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"FacebookPinterest\n\nThere are no flowers in the Flower Room of the presidential palace in Kabul. Still, when Hamid Karzai strides into the room\u2014\"It's too formal in my office!\" he says; \"I like the light here!\"\u2014and pumps his visitor's hand, then assumes a leaning crouch in his chair and proceeds to lay out, with unquenchable optimism, the blossoming of Afghanistan, well, you want to believe that what you see tangled against the windows is not halfdead ivy, that what you smell isn't a waft of cheap air freshener, but instead\u2026owers!\n\n\"Today was a busy day,\" Karzai says. He's neatly bearded, robed in white, wearing a brown vest and a karakulwool hat. His voice is proud, almost gleeful. \"It was cabinet day. For the first time, we discussed preparations for the future. For example, we can now project how much food we produce, which we never knew before. We discussed strategic food reserves for the country. Unimaginable that we would ever discuss that!\" He smiles, thrusts a finger into the air. \"Interestingly, we also received an account of how much poppy fields were turned into food fields. Now the poppy farmers are starting to grow grapes. Apples, pomegranates, watermelons. Honeydew!\"\n\nHeroin into honeydew\u2014he lets the image linger. He wants it to sink in. \"I don't think it's so much our government programs. I think it's the people themselves. They simply feel that life is secure, that they have a future. Any family that wants to have a good name in the village, rise higher, and be somebody\u2014they can't do that with poppies! They can't do that with poppies! Poppies are just for today; everybody knows it's bad. They want to be back with their beautiful orchards. Go picnicking!\"\n\nPicnicking\n\nJust outside the door, several babyfaced guards stand in loose formation, cradling Kalashnikovs. Beyond the guards lie other government palaces, most of them empty and in various stages of bombedout ruin. Beyond the palaces, twentyfoothigh walls. Beyond the walls, the battered capital city of Kabul.\n\nThere's no picnicking for Karzai beyond those walls. Twice he's nearly been killed after leaving the compound. Three members of his cabinet have narrowly escaped assassination attempts; three others weren't so lucky. Yes, it's bad for Karzai in Kabul, but it's worse still in the provinces\u2014which remain, his sunny depiction notwithstanding, throttled by the world's largest opium trade, by warlords who have carved up the countryside into lawless fiefdoms, and by Taliban insurgents who never got Operation Enduring Freedom's message. It's bad for Karzai, but it's far worse for his people, 70 percent of whom are illiterate and 25 percent of whom are jobless.\n\nSo he stays behind his walls and holds meetings\u2014as he did on March 1 with President Bush, who had been secretly airlifted into the compound and who scattered words like impressed and enthralled and inspiring while military aircraft roared overhead.\n\nThat same day, American newspapers reported a U.S. intelligence official's testimony before the Senate that \"insurgents now represent a greater threat to the expansion of Afghan government authority than at any point since late 2001.\" Nothing about picnics or honeydews in this testimony. Instead: an \"almost fourfold\" increase over the previous year in suicide attacks. \"Increasingly used beheadings.\" A \"thriving narcotics trade.\" Among the senators who heard the gory details was Susan Collins. \"It worries me greatly,\" she says. \"I so want Afghanistan to succeed. Both times I went there, I also went to Iraq, and the contrast was so great. Maybe that's why I still have hope. And I'm so impressed with Karzai. I personally find him so dynamic\u2014dashing, even. But I have wondered if that's just an American reaction.\"\n\nCollins is smart to wonder. For we've bought into Hamid Karzai. He's been sold as the dapper caretaker of our one feelgood story in the war on terror. We greeted him with thunderous applause at the 2002 State of the Union address, when Bush introduced him as \"the distinguished interim leader of a liberated Afghanistan.\" Four years later, we're still applauding\u2014and why not Osama bin Laden's protectors, the Taliban, now live in caves. Girls can go to school again. Women don't get beaten or stoned for refusing to wear burkas. Afghans can vote, and do. Our misadventures elsewhere notwithstanding, we've still got Afghanistan to point to, and Hamid Karzai\u2014\"their George Washington,\" gushes Senator Lindsey Graham\u2014as the emblem of what a Muslim leader should be.\n\nThis is our feelgood story. It would be nice if it were Afghanistan's, too.\n\nBut it's not. \"The security environment has deteriorated there in a very significant way,\" says terrorism expert Peter Bergen. \"The official stand by NATO is that Kabul is 'tense and unstable.' That's a sea change from two to three years ago, when you could walk around anywhere.\"\n\n\"Regardless of how wonderful Bush said everything is in Afghanistan, we're losing ground there,\" says a top Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer. \"And we're going to lose even more ground when we replace our troops with NATO, which isn't up to the task of counterinsurgency.\" Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff at the State Department, agrees: \"We're trying to do Afghanistan on the cheap. And it's costing us.\"\n\nWhat has happened is not an inexorable slide into defeat\u2014not yet, anyway. But the surge in violence throughout Afghanistan would probably not be taking place if the country were otherwise better cared for\u2014if its roads were paved, if its poppy farmers knew of an easier way to make money, if its people felt like picnicking rather than running for cover. The real disgrace is that four years later, the Afghan collective will remains up for grabs. \"We should've been concentrating on building their economy,\" says William Milam, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. \"These Taliban guys, if they start breaking people's rice bowls, they'll run into popular resistance\u2014they'll fail. But because we've just approached Afghanistan in military terms, we've allowed the Taliban to bounce back.\"\n\nBombings, social discontent, a halfassed reconstruction\u2026 Sound familiar Still, no one equates Afghanistan with Iraq. Not at this point. For one thing, Afghans still appear to be glad we're there; in fact, \"they're worried shitless we'll leave,\" says one Senate Armed Services Committee aide. \"They think that NATO coming in means the U.S. washes its hands\u2014and they could be right.\"\n\nFor another, they've got Hamid Karzai. They're just not sure that's a good thing.\n\nKarzai is the president of a country that barely knows him. To his countrymen, he wasn't the obvious choice in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion. To the international community, however, he was \"clearly the natural candidate,\" says James Dobbins, the U.S. envoy to the conference in Bonn, Germany, where Karzai was selected by an Afghan council in December 2001. \"He had traveled abroad, speaks languages well, has a winning personality.\" The Afghans at Bonn sensed this. \"He emerged only after the Bonn conference, not before,\" says Dr. Abdullah, Karzai's foreign minister, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name. Or as one of the Bonn attendees, Seyyed Mustafa Kazemi, puts it, \"After 9/11, a wave came, and Karzai rode the wave.\"\n\nGiven the chance, Afghans would probably have elected a renowned warrior like Ahmed Shah Massoud or Abdul Haq. (But both men had recently been killed by the Taliban.) Instead they got a wealthy tribal leader's Westernized son who had attended college in India during the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan in 1979 and had taken refuge in Pakistan during the Taliban years. Four years later, his adversaries still scoff at his credentials\u2014and his courage. Insists one political opponent, \"His biography was written for him.\"\n\nBy any ordinary standard, however, Hamid Karzai is a committed patriot. His father was assassinated by the Taliban in 1999, and Karzai spent the next two years lobbying other nations on behalf of his beleaguered country. Through his international meeting and greeting, Karzai became a player, albeit an impotent one. \"I never knew him not to be frustrated with the Western world,\" says Professor Thomas Gouttierre of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, an Afghanaffairs expert and longtime friend of Karzai's. \"His argument was that by abandoning Afghanistan, we were putting our own interests at great risk. No one paid attention to him.\"\n\nOne day in October 2001, Karzai let bravery cloud his judgment and sneaked across the border into Afghanistan with a small group of friends, determined to stir up a revolution or die trying. But Karzai had no experience in combat. When the Taliban cornered him, he didn't fight\u2014he allegedly radioed the Pentagon for help and was ferried off in an army helicopter. (Fearing that this paints Karzai as cowardly, his aides to this day deny that he was ever airlifted to safety. But former envoy James Dobbins remembers being in General Tommy Franks's office and being told by Franks, \"We've just rescued Hamid Karzai. He was in a firefight, and we were afraid he was going to get overwhelmed, so we picked him up.\") He later returned to battle, which is where he was when the call came from Bonn on December 5, 2001, asking him to be the new leader of Afghanistan.\n\nThat day, Karzai issued his first edict\u2014namely, that the Taliban who killed his father and tried to kill him and tormented his country would be pardoned. \"I have declared general amnesty to all,\" he said. \"Let there be no revenge and no vendetta.\"\n\nA Taliban spokesman later said that Karzai would let Mullah Mohammed Omar stay in Kandahar and \"live in dignity.\" To which Donald Rumsfeld reacted by threatening \"to work with other people\" if Karzai made any deals with Omar. And so Hamid Karzai did what he does best: He accommodated.\n\nHe's been accommodating ever since. In 2003, Karzai came to America to meet with Bush and testify before Congress. But because, according to one congressional staffer who dealt with Karzai's aides during the trip, \"he was told by Zal [Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan] not to embarrass Bush by being too critical,\" Karzai painted such an upbeat picture of his country's situation that Republican senator Chuck Hagel openly questioned his credibility. In 2004, Karzai asked the West to let Afghanistan eradicate opium production on its own, only to turn around and watch as planes\u2014flying over U.S.controlled airspace but belonging to the British, according to one top Karzai aide\u2014pelted the poppy fields of Nangarhar Province with herbicides. In 2005 he went to Washington and asked Bush for greater control over military activity there so as to avoid the home invasions so offensive to Muslims. Bush replied that while \"our relationship is one of cooperate and consult\u2026 our troops will respond to U.S. commanders.\" Then, this past February at the London Conference on Afghanistan, Karzai put on his most grateful face as Condoleezza Rice announced that the United States was flatlining its annual aid to Afghanistan at $1.1 billion\u2014leaving him well short of the $4 billion he said he'd need to fight narcotrafficking.\n\nThe job of appeasing both his splintered country and its fickle Western benefactors would sap lesser politicians. But Karzai's zeal is limitless. He does not take a day off and expects the same of his staff. Most weekdays he's visited by tribal elders who lecture him about his hapless cabinet and the greedy nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, and he promises to look into it. It's his only physical contact with the public.\n\n\"In terms of travel to the provinces, I wish I could do more,\" Karzai says. \"But it causes a tremendous hazard to the people. I want to do more, but security won't let me.\"\n\nSo he stays behind the palace walls. Or he leaves Afghanistan altogether\u2014bedazzling Westerners with his cape and hat and tales of Afghan girls going to school. Afghans are less mesmerized. Every Friday morning, Karzai submits to a fifteenminute callin show on Radio Afghanistan. During one program in June, a caller told Karzai that he was a highway cop who had not been paid his salary for five months. \"I will be very unhappy if this is true,\" Karzai said. The next caller complained about the inadequacy of the roads, and Karzai replied, rather pathetically, \"I hope the companies doing this work will do it honestly, because we are a poor nation and cannot provide money again and again for road building.\"\n\n\"How much of the lack of progress can you blame on Karzai\" says one former U.S. diplomat. \"Some of it. I worry that he may not have enough steel in his soul.\" Karzai's greatest achievement may be something that has not happened\u2014namely, civil war. On the other hand, his solution\u2014to welcome the wouldbe enemies into his government\u2014has ensured rampant corruption in his administration.\n\n\"He has buddied up with warlords who should instead be on trial,\" says the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer. \"And that permits the narcoeconomy to continue. There are only two sources of income in Afghanistan: Western charity and drugs. Karzai's kept them both flowing. In fairness to him, he has had some very frank meetings here in America, some of which I attended. And he's said, 'Look, I'd like to go after the warlords, but as long as Rumsfeld doesn't help by supplying troops, forget it.' \"\n\nDealt a feeble hand, Karzai has had little choice but to \"reintegrate\" Afghanistan's bad actors by awarding them government jobs. \"What is the cost of not doing that\" asks Zalmay Khalilzad. \"You might not be getting the best minister available, but if you don't do it, then you may end up in conflict, which may have even more negative consequences. There will be fighting, people will die, and that may undermine the confidence of the international community and its desire to invest. You could say he's been prudent in doing this.\"\n\nPrudence, of course, is timeconsuming. The question is, how much time does Afghanistan have before the checks stop coming and the country is left to fend for itself Says former ambassador Milam, \"I happen to agree with the general outlook of the Afghanis that this is a window of opportunity for them. If they don't get started down the right path now, they never will.\"\n\nThe looming specter of a missed opportunity is what worries Hamid Karzai's countrymen (and in turn stokes the morale of the newly resurgent Taliban). Here is Noor Aqa Roeen, a professor who spent a decade in prison under the Communist and Taliban regimes: \"Karzai's weak. He's never been suited to lead a country in so critical a situation. Half the public doesn't trust him.\" Here is Professor Faizullah Jalal, whose wife serves as Karzai's minister of women's affairs: \"Karzai is a failure. If the U.S. didn't want him, he wouldn't have gotten ten votes this past election.\" Here is Dr. Abdullah, Karzai's minister of foreign affairs, on his boss's leadership skills: \"I think the future will judge it.\"\n\nDesperate to find someone with something charitable or optimistic to say about Afghanistan's first democratically elected leader and the direction in which he's taking the country, I telephone his brother Qayum, a Baltimore restaurateur who spent years laboring with Hamid on Afghan causes and who represents Kandahar in the Parliament. When I ask Qayum to assess the state of his country, his voice wells with sadness.\n\n\"The people are frustrated,\" he says.\n\n\"The people don't know where Afghanistan will be ten years from now. The insurgency is still active. There's still corruption. No one knows what happened to the reconstruction process. And all of this is because change hasn't happened quickly. When a society emerges from a nightmare such as ours has, there are two possibilities. Either it ends up in the hands of a leader like Mandela or Gandhi\u2014a visionary who pushes things forward\u2014or you surrender to daily politics. That's what you see now. Hamid was not able to get out from the daily politics. He went into that swamp. I don't think he'll agree with me, but that's my view.\n\n\"Hamid is the most decent human being I know. I wish I was like him. But for the salvation of the country, he must change. He must change from being a politician to a leadership role. He must come up with a vision. The people of Afghanistan can't do things on their own. Until the people can stand on their own two feet, they need the help of the government.\"\n\nBut surely you can pick up the phone and tell your brother these things. Qayum Karzai sighs. \"The same thing is happening to me as is happening to the rest of Afghanistan,\" he says. \"You cry, you complain, you pick up the phone. And after a while, you realize there's no point. You just let it go.\"\n\n\"It's great that the Afghan people want more,\" Hamid Karzai says. \"That they expect their government to do more\u2014that's participation! You should be afraid of the day when they say, 'We don't care.' \"\n\nTrue, so far as it goes. But what if the government continues to fail How long will it be before the West tires of throwing billions into a corrupt sinkhole How long will it take for all that Afghan idealism to erode into cynicism or worse How long before the country descends again into terror and chaos\n\nA few hours before arriving at the presidential palace, I had met a young woman from the dangerous eastern border province of Paktika. She told me that she was running for Parliament but that her chances of winning were poor, given that the men in Paktika were confiscating the women's voting cards. She was campaigning chiefly for children, she told me. \"We were supposed to have a school for girls built in our province, but the plan has never been implemented. I told President Karzai all of this three years ago. He told me he'd look into it. He seemed very enthusiastic at the time. But he's forgetting us. I don't think he's paying attention anymore.\"\n\nKarzai nods and squints at me as I recount this story for him. \"Look,\" he says, \"if a woman from Paktika\"\u2014he glances around the room at his aides, who bob their heads at the mention of this backward province\u2014\"can run for Parliament\u2026you don't know what that means. It means massive progress. Massive progress! That's good news. There are lots of schools that have opened. All over the country. And there's a very good governor over there, so I'm sure he's working on it.\"\n\nSeveral months later, the girls' school has yet to open in Paktika, where the illiteracy rate stands at 99 percent. What has happened in Paktika during this timespan is as follows: A proKarzai cleric was killed when a bomb detonated in his mosque. Other bombs killed or wounded twentysix U.S. and Afghan soldiers from August through November. The British embassy issued a warning that the province was not safe to visit. A female candidate for Parliament withdrew after receiving death threats. And just before Bush's visit to Afghanistan, the Tenth Mountain Division of the U.S. Army landed in Paktika, with its commander remarking that \"there might be an increase in terrorist attacks and we have to gear up for this.\"\n\nTo be fair, two other things happened during these months in Paktika: Coalition and Afghan officials opened the province's first women's vocational training center and finished its first paved road. The U.S. Army was there at both ribbon cuttings to commemorate the progress\u2014or massive progress, as Karzai might have said if he had been there. But of course, he was in Kabul, behind his palace walls.\n\nRobert Draper is a GQ correspondent.\n\nEXCLUSIVE GQ.COM INTERVIEWSaid Hyder Akbar is a student at Yale and author of the 2005 memoir Come Back to Afghanistan: A California Teenager's Story. Oh, and his dad is good buddies with Hamid Karzai. Akbar talks about the state of Afghanistan in this exclusive GQ.com interview\n\nGQ, May 2006"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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