A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  In her more than forty years of marriage, she had never visited Afghanistan. If her husband became president, she would be the first lady of a country she had never seen. It was a job she didn’t want. She felt her family had already lost too much for Afghanistan. “I wasn’t willing to make another sacrifice. We had sacrificed forty-some years of our lives for this.”

  Qayum had trouble raising money. President Karzai discouraged him from running and told others not to support him. The conversations between the brothers were civil, Qayum said, but Hamid thought that any fraud or wrongdoing in the election would be blamed on him. Others believed that jealousy was part of the issue, that he felt that another Karzai in the palace might diminish his legacy. The modern history of Afghanistan had no precedent for a peaceful transfer of power. Kings and presidents most often left office dead or deposed. President Karzai wanted to have the distinction of furthering Afghan democracy. “The worst thing that could take place would be for me to stay in office,” Karzai had told Ambassador Ryan Crocker. “No, that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing would be for one of my brothers to become president.”

  A month before the election, Qayum announced that he was pulling out of the race.

  —

  Election day dawned cold and drizzly in Kabul. In the weeks prior to the April 5 vote, a grim anxiety had gripped the capital. The Taliban were setting off bombs nearly every day, targeting Afghan officials and places frequented by foreigners. Insurgents attacked the election commission headquarters and the American charity Roots of Peace and shot up the restaurant inside the Serena Hotel. The city had a bunkered, shut-in feel. Restaurants and universities and businesses had closed, and the main roads into the city had been blocked off. Afghan police were stopping and searching cars all over the city. Election observers had fled the violence. Expats had moved away. The coalition had spent less than half as much money to organize the 2014 election as it had the previous time. The U.S. military—with far fewer troops present, and those no longer engaged in daily combat—had drifted into the background. Afghans, as they stepped out onto the desolate, rain-slicked streets and headed toward schools and mosques to cast their ballots, were far more on their own.

  And yet, at the polling sites, these citizens who had lived through decades of war spoke of their hopes for peace, better schools, more jobs. Using a side entrance reserved for female voters, Zakia Raoufi, a forty-five-year-old housewife, cast her ballot at the same school where her son had graduated three years earlier, and which Hamid Karzai had attended years before that. After she had woken up, washed, and prayed, she’d said good-bye to her children and left the house for the first time in three days, a period during which she had worried about the near daily violence. “I was wondering whether I will come back home alive or not,” she said. Her son had studied computer science and learned English at Habibia High School, but the family had no connections among the government elite and no money to pay bribes for employment, so he had moved to Iran and was now working as a tailor. “So this election means a lot to me,” she said. “What I’m hoping for from the next president is someone to stop the bloodshed in this country, to provide us peace and stability and education and opportunities for our children.”

  Before the vote, polling had suggested a tight race. Karzai’s inner circle had continued pushing Zalmai Rassoul, the French-educated physician and former national security adviser and foreign minister. But Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani had been attracting large crowds at their rallies.

  Early on the morning of the election, Rahmatullah, one of the body guards for Kabul’s mayor, received a call from his brother-in-law in the central province of Sar-e-Pol. “He said, ‘We have been threatened by the Taliban not to go out and vote.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about the Taliban, just go vote.’ ” Rahmatullah had proudly dipped his index finger in the blue ink at Lycée Esteqlal and had his voting card punched with a crescent moon. “Our hope is for peace and stability, for job opportunities, and to provide shelter for the homeless people,” he said. “We are here to decide about the future of Afghanistan.”

  Ahmad Shah Hakimi, a forty-three-year-old official in the Commerce Ministry who also did business as a currency trader, was tired of working for a corrupt government. “We just want change, and we want to elect our own president,” he said. “I voted in the last election, but the government turned out to be corrupted, and people are really tired of that.” Qureshia Sirat Ahmadi, an eighteen-year-old high school student voting in her first election, recited verses from the Koran in her head to calm her worries as she drove to the polling station. “The enemies of Afghanistan always wants to disturb these national days, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t come and vote,” she told me.

  Over the past two presidential elections, voter turnout had fallen as the insurgency had gained strength. In 2009, after more than a million fraudulent votes were thrown out, election observers calculated that about 4.5 million people had voted, out of more than fifteen million registered, about half as many who had gone to the polls in 2004. By the end of Saturday’s voting, with long lines of voters huddled under plastic sheeting in the rain, it began to look like turnout might have rebounded. There were estimates that six or seven million people had voted. On the night of the election, Qayum called President Karzai to congratulate him. Turnout had been far stronger than expected; the sporadic violence did not appear to have disrupted the voting. “What Truman said, ‘The buck stops here.’ That credit belongs to him. That the election process was so smooth,” Qayum told me. The president was gracious and told Qayum that he had also performed a service to the country by agreeing to drop out of the race. It was a proud day for a lot of people. “I don’t think I have, in the last thirteen years, I have not felt so satisfied, that, my goodness, things have worked so well in this one day, that might alter the destiny of Afghanistan for good,” Qayum said. “It will just demoralize the armed thing, it will deliver a totally different message to the neighbors, that if this nation is so resilient, that we might as well take some different route.”

  Within three weeks of the election, half of the votes had been counted. They showed that Abdullah Abdullah had a lead of more than ten points over Ashraf Ghani, but at 44 percent of the vote, he still had fallen below the 50 percent threshold that would enable him to avoid a runoff. The counting was going slowly. Ballot boxes in remote districts had to be transported along poor roads through dangerous terrain. The fraud that had eviscerated the previous election, however, seemed to be less acute. Abdullah Abdullah remained confident of his chances. Even though he claimed a mixed ethnicity—his stepfather was Pashtun, his mother Tajik—the prospect that a candidate so strongly associated with the Northern Alliance and minority Tajiks could preside over a country ruled for most of its history by Pashtuns looked as if it could become reality. The final first-round tally had Abdullah winning 45 percent of the seven million votes, followed by Ghani with 31.5 percent. Nearly all the leading Pashtun presidential candidates from the first round had lined up behind Abdullah. “The story is over—the others are 14 percent or 13.5 percent behind,” Abdullah said. The runoff would be held that summer.

  —

  President Karzai’s dream throughout his presidency was to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict with the Taliban. He mentioned that goal when he was sworn in for his second term, and he pursued the prospect of peace talks until he left the palace. The record of those efforts has not been written; most of it took place in the shadow worlds where spies and militants intersected. When the outreach surfaced publicly, it was normally when something went disastrously wrong. There was the “fake Mullah Mansour” episode in the fall of 2010, when a shopkeeper from Quetta purporting to be the senior Taliban leader was escorted to the palace by British intelligence and got an audience with Karzai. There was the Taliban peace emissary who came to Kabul to meet former president Burhanuddin Rabbani the next year and blew himself up during the meeting. President Karzai had dispatched Qayum
on exploratory talks with the Taliban in Saudi Arabia in 2008 that hit dead ends. Ahmed Wali had also reached out to Popalzai leaders within the Taliban at various times, to little effect. In 2012, the Taliban even opened an office in Doha, Qatar, after years of behind-the-scenes work by American and German intelligence agents that many hoped was a prelude to peace talks. But that effort failed, too, because Karzai felt left out of the loop. The fact that the Taliban office had embassy-like accoutrements, with nameplates—“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”—and flags flying, enraged Karzai.

  “He conceived of this as an American plot, that we were colluding with Pakistan and others,” U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham told me.

  The Taliban had vowed that their war against the Afghan government would go on indefinitely if Karzai’s administration signed any long-term agreement with the United States or troops remained in the country. Part of Karzai’s distancing from America over the years always had an aspect of catering to public opinion, and the Taliban were an important part of the Afghan public. American officials believed that Karzai’s provocations toward the United States were partly aimed at winning favor among insurgent leaders. Most of the American troops were leaving Afghanistan regardless of what he agreed to, and he’d become more interested in tending to the wounds of his own countrymen. “I know I have many flaws,” Karzai once said. “But I do know my people.”

  In November 2013, standing before thousands at the loya jirga he’d convened for his people’s decision about the future with America, Karzai balked. He decided that even if they voted for the deal, which they overwhelmingly did, he would not sign it until after the elections.

  The decision shocked even his closest aides. They had spent months going over endless drafts, parsing each word. The document was littered with concessions to Karzai; you could hardly go a paragraph without finding a phrase like “with full respect for Afghan sovereignty” or “noting that the United States does not seek permanent military facilities.” The United States had agreed that its troops would not enter Afghan homes except under extraordinary circumstances. They would not arrest or imprison Afghans or run prisons of any kind. There were provisions that the United States would not store chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons on the bases that Afghanistan would allow them to use in the future. The Afghans had ultimately agreed to grant U.S. troops immunity from prosecution in their country. Karzai’s decision to suddenly disregard all that work and those hard-fought negotiations for the sake of some personal whim infuriated even his most loyal colleagues. Many of them had grown to loathe his capriciousness. He seemed to have become a president without any overarching vision for his country save inclusiveness for Afghans and exclusion for foreigners, a man whose energies were devoted to outfoxing his enemies. “He was a master tactician,” Javed Ludin, a former chief of staff, recalled. “He would think of all scenarios, all possible moves, but he could never prepare for anything beyond a few weeks.”

  When asked about Karzai’s greatest weakness, one cabinet minister pointed to this trait. “He was a man who was changing his mind,” he said. “He was telling us he would do something, and he was not doing it. He was telling us he was consulting everybody, but at the end of the day, at the last moment, he just did what he wanted to do.”

  The surprise reversal meant further headaches for the Americans involved. Karzai busted the one-year timetable they’d agreed to the year prior, and the move was interpreted as his sweaty grasp at a final few months of power. By not signing the agreement, he would be a leader who would have to be reckoned with until the very end, rather than a lame duck. The palace secretly had another round of contacts going with the Taliban, with meetings in Dubai and Riyadh, and Karzai was also hoping for a breakthrough. He was releasing dozens of Taliban prisoners, to great consternation, and striking a posture about as openly hostile to America as he’d ever been.

  “We want the Americans to respect our sovereignty and laws and be an honest partner,” Karzai told the crowd at the jirga. “And bring a lot of money,” he added, to laughter.

  In late February 2014, after Karzai insisted that he would not sign the security agreement, President Obama talked to him over the phone. The two leaders hadn’t spoken in more than seven months, and Obama had essentially washed his hands of Karzai. Obama told him that the Pentagon had begun planning for the complete withdrawal of U.S. and coalition troops by the end of the year. It was known as the “zero option.” And without the troops, the warning went, there would be no money for Afghanistan. NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen said so plainly at a conference in Brussels: “If there is no agreement, there will be no NATO troops in Afghanistan after 2014.”

  But these kinds of ultimatums had failed repeatedly with Karzai. One reason they had was that the United States wouldn’t follow through on its threats. Karzai knew that the Americans didn’t want to withdraw all of their troops and watch the Taliban flood back into cities they had fought for years to defend. Just as they weren’t prepared to cut off aid over the corruption cases, they wouldn’t risk throwing everything away at the end if they could possibly avoid it.

  Karzai felt that his successor, whoever that might be, should be responsible for making any pact with the United States, because he would have to live with the consequences of that decision. In speeches, he had likened the bilateral security agreement to the 1879 Treaty of Gandamak, where Afghans ceded their foreign policy to the British administration in India. There were historical mistakes that he, too, didn’t want to repeat. He insisted he would sign it only once there was peace in Afghanistan.

  Karzai felt that his brinksmanship gave him leverage over the United States in the final months of his presidency, his aides recalled, but by that time there was no relationship left to manipulate.

  “That was kind of the final turn of the wheel,” Cunningham said.

  —

  President Karzai had remained silent during the vote-counting process, which added to suspicions. Some Afghan politicians believed he wanted the election to be a deadlock, giving him an opportunity to seize power and rule indefinitely. His aides said he was worried about Abdullah’s lead and the prospect that a Tajik president could inflame the Pashtun-led insurgency. The first-round results were dramatically reversed by the runoff. Preliminary totals showed that Ghani had charged ahead, a swing of 1.9 million votes in his favor. But more disturbingly, turnout estimates were so high that many observers couldn’t believe them. Abdullah, who had not challenged the first-round numbers, now screamed massive fraud. He vowed not to accept the results and demanded that all vote counting be stopped. There were soon audio recordings of election officials allegedly conspiring against him, the whole ugly replay of 2009 reemerging. Street demonstrations by both camps had become a daily occurrence. Abdullah threatened to form a Northern Alliance breakaway government based in Mazar-e-Sharif.

  Nearly thirteen years after the U.S. military overthrew the Taliban, America’s always fragile project appeared to be breaking under its own weight. Abdullah’s followers were discussing plans to seize government buildings in at least three provinces, and potentially march on the presidential palace. The loyalty of the Afghan security forces, whose leadership was heavily represented by Tajiks, was being called into question. With both candidates declaring themselves the winner, and threats of a parallel government, they were staring at civil war. Hamid Karzai’s government had been willing to forgive pretty much any sin to avoid this very scenario.

  President Obama called Abdullah just after sunrise on Tuesday, July 8, to warn him not to consider seizing power and to wait until the administration’s anointed crisis manager, Secretary of State Kerry, flew to Kabul. “The reason we intervened so rapidly was to urge them to stop even thinking about going down that road, which, I agree, would have been a disaster for the country,” U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham told reporters in Kabul. After two days of negotiations inside the U.S. embassy and the palace, Kerry brokered an agreement in which all eight millio
n votes would be audited. The election had failed. But they could still pick up the pieces and avoid civil war. In his talks with Abdullah’s camp, Kerry had given an impassioned discourse on the sacrifices laid down for the sake of the Afghan government. As he implored the candidate’s supporters not to abandon the process, he spoke of his time in Vietnam, of the soldiers who’d died in Afghanistan, of his own personal experience as a failed candidate. American officials had also warned that if the candidates resorted to violence or sought to operate outside the constitution, it would result in the end of American assistance to Afghanistan.

  At the end of the second day, Abdullah and Ghani hugged in Ambassador Cunningham’s living room, sealing their agreement. At the press conference afterward, flanked by Ghani and Abdullah, Kerry looked worn out. “This is unquestionably a tense and difficult moment,” Mr. Kerry said, “but I am very pleased that the two candidates who stand here with me today and President Karzai have stepped up and shown a significant commitment to compromise.”

  One of the most important agreements they had come to, but had not admitted at the time, was to change the very structure of the government, weakening the presidential powers that had been bestowed on Karzai during his years in office and gradually establishing a quasi–prime minister position to share the authority with the president. The loser after the recount would be appointed as chief executive, with unspecified powers, followed in a couple of years by a constitutional change to a parliamentary system with a prime minister leading the government while the president remained head of state, a structure Abdullah and his fellow Northern Alliance leaders had long advocated for.

  The audit itself, taking place in two roasting Kabul warehouses, overseen by teams of American and European advisers, involved counting the contents of twenty-two thousand ballot boxes, and quickly fell behind schedule and dragged on through the summer. Fights broke out at least three times inside the warehouses; people were hospitalized with scissor wounds. The agreement that the candidates had hugged upon almost fell apart several times, and Karzai was accused of plotting a coup to keep power.