[Critics say the former president of
Afghanistan is working from the wings to destabilize his successor’s
government.]
By Mujib Mashal
 |
|
Mr. Karzai’s critics
accuse him of working from the wings to destabilize the
government and exploit a moment of
national crisis to try to return to power.
Credit Adam Ferguson for
The New York Times
|
KABUL,
Afghanistan — Hamid Karzai,
the former Afghan president and current antagonist to his successor’s
government, likes to describe Afghan politics as a marathon.
To the long roll call of visitors he meets
each day — regional power brokers and elders, government officials, religious
leaders, well-wishers who reminisce longingly about his years in power — the
metaphor is clear. Mr. Karzai has never stopped running, never stopped
maneuvering, and he won’t.
Mr. Karzai’s critics, especially those close
to President Ashraf Ghani, accuse him of working from the wings to destabilize
the government and exploit a moment of national crisis to try to return to
power — or at least to force some concessions. They say Mr. Karzai is actively
undermining a vulnerable president, maintaining an alternate pole of political
influence and patronage, and stoking protest movements that some fear could
turn violent.
So what is Mr. Karzai’s answer? He flatly
denies that he’s trying to harm the government. But then there’s the hint of a
wry smile: “If there are some people running faster, those who are falling
behind should not complain.”
Following Mr. Karzai through days of meetings
— dozens of discussions, and interviews on and off camera — it becomes clear
that he is still operating like a man in power.
His many visitors come to seek his leverage
in the government, and he is happy to pick up the telephone to call a minister,
a governor or an ambassador. He still communicates with world leaders, signing
letters to them on weekly basis.
Much of Mr. Karzai’s politics happens around
noon, when a larger crowd gathers for a group prayer on the grass outside and
then follows him upstairs to a sunlit dining table for lunch. On a given day,
there are former and current government officials, generals, judges, bankers,
tribal elders, former members of the Taliban and preachers from Kabul’s major
mosques.
A master storyteller and conversationalist,
Mr. Karzai takes his seat at the head of the table.
“Who is raising this question out there, that
I am returning?” Mr. Karzai began one recent conversation over stuffed peppers,
vegetable rice, and chicken cooked with carrots. “I have made it clear I don’t
want to.”
But that was good enough to stir a spirited
conversation, full of anecdotes about his days in power and how people do not
trust the current government. One former cabinet minister, who still serves as
an adviser to Mr. Ghani, insisted that Mr. Karzai was the only natural
alternative, and a great hope to the 90 percent of the country disenchanted
with the current government.
Mr. Karzai listened attentively. He took
another bite.
He seems to invite the question hanging over
him: If Mr. Karzai does not want to return to power, just what is he trying to
achieve by increasing pressure on a government already on the brink?
And it is on the brink. In private
conversations, Afghan and Western officials alike worry that Mr. Ghani’s
administration may be facing an existential crisis that could peak as soon as
next month.
The end of September is the deadline for the
government to meet the commitments of a political deal brokered by Secretary of
State John Kerry after the catastrophic 2014 election dispute. By then,
Afghanistan is supposed to hold a parliamentary election, enact sweeping
electoral reform, and amend the Constitution to create the position of prime
minister for Mr. Ghani’s election rival and current governing partner, Abdullah
Abdullah. But staying on schedule was already impossible many months ago, and
Mr. Kerry has publicly insisted that Mr. Ghani’s government will remain through
the end of its five-year term, regardless.
That is just the beginning. The country’s
security situation is worsening, despite the American military’s increased
involvement in the fighting. The Taliban have seized many districts, and they
threaten to take many more.
Mr. Ghani, the constant technocrat, has been
forced to focus on security, and his economic initiatives have stalled. And
suddenly he has also been challenged by a street protest movement in which
ethnic Hazaras are accusing his government of systematic discrimination.
The most recent of the demonstrations was
struck by a suicide bombing, claimed by the Islamic State, that left at least
80 people dead. Now the demonstrators accuse the government of purposefully
leaving them vulnerable to attack, and they have given Mr. Ghani an ultimatum
to meet their demands — another September deadline, as it turns out.
On top of all that, a new protest movement,
potentially more dangerous, is growing just north of Kabul, the capital,
calling for the government to rebury with dignity a bandit northern king who
has been dead for nearly a century, shot by a firing squad. Among the people
calling for the reburial, and threatening protests, are northern militia
commanders who have long been skeptical of Mr. Ghani, and they have also given
him a September ultimatum.
Government officials accuse Mr. Karzai and
his allies of having a hand in the recent protests. But he says he is after
neither the collapse of the government nor a return to power. “I have
absolutely no doubt about that,” he said.
He just wants the government’s legitimacy
affirmed after the September deadline, he said, and the only way left is to
call a traditional loya jirga — a grand assembly of tribal elders from across
the country.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Karzai’s push for a loya jirga is the
move most widely seen as a game plan for returning to power, or at least for
negotiating more leverage. His strength is with the tribes and the power
brokers he has maintained at his side, while Mr. Ghani has alienated many of
them.
It helps to understand that Mr. Karzai
represents an entire network of power — national as well as local — accumulated
over 13 years and beyond. That network feels that it is slowly being uprooted
under Mr. Ghani’s presidency, and that it could be vastly weakened if the
current government survives the September deadline intact.
In Kandahar, powerful strongmen who owe their
rise to Mr. Karzai’s protection have had standoffs recently with officials sent
by Mr. Ghani over lucrative custom taxes and where the money goes. A northern
lawmaker who stopped by to see Mr. Karzai complained that the government was
cutting her off and working “so beautifully and systematically” to weaken their
mutual support base. She might not return from vacation abroad, she said, if
the situation continued and Mr. Karzai did not signal his plan clearly.
If it came to an open political struggle, it
is unclear whether Mr. Ghani would be able to score points with what would be
perhaps his best case to make against Mr. Karzai: that the seeds of both the
current security and political crises were sown on Mr. Karzai’s watch, and that
the former president left him a system suffocating in corruption and patronage.
That is in part because Mr. Karzai has been
busy using his social acumen to try to shed a more favorable light on his
legacy after 13 years in power.
Mr. Karzai, who lives a stone’s throw from
the presidential palace, says his routine has changed little since he was
president. He has more free time to relax in the afternoons, but his mornings
are busier. He meets more people than he did when he was in power. On average,
his office estimated, Mr. Karzai sees more than 400 people a month. Every Eid,
three-day Muslim celebrations that come twice a year, Mr. Karzai opens his
gates to a flow of visitors, reaching up to 6,000 people.
From the moment he leaves his residence in
the morning, his two young daughters tugging at his trousers, he is a man on
the move, trailed by secret service agents. Mr. Karzai, 58, describes himself
as hyperactive, and he is rail-thin. He drinks four or five espressos a day.
He still moves with ease among drastically
different groups of people, from Oruzgan elders who interrupt him with
passionate diatribes, to groups of youths coming to present him with their
latest research.
Mr. Karzai makes them laugh, and when they
shed tears, as one group visiting from central Afghanistan did during a recent
audience, he offers tissues.
As for what he might be seeking from all of
this, Western officials in Kabul acknowledge that Mr. Karzai, a masterful
tactician and politician, does not necessarily need to have a clear concept of
what he wants. He can mount pressure on the government in ways big and small,
throw many irons in the fire, and perhaps force a critical blunder from Mr.
Ghani.
But Mr. Ghani is not without resources. Much
will depend on how many opposition figures the president can co-opt to keep Mr.
Karzai at least partly on the margins.
Mr. Karzai reserves his sharpest criticism of
the government for what he considers its biggest sin: cozying up, “immensely,
sadly,” to the United States and relying on it for its survival.
Mr. Karzai, who sent flowers to the American
ambassador for the Fourth of July holiday and then signed a thank-you note to
the ambassador for thanking him, said in an interview with The New York Times
last week that “the Americans, whose primary slogan is democracy, are making a
sham of democracy in Afghanistan.”
He is not fundamentally against the American
presence, he says: He just wants them to stop bombing his country and
interfering in the political process, which he accused Mr. Kerry of doing in
the spring when he insisted on a full-term Ghani government.
“This is a blatant interference to undermine
the sovereignty of Afghanistan,” Mr. Karzai said in the interview. “Look at
this country: What do we have other than our pride and sovereignty? Then
someone comes — from a good place, America — stands here in our country to
determine the duration of our government as he sees fit? That is an insult.”
Meanwhile, the streams of visitors continue,
and Mr. Karzai regales them with parables that at times seem like bids for
redemption, and at others like foresight.
During one lunch, he told a story of a group
of tired travelers in a desert who see a fire in the distance and hear drums.
Men are dancing the circle-dance called Attan. The travelers decide to spend
the night there, and to make their hosts feel comfortable, they join in the
dance.
But the dance stretches on and on.
“One of the travelers is wise, he realizes it
is the devil’s dance and it will go on all night,” Mr. Karzai told the guests.
“When the morning comes, there would be no sign of a dance or the devils.”
He paused, then drove the point home: “We are
stuck in the dance of the devil,” he said, to chuckles. “When the sun rises,
the devils will be gone, but we will be left in this dry land.”
Follow Mujib Mashal on Twitter @MujMash.
Reporting was contributed by Matthew
Rosenberg from Washington, and Jawad Sukhanyar, Mohammad Fahim Abed and Zahra
Nader from Kabul.