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Saturday/Sunday, November 24 - 25, 2012 | C1
OUR MAN
IN KABUL?
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
For the U.S. and its allies, Afghanistan is now a two-front war:
a military struggle against the Taliban and a bitter
political rift with the Afghan president.
AFGHAN PRESIDENT Hamid Karzai with U.S. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, left, and British Gen. David Richards on Feb. 4, 2007. The disconnect between the U.S. and Afghanistan is now deepening,
as Washington begins negotiations on what enduring military presence, if any, the U.S. could have after the Western coalition’s mandate ends in 2014.
T
BY YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
HE DARKEST PAGES of Afghan history are reserved for a traitorous king
named Shah Shuja. Enthroned by British invaders in 1839, he was ignominiously slaughtered once the routed infidels left.
President Hamid Karzai knows this
story well. He hails from the same
Pashtun sub-clan as the reviled 19thcentury monarch. In their leaflets, poems and songs, the Taliban relentlessly
mock Mr. Karzai as the modern-day Shuja, a ruler imposed
by outsiders and destined to meet an unhappy end.
In a broken country whose main glory is its history of
defeating invading empires, this insult is pernicious and
hard to brush off. Brought to power by the U.S. invasion,
Mr. Karzai understands that his legitimacy and future survival depend on proving that he is no puppet of the Western unbelievers—no matter how much he actually depends
on their money and troops.
This critical contradiction, often misunderstood in the
U.S., has crippled President Barack Obama’s escalation of
the Afghan war, America’s longest foreign conflict. It also
makes fresh rifts all but inevitable as U.S. troops prepare
to come home in two years.
American commanders got a taste of Mr. Karzai’s deep
ambivalence about the war, ostensibly waged in his gov-
ernment’s name, during a visit to Kandahar in 2010. They
had flown Mr. Karzai to a meeting with elders in the Taliban’s hometown, expecting him to act as a wartime commander and kick off the military offensive that was the
centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s troop surge.
Instead, as stunned generals looked on, Mr. Karzai
called the Taliban “brothers” and told the turbaned elders that the war wouldn’t end as long as he was seen as
a “foreign stooge.” He then asked the elders whether
they wanted the offensive to begin. Hearing shouts of
Mr. Karzai’s legitimacy rests on
proving he is no puppet of the West—
no matter how much he actually
depends on its money and troops.
“no,” Mr. Karzai ordered a halt to the long-planned operation to clear Afghanistan’s second-largest city.
This disconnect is now deepening, as Washington begins negotiations on what enduring military presence, if
any, the U.S. could have after the Western coalition’s mandate ends in 2014. How to deal with an increasingly assertive Mr. Karzai is likely to become one of Mr. Obama’s
main foreign-policy headaches during his second term.
“We want to be your good friends, but we will never
want to be your servants,” said the Afghan president’s
chief of staff, Abdel Karim Khurram, in a rare interview.
Mr. Khurram said that the way America has waged war
there since 2001 has been “counterproductive,” adding
that the Taliban, once seemingly vanquished, are resurgent across Afghanistan and in neighboring Pakistan. “This
region is more radical now than 10 years ago,” he said.
A close look at Mr. Karzai’s growing alienation from the
U.S. helps to explain why so many of America’s war objectives in Afghanistan remain unfulfilled. It seems increasingly likely that the U.S. will leave behind both an undefeated Taliban insurgency and a dysfunctional government
mired in corruption and utterly dependent on foreign aid.
Mr. Karzai described his relationship with the Obama
administration as “tension-ridden” in an interview with
The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. To many U.S. officials, these tensions have translated into a two-front war:
a military struggle against the Taliban and a more insidious, parallel political tussle with the Afghan leader.
Aware of Afghanistan’s history, Mr. Karzai opposed the
very notion of a U.S. counterinsurgency campaign, fearing
that the insertion of American troops into traditional Afghan villages, and the casualties that they cause, would
end up reinvigorating the Taliban. He has also argued that
U.S. military operations are meaningless without first confronting Pakistan, which provides havens and support to
Afghan insurgents—allowing the Taliban to bounce back
after every offensive.
As a result, between the U.S. and Mr. Karzai, said a senior former American diplomat in Kabul, “there is a fundaPlease turn to the next page
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