Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan

Introduction

Peshawar, Pakistan, in the 1980s had to be one of the most fascinating places on earth. The capital of old India’s, now Pakistan’s, wild and woolly North-West Frontier Province, the ancient Pathan, or Pashtun, city had been the stopping place of countless camel caravans and conquering armies traversing the legendary Khyber Pass, twenty-five miles to the west, to and from Afghanistan. In the nineteenth century, the British army established a garrison in Peshawar and stretched a string of sentry posts high into the Hindu Kush mountains. One of the posts, from where the young Winston Churchill reported on a battle between British-led Hindu Sikhs and Pashtun tribesmen, is still known as Churchill’s Picket.

Beginning with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, Peshawar became the temporary home for thousands, then tens of thousands, then millions of Afghans who had fled their country to escape both Soviet Communist rule and the steadily escalating violence of the jihad, the Muslim holy war waged against the Soviets by ragtag militiamen called mujahideen, or holy warriors.

The refugees settled in Peshawar’s already teeming streets and in vast refugee camps, sizable towns themselves that sprang up on the unpopulated plains outside of town. The Afghans opened tiny shops in the narrow, crooked streets of Peshawar’s old bazaars, selling heirloom family carpets and jewelry set with deep blue lapis lazuli stones from the famed mines of Badakshan. They also sold Soviet hammer-and-sickle military insignia and Red Army field caps, which came with often fanciful tales of how they had been plucked from the corpses of dead Russians. On the dusty plain outside of town Afghan horsemen played their wild games of buzkashi with calf carcasses.

The refugees attracted battalions of aid organizations, from the United Nations’ World Food Program to the International Committee of the Red Cross to more obscure and sometimes dodgy enterprises that saw an opportunity to exploit the refugees’ plight, raise pots of money from concerned Western donors, and live comfortably in one of Peshawar’s large walled homes with servants to cook, clean, guard the gate, and do the laundry.

The chance to do battle with the Soviet Union through Afghan proxies roused the spirits of Western cold warriors, including President Ronald Reagan. Spurred by flamboyant Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, who adopted the jihad as his personal war, Reagan’s administration financed weapons shipments and clandestine CIA operations on the side of the Afghan resistance. The CIA’s supplying of Stinger shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles to the mujahideen is often cited as a major factor in the eventual withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan.

Shortly after their invasion the Soviets closed Afghanistan to Western journalists, who faced the risk of death when traveling inside the country with groups of armed mujahideen or the risk of arrest if they were caught. Countless tales of the horrors of imprisonment in Afghanistan’s notorious Pul-i-Charkhi prison, or the chance of dying in a skirmish, deterred many journalists from even attempting a trip inside. That some did venture inside, such as the Christian Science Monitor’s Edward Girardet and the New York Times’s Donatella Lorch (who entered Kabul disguised in a burka), is a testament to their bravery and dedication to journalism.

The closing of Afghanistan made Peshawar an irresistible magnet for journalists from around the world, and as going inside was so hazardous and arduous, Peshawar became a thriving information bazaar. Every major faction of the Afghan resistance, and several minor ones, had headquarters there, and their spokesmen were eager to plant not only information but rumors, misinformation, disinformation, and gossip into the dispatches of Western journalists, many of whom were ignorant of the language, culture, and multilayered nuances of relations among the various families tribal groups and political parties. Every Afghan party published its own newsletter, which contained romantic and usually inaccurate or wildly exaggerated descriptions of the victories of their mujahideen. Many journalists who were there for the long haul relied on the newsletter of Professor Sayeed Majrooh, a former Kabul University philosophy teacher whose Afghan Information Center was the most reliable of the many Afghan sources. Dr. Majrooh was assassinated in 1988 by fundamentalists from the party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Peshawar was full of not only journalists, Afghan refugees, commanders, and mujahideen, but also of every shade of spy, saboteur, agent provocateur, and soldier of fortune imaginable. The town was often shaken by the boom of terrorist bombs, and rare was the night without gunfire. Spies from Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, the ISI, mingled with those of the Soviet Union’s KGB; its Afghan counterpart, KHAD; the American CIA; and Britain’s MI6. At the famous Green’s Hotel, a shabby survivor from the days of empire, one tableful of tea-drinkers could be seen leaning with comical obviousness toward another table, ears straining to pick up shards of whispered conversation.

This was the Peshawar to which I traveled in November 1986 to scout the ground for Boston University’s Afghan Media Project. On that first visit I hoped to get the Pakistani government’s official permission to conduct the project on Pakistani soil. Many meetings, handshakes, and cups of tea later I realized no government official would put his signature on the required document, which in Pakistan is called a certificate of non-objection, so I decided we should just go ahead without permission and see what happened. We found classroom space in Peshawar’s University Town, where most of the aid groups and expats were located, and set about recruiting students for our first training session, which was to last six weeks. That’s when I first met Hamid Karzai.

We made it a requirement from the start to recruit equally from all of the major parties, so we began to make the rounds of party headquarters explaining the project and asking each party to send us a half dozen people to be trained in video news gathering, photojournalism, and print journalism. When we called on Professor Mojaddedi’s Afghan National Liberation Front, our contact was a poised, smiling, and immaculately groomed Hamid Karzai, then a young man of thirty years of age but already bald; his neatly trimmed beard was gray. Westerners especially liked to deal with Karzai because he was bright, personable, and pleasant, and his English eliminated the need for cumbersome and often suspect translation. He was also diplomatic and always spoke well of the other resistance parties, even though he had by now developed a strong aversion to the extreme Islamist practices of some of them, especially Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s faction of the Hezb-i-Islami party, the Party of Islam. Karzai’s moderate views, engaging personality, linguistic ability, and position in the ANLF put his name on invitation lists, and he often attended social functions at the U.S. consulate in Peshawar or the residence of John Dixon, the director of the U.S. Information Service’s American Center and his successor, Richard Hoagland. While some Pakistani and Afghan guests took advantage of these gatherings to imbibe forbidden alcohol, Karzai quenched his thirst with tea or soft drinks.

After two training sessions, the Afghan Media Resource Center was established, staffed by the Afghans we had trained or recruited from the various parties. The AMRC was doing exactly what we had hoped for—augmenting the news coverage of a war that was very difficult for Western journalists to cover, and helping to open the world’s eyes to what was happening inside Afghanistan. I left Peshawar at the end of August 1988 and did not see Hamid Karzai again for sixteen years.

In the intervening years the news from Afghanistan was, for much of the time, dismayingly bad. The jihad against the Soviet Union had been replaced by internecine warfare among the Afghan factions, warfare that damaged Afghanistan far more than had the struggle to drive the U.S.S.R. from the country. The civil wars were finally quelled, in large measure, by a seemingly altruistic religious movement, the Taliban, which at first won the applause of the world for bringing peace at last to poor Afghanistan. The applause soon turned to dismay, shock, and horror as the Taliban’s barbaric governance became known, and to anger when they hosted Osama bin Laden and his terrorist movement. Then came September 11, 2001, and the world collectively decided that the Taliban must go and that bin Laden must be stopped.

After the terrible shocks of that autumn, I was surprised and pleased to learn that my old Peshawar acquaintance Hamid Karzai had been picked by the UN-brokered Bonn Conference to be the head of a provisional Afghan government. Later he would be selected by a grand loya jirga, a traditional form of Afghan assembly, to be president of the interim government. Finally, in the fall of 2004, Karzai would be elected president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, in that country’s first ever democratic national