There was no building in good repair to house such a large meeting, so Germany provided a huge tent, normally used for beer garden festivals along the Rhine, as the venue for the LJ. Delegates arrived by UN aircraft from the farthest corners of the country, others by jeep and even by tractor and on horseback. Some wealthy delegates arrived in processions that included dozens of heavily armed gunmen, dancing camels, drummers, and long-haired tribal dancers who swayed through the streets in celebration. Kabul’s traffic was gridlocked, and clouds of exhaust fumes hovered over the city. For the first time in nearly three decades the country was enjoying a national political event. Men and women delegates all ate together in an enormous communal dining hall. A massive security operation was undertaken by ISAF, which set up three security perimeters around the LJ complex. “This process has been much less than perfect,” said Brahimi. “But after nearly thirty years of conflict, the process is truly representative and much, much better than we could have hoped for.”
Many delegates were dismayed when at the last moment the UN invited all the warlords and the governors of the provinces to sit in the front row of the LJ, although according to the rules of LJ Commission they had not been elected and there was no reason for their presence. An exclusion clause in the rules did not allow anyone who had committed human rights abuses to be elected, although the commission did not exclude anyone on those grounds. European ambassadors were also angry, saying the warlords had been brought in at the behest of the Americans. “Giving the warlords a front seat was a blow to the Afghans and a negative symbol of U.S. influence, ” said one ambassador.
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However, the Americans, with their pro-warlord policy, were anxious to show that the warlords supported the political process.
When Zahir Shah, helped by aides, finally climbed up onto the stage to open the LJ, he received a five-minute standing ovation and many delegates wept. Below him sat men in every conceivable kind of attire, from three-piece Armani suits to Uzbek capes to the long flowing shirts and baggy trousers of the Pashtuns to turbans of every tribal color and pattern. On one side sat two hundred women delegates—their heads covered but their faces bare; they had discarded the burqa, or full veil, enforced by the Taliban. The warlords sat up front, across from the world’s diplomats. It was a breathtaking scene full of exhilaration and heartbreak as people rejoiced to see Zahir Shah back in Kabul and remembered the millions of Afghans who had lost their lives in the wars.
Day and night Afghans were glued to their radio sets, which broadcast the LJ sessions live. In his address Karzai appealed for peace: “Everywhere I go people don’t ask for money or food or jobs but they ask for peace. The nation’s wish is clear, the nation wants peace and to be free from the warlords. After that people want education.”
The sessions quickly got bogged down in denunciations of the warlords, factionalism, and parliamentary minutiae. One session, which elected the speaker of the LJ and his deputies, ran all day and night for twenty hours. In a path-breaking step, a woman, Simar Samar, was elected as one of the three deputy speakers of the LJ.
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Karzai’s main challenger for interim president was Masuda Jalal, a forty-two-year-old former medical professor at Kabul University who had lost her job under the Taliban. Even though General Fahim threatened her husband to stop her from running, she still garnered 171 votes. Mir Mohammed Mahfooz Nadai, a little-known medical doctor, won eighty-nine votes. Karzai won the presidency with a resounding 1,295 votes.
The LJ had achieved its wider aim. It had mobilized the entire country in a national purpose. Afghans from every ethnic group, tribe, and community had gathered under one roof in an atmosphere of discussion rather than conflict. Afghan women had come out of the shadows for the first time. The LJ legitimized a political process that no warlord could now question and showed the warlords that they were held in public contempt. It gave Karzai, the government, and the international community a base from which to start rebuilding state institutions. The danger now was that Afghan expectations would be pitched too high. “All the Afghans were speaking as though the LJ would solve all their problems,” Brahimi said later. “It was one step to empower people but it was crazy to think it could change the country overnight.”
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Many Afghans later argued that neither Karzai nor the UN had tapped the true potential of the LJ. Karzai had failed to envisage a strategy for what he wanted out of the LJ, apart from his own election as president, and had failed to put together a team to exploit the positive public mood toward him and the international community. Most significant of all, the LJ had offered Karzai a chance to put the warlords in their place, but the United States, which depended on them, had vetoed any such idea. Karzai had succumbed to U.S. pressure and refused to do so. In forming the new cabinet of twenty-nine ministers, he endorsed the status quo. General Fahim remained defense minister and one of three vice presidents. The new Pashtun interior minister, Taj Mohammed Wardak, was eighty years old and could make no headway in reforming the police. The brilliant Pashtun technocrat Ashraf Ghani continued as finance minister, which offset Panjsheri power, as the Pashtun ministers now held the purse strings. From among the king’s supporters Zalmay Rasul became the new national security adviser, with the British pledging to fund and train Afghans for a national security council based on the American model.
In the final tally, the Pashtuns had supported Karzai, even though many felt betrayed by Khalilzad and angry at the rising toll of civilian casualties due to U.S. bombing in the Pashtun south and east. In July, AC-130 gunships shot up four villages in Uruzghan province, killing fifty-four people while families were celebrating a wedding. That month, U.S. forces launched six raids into Uruzghan, but did not capture a single Taliban leader, although eighty civilians were killed. Global Exchange, a human rights organization run by Marla Ruzicka, a young, vivacious American who was later tragically killed in Iraq, listed 812 Afghan civilians killed by U.S. air strikes in June alone. Ruzicka said that most of the deaths were a result of faulty intelligence given to U.S. commanders and overreliance on air power due to the chronic shortage of U.S. troops on the ground.
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The LJ also did little to end the conflicts between the warlords. During the summer months, there was severe fighting in the north between the militias of Dostum and Atta. In the west, Pashtun commander Amanullah Khan fought to oust Ismael Khan from Herat. There was also severe tension between Ismael Khan and Gul Agha Sherzai, the governor of Kandahar.
Senior U.S. officials and generals, however, persisted in treating the warlords like heads of state, inflating their egos even further. In September alone, the U.S. Treasury secretary, John Taylor, visited Ismael Khan in Herat, Dov Zakheim met with Dostum and Atta in Mazar, while Lt.-Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the commander of U.S.-led Coalition forces, met with them all. In retrospect, the new U.S. ambassador, Robert Finn, wondered if the United States could have done things differently: “None of these warlords were openly defying Karzai, but could the U.S. take the risk, without enough troops in the country to do something about them, that could prompt a civil war? However, we should have moved away from the warlords much earlier and we should have stopped visiting them. We should have supported the government more visibly. I stopped visiting Ismael Khan and Dostum, but Rumsfeld visited them several times.”
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Unable to take a tough position against the warlords, Karzai spent much of his time trying to maintain a balance between them and hold on to his authority and that of the government while Afghan citizens demanding the warlords’ removal. Karzai told me in December, “The warlords know that they cannot survive without the center, and they are not strong enough to challenge the center—there may be acts of defiance, but no challenge. We call the shots, they don’t call the shots, but there is a huge disconnect between the central government authority and the lack of an administration—we need to fill that gap very quickly, and I need good, trained people, which I don’t have.”
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Senior European officials now told U.S. diplomats that warlord power had to be curtailed, a new Afghan army had to be swiftly built up, and the United States had to force Fahim to agree to reforming the warlord-controlled defense ministry. At a conference in Spain, the Europeans asked the Americans for “a strategy that deals with the warlords that includes incentives and disincentives.”
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U.S. protection of the warlords had become a major constraint to Afghanistan’s ability to move forward and a growing bone of contention between Europe and the United States.
At a commemorative meeting in Bonn on December 3, 2002, to celebrate the first anniversary of the Bonn Agreement, Karzai signed a decree formally inaugurating the new Afghan National Army, banning all militias and formalizing a program to disarm them. The warlords were given one year to surrender all heavy weapons. It was the start of something new but it would be extremely slow and difficult to implement. Then, just as the government tried to shift gears with the warlords, the Taliban ignited a slow-burning fuse in the south, reemerging to attack soft targets. Karzai escaped a Taliban assassin’s bullets by a hairsbreadth while driving through Kandahar on September 5. That same day, bomb blasts in Kabul killed 15 civilians and injured another 150. It was not a good time for the country to start looking fragile, as the rift in the international community over the U.S. intention to invade Iraq had begun to drive a deep wedge in joint efforts to rebuild Afghanistan.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Musharraf’s Lost Moment
Political Expediency and Authoritarian Rule
The war may have been fought and won in Afghanistan, but it left Pakistan confronting the fallout and the most dangerous political challenges. Musharraf faced near-war with India due to attacks by Kashmiri militants, anti-U.S. protests in Pakistan’s streets, the escape of thousands of al Qaeda and Taliban into Pakistan, an economic slump, and suicide bombings by terrorist groups targeting Shia and Christian minorities. Pakistan had become without doubt
the
front line in Bush’s global war on terrorism.
The ensuing chaos was also a time of enormous opportunity, and the future of Pakistan would depend on how President Musharraf reacted. In Western capitals, there was a strong desire to see the pariah military regime brought in from the cold to act like a cooperative, acquiescent regime against the terrorists. Pakistanis hoped that Musharraf, who had made the right decision after 9/11, would now follow that up by restoring representative government and curbing jihadism across the board. Both hopes were to remain unfulfilled.
The reality was that Musharraf lacked any political consensus from which to build democracy. The army’s pro-extremist policies in Kashmir and Afghanistan strengthened its ties to Islamic fundamentalist parties at home, making any real curtailing of fundamentalism impossible. Some generals viewed 9/11 as an opportunity to carve out a permanent role for the army in the political system. They were not about to yield power to a bunch of squabbling civilian politicians. In the post-9/11 era, Washington’s sole objective was to catch al Qaeda leaders, and it asked for the Pakistan army’s cooperation. That suited Musharraf fine. He was not being asked simultaneously to rein in militants at home, democratize, or rebuild national institutions that would turn Pakistan away from the legacy of jihad the army had cultivated for three decades. As in Afghanistan, the Bush regime was demanding of Pakistan the very minimum—far short of the kind of nation building that was required.
For a brief moment Musharraf hinted that perhaps the army had seen the light and was cutting its umbilical cord with the Islamic extremists. “The writ of the government is being challenged,” he said in what would become his famous speech of January 12, 2002. “Pakistan has been made a soft state where the supremacy of law is questioned. This situation cannot be tolerated any longer.”
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Minutes after he had spoken, an excited Wendy Chamberlain, the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad, telephoned Colin Powell and told him that Musharraf had delivered everything the Americans had on their wish list. Powell immediately welcomed Musharraf’s “explicit statements against terrorism.”
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The army’s promised crackdown on militancy delighted most Pakistanis, and marked the highest point of Musharraf’s popularity. A poll by the U.S. State Department in February showed that 82 percent of Pakistanis supported the government’s decision to side with the United States, up from 64 percent in a poll taken after September 11. Seventy-nine percent of people voiced a good opinion of Musharraf, up from 57 percent in September.
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After the January 12 speech, Pakistanis began to look at what they had gained from the present crisis. The army faced an unprecedented opportunity to reform the country—if it wanted to do so. The war in Afghanistan had been mercifully short, the threatened inundation by Afghan refugees had receded, the Islamic parties had failed to muster public support outside the Pashtun areas, and Pakistan’s support to the United States was being rewarded with unprecedented aid and debt relief by the international community. The potential repercussions for Pakistan during the war could have been much more severe, but now the rewards were turning out to be life-saving.
Moreover, Pakistan’s Islamic groups were in disarray. Thousands of Pakistanis had been killed or wounded fighting for the Taliban, several thousand taken prisoner by the NA warlords and not to return home for another three years, while those who did return home alive were demoralized and disillusioned by their leaders. Senior clerics, retired ISI officers, and right-wing pundits who had filled the media with their predictions that the Americans would meet their Armageddon in Afghanistan, as had the former Soviet Union, were proved embarrassingly wrong. The ISI had told Musharraf that the Taliban would hang on until the spring of 2002 and then conduct guerrilla war from the mountains, but the Taliban had collapsed in just six weeks.