A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  The government ministries, controlled by different ethnic and political factions, tended to ignore orders from the palace and rarely coordinated with them. The real decision making happened when President Karzai gathered privately with his aides and ministers, with no foreigners present, and hashed out issues, in the fashion in which Afghan politics had played out for generations. There were administrators: several hundred other palace employees worked in a separate department known as the cabinet secretariat, including many who had served in previous regimes, writing up presidential decrees by hand and carrying out palace business as it had been done since the king’s time. One American military adviser called the cabinet secretariat the “beating heart” of the Afghan government, but the United States tended to disregard it.

  The way Karzai made decisions was often reactive and ill-supported by study or data or preparation, but it was the way to which he and his Afghan colleagues were accustomed. Trying to shoehorn decisions through a new multilayered NSC meeting process was not. Ambassador Ronald Neumann could recall long arguments with Karzai about how the palace should adopt a system of data-driven briefings to help inform his thinking. “But Karzai’s view is: I don’t trust staff, I don’t trust paper, I don’t trust reports. I trust what a good man tells me,” Neumann said. “I argued with him, that a good man can produce a bad report because he misperceives, because of partial information. He doesn’t have to be doing it deliberately, but a good man can give you a false impression. I absolutely lost. I couldn’t rock this view.”

  Other diplomats observed the same disorganization in Karzai’s palace. “He never writes anything down,” one British ambassador to Kabul said. “He never has records. There’s no follow-up. Sometimes someone takes notes but nothing is ever promulgated.”

  “They would come up with an agenda every week and they would just completely blow it off,” Kotkin said. “They don’t want to have meetings like we would have meetings. They just wanted to have a shura. We would just go crazy because they’re not following the agenda.”

  Karzai’s management style also left his own aides frustrated and off balance. Cabinet meetings would meander through hours of tedium. At one point while Karzai was still interim president, one of his ministers demanded a ten-minute break for every hour of discussion. In these cabinet sessions, Karzai dove into matters that other leaders might have left to subordinates. They chose an eight-hour Afghan government workday, from eight a.m. to four p.m., then, seven months later, shortened it by an hour. They worried over how many cars coming from Pakistan had steering wheels on the right-hand side, as opposed to the customary left, as in Afghanistan. Karzai felt the minimum age limit for mayors was too low. That the available university training on animal husbandry was insufficient. He thought there were too few trees in Kabul and too many potholes. In his war-weary capital, he wanted more five-star hotels. One of Khalil Roman’s duties, as deputy chief of staff, was to take notes on all these issues at cabinet meetings. During particularly tense exchanges among the ministers, Karzai would look over and order him to write faster, to capture every word. “He was displaying behavior which was unique to a tribal leader, to a khan or a malik, rather than a democrat or a modern leader,” Roman recalled. “He would be so happy when someone would compliment him. Then he would abuse people. He would use swearwords. He was dictating whatever he wanted, his will.”

  As the weeks went on, Bruha and Kotkin watched with growing alarm as the NSC autopiloted through a succession of failures. The work on banning the fertilizer used in roadside bombs got snatched away by the Interior Ministry. The National Security Council office flubbed the process of choosing which former Taliban fighters should come off the United Nations sanctions list, with shoddy research and no coordination with other branches of government. The NSC’s most important task, to guide the transition to Afghan security control as the American troops withdrew, was taken over by a new office under Ashraf Ghani, who had lost to Karzai in the election. In a memo Kotkin wrote for his boss titled “Observations of ONSC Failures,” he noted that the Office of the National Security Council was “completely detached and out of the loop,” and that within the Afghan government “it is generally understood that the ONSC does not have the authority to task Ministries to generate reports, answer requests for information, or provide assessments to satisfy Presidential requirements.”

  The ISAF brass knew that the NSC bureaucracy, despite the millions of dollars poured into it, was not the way to influence Karzai’s government. The top generals had created another weekly forum, what they called the Senior Security Shura, as a way for Petraeus to meet directly with the Afghan ministers of defense and interior and the intelligence chief to carry out the war plan. No one bothered to let the National Security Council know what took place at those meetings.

  At Karzai’s palace, plenty of wheels were spinning, but the advisers knew they were going nowhere. “There was no leadership,” Kotkin said. “They were just not doing anything.”

  Three months into the army officers’ job, their Afghan colleague Yaar walked into the office, looking upset.

  “You guys have to leave,” he told them. “Today.”

  That morning, an Afghan newspaper had published an article about how two foreign spies were working inside the palace. It claimed these were British spies working for the CIA to steal Afghan secrets. This type of press smear was a common tactic in neighboring Pakistan, where any foreigner who fell out of favor with the government would appear in print as an agent of Blackwater, Mossad, the CIA, or all three. Yaar thought that his boss Spanta, who wrote a column in the Afghan press under a pseudonym, had leaked the story. But many people in the palace resented the presence of these two “Lawrences of Afghanistan,” as Daud Yaqub, a senior national security staffer, described them. “Everybody saw them as doing nothing but gathering information for their boss,” Yaqub said. Whoever had done it, the message was plain enough. Kotkin and Bruha retreated for a week or so to wait for tempers to cool, whiling away the hours reading books in the ISAF garden under the dappled shade.

  Karzai was increasingly sensitive to appearing to be an American lapdog. As he grew into the role of president, he tried to exercise the sovereignty he felt befitted his role as head of state. The problem was that the United States, in one way or another, paid for almost all of the operations of his government and the security forces fighting on his behalf. Despite that, at every turn Karzai sought to distance himself from the United States. Civilian casualties prompted him to demand an end to American air strikes or night raids, to keep U.S. soldiers out of Afghan homes. He wanted Afghans to take control of Bagram prison so that Americans wouldn’t be holding his citizens—and predominantly his fellow Pashtuns—prisoner. He increasingly left Americans out of the loop when making decisions.

  In the late summer of 2010, at the height of military operations in southern Afghanistan, he made the surprise announcement that he would be banning all private security companies within four months, despite the fact that nearly all American military and civilian staff relied heavily on these companies to do their work. When Karzai made that unilateral decision, the United States was employing nineteen thousand private security guards in Afghanistan, from companies such as Triple Canopy and Xe Services, better known as Blackwater. American officials considered these demands at the very least unrealistic and more often saw them as a dangerous threat to the partnership and the mission.

  These types of decisions earned Karzai his reputation as an erratic leader. But taken together, they began to appear strategic: by making unrealistic demands for autonomy, Karzai could win small concessions that inched him toward greater authority. These public onslaughts against the United States also earned him some measure of credibility among a population that had turned deeply against the war. The American posture of doubling down on a losing battle gave Karzai that many more chances to attack his allies.

  —

  In the fall of 2010, Ambassador Eikenberry went to warn
Karzai that WikiLeaks would be publishing a cache of thousands of diplomatic cables with potentially embarrassing revelations about the State Department’s view of the Afghan government. At first, Karzai brushed the issue aside. They had already talked about WikiLeaks, he reminded Eikenberry, when Julian Assange’s website had published the “war logs” of thousands of military field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan. Eikenberry told Karzai that this was WikiLeaks 2, and it was going to be much worse.

  “What’s it going to say about Afghanistan?” Karzai wanted to know.

  “We don’t know what cables might be leaked,” Eikenberry told him. He was under strict instructions not to talk about their contents.

  Karzai considered this. “Now, is there going to be anything from you about medications?” he asked.

  His aides laughed nervously. Karzai was referencing Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars, which had been published two months earlier. Woodward, citing “sensitive intelligence reports,” wrote that Karzai was erratic, with delusions and severe mood swings, and that he “had been diagnosed as a manic-depressive” and took medication for the condition. He also suggested that Karzai might sometimes be “high on weed” in the palace.

  No one disputed that Karzai wore his emotions on his sleeve and could flip from giddy laughter to rage in a moment. On several occasions, he wept publicly while giving speeches about the suffering of the country or while visiting the war wounded in hospitals. Many people around him did consider it possible that he took medication of an antidepressant or mood-stabilizing variety. But only the most vicious of the president’s enemies actually claimed that he took recreational drugs. Karzai was a devout Muslim who did not smoke or drink. Woodward quoted Eikenberry as saying, “He’s on his meds, he’s off his meds” to describe the president’s mercurial behavior—something Eikenberry denied having said. Karzai had seized on the passages as further evidence of America’s disrespect for him.

  “No, Mr. President,” Eikenberry responded. “It will, though, be conversations between your ministers and embassy officials, and they’ll be saying things that are going to be controversial in Afghanistan.”

  Karzai swiveled toward Spanta, his national security adviser.

  “Now I will finally know if you are an American spy,” Karzai told him.

  There was nervous laughter among the other palace aides.

  “I’m not an American spy, Mr. President. I speak my piece. I’m a good Afghan patriot.”

  “We’ll see,” Karzai said.

  —

  During Petraeus’s tenure as ISAF commander, American military aggression exploded. Special operations kill-or-capture raids rose to about six hundred per month, or twenty per night. The number of air strikes spiked dramatically, in a reversal of McChrystal’s decision to limit bombings that might kill civilians or erode the Afghan public’s support for the war. Four months into Petraeus’s command, the U.S. military reached its high-water mark for bombings, launching 1,043 air strikes in one month. Civilian deaths rose in tandem. The problems that Karzai cared about were all getting worse. And as America’s celebrity general, coming off his tour in Baghdad, Petraeus was a tough man to dissuade. “Karzai was, frankly, scared of Dave Petraeus,” an American ambassador told me.

  Petraeus was concerned that ISAF and the palace couldn’t get on the same page. He and Karzai often disagreed about the facts on the ground, the daily drumbeat of arrests, shootings, bombings. And they found little common ground on the broader strategy. Their problems came to a head in November, six days before an important NATO conference in Lisbon to discuss the war plan. That Saturday evening, Karzai had met me and two of my editors from The Washington Post who were visiting Kabul. In the discussion that night, Karzai vented his frustrations with the American war in Afghanistan. He seemed to have concluded that U.S. military operations had reached the point where they were counterproductive, that their actions were making more people join the Taliban than leave them. He wanted American soldiers out of Afghan homes and off their roads. “The time has come to reduce military operations,” Karzai told us.

  “The manner in which this war was conducted by our allies,” Karzai said, “increasingly began to cost the Afghan people in terms that they could not understand. The bombardment of our villages, where we knew there wasn’t an al-Qaeda or a terrorist, the pursuit of a Mr. B. Taliban, of whom there are thousands in this country, and in pursuit of bombard ing an Afghan home or an Afghan village and causing death and injury to innocent people, women and children, this is what the Afghan people fail to understand. You are really speaking to a skeptic mind-set here in Afghanistan, that doesn’t know whether the international community is here to fight terrorism. And if it is fighting terrorism, do they know that they’re making mistakes? Whether the international community is here to free Afghanistan from the troubles that it had and strengthen it, or if it’s added to those problems?

  “The message that I have for the American people is, one, that we know in Afghanistan that America earns money the hard way. That you work hard. I’ve seen people working in America, that all that you spend there [is] hard-earned, from your younger people to the older people; they wake up early in the morning, they wake up much earlier than us, and go to work, and toil the whole day, shed a lot of sweat before they can earn a dollar. But that dollar spent in Afghanistan doesn’t reach the Afghan people the way it should. Second, the intentions that you have in America toward Afghanistan as a people, as a country, is not reflected here in Afghanistan the way it should. It sometimes is reflected in contradiction to what you are thinking as an American people. The security firms, for example: How can you have a country grow a police force if you have created a parallel structure of at least forty thousand men with more money, with more salaries, with less accountability to them? And yet expect us to have a strong and effective police force and one that can provide you and the Afghan people with security.

  “We have our faults,” Karzai said. “We have too many faults. We are a poor country. We are a highly undereducated country. We have centuries of backwardness to cope with. We have lots of other difficulties of our own. But we are genuinely trying to emerge out of that misery. We are genuinely trying to fight terrorism. We are genuinely trying to be a country that likes to live well with its neighbors and with the rest of the world. We genuinely want to be partners with America for good and for good causes. The way things are moving, we don’t seek clarity on these accounts, whether we are treated as equal—let’s not talk of equal—whether we’re treated respectfully or whether we’re seen as ‘Hell, these third-world guys, let’s use them and abuse them and confuse them.’

  “The Taliban is not a man manufactured in a factory and then brought to—the suicide bombers may be, but not the Taliban; they are people, they have families, they have wives, they have children, they have mothers, they have fathers, they have cousins,” he said. “And they suffer, too. They suffer exactly from the hands of the same elements. When there is a bomb blown up by a suicide bomber, maybe a Taliban family member is standing by and gets hurt.”

  The kill-or-capture raids that American soldiers were launching at record rates were “terrible, terrible,” he said. “The raids are a problem always. They were a problem then; they are a problem now. They have to go away. The Afghan people don’t like these raids. If there is any raid, it has to be done by the Afghan government within the Afghan laws.”

  He wanted all of it to stop. From the start of his tenure as president, when he declared, “I would not kill an ant to remain in this position,” Karzai had been opposed to violence in any form. His disdain for macho military posturing, and for using the powers of his office to inflict physical harm, only deepened over time. During the Soviet war, he had occasionally carried a gun when visiting rebels on the battlefield but claimed that he never fired it. As president, his office had a backlog of three hundred death-penalty cases that he refused to sign because he could not bear the thought of executing a potentially innocent man.
I asked him about the CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. I thought he might be in favor of those, because he’d always talked about how Islamic terrorists were headquartered in Pakistan and should be attacked there. But he didn’t seem to want that, either. “My nature is not one that appreciates military. I’m not a pro-gun person, I don’t like guns or airplanes, so I can never talk in favorable terms about planes that are shooting people or bombing people, so you’ll have to ask a more hard-core fellow. I’m a soft-core fellow.”

  Karzai seemed to have decided that he wouldn’t stand by idly as the Americans sank deeper into their quagmire. He referenced the phrase from Eikenberry’s cable, by then famous, about him not being an adequate strategic partner. “If a partner means a silent spectator of events conducted by Washington, if that’s the kind of partner you seek, well, I’m not that partner,” Karzai said. “Nor will be the Afghan people.”

  When Petraeus read these comments the next morning, he became enraged. He called up Ashraf Ghani, the former World Bank official who often helped mediate between Karzai and the Americans. Petraeus told him he felt betrayed, that Karzai had abandoned the surge strategy they had agreed on together. Petraeus told Ghani to listen very carefully. “Your president has put me in an untenable position,” he said. “Untenable” meant that unless Karzai clarified his position, Petraeus could not go to the conference in Lisbon. He could not work with Karzai. He could not remain as ISAF commander.

  Petraeus had issued a similar ultimatum to the Iraqi prime minister early in his tour as military commander in Baghdad, when the Iraqi national security adviser had presented Nouri Kamal al-Maliki’s demands: accelerating transition to Iraqi control and pulling American soldiers back onto big bases, essentially reversing Petraeus’s elaborate counterinsurgency plan. Petraeus let it be known that if this was truly Maliki’s desire, he should let President Bush know as soon as possible, but it would also mean that Petraeus would be on the next flight to Washington. Maliki backed down.