Hamid Karzai will need all of his remarkable diplomatic skills to win over a country that has learned, from long and brutal experience, to expect the worst. Just days before Karzai was installed, a fragmentation grenade exploded in a busy market in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif, wounding close to 100 people. Some said the explosion was an accident; others believe it was an attack by Taliban terrorists. Then, a day before the Inauguration, American AC-130 gunships and fighter aircraft bombed a convoy of vehicles believed to have been carrying Taliban leaders, but which local reports said carried 65 tribal elders on their way to the Inauguration ceremony. Karzai is more aware than anyone of the challenges he faces, and the need to provide hope while also playing down expectations. “The significance of this day in Afghan history will really depend on what happens in the future,” he told reporters who gathered for his swearing-in ceremony–which drew tears from many Afghans present. “If we deliver what we promise to the Afghan people, this will be a great day. If we don’t deliver, we’ll go to oblivion.”
Even his supporters say that Karzai is best suited to lead Afghanistan not so much because of what he is, but because of what he’s not. He is not an obstreperous warlord with blood on his hands, plunder on his mind and a ragtag army. He is not tainted by association with the mujahedin who flattened Kabul after driving out the Soviets, or with the fanatical Taliban who took their place. He is not a bully, or a crook, or a chauvinist or a zealot–he is none of the things that has defined Afghan leaders over the past 23 years. But if his new administration begins to unravel, those same attributes may come to be seen as weaknesses. “He is alone, doesn’t represent a party, has no political base outside his tribe and is not widely known in Afghanistan,” says a Western diplomat in Islamabad. “He has been superimposed… from outside. He did not become the Afghan leader through military prowess and the traditional tribal system.” Many inside and outside of Afghanistan wonder whether Karzai may be too thoughtful and unassuming to govern a land still dominated by thugs.
A vanguard of roughly 80 British Marines arrived in Kabul to help protect the new administration and to provide a safe zone for Afghans to work out their differences peaceably; the Brits should be followed by an international force of up to 5,000. But Afghans have long been hostile to foreign armies, and if the new government seems to depend too heavily on the peacekeepers, it could begin to look like a puppet regime. Afghans don’t take kindly to those, as they showed when they brutally ousted the Soviet version in 1992. The peacekeepers have worries of their own: if they’re thought to be weak, opponents will start shooting at them. Karzai will need to derive strength from the foreign troops–who, in a way, are his militia–while also keeping his distance.
Karzai’s standing among Afghans derives mainly from his position as head of the Populzai clan, part of the Durrani tribe that has traditionally provided the country’s kings. He worked briefly as deputy foreign minister in the postcommunist mujahedin government in Kabul, before factional infighting drove him to relocate to Quetta, Pakistan. From there Karzai initially supported the Taliban with arms and money. But he quickly grew disillusioned with the mullahs’ extremist interpretation of Islam, and after his father was assassinated by suspected Taliban agents in 1999, he spoke loudly–at U.S. congressional hearings and elsewhere–of the dangers posed by the regime.
Now he must deal with countless Afghan rivals, as well as regional powers with a long history of meddling in Afghanistan’s affairs. The city of Jalalabad alone is divided among three warlords, and Karzai’s enemies (even some former Taliban officials) may already be looking for new regional sponsors. To overcome feuds, Karzai will need to use the only practical leverage he is likely to have: the prospect of foreign aid, which in some ways is now the nation’s primary resource. “If some warlord, say in Kandahar, is willing to play ball,” says a Western diplomat, “he may find himself receiving more assistance.”
It will take vast amounts of money just to get shelter over everyone’s head and food in their bellies. Only 12 percent of Afghans have access to safe drinking water, and more than 3 million are refugees. Yet the worst ruins are not the ones you see on television; they’re inside people’s minds. “Twenty-three years of war have ravaged… the people in Afghanistan,” says a recent World Health Organization report. “Killing, executions, massive persecution, forced internal displacement, fear associated with living in mined areas and the latest escalation in violence have all left an indelible mark.” That’s not a mark that can be erased in a month, a year or even in a generation. But confidence-building has to begin somewhere: the dollar has tumbled against the afghani, and Karzai has proved–for now, anyway–that warlords don’t always win.
