Afghan Journal

Karzai, the West and the diplomatic marriage from hell

One of my Kabul press corps colleagues once described covering President Hamid Karzai’s government and the Western diplomats who are supposed to be supporting it as a lot like being friends with a couple while they go through a savage divorce. We reporters hop back and forth, from cocktail party to quiet lunch to private briefing, listening to charming Afghans and Westerners -– many of whom we personally like very much — say outrageously nasty things about each other. Usually, the invective is whispered “off the record” by both sides, so you, dear reader, miss out on the opportunity to learn just how dysfunctional one of the world’s most important diplomatic relationships has become.

Over the past few weeks, the secret got out. Karzai — in a speech that was described as an outburst but which palace insiders say was carefully planned — said in public what his allies have been muttering in private for months: that Western diplomats orchestrated the notorious election debacle last year that saw a third of his votes thrown out for fraud. The White House and State Department were apoplectic: “disturbing”, “untrue”, “preposterous” they called it. Peter Galbraith, the U.S. diplomat who was the number two U.N. official in Kabul during last year’s election, went on TV and said he thought Karzai might be crazy or on drugs. Karzai’s camp’s response: Who’s being preposterous now?

Then, like every good marital fight, it was suddenly over. There were Hillary Clinton and Bob Gates assuring Americans that Karzai is, in fact a “reliable partner”. Karzai, without taking back a word of his speech, let it be known that he held no grudges. On Saturday, the Afghan president and the United Nations sealed the deal by agreeing new rules for the next election.

Readers can be forgiven for wondering what on earth is the matter with some of these people.

For the record: I’m no doctor, but I think the Afghan president is probably not a mentally ill drug addict. Nor do I think Western officials were trying to overthrow him by engineering ballot fraud last year. I do think both sides are doing themselves real harm by shouting at each other.

There are still a few diplomats that Karzai likes, and some who like Karzai. And this is Afghanistan, after all, a country where “enemies” are often just the people you are trying to kill until they become your friends. Karzai is a master at working with people he distrusts: many of the members of his cabinet belong to groups that were –- literally — at war with each other at various times. His first vice president was once a rival faction’s security boss who threw him in jail.

Why Karzai decided to attack the West

It was a strange or at least unusual event. Reuters, other news wires and mostly Afghan journalists were summoned to the presidential palace early in the morning. A frequent and very familiar routine of standing around, waiting and multiple security checks then started .

On this occasion, we were packed onto mini buses with blacked-out windows and told only that we would be leaving the palace and going “some place outside”. The guessing game ended when the buses, flanked by armored Land Cruisers and charging down a busy city highway, honking other vehicles out of the way,  turned into another building very familiar to reporters in Kabul: the Independent Election Commission (IEC).

It is not unusual for President Hamid Karzai to give press conferences elsewhere in Afghanistan (in other cities for instance) but I cannot recall a time when he addressed reporters in Kabul anywhere but the press room of his palace. Not knowing what was in store, I reminded myself it was also April Fool’s day.

We all agreed that we might get a response out of Karzai about the rejection of a presidential decree by the lower house of parliament and possibly something about the reforms that the U.N. has wanted of the IEC.

What we got instead was some of Karzai’s strongest words against the West and the international community. The defiant tone was set by Azizullah Ludin, the Chairman of the IEC, who gave an impassioned and rather rambling speech about how hard he had tried to serve the Afghan people, about how difficult the presidential election in August had been to monitor and how sad he was that the foreigners were interfering so much and manipulating the efforts of the IEC.

Ludin’s deputy, the Chief Electoral Officer, Daoud Ali Najafi, then followed with a much shorter but equally defensive testimony of what he had gone through and the pressures he faced. IEC colleagues and Karzai nodded in support. The whole thing (was it a press conference? An extraordinary meeting? An open exchange of feelings about how last August’s elections went?) started to feel a bit like a rather grandiose cognitive therapy session, in which people who have been scarred by something in their life, in this case an experiment with democracy, “share their pain” with like-minded sufferers as a catharsis.

Ludin and Najafi were heavily criticized by Karzai’s main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah,  the sacked U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith, and the media, during and after the elections.