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Unfortunately, I had planned a real vacation between Christmas and New Year’s Eve for the first time in years. I was supposed to go to California for a friend’s wedding. I had even bought a ticket.

“Nothing’s gonna happen after Christmas,” I told my boss.

“I’m not even going to respond to that,” he said.

“But I’m supposed to be on vacation.”

“We’ll see.”

Until his verdict, I worked. While Samad and I were about ninety minutes outside Lahore one afternoon, reporting on how the main Jamaat-ud-Dawa campus was up and running despite Pakistani claims to have shuttered the charity, I glanced at my BlackBerry. Farouq had written an e-mail. He was slightly hurt because I hadn’t told him I was coming to Afghanistan the next day to interview President Karzai. I called him.

“What interview with Karzai?”

“I heard you had an interview with Karzai.”

“No. I’ve repeatedly asked for one. But they haven’t told me anything.”

Farouq, helping the New York Times with the kidnapping of its reporter, said a photographer told him I had an interview with Karzai.

“What? No. I think they would have told me.”

We hung up. I thought for a minute. I had been pushing for an interview for months, relying primarily on my good friend Barack Obama. My argument went like this: Obama was probably going to be president. Obama thought Afghanistan was really, really important. Obama was a U.S. senator from Illinois. I worked for his hometown newspaper. Therefore, the president of Afghanistan should talk to me. Now that Obama had actually been elected, this ridiculously thin argument may have actually worked. It would be a coup—Karzai had granted very few interviews in recent months. I called Karzai’s spokesman, aware of the government’s incompetence.

“Do I have an interview with Karzai tomorrow?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Maybe someone should have told me.”

“I thought I did,” he said. “I sent you a note on Facebook.”

“I didn’t get it.”

“Sorry about that,” he said, although he clearly wasn’t. “Can you be here at noon?”

“No. I’m in Pakistan, and I’m in the middle of nowhere, Pakistan. I think it’s highly unlikely I could get there by noon.”

“How’s four?”

I said I’d check. The morning flight to Kabul was sold out, but my travel agent, a friend, promised to get me on the plane if I could make it back to Islamabad. Samad drove us back the six hours, pulling into the capital before midnight. The next morning, he rushed me to the Afghan embassy where I picked up a visa in a record fifteen minutes.

After a quick flight and a harried attempt at scribbling questions, I was ushered in to see Karzai, who looked tired and gray, a dehydrated version of his earlier self.

“It’s nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said, standing to shake my hand.

I didn’t tell him that we’d met before. Our interview was strange and rambling, and Karzai jumped from subject to subject, failing to take any responsibility for all that had gone wrong in his country. He blamed the U.S.-led coalition for hiring “thugs or warlords or whatever,” and then going with “those thugs to the homes of hundreds of elders and community people,” which “frightened them into running away from Afghanistan.” I had a hard time understanding exactly what Karzai meant. At some points, he seemed distracted. His voice occasionally went up several pitches—when he said “high time,” the “high” sounded a good sixteen notes higher than “time.” His face twitched continually, evidence of an attack on him years earlier. Karzai made sense when he talked about the failures of the international community—they didn’t understand the damage from civilian casualties, didn’t train the police, didn’t focus enough on militant sanctuaries in Pakistan. But he seemed completely oblivious to his own failures, except that he had been too soft with his initial complaints to the international community. His points on the Taliban were just bizarre. He wanted to negotiate with the Taliban but didn’t know where to find them.

“I try to find them, I keep sending them messages, I don’t know their address,” he told me. “That is another