystal’s request for more troops, the US Vice-President Joe Biden had argued against the surge precisely because he felt Karzai could not be trusted. He was supported by the US ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, a retired general who had served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and who had warned Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, that Karzai was ‘not an adequate strategic partner’. In Washington it was beginning to look as if Biden and Eikenberry might have been right.

For all the sophistication of the way Karzai presented himself to
the West – the cleverly assembled outfit, his mastery of seven languages, the statesmanlike manner, his looks and his native charm – his was no doubt a case of once a Pashtun, always a Pashtun, whose instincts were perhaps not nearly as liberal or modernizing as some of his backers would like. In April 2008, Karzai remained unaccountably silent when a 23-year-old journalism student, Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh from Mazar, was sentenced to death by a local court for ‘insulting Islam’. Kaambakhsh’s only crime was to have circulated an article taken from an Iranian website questioning why Muslim women cannot have multiple husbands in the same way as their menfolk can legally take four wives. He had no legal representation at his trial, which was held in secret. Yet Karzai refused to intervene even when the death sentence was upheld by the Upper House of Parliament.
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Similarly, just before his re-election, Karzai was accused of backing a constitutional amendment that appeared to forbid women from refusing to have sex with their husbands. The
Daily Mail
, in an article entitled ‘As Bad as the Taliban?’,
⁸
quoted a spokesperson for the United Nations Development Fund for Women who described the amendment as ‘the legalization of rape in marriage’.

Was the President acting from a need to curry favour with his fundamentalist supporters? Or did he partially or privately agree with this kind of extreme conservatism? Perhaps it was a complex mixture of the two? His signals were never clear. Some suspected that he took pleasure at times in deliberately antagonizing the West. Others looked for clues in his private life. It was often said that his wife, Zenat Qureishi, an experienced gynaecologist before she married, was forbidden in the traditional Pashtun way to leave the Presidential Palace without his permission. Afghanistan’s educated First Lady was potentially a valuable asset if the President
was serious about improving women’s rights, but for whatever reason she remained well out of the media’s reach.

It was hard in some respects not to pity Karzai, for his position between West and East, Nato and the Taliban, was an almost impossible balancing act to maintain. Mullah Zaeef described him as an almost tragic figure, a man who woke up every morning ‘between the tiger and the precipice, never knowing which way to turn’. The pair had met a number of times since 2006, always at the invitation of the President. ‘We sparred verbally, but tried to find a solution together,’ he recalled in his book. ‘It is quite an enigma, and it is hard to see who can cut this knot.’ He certainly did not dislike him personally: ‘One can feel that he is not a cruel man. He would not consider killing someone or throwing him in jail.’ Nevertheless, he thought Karzai was hopelessly out of his depth as a leader, ‘unable to differentiate between friend and enemy, because he did not come to power the way he should have, through slow, difficult steps.’ As a consequence he was a man as much sinned against as sinning, a kind of Afghan King Lear: ‘He is imprisoned within a circle of people that keeps him far from the truth, and the information he seems to get is very weak and often has nothing to do with reality. But he relies on this information, and it results in inappropriate action.’

In the end, though, Zaeef held Karzai in contempt. Although not a cruel man, the President was still responsible for the cruelties of his ‘guests’, the foreigners, and was guilty by association. ‘He could condemn those actions, but he is caught up in politics. He loves power, and wants to stay where he is.’ Or, as the Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid put it: ‘It’s just a game he is playing. He is trying to show people he is not under the control of the Americans, but it’s completely false.’

Many Kabulis I met complained that they had seen no benefit from the billions of aid dollars that had supposedly been spent in their country. Eight years into the post-Taliban era, it was true that most public buildings, such as the National Library or the Academy of Science where I had met the Pashtun history professor, Ustad Rafeh, remained depressingly dilapidated. Meanwhile, the ever-worsening condition of the city’s traffic-clogged roads provided daily evidence of civic mismanagement and, it was always cynically inferred, corruption. As a Kabuli friend muttered: ‘If the Taliban had had as much money as Karzai has, everything round here would be made of gold by now.’ Instead, after rain, every road surface was covered with a skin of brown slime that refused to drain away. It was little better when the sun came out, for then the roads dried and the slime was turned into clouds of choking dust. Where they existed at all, pavements were often dug up and completely impassable, even in the prestigious embassy district in Wazir Akhbar Khan, where pedestrians hopped between stepping
stones in shirt hems and sandals permanently caked in filth.

Those foreign billions had gone somewhere, however, and the general sense of grievance, which always seemed strongest among the city’s Pashtun community, was accentuated by conspicuous pockets of free enterprise that dotted the city and which always seemed to be owned by Tajiks. Kabul had always been dominated by the Persian-speaking Tajiks, the second largest ethnic group in the country. They traditionally worked as merchants, bureaucrats, doctors and teachers – a kind of urban middle class to the rural Pashtun aristocracy. In many cases the new Tajik wealth was shamelessly flaunted, most conspicuously in the concentrations of flashy villas that had sprung up around the city centre.

Allegations of corruption clustered especially thickly around Marshal Fahim, an ethnic Tajik born in the Panjshir valley, from where his friend and co-commander Ahmed Shah Massoud had mounted his famous resistance against the Russians in the 1980s. On Massoud’s death and the fall of the Taliban he became the Defence Minister, a position he was soon accused of abusing by packing the army’s ranks with Tajik fighters. This may have been the least of his sins. In 2002 the CIA, who had paid Fahim millions of dollars to ensure his support during the invasion period, were shocked to discover that their protégé was still deeply involved in narcotics trafficking, even running a private cargo plane over the border with Tajikistan. He was also accused of treating the Panjshiri emerald-mining industry almost as a private asset, with the profits said to have been stashed in a string of secret Dubai bank accounts. Fahim was removed as Defence Minister in 2004, but he remained a powerful and deeply divisive figure who has survived at least four assassination attempts since 2002. According to Mullah Zaeef, men like him had ‘a vested interest in keeping the Taliban
out, and perpetuating the war’. His luxurious home in the capital, he added, belonged to a Pashtun businessman evicted after he was accused of supporting the Taliban.

In 1994 as head of the Tajik-dominated KHAD, the hated Soviet-era secret service, Fahim had once arrested and interrogated Hamid Karzai on suspicion of his being a spy for the ISI. Despite this, Karzai chose him as his running mate in the 2009 presidential elections – a choice roundly condemned by the NGO Human Rights Watch.

‘To see Fahim back in the heart of government [is] a terrible step backwards for Afghanistan,’ said one of its directors, Brad Adams. ‘He is one of the most notorious warlords in the country, with the blood of many Afghans on his hands from the civil war.’

Afghanistan often made strange bedfellows of its politicians. Perhaps Karzai calculated that it was better to keep this enemy close than to have him plotting from the outside. At any rate, he was used to vigorously defending his former tormentor in public. In 2006 he described him as his ‘dear brother . . . No one can ever reduce the respect that Marshal Fahim has earned for himself.’
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The new ‘Gulbahar Shopping Center’, a block of gaudy greens and yellows near the Foreign Ministry, provided a more prosaic illustration of Tajik advantage in Kabul. It was named after a town at the foot of the Panjshir valley, while the American spelling of ‘Center’ gave a good indication of who and what was really driving the city’s wartime economy. The entrance was guarded as heavily as a government ministry – armed policemen in balaclavas, sandbags, a machine-gun-topped Humvee stationed across the street – but beyond the body-friskers and bag-checkers lay a different world. There were four floors of shops arranged around a lofty atrium where fountains and piped music played. There was a
children’s play area equipped with a dozen penny-rides, and a shoot’em-up games arcade for the teenagers. The floors were all of marble, and a flashing glass elevator glided up and down. At first glance this unlikely vision of the new Afghanistan looked as sharp and clean as any shopping mall in Dubai.