Descent Into Chaos Read Free Page B

Pakistani support that kept them afloat. My book Taliban, published in 2000, led to threats by the ISI and their extremist supporters. The book was swiftly translated into Dari and widely distributed in Afghanistan, particularly by Karzai and Ahmad Shah Masud’s tribal network. Moreover, a speech I gave in Lahore demanding that Pakistan reconsider its Afghan policy and drop support for the Taliban had been widely circulated in Afghanistan after being broadcast by the Dari and Pushtu services of the BBC. 2
    That day in Lahore, Karzai and I had a long discussion and determined that he had only two choices. He could leave for Europe to become just another émigré Afghan politician out of touch with his people and hovering around the entourage of the former Afghan king, Zahir Shah, now in Rome, where a new political effort was under way to oppose the Taliban. Or he could deposit his family abroad and then take his life in his hands and enter Afghanistan to rally the Pashtun tribes and foment rebellion against the Taliban. In fact, for the past three years Karzai had quietly been preparing for such a day, meeting in Quetta with dissident tribal leaders who came out of Afghanistan, collecting arms and money, and secretly distributing them to his supporters inside the country. Uppermost in the minds of his tribal supporters was whether Karzai could ever muster the international support crucial to his efforts.
    Unfortunately, Washington and London considered Karzai a political lightweight, and any success at fomenting rebellion in the Pashtun heartland of the Taliban was considered unlikely. Karzai had been a Mujahedin, a member of the Afghan opposition to the Soviet invaders, since the early 1980s, but he had never fought directly against the Soviets and he had no experience as a military commander. Karzai spoke six languages (Pushtu, Dari, Urdu, English, French, and Hindi), read voraciously, and was a snazzy dresser. Western diplomats considered him an intellectual but not a leader who could topple the Taliban. Moreover, the United States was not particularly interested in the future of Afghanistan or the Taliban regime. All they wanted was someone to deliver Osama bin Laden.
    “Our people are not yet ready for guerrilla war against the Taliban, and the Taliban are still very strong and ruthless, and they will carry out reprisals against the civilian population,” Karzai told me that day. “But how can I leave all my people and the anti-Taliban network I have created over these years and go abroad—I cannot betray or abandon them now.” He asked for my advice, and I bluntly told him that I could not imagine him joining the bickering émigré leaders in Rome trying to exert influence over Zahir Shah, who was now more than seventy-five years old. Whereas other Afghan leaders had settled abroad, including many of his brothers, Karzai had spent the last decade close to his people. The chronic lack of real leadership among the contentious Pashtuns had been a major factor in the Taliban’s rise to power in the 1990s. I was convinced that if he decided to do so, Karzai could fill the leadership gap among the Pashtuns.
    Hamid Karzai was born in Kandahar in 1957, the fourth of eight children born to Abdul Ahad Karzai and his wife, Durko. Subsequently all the children except two, Hamid and his younger brother, Ahmed Wali, were to emigrate and settle in the United States. It was a typically tragic tale of the Afghan diaspora after the Soviet invasion. The eldest brother, Abdul Ahmad, became an engineer in Maryland. Qayum and Mahmood set up a chain of Afghan restaurants in the United States. Shawali became a businessman in the Arabian Gulf city of Dubai. The youngest son, Abdul Wali, became a biochemist on Long Island, while a married sister, Faozia, settled in Maryland.
    Hamid Karzai went to primary school in his native city of Kandahar and then attended high school in Kabul. It was an unremarkable childhood for a member of the Pashtun