Hamid Karzai: Flailing Incompetent or Afghan Proteus ?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

A reporter for a “respectable” daily described Hamid Karzai’s recent statements about election stealing as evidence of some sort of “flailing around.”   I always worry when words like this appear in a news item.  The reported phenomenon comes across as under-analyzed at best.  The term“senseless” that is so familiar from descriptions of terrorist actions has the same effect.  Either the writer can’t understand what he/she is writing about or he/she disapproves of it. 

A suicide bombing may be evil or self-defeating or misguided or (in the happiest cases) unsuccessful, but it’s always the consequence of motivation or intention, which makes it anything but senseless.  The destruction of the World Trade towers was brutal and despicable, among other things; but it certainly wasn’t senseless, although the term turns up frequently in that context.  Perhaps ordinary horror-averse observers feel  more comfortable with the idea of ghastly behavior as vapidly mindless rather than ruthlessly intended.  But reporters should be less timorous.

As for Hamid Karzai, he has never come across as the ideal president of a country I would like to call home.  But surely he would be dead by now,  if he were so mentally confused as to be flailing around.  No doubt he has issued conflicting statements about current status quo in Afghanistan.  But who could possibly believe he is unaware of the  contradictions?  And how could anyone with a grasp of Afghan realities imagine that he is not sending signals in a very calculating way?  He’s fishing.  Who’ll bite?  How hard? 

In short: which way is the wind blowing?  U.S. protestations notwithstanding, the situation in Marjah is not entirely rosy.  And I have no trouble believing that Karzai will cut a deal with the Taliban, if the terms are right.  The Taliban may not be nice, but they’re Afghan rascals, unlike Americans, who are aliens, pure and simple, although too powerful to bush aside like flies.  Finally, there’s this: a shape-shifting protean persona is a tricky target.  Aping Proteus is a time-test survival strategy.

I confess I have my own vision of what an ideal Afghanistan would be like.  Above all, the situation for women would be a thousand times better than that which obtained during the Tailban heyday in Kabul.  But my preferences are irrelevant.  Hamid Karzai surely has essentially two things in mind.  His own short term survival—and a post-American Afghanistan consistent with Afghan identity and history, especially one in which he and his clan play a significant role in running things the Afghan (not the American) way,  which necessarily  involves allocating power among clans and ethnic groups.  Hence the war lords.  Hence the position of power that his brother enjoys in Kandahar.  Who, among American policy makers, ever imagined that Karzai would sack his own brother? Even if Karzai himself is not profiting from the opium trade, a man who undercuts his own brother is not a man who is going to be trusted by others in Afghanistan.

Some non-Afghan writers seem to grasp these complexities.  A piece by David Ignatius in the Washington Post includes the following bit:

Karzai has caused consternation among Americans recently because of his defiantly independent rhetoric and his invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Kabul. His tirade Thursday against meddling by the United States and its allies will deepen that concern. But it's not surprising that he's bristling against U.S. pressure to reform or dickering with his Iranian neighbor. Politics in this part of the world is a contact sport, and we shouldn't be afraid of Afghan expressions of sovereignty.

Still, for all its glimmering of insight, this article is much  too focused on the American point of view.  It’s doubtful that Karzai’s reception of Ahmadinejad was mere “expression.”  I think it represented a calculated policy on Karzai’s part—to keep options open, to provide for alternative futures, to claim a player’s role in the neighborhood—even, perhaps,  to show Americans their proper place as temporary intruders on a much contested  territory.

Another  piece, this one by an ex-Indian diplomat writing for the Asia Times on Line, also suggests that Karzai is (and must be) a very adept political dancer.  A certain jaded Indian perspective on Pakistani machinations infuses the article, but M.K. Bhadrakumar gives Karzai credit for more acuity than most American writers do.  I recommend a top-to-bottom reading, but these passages are representative:

Karzai has excellent networking with the tribal channels and with Peshawar-based Pashtun nationalists. A genuine national reconciliation becomes possible since Karzai can act as a bridge between the Taliban and the virulently anti-Taliban "warlords". On the other hand, the backing of the "warlords" ensures that Karzai does not get overwhelmed by the Taliban. This is important as the Taliban today are the single-best organized force in the country, whereas Karzai lacks muscle power on his own without the backing of the "warlords."
   
    Quintessentially, Karzai has resorted to what can only be called the "united front" strategy, to use the Marxist-Leninist parlance. He is probably on the right course, and in any case he has no other choice because he cannot hold out indefinitely against the full weight of the Pakistani "deep state" bent on demolishing him.

  And:

Karzai is an able politician with acute survival instincts, and he is not a woolly headed romantic who fancies that he can get away with strategic defiance of the US, which has staked its global prestige and that of the entire Western alliance in the war in the Hindu Kush.

Obama should distinguish that it is the ISI and the Pakistani military whom Karzai (and the "warlords") considers to be his adversaries. His frustration is that the Americans are either far too naive to comprehend what is going on or are dissimulating since they are pursuing some "hidden agenda" in relation to the geopolitics of the region....

Karzai's alienation is widely shared by the Afghan elites in both Kabul and Peshawar. A grand tribal jirga was recently held in Peshawar just ahead of the US-Pakistan strategic dialogue of March 24, and was widely attended by noted Pashtun intellectuals, tribal leaders, politicians, professionals, civil society members, women's groups and representatives of established political parties of the North-West Frontier Agency.The jirga issued the Peshawar Declaration, a statement which cautioned Washington that the root causes of terrorism lie in the Pakistani military establishment's "strategic depth" mindset and the Arab expansionism embodied by the al-Qaeda under the garb of global Islam.

It made an impassioned plea not to leave the helpless Pashtuns of the tribal agencies and the North-West Frontier Province at the mercy of the Pakistani army and the intelligence agencies.
   
In the prevailing circumstances, Karzai has no option but to turn toward Tehran for understanding and support. The Iranians have a profound understanding of the Afghan chessboard and can grasp the raging storms in the mind of the Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line.

Would that our journalists and our policy makers in Washington had as profound an understanding of the dynamics of the situation.