An inside view of Karzai

I met a recently with a a highly placed government official and asked about his assessment of Afghanistan today and in the next two years.

The conversation was in Dari, the Afghan version of Farsi. In translating from memory, I have tried to be as accurate as I was able. However, this is sure to be an imperfect task.

This is what he said:

Kabul resembles a chicken coop that a hungry fox has invaded. Chaos reigns in the confined space. The traumatized creatures—their eyes bulging for fear of death, their wings flapping in a vain attempt to escape the deadly bite of the unrelenting beast—flutter all over the overfilled cage in aimless, pitiful agony.



Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, who had always prevailed in his nefarious plans with his American handlers, failed for the first time during his most recent visit to Washington to persuade the American administration to agree to submit after 2014 any remaining American military personal to Afghan legal jurisdiction.

Mr. Karzai, an intellectually untrained but remarkably shrewd politician, in the best school of Third World bureaucrats, could not be expected to recognize his limits in this matter. Why his Karzai-friendly CIA handlers failed to convince him that this was one thing even the U.S. President could not grant him remains a mystery.

As a pressure tactic, he had frontloaded his demands with a long list of military equipment, including long-range artillery, modern fighter planes, and tanks, all sophisticated gadgets that his largely illiterate soldiers could neither operate nor maintain. Some of these items he demanded he was quite sure he would not get. But nevertheless, he put them on the table. He did so for the sole purpose to exchange them in a dramatic comprise move, forcing the Americans’ hand to give in the issue of retaining the protection of their post-2014 troops from the Afghan judiciary.

His insistence on the matter was purely for internal Afghan consumption. He wanted to return home from Washington as a champion of the Afghan nation’s interests. Forcing Washington to acquiesce in this is, for the Afghan pride, a crucial subject, and he hoped to secure his and his family’s safety after his retirement as president.

Despite his overgenerous treatment, he returned home with his head bent. For the first time, it dawned on him that the U.S. was dead serious in withdrawing most of its troops from his country and leaving the fighting to the Afghans themselves.

He and his cohorts suddenly saw themselves confronted with the possibility that the U.S. could even withdraw all its troops, leaving them alone, without the certainty that they could call in American military personnel to protect them should their deeply discontented and angry people come after them—a situation that, at best, could force them into exile and, at worst, cost them their lives.

When I asked my brave discussant what he thought about the possibility of fair elections in May of 2014, he chuckled and said:

He’s too cunning. Americans will never understand him. As soon as he boarded the plane back from Washington to Kabul, he started to think about how he could try to make sure that someone from his own camp would win the presidency. And quite soon, he knew what to do. The Independent Election Commission had decided that the voting cards used during the last presidential elections were unreliable as thousands, if not millions, of fake cards had been issued. They had begun preparing to issue new and more secure voting cards.

The day after Karzai arrived in Kabul, he announced that there was neither the time nor the money to issue new cards and that the old voting cards—the ones with the help of which he had secured his second term—would be used. The chairman of the Independent Election Commission called Karzai’s declaration politically motivated. In no uncertain terms he announced that with the old cards fair elections would be impossible.

My discussant laughed and asked rhetorically:

Let’s see how he’s going to bribe the chairman. Will it be a plum position or an envelope full of cash? And the cash that Mr. Karzai often and generously doles out comes in regular shipments from the Iranian embassy.

Suddenly, he grabbed my hand and asked:

If you write about what I said, you will not mention my name, will you?

Before we began our talk, I had promised not to mention his name to anyone. And I know I’ll keep that promise.