Charm and the West Keep Karzai in Power, for Now
By DEXTER FILKINS
nytimes.com
KABUL, Afghanistan, March
25 — For a man occupying a
post that has led almost inevitably
in recent years to exile or
execution, Hamid Karzai exudes
a surprising confidence.
Mr. Karzai, the chairman of the
caretaker government installed
after the Taliban's collapse,
blithely tosses out the gruesome
anecdotes of presidential
succession: Najibullah,
disemboweled and hanged from a
street pole. Muhammad Daoud,
shot by his own guards as he sat
on a palace couch. Noor
Muhammad Taraki, smothered
with a pillow.
"A little civility is what
Afghanistan needs," Mr. Karzai
said recently at his office in the
presidential palace. "If I had
guns, people would hate me. Who
wants guns?"
It is with such assurance that Mr.
Karzai presides over this roiling
and ruined country, now the focus
of a Western-backed experiment
to hatch a democracy where
terror and tyranny ran loose for
nearly a quarter-century.
His task is to provide the bridge
between Afghanistan's previous
rulers, the deposed mullahs of the
Taliban, and a more lasting
provisional government intended
to lay the groundwork for
nationwide elections.
As he enters the second half of
his six-month term, Mr. Karzai
has cut a dynamic figure in Kabul
and the West. With his fluent
English and dazzling attire, he
eclipsed expectations that he was
merely a colorless stand-in for
the Western coalition that ousted
the Taliban.
With trips to 15 capitals, Mr.
Karzai has helped sustain interest
in his country at a time when it
might have begun to wane. He
and his aides are busy devising a
plan to spend $4.5 billion in
promised foreign aid on
everything from hospitals to
highways and schools.
Yet for all Mr. Karzai's
cheeriness, there are growing
signs that the interim government
over which he presides is a
troubled enterprise, sustained
almost entirely by his charisma
and Western cash.
Turmoil that could ultimately
threaten his government, from
ethnic strife to battles among
warlords, percolates nearly
everywhere outside the capital.
In the north, two of the country's
most powerful warlords, Gen.
Abdul Rashid Dostum and Gen.
Ostad Atta Muhammad, continue
to clash as their armies struggle
to outmaneuver each other for
supremacy. Across western and northern Afghanistan, Iran
exerts its own influence, funneling cash and guns to its
local protégés.
Indeed, outside Kabul there seems little evidence of a
central government at all.
Without a functioning telephone network or highway
system, rural outposts are almost completely isolated.
Civil servants in nearly every province have gone unpaid
since Mr. Karzai's government took office. Taxes, where
they are collected at all, appear only rarely to reach the
government's coffers.
"We don't have any contact with the central government,"
said Saleh Muhammad Zari, the governor of Faryab
Province in the northwest.
Like many other officials, Mr. Zari has an office with no
electricity, no phones and no furniture. He sits on the
floor, and none of his employees have been paid.
Mr. Karzai's government has been unable to provide basic
security, and soldiers nominally in its employ are often the
agents of chaos.
Soldiers under the command of General Dostum, the
deputy defense minister, have been blamed for expelling
thousands of Pashtuns from their homes across northern
Afghanistan. The checkpoints that used to make the
fighters known as mujahedeen notorious for rape, murder
and extortion again block roads across the country.
By contrast, Kabul is resurgent. Since the interim
government came to power on Dec. 22, money and people
have flowed in from the West, giving the ruined city a
dynamism and sense of hope it has not felt in years.
Nearly 5,000 foreign troops have made the city safer than
many Western cities. With help from the United Nations,
the government ministries are humming with purpose.
Indeed, Mr. Karzai often appears to be less a head of state
than a mayor. In his three months in power, Mr. Karzai has
ventured only occasionally into the provinces, which, with
their mud-brick huts and oxcarts, sometimes seem
separated from Kabul by centuries.
His Domain: Mostly Kabul
On the rare occasion that Mr. Karzai steps out to meet his
own people, he is met with whoops and cheers. During a
recent stop in Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, thousands
of residents lined the roads and threw afghani notes — a
traditional greeting — at his car as he swept past.
Then Mr. Karzai ducked into a memorial service for
Abdul Haq, a warlord killed fighting the Taliban, said a
few words, boarded a helicopter and flew away.
Mr. Karzai acknowledges the capital's, and his own,
remoteness from the rest of the country. But he insists that
his interim government inspires the loyalty of Afghans
everywhere.
"We don't have contact with the provinces, but that's not
same thing as not having power," he said. "When we call a
governor and tell him to come, he is here the next day."
But Mr. Karzai's breezy style has begun to trouble some of
his Western friends and even those in his own government,
who worry that beneath his exuberant surface he lacks the
will to confront the country's problems or his own internal
enemies.
"Sometimes he is too optimistic," a senior member of the
interim government said. "We think he should be stronger,
but he has never been in such a position before.
"What is needed of Chairman Karzai is that he should
clear his mind of a lot of people. If this country were 10
times more destroyed, it wouldn't matter to them. They are
after an opportunity to hit back at us, and you shouldn't
give them an opportunity."
Even on issues that he knows well, Mr. Karzai's political
touch has recently failed him. The recent postponement of
the return of the former king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, from
exile in Rome came as a personal blow to Mr. Karzai,
who was for a long time the king's prinicpal advocate in
Afghanistan.
Others in the interim government, who have traveled to
Rome, say Mr. Karzai failed to detect signs of profound
anxiety on the part of the former king that foreshadowed
his decision.
All around Mr. Karzai the maneuvering to succeed him
has already begun. Abdul Rahman, his handpicked
aviation minister, was murdered at the Kabul airport by a
mob on Feb. 14. Mr. Karzai denounced the killing as a
conspiracy within his own government, and three men,
including the deputy intelligence minister, were arrested.
Ever since he was chosen to be
chairman of the interim
government, Mr. Karzai has had
to dispel the impression that he is
not only a client of the
Americans, but of the former
Northern Alliance, the
American-backed group that did
the bulk of the fighting against the
Taliban.
Mr. Karzai is a Pashtun, and as
such a member of the country's
dominant ethnic group, but he
presides over a government
dominated by Tajiks. Nearly half
of the posts in his cabinet are
occupied by former members of
the anti-Taliban opposition,
including defense, foreign affairs
and interior.
Popularity Follows Money
To a man, the Tajik ministers
profess loyalty to their chairman,
even as rumors swirl that they
will abandon him for their
longtime leader, Burhanuddin
Rabbani, when the broad-based
meeting known as the loya jirga
convenes in June to choose a new
government.
Mr. Rabbani is said to be forming
an alliance of warlords that
includes Pashtuns of a militantly
Islamic bent, including Abdul
Rab Rasool Sayyaf and
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord
considered responsible for killing
as many as 50,000 civilians
during rocket attacks on Kabul in
the 1990's.
What may determine the loyalties
of warlords and governors
around the country will be Mr.
Karzai's ability to put money into
their hands.
So far, the government seems
unable to collect much in the way
of taxes or spend what little
money it has. There is less than
$6 million in the treasury, itself a
gift from the United Nations. In
the provinces, tax collection and
spending ebb and flow at the
whim of local warlords.
In Mazar-i-Sharif, what little
revenue the local authorities had
collected evaporated in a single
day when General Dostum
decided that he needed to pay his
troops.
"General Dostum is the boss,"
said Abdul Jaber Qazi Zoda,
finance director for Balkh
Province, which includes
Mazar-i-Sharif.
The overwhelming impression is
that local warlords, not the
central government, hold sway.
Across a 200-mile swath of
territory from the Maimana
district in the northwest to
Mazar-i-Sharif, local officials proclaimed their principal
allegiance to General Dostum, not Chairman Karzai.
Across the north, virtually every gate of every public
building is adorned with a portrait of the mustachioed
commander.
Of the many warlords, General Dostum evokes the
greatest suspicion, and the most wrath, within the central
government. General Dostum, who fought on virtually
every side in the country's 23 years at war, has professed
his support for Mr. Karzai's government and has been
made deputy defense minister.
Yet he is widely believed by United Nations officials and
members of the interim government to be receiving arms
and money from the Iranian government. At the same time,
he has invited into his fief a pair of Pashtun warlords
known for their allegiance to Mr. Hekmatyar, who has
vowed to topple Mr. Karzai's government.
"His past was one of betrayals," a senior member of the
interim government said of General Dostum. "He deals
under the table. He is a man who does not believe in
ideals. For him there is no value but himself."
Much of Mr. Karzai's eventual leverage resides in the
$4.5 billion in foreign aid pledged over the next five years
to help rebuild Afghanistan. So far, signs that the money
has been put to use are rare in Kabul; in the provinces they
are virtually nonexistent.
Nigel Fisher, deputy director of the United Nations
special mission to Afghanistan, said that only a tiny
fraction of the foreign money had been spent, and that
many of the projects envisioned for the country were still
being planned.
In an interview, Mr. Fisher said it was the United Nations'
priority to try to use the aid money as a tool to help
strengthen Mr. Karzai's government. By channeling money
if possible through Kabul, Mr. Fisher said, the
organization hopes to increase the dependency of local
areas on the central government, furthering the unification
of the country.
"We are trying to create an impression of governance,"
Mr. Fisher said.
To date, the money that has flowed is a trickle. The United
Nations has paid government workers in Kabul for two
months, and it spent $24 million organizing the return of
some 1.7 million Afghan children to school. The United
Nations has replaced broken windows in government
offices, and donated computers, copy machines and about
200 cellphones to senior government officials.
"Symbolism is important," Mr. Fisher said.
What may determine how quickly the money flows, and
whether Mr. Karzai can use it to stitch the country
together, is the degree of security that prevails. And that,
increasingly, seems very much in doubt.
On the roads out of the capital, the driver is at the mercy
of the bandits and the checkpoints, many of them manned
by soldiers looking for a way to make easy money. At one
checkpoint outside Jalalabad, villagers needing rides to
Kabul pay the soldiers to flag down cars and force drives
to accept a rider free.
Needed: An Afghan Army
Mr. Karzai's writ extends no farther than the city limits of
Kabul, where some 4,500 troops — from Britain, Italy,
Germany and other Western countries — seem to have
won the approval of local residents.
The Bush administration's refusal to expand that force
seems likely to make Kabul the exception rather than the
rule in future months.
The foreign troops in Kabul have just begun to train the
first 500 members of what is envisioned as an Afghan
national army. That force is months, and possibly even
years, away from being able to take on the large and
battle-tested armies commanded by warlords like General
Dostum and General Muhammad.
"For the army to acquire what we call minimal
operational capacity will take a year — at a minimum,"
said Maj. Gen. John McColl, the British commander of the
International Security Assistance Force.
What worries people like Mr. Fisher, the United Nations
official, is that the absence of peacekeepers around the
country will prevent peace from taking hold, and that that
could doom the rebuilding process.
"It would be terrible for the donors to condition their aid
on security," Mr. Fisher said, "and then for the
international community not to extend the security force
around the country."
On the day of his inauguration, Mr. Karzai warned the
Afghan people that if they missed this chance at
redemption, they would slide into oblivion. From his
perch in the presidential palace, Mr. Karzai no longer
colors his remarks with such dark hues, and paints himself
as a much more optimistic man.
In office, Mr. Karzai says, he has learned well enough that
the Afghan people are sick of war, that any national leader
who tries to thwart that desire will have to answer to
them. On that, he says, he stakes all of his confidence.
"The crowds, the thousands of people — it is not because
they like me," he said. "No. It is because they want a new
Afghanistan, a very new Afghanistan, an Afghanistan that
should be without the rule of the guns." |
