The elder Karzai also had great dreams for his children. He wanted them to receive world-class educations and become qualified to lead their country forward toward progress and modernization. He sent several of his sons to study in the United States. When Hamid was finished with high school, his father sent him to university in India to earn an undergraduate and a graduate degree and to become proficient in English, to go with his two native languages, Pashto and Dari (also known as Farsi, the language of the Persians).
Hamid Karzai was barely twenty-one years old in 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini launched the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Soviets invaded his own country. Living in India, he felt lonely and far away from the dramatic events engulfing his people and his family. When he learned that his father had been imprisoned, he wanted to rush home, but his family said no. There was nothing he could do to help. He needed to stay alive, finish his studies, and plan for the future. Reluctantly, he agreed.
By 1982, however, Karzai was hearing dramatic stories of the mujahadeen fighting bravely against the Soviet forces. They were not yet achieving big successes (those would not really begin until 1984, when the Reagan administration dramatically accelerated aid to the Afghan “freedom fighters” through the CIA), but they were holding their own.
Karzai was inspired. He wanted to be part of it. He wanted to help, someway, somehow. Unable to contain himself any longer, he bought a train ticket and began the forty-eight-hour journey from Simla, India, to Quetta, Pakistan, where at least he could see the enormous and rapidly growing refugee camps along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and get a clearer picture of what was really happening inside his country.
On the train, however, he overheard something that deeply disturbed him. Several men from one of Afghanistan’s most radical political movements were talking about joining the jihad and killing the Russians, but they were also talking about their leaders’ dream to one day seize control of Afghanistan and establish a Sunni theocracy, much as the Ayatollah Khomeini had seized control of Iran and established a Shia theocracy.
This was a new development, at least for Karzai. From his limited vantage point in India, all he had heard were positive stories of the jihadists defending their country from the infidels. He had not yet detected an extremist strain that might seek to use the conflict in Afghanistan to hijack the country and take it into Khomeini-esque fascism rather than returning it to a constitutional monarchy.
“I became aware of a political and ideological movement that wanted to undermine the traditional Afghan value system and the Afghan way of life,” Karzai told a biographer. “Over the months and years to come, I would see that this radical movement had many fathers. Everyone had a hand in its growth—the West, the neighbors [i.e., Iran, Pakistan, and the U.S.S.R.], everyone. And this movement was ultimately the cause of so much evil in Afghanistan and so much destruction in the United States and the rest of the world.”439
Joining the Mujahadeen
Though he was now alert to and wary of a growing extremist strain in the anti-Soviet effort, Karzai was a devoted nationalist and still deeply committed to helping the mujahadeen succeed. Finished with his academic studies, he was now free to join the resistance and lend whatever skills he had to the cause.
Absent any military training, Karzai was asked by his father—living in exile in Pakistan—to help him with the logistics of moving food, medical supplies, weapons, and other goods to the fighters operating inside Afghanistan. Later he was asked to work in the refugee camps, teaching English to young people eager to prepare themselves for a better life one day. It was a job he loved and remains proud of to this day.
“Of all the things I did during those years, [teaching] that English course was one of my best contributions,” Karzai would later recall. “It was a great, great work, and many young Afghans who learned English in that program went on to continue their educations, some to a very high level. I remember those people, and it gives me great happiness to know that I was able to help them with their educations.”440
Eventually, however, Karzai became determined to go into battle against the Soviets. He wanted to participate in what his people were doing. He wanted to see what the Russians were doing. He wanted to feel like he was making a difference on the front lines. He believed that if Allah ever had a plan for him to provide leadership to the Afghan people, he was going to need the credibility of having served in forward areas.
The leadership finally gave him his chance. He went on numerous missions deep inside his homeland, conducting raids against Soviet convoys, engaging in firefights with Soviet patrols, and shooting down Soviet helicopters and fighter jets. It was exhilarating for Karzai, but he, his father, and the mujahadeen leaders all knew that ultimately this was not the best use of his gifts and abilities, including his language skills. He could be of far more use to the movement as a political leader, building relationships and alliances with the outside world and planning for the day when Afghanistan would be free and a new government would be formed.
When the Soviets finally left in 1989 and the caretaker regime they had left in place collapsed in 1992, the mujahadeen rose to power in an “interim government.” Karzai was brought back to Kabul and appointed deputy foreign minister. It was a role that would have suited him perfectly, but it did not last for long. The coalition that made up the government was fragile at best. After more than a decade of intense combat, several of the most powerful tribes were not ready to stop fighting. They certainly were not ready to share power. They wanted to control the entire country for themselves, and a horrific civil war broke out.
It was kingdom against kingdom, tribe against tribe. Karzai watched in disbelief as the country he had just helped to liberate descended into what he called “a wilderness of savagery.”441 Kabul was being blown apart, house by house, street by street. What little the Soviets had left intact was being systematically obliterated. And thousands of Afghan Muslims were dying in the process.
By 1994, Karzai could not take it any longer. He had been spectacularly unsuccessful in persuading the Clinton-Gore administration to help his disintegrating country. The United Nations and the Europeans were similarly unhelpful. With the violence so bad he feared for his own life and the lives of his wife and children, Karzai pulled them out and returned to Quetta, Pakistan, to catch their breath and regroup.
Resisting the Taliban
In the early 1990s, Karzai began to notice the Taliban rising to power, though at first he—like many Afghans—thought the Taliban might be a positive force for change.
“As Karzai tells it,” wrote Nick Mills, an associate professor of journalism at Boston University, in an excellent and thought-provoking biography of the Afghan leader, “a warlord in Kandahar kidnapped two girls from a rival group, and the girls were gang-raped at the warlord’s base. A small group of Taliban attacked the warlord’s base, freed the girls, and hanged him. Word of the dramatic rescue spread rapidly. The Pakistanis took notice as well and supplied the Taliban with weapons, vehicles, and military advisers.”442
The goal at the time was to find someone—anyone—to restore some semblance of order and security to a country wracked by lawlessness and sectarian violence. The Taliban seemed to fit the bill. As Karzai has said, “We had hopes for the movement. We hoped the Taliban would bring peace and restore Afghanistan to the hands of the Afghan people.”443
But as Mullah Omar and his forces steadily gained control of the country, Karzai kept hearing disturbing reports of wanton acts of cruelty against innocent civilians, and he began detecting that the Taliban was not really a homegrown movement. It was being heavily influenced by, if not directly run by, Arabs, not Afghans. Growing numbers of Saudis were seen entering and operating in Kabul, Kandahar, and other regions of the country. Radical Wahhabi Muslims, not traditional Muslims, were preaching in the mosques. And suitcases full of money were flowing into the country from the Arabian Peninsula.
In 1996, Taliban leaders asked Karzai to s
erve as Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United Nations. But, deeply disturbed by where the movement was headed, Karzai declined. By 1999, the Taliban and its al Qaeda “guests” controlled 90 percent of the country, and they now believed that Karzai—still in Pakistan—was emerging as their main enemy.
They were right. Tribal chieftains were sending messengers to Karzai asking for help. Karzai was being interviewed on the BBC, the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and other international networks, and he was exposing the Taliban’s cruelty and imploring the world to come to his country’s aid once again.
“Islam?” Karzai would tell anyone who would listen. “The Taliban [are] not practicing Islam.” He called them a “tool for defaming Islam.” He accused them of being out “to destroy Afghanistan and Islam together” and insisted, “Humiliating women is not Islam. Depriving children of education is not Islam. Destroying lives is against Islam.”444
To silence Karzai, the Taliban assassinated his father in 1999. This did not stop the Afghan idealist, however. Instead it deepened his resolve to do everything in his power to liberate his country from the Taliban.
Karzai accelerated his efforts to make the Clinton-Gore administration and the Western powers see the danger brewing in his country and to persuade them to take decisive action against the Taliban and al Qaeda before it was too late. Tragically, his pleas fell on deaf ears. “We kept telling the United States for the past five or six years . . . of the dangers that [these terrorists] could pose to the United States,” Karzai would later say during an interview on American television not long after 9/11. “Unfortunately the incident in New York happened with such a tremendous loss of life, and that caused the reaction, which was right, which was on time. The only thing is that I’m sorry that it had to take that kind of a calamity for us to work against terrorism.”445
Karzai is convinced that the U.S. government could have taken action during the 1990s to crush the threat posed by al Qaeda and the Taliban and that it had a moral obligation to the American people as well as to his own people to have done so. And he regrets that the price the U.S. paid for not listening was so enormous. “Should President Clinton have done more at the time?” Karzai said later, describing his disappointment at all the missed opportunities of the 1990s. “Yes, but not only he—the whole world should have done more. If the world had done more, the Twin Towers would be standing today.”446
Destroying the Taliban
As the 9/11 attacks on the United States unfolded, Karzai was enraged but not surprised. This was what he had long feared could happen, and now it had.
When the Bush administration was ready to fight back, Karzai and his colleagues were ready too. After years of preparation, they had a network of insurgents in place to help the Americans, beginning with the forces of the Northern Alliance, which still controlled about 10 percent of the country. They had an extensive network of tribal leaders and informers that could provide intelligence on the whereabouts and movements of Taliban and al Qaeda forces. They had an extensive network of villagers willing to provide trucks, beds, food, and anything else they could to help the Americans and the mujahadeen oust these Radicals so they could again breathe free mountain air. They also had hundreds of local leaders ready and willing to form a representative government when the time was right.
In early October 2001, Karzai left his home in Quetta for the mountains near Kabul to rally his people against the Taliban. “I told everyone that I was going to a friend’s memorial service in town,” he said. “I didn’t even tell my wife what I was really up to. I only said that if I weren’t back in a few days, it was because I was busy and she shouldn’t worry. She was surprised, of course, but I didn’t give her the opportunity to discuss my trip. I hurried away.”447
Once at the Afghan border, Karzai linked up with three close friends and trusted advisors who had agreed to help him get in and cover his back in the process. “They had two motorbikes and a couple of handguns,” he recalled, adding that they donned Afghan-style turbans and hats, hoping to blend in to the local traffic and not attract attention. Gone was the natty Western clothing and distinguished lamb’s-wool hat Karzai loved to wear and for which he would later become known.
Karzai was a wanted man. Given what had happened to his father, he knew that if the Taliban found him, they would slaughter him immediately. He was taking an enormous risk, but he felt he had no choice. If there was ever a chance to liberate his homeland, this was it, and his credibility with his own people as well as with the West hinged on his getting inside the country as quickly as possible.
“We stayed in a village near Kandahar’s airport; then we moved to a house in the middle of town,” Karzai would later recall. “That evening, American bombs began to fall around us. The war had begun. My cousins arranged for a taxi—an old Toyota station wagon—to take us into central Afghanistan. We stayed with a clergyman for several nights in the village of Tarin Kowt. His brother was a Taliban judge. In the afternoons, the brother would have tea with me and defend the Taliban. Yet he never told them I was staying in the house. That’s when it sunk in that the Taliban were on the run, that Afghans wanted change.”448
One night around nine o’clock, Karzai and his colleagues pulled together their first anti-Taliban organizational meeting inside Afghanistan, meeting with the local mullah and four tribal chiefs.
One of the chiefs asked if Karzai was in contact with the Americans.
Karzai said yes.
Were the Americans sending troops, or just bombs?
Karzai said he did not know for certain.
“You have a satellite telephone,” the mullah noted. “Call the Americans and tell them to come and bomb the Taliban command center” in the village of Tarin Kowt.
Karzai hesitated. He said he could not call in American air strikes against his own people.
“In that case, you don’t want to win,” said the mullah. “You want to be a loser.”
The words stung, and Karzai was stunned by the cleric’s blunt manner.
“The population is fully with you,” the mullah continued. “We will defend you to our deaths. But these are cruel people we are dealing with, and they have full backing from outside the country [i.e., bin Laden’s money and international network of jihadists]. They will have no mercy on us. They will bomb us. They will send rockets into our homes and send the flesh of our women and children into the trees. Is this what you want?”
Karzai shook his head.
“We cannot win without the Americans,” the mullah concluded. “If you can’t tell them to bomb, then at least ask them to drop weapons for us.”449
Karzai finally agreed. He made the call, then rounded up about sixty men willing to head into the mountains to wait. Along the way, they encountered hundreds of other Afghan men—young and old—eager to join them. “The Americans dropped us weapons, ammunition, and sixteen members of the special forces,” said Karzai. “Once, the Taliban and al-Qaeda came close to capturing us, setting up an ambush with about five hundred militiamen. But a village clergyman who had risen to call the early-morning prayers saw these armed men getting out of their vehicles and moving into the mountains. Instead of summoning the faithful to prayer, he ran to warn us. We put up stiff resistance, and we had help from American bombers. The Taliban announced that they’d caught and hanged me. I knew my wife was hearing this, but I couldn’t call her because my satellite-phone batteries were running out.”450
Soon U.S. and NATO forces were arriving, massive amounts of weapons and ammunition were flowing to Karzai’s men and the Northern Alliance, and the bulk of the Taliban and al Qaeda were fleeing for their lives.
Chapter Eighteen
Karzai’s Mission
What he wants and what he has accomplished
It is almost impossible to convey the sense of elation that Hamid Karzai, his family, his colleagues, and his people felt when their country was liberated in late 2001.
Or when Karzai took office as interim president
on December 22, 2001.
Or when national elections were held on October 9, 2004, and 8.1 million Afghans voted, 42 percent of whom were women.
Or when the votes were tallied and they learned that Karzai had received 55.4 percent of the vote and a stunning 3 million more votes than the closest of his eighteen challengers.
Or when Karzai was sworn in on December 7, 2004, for a five-year term as the first democratically elected president in Afghanistan’s history.
Or when parliamentary elections were held in 2005, with some five thousand Afghan candidates running for the opportunity to represent their people.
The day they had the first opportunity to cast their ballots to choose their own leaders was a day no Afghan will ever forget. “It is a very important day,” said a seventy-five-year-old toothless man in an old black turban as he voted in 2004. “We are very happy. It is like independence day, or freedom day. We are bringing security and peace to this country.”451
“We are selecting our own president for ourselves,” said a fifty-year-old headmaster of a local Afghan school. “That’s important. There will definitely be changes after this election. There will be an end to the robberies and armed militias. People will cooperate with the government.”452
“It is like a dream,” one Afghan told the BBC, his eyes filled with tears. “Twenty-five years of displacement and life away from home have broken my back. Today I feel like I am reborn.”453
An elderly woman who walked through mountain snows for four hours to find a polling station and cast her ballot told a reporter, “My life is almost over. [But] I am doing this for my children, and for my children’s children.”454
Not everyone outside the country fully understood what was happening in Afghanistan, however. Many in the West were—and remain—skeptical that representative government can firmly take root and bear fruit in an Islamic country such as Afghanistan, especially given its long history of bloodshed. But Hamid Karzai made the case that he was a proud and devout Muslim as well as a proud and determined democrat.
Inside the Revolution Page 29