It’s been years since he last set foot in the land that once gave him sanctuary. He’s a different man than he was then, and the gray that used to dust his temples has grown, marking the hard years in between. Yet here he was, walking the grounds at Arlington, deep in conversation with his American mentors, those who had seen the evil being done to the country he loved, and were willing to help him stop it.
Karzai with Gates, McChrystal at Arlington
He knew the sacrifices they’d made on his behalf, knew that there was a price for freedom, and that sometimes that price was the blood of his own people. The price was steep, but the man leading foreign troops spoke a language they both understood. He’d spent years with men like this: hard men who knew that taking lives was a lesser evil done in the name of a better world where maybe fewer people had to die.
He sat with the president, heads together, planning the years ahead. They’d talked on the phone many times already, but this president knew the value of a face to face conversation. That to be seen with the leader of the free world was more than an Instagram, but a signal to those watching at home that there would be actions behind the words of the Americans. That to be seen with this man was enough.
President Obama and Karzai, May 2010.
He walked with the general, too: the legend that knew what it took to strike fear in the heart of his enemies. This was a man with a vision like his own – a warrior who wanted nothing more than peace, but was willing to stand with his Afghan brothers to make that peace possible. And he would do that with whatever means he had at his disposal.
This man was his friend, someone he trusted enough to have in his home. A man who could speak to him more directly than the others. A man who knew better than most that diplomacy’s velvet glove was best wrapped around warfare’s iron fist.
Karzai, McChrystal, 2010
He spoke at the American State Department, thanking the Americans for their sacrifice, because he knew that without American blood and treasure a better Afghanistan would never be possible. He knew, too, that American politicians, not soldiers, would decide the fate of his homeland. It was for them those words were spoken. He left with a renewed hope and assurances from the Americans that their support would never waver.
It seemed possible then that Karzai and the US could move past the 2009 elections in Afghanistan. That the rift between Washington and Kabul could be mended just enough to win what was turning into America’s longest war. The right general to lead the war and deal with the Afghan president seemed to have been found, and a new, brighter chapter was about to be written.
Hope is brightest in the spring, even in Afghanistan, where during the last several years the end of winter has meant renewed violence by the insurgency. That hope was greatest in 2010, when Hamid Karzai was still president, and General McChrystal was commander of all NATO and American forces in the graveyard of common sense. All that changed that summer with the release of a Rolling Stone article, and McChrystal’s resignation as commander in Afghanistan.
Five years later Ashraf Ghani went to Washington. He too met with the American president and the generals. He, too thanked the American people for their sacrifice. Because Ghani is trying very hard to be the Karzai we used to know.
Hugging it out with Hamid
There was a time, a simpler time, when we embraced Hamid Karzai with all the warmth the open arms the Global War on Terror (GWOT) could muster. When HK was enfolded by Stanley McChrystal and loved and feted by people like Donald Rumsfeld. When G Dubs and His Karzainess were BFFs just trying to sort the LULZ from the sads, and we all knew who the target was: Talqaedaban. Which was as mythical a creature as a unicorn that delivered pizzas, but the Americans believed in it anyway.
Because that meant there was an Evil Empire to counter. That there was a bogeyman under the bed. That there were monsters in the closet. That there were dragons just outside the peaceful places that justified a pitched battle that seemed to stretch on forever.
So the Americans found in Karzai a workable man. Someone they could put at the head of Afghan government after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Where he stayed for the next 13 years, until the law of the land demanded he step down.
The revisionist view of Karzai is the belligerent malcontent who had the audacity to bite the hand that kept him and his country fed all those years. That instead of letting things like dead Afghan civilians continue to slip by, that he would stand up and not let the Americans drop bombs anymore on Afghan homes. Or condone the night raids that, while effective at policing terrorists, did more harm than good when it came to countering the insurgency. Because no matter how many times I tell you that Uncle Ahmad’s a bad, bad man, all you know is that I broke into your home in the middle of the night to take him away.
Like all leaders, at some point Karzai had to look ahead to a future without American dollars and guns. So he started saying things one expects to hear from any democratically elected president if another country had interfered in the election process. In a case of typically American hubris, the US opted to try and prevent his election in 2009. The following year, Stanley McChrystal left, and Karzai lost his only real ally in the administration. General Petraeus sidelined Karzai, and Karzai’s public pronouncements about the Americans reflect a sovereign leader who did not take that slight well.
It’s easy to dismiss Hamid Karzai as an ungrateful recipient of American aid who should have kept his mouth shut if he was going to take the money. Right now Ghani’s an American darling because he’s being the sycophant that Obama and Carter need him to be in order to justify the latest change to troop withdrawal plans. Because those plans have changed considerably over the last few months.
There are American goals at stake here: a still-active insurgency, the threat (however ephemeral) of ISIS establishing a presence in the country, and the return on investment in billions spent to build the infrastructure both physical and philosophical of a country in dire need of a post-Taliban overhaul. If organizations like USAID hope to have any relevance in an SOF happy world, they’ll need to demonstrate that some of what they did in the graveyard of forward thinking had some kind of positive effect.
The sad truth about American involvement overseas is that we don’t want to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with anyone, no matter how many times we say it. Which we don’t anymore, because the idea of shohna ba shohna has been abandoned like all the other shiny things we tried in the country. We don’t want equality: until Americans can deal from a position of power, there’s no value in it from an American perspective. That’s not something unique to American diplomacy, but the veneer over American assistance has always been that we’re here to make things better in whatever country the pallets of money are landing this week.
Ghani 2.0 looks a lot like Karzai 1.0
Ghani and Abdullah’s current arrangement is an American construct, and Ghani’s a Western darling. But that could change, and quickly. So far Ghani’s overpromised and underdelivered: it’s been more than half a year, and his cabinet still sits unfilled and only a few of the provinces have actual governors. The rest are only placeholders, leaving them unable to implement any kind of governance at the subnational level. The cabinet appointments are troubling, in that none of the ministries can move forward until leadership is put into place.
The reason this is working so well for Ghani, and he’s not being held more accountable, is the lack of American bodies coming back from Afghanistan. That’s making it possible to prosecute the counterterrorism component of the Bilateral Security Agreement with extreme prejudice. Which is completely legal, despite what the New York Times has to say on the matter.
Ghani’s making all the right moves to keep the Western dollars flowing: agreeing to the National Unity Government (NUG) deal, fighting corruption, and making nice with Islamabad. But the NUG is showing cracks, most recently over a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Pakistani and Afghan intelligence services. Reportedly Abdullah never saw the final version, and he wants it changed.
To date, no progress has been made in the anti-corruption fight, something that makes continued foreign funding politically difficult. And relations with Pakistan are fraught with peril given that the Pakistanis support an insurgency that’s killing Afghans.
Unless Ghani’s government can work together, fight corruption, and leverage relations with Pakistan into a peace deal with the Taliban, it’s going to be a rough road to the 2019 elections. Right now Ghani’s a DC darling. But so was Karzai, once. In the end Ghani’s greatest challenge won’t be the insurgency, but a fickle West where politics dictate policy, and the “good war” is just the latest war we’d rather forget.