During a September 2003 forum at Princeton University, Karzai was asked point-blank by a student whether Islam was compatible with democracy. Absolutely, he insisted. The Taliban and al Qaeda used Islam “to justify murder and killing and destruction.” But the Afghan people “joined hands” with the world’s democracies “and drove them away.” True Islam, he argued, calls for a just and fair society. “How can you have justice if you don’t have people voting and choosing their governments?” he asked. “Islam is totally compatible with democracy.”455
On July 4, 2004, President Karzai was honored at a ceremony in Philadelphia for being a true follower of Thomas Jefferson and a model for future Jeffersonian democrats. In presenting Karzai with the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, H. Craig Lewis, chairman of the Philadelphia Foundation, put it this way: “Like some very famous Americans who met in Philadelphia more than two centuries ago, President Karzai has pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor to a cause and a country in which he deeply believes. He joins a distinguished roster of other Liberty Medal winners who have truly championed freedom and democratic values for the benefit of their nations and the world.”456
Mayor John F. Street added, “President Hamid Karzai has tremendous faith in his country and its people and is a remarkable force in leading Afghanistan toward stability and democracy.”457
In reply, Karzai said:
I am deeply honored to receive the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, on this momentous day, commemorating the Independence of America . . . in this great hall . . . which itself is a beacon, and a symbol of freedom. . . . I accept the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, with pride and a humble heart, on behalf of the Afghan people. This award is the Afghan people’s award. The Declaration of Independence, signed in this very hall, led to the founding of this great nation . . . the United States of America. This historic and remarkable document . . . was based on basic, yet fundamental, beliefs of the founding fathers of America . . . that “God intended Man to be free”! That “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were inalienable rights, granted by God to all men . . . rights that must not be taken away. We, the Afghan people, have also enshrined these divine rights in our new Constitution. And we will protect and defend them. . . .
In November 2001, when I was conducting the campaign against the Taliban, a bomb hit an Afghan tribal leader’s house and killed several members of his immediate family. A few days later, I was breaking fast with some Afghan elders, including this tribal leader, and some American officers. The tribal leader told the American officers that, “I have lost members of my family . . . and I wouldn’t care if I lost more members of my family, provided Afghanistan is liberated.” Ladies and gentleman, the Afghan people have sacrificed dearly to attain freedom. . . .
Ultimately, the Afghan people succeeded. With your help, we freed Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion . . . and with your support . . . we liberated Afghanistan from the rule of terrorism and extremism. As partners and defenders of freedom, both our nations are cognizant that liberty has its enemies. Where Liberty dies, evil grows. We Afghans have learned from our historical experiences that liberty does not come easily. We profoundly appreciate the value of liberty . . . for we have paid for it with our lives. And we will defend liberty with our lives. Here I quote the Afghan king of the early part of the last century . . . King Amanullah Khan, his words in pursuit of independence. “I will not stop seeking till I reach my heart’s desire. Either the life in me gets to my beloved or the life in me leaves my body.” For him “beloved” was liberty. And liberty is indeed beloved. Thank you. God bless you. God bless America and Afghanistan.”458
This was not a case he made only in the West. Karzai addressed Muslim leaders in Doha, Qatar, in February 2008. Among his remarks were the following comments:
As a Muslim, I am greatly pained to see that, in contrast to the glory of our forebears, today we Muslims live in rather troubled times. It is unfortunate that many of the most violent conflicts today are taking place in our countries; or that, despite our immeasurable resources, too many of us are afflicted by poverty. It is painful to see that we make up one-fifth of the world’s population, but only five percent of the world’s economy. While the injunctions of our great faith are totally consistent with our duties as citizens of a single world which we share with the West, sometimes we do seem to have difficulty reconciling the two. . . .
As a Muslim, I think it is time we do better with the basic tenets of our great faith, Islam, and relive its glorious tradition of tolerance and progress. Fourteen hundred years ago, the benevolent God ordained to his Messenger Muhammad (PBUH) in the Holy Qur’an that “all humans are equal in the sight of God,” and that humans are born into different tribes and distinctions not to despise one another, but to know one another better. This Qur’anic verse is the earliest assertion ever about our shared humanity and about the basic elements we hold in common as members of a single human race. As Muslims, we must live up to the eminence of this divine truth.
And then, more than a millennium after the Holy Qur’an spoke about equality in the eyes of God Almighty, the founding fathers of what is today the United States of America adhered to the same principles as they set about founding a new great nation: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” they declared. The United States Constitution begins with “We the People”—a telling reminder of Islam’s emphasis on the basic bondage of mankind. Thanks to the exemplary vision of its founding fathers, America today is a true beacon of prosperity, hope, and success. The American ideals of freedom, democracy, equality, and respect for the rights of the individual have inspired people around the world. I would say it is these ideals, much more than military prowess, that makes America attractive. . . .
The United States has also been one of the most successful nations in the world in terms of embracing and accepting multiplicity of religions and changing it to a social reality. Today, in the United States, Muslims live in peace and harmony with the followers of other religions, enjoying protection and full rights as citizens of that nation. . . . Today, no matter how divergent the views and interests of the United States and the Muslim world may appear on the surface, fundamentally, we aspire to the same ideals of freedom, peace, and prosperity.”459
Confronting Poverty
Early on, I was encouraged not only by President Karzai’s outspoken call for building a Jeffersonian democracy but by his commitment to tackling the enormous social and economic challenges facing his country and his devotion to improving the quality of life of every Afghan, particularly the lives of women and children. And while the country has a long, long way to go, Karzai and his team did make progress.
To begin with, Karzai was successful in persuading world leaders to support his country in a variety of ways. In January 2002, for example, just weeks after taking office, “Karzai swept onto the international stage . . . at an international donor’s conference in Tokyo, where he managed to persuade donors to pledge more than $4 billion to help rebuild Afghanistan,” reported the BBC, describing the new president as “charismatic” and a “shrewd statesman” with impressive diplomatic skills.460
By 2006, such skills had helped Karzai drive that number up to $10.5 billion in international aid pledges. In the summer of 2008, the U.S. government—impressed with the steady and significant progress that had been made so far—pledged an additional $10 billion in military and reconstruction assistance, while eighty other countries pledged an additional $5 billion.461
Such resources have been put to important use. More than four thousand kilometers of paved roads now crisscross the country, compared to only fifty when the Taliban was in charge. Nearly two thousand public schools have been built. Five universities are now operating. One hundred three hospitals are now running, along with 878 regional health clinics, and some 16 million vaccinations against childhood diseases have been administered.462
“Since the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan’s infant
-mortality rate has been reduced by almost 25 percent,” noted an impressed First Lady Laura Bush following a visit in June of 2008. “Its per-capita GDP has increased by 70 percent. In 2001, only 8 percent of Afghans had access to basic health care. Today, that number is 85 percent. In 2001, fewer than a million Afghan children were in school—all of them boys. Today, more than six million Afghan children are in school—about a third of them are girls.”463
Perhaps it was not surprising that Karzai took a special interest in caring for the needs of women and children. He is married to a doctor who has spent many years caring for widows and orphans in Afghan refugee camps, and the couple had their first baby—a son—in 2007, when Karzai was forty-nine.464
Meanwhile, the Karzais have also been particularly focused on encouraging the participation of women in the political system. “We should do a lot more,” Karzai said. “But the past five years have produced a lot of result, and a lot more will take place into the future. Out of 249 members in the Afghan Parliament, 68 are women. That’s 27 percent of the Afghan Parliament.”465 By way of comparsion, in the 110th U.S. Congress (2007–2009), women held only 18 percent of the seats in the House and Senate combined.466
Asked in 2006 whether the Afghan people regarded the U.S. and NATO presence as invasion or liberation, Karzai said liberation without a moment’s hesitation. “Five years ago,” he said, “we were a country ruled by al Qaeda, ruled by their associates, the Taliban, and their sponsors from outside. Five years ago, we had more than five million of our people living outside of Afghanistan . . . the political leaders of our country [living] outside of Afghanistan. . . . I was outside of Afghanistan. . . . We had no schools in Afghanistan. We had no press in Afghanistan. We had no television in Afghanistan. People could not listen to their radios in their homes. . . . If you were caught listening to the BBC, you could be punished. Today we have Afghanistan once again as the home of all the Afghan people. . . . Four and a half million Afghan refugees have returned. We have Afghanistan’s flag flying all over the world over our embassies, and we have sixty embassies represented in Afghanistan, some resident, some nonresident. We have the United Nations. We have the U.S. building a huge embassy there. . . . So for all good reasons, we are a liberated country with democracy. . . . Today we have . . . six television channels, private ones. And we have over 300 newspapers, all of them critical, by the way. And we have over thirty radio [stations]. So what do you call us, liberated or not?”467
Confronting the Radicals
From the very beginning, enormous challenges plagued the young president, who was a mere forty-four years old when he became the leader of his country. Among them: ongoing terrorism as Taliban and al Qaeda forces sought to destabilize and overthrow his regime; millions of widows and orphans; wrenching poverty; shortages of good housing and good jobs; illiteracy; psychological trauma; rampant drug production and drug use; budget shortages; government corruption; and an incredibly hostile neighborhood with the Radicals of the Iranian government on one side, an unstable Pakistan on the other, and the Russian Bear to the north.
Despite such challenges, Hamid Karzai initially seemed determined to build a healthy, functional democracy in his country, and I was moved by his personal determination to destroy the Radicals’ stranglehold on his country despite at least four assassination attempts between 2001 and 2008 alone.
“Innocent life is the enemy of terrorism,” Karzai argued with passion. “In other words, terrorism sees us all as enemies. Therefore, we have only one approach, one cause, one direction, one objective: to fight it, period. Playing with it is like trying to train a snake against somebody else. You don’t train a snake. You cannot train a snake. It will come and bite you. Therefore, there’s only one way: to fight terrorism, to fight extremism, in whatever form, wherever it may be, and to not use extremism as an instrument of policy. These are evils that the world has to get rid of. We have no choice there. If we adopt a complacent approach of having a choice there, you will see more destruction all around the world, without knowing when the next target would be.”468
By and large, Afghans have appreciated U.S. and NATO security assistance. They understood the stakes, and they understood the evil they were up against. In 2008, for example, some 70 percent of the Afghan population said they supported the presence of international forces to help them establish security. What was more, a stunning 84 percent said they supported their democratically elected government, compared to only 4 percent who said they wanted to go back to the rule of the Taliban.469
Afghans have not treated Osama bin Laden like a hero or a misunderstood genius. Rather, they have been determined to rid them-selves of him and his al Qaeda tyrants. “In Afghanistan, people hate [bin Laden] because he has caused so much suffering to Afghans,” Karzai told an American TV interviewer. “The Afghan people really see the pain that the American people went through [on 9/11] because they have experienced the same pain, so . . . there’s hatred for [bin Laden] in Afghanistan.”470
In his first years in office, Karzai not only strongly supported U.S. and NATO military efforts to root out the Radicals in his country; he actually urged the West to bring in more troops to finish the job.
Beginning in the winter of 2007 and continuing throughout the spring of 2008, terrorist attacks against the Karzai government and against innocent civilians spiked significantly. Karzai privately insisted to U.S. and NATO officials that a “surge” was needed in Afghanistan as it had been in Iraq. Only more troops could dramatically reduce violence in Kabul and the countryside and stabilize the government and society, he argued, while in the absence of more troops, Afghanistan’s future was in grave danger.
On June 13, 2008, Taliban forces underscored his point, pulling off a daring prison break in which scores of incredibly dangerous militants—including numerous would-be suicide bombers—were allowed to escape into the mountains. “Under the cover of darkness, nearly all of an estimated 1,150 prisoners, including some 400 Taliban inmates, fled from the jail,” Reuters reported.471
By then, the Bush administration, the British, and other NATO countries had already been stepping up their efforts, but they noticeably accelerated after the jailbreak, increasing the number of foreign troops in Afghanistan from about forty thousand in 2007 to more than seventy thousand by the fall of 2008.472
Meanwhile, U.S.- and British-trained Afghan soldiers were defending their country as part of the Afghan National Army (ANA), a force that did not even exist before Karzai took office. Month by month, more Afghan troops graduated from the Kabul Military Training Center, preparing for the day that the country would have sufficiently trained and experienced forces to battle the Radicals without massive foreign assistance. At the same time, Karzai kept seeking to persuade countries from around the world to supply the Afghan forces, and such help was forthcoming. The Bulgarians provided mortars, ammunition, and binoculars. The Canadians provided small arms, ammunition, and other equipment. The Czechs provided helicopters. The Greeks provided tanks. The Romanians provided mobile kitchen trailers, while the Swiss have provided fire trucks, to name just a few examples of international assistance.473
When I visited Afghanistan in October of 2008, however, the big question was still whether the U.S. and NATO were doing enough to make Kabul and the rest of the country safe from the Taliban and from al Qaeda terrorists. Yes, much had been done. But many Afghanis told me the Taliban was regrouping, determined to unleash more chaos and carnage if the West did not do more to strengthen Karzai’s hands.
Now, I have to say that when I was there, Kabul struck me as by far the most squalid and impoverished national capital I have ever visited—but not necessarily the most dangerous. Beggars were everywhere. Children covered with filth roamed the streets. Many destitute women wore suffocating blue burkas (despite the fact that it was over 95 degrees Fahrenheit) while carrying children and groceries, since they had no vehicles of their own. Most buildings were pockmarked with evidence of three decades of fighting
, and many appeared to be in danger of collapsing. Nevertheless, my colleagues and I were able to travel around quite freely. We did not use an armored car. We did not wear flak jackets or helmets. The Afghanis who drove us and guided us from place to place had no weapons, and neither did we. Foreigners are not particularly encouraged to stroll about unaccompanied, as kidnappings by Taliban agents are still a concern. But there were no acts of terrorism in the five days we were on the ground. We never heard gunfire. We never heard explosions. And we never felt fear, despite the bloody history of the city.
Just days before my colleagues and I arrived, President Karzai and several Afghan governors and tribal leaders held a videoconference with President Bush and several senior U.S. diplomatic and military officials. Karzai briefed Bush on the latest evidence of progress. He specifically noted that the leaders of the Nangarhar province—located right on the border with Pakistan, in the heart of Taliban country—had over the past year successfully transformed itself from being the second biggest Afghan producer of poppy seeds for making opium and heroin to a province that was virtually drug free.474
Just days after we left, however, a Christian aid worker was murdered in Kabul by two members of the Taliban. Shortly after that, a suicide bomber shot his way into the entrance of a government building in the capital and blew himself up, killing five people and wounding twenty-one others. And that was just the beginning.
The hard truth is, the Taliban did not fold quickly or disappear into the night. Rather, in 2009 and 2010, they did regroup and then intensify their efforts to destroy Afghanistan’s fledgling democracy and regain control of certain Afghan provinces. U.S., NATO, and Afghan forces increased their efforts to “clear, hold, and build” these areas—clear towns, villages, and provinces of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters; hold these areas and protect them from reinfiltration; and then invest significant funds to build schools, medical clinics, apartment buildings, and other sorely needed infrastructure. But it has not been as easy as many had hoped. Terrorist attacks against Afghan civilians—as well as attacks against U.S. and NATO forces—spiked in 2009 and 2010. Roadside bombings increased significantly. Suicide bombings began occurring every two or three days. Assassinations began averaging about one per day.
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