The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [44]
I begged my sources in the presidential palace to arrange an interview with Karzai, even showing up at a key official’s office one afternoon. The official was busy watching The Three Stooges.
Eventually Karzai let me shadow him for two days, but he wouldn’t sit down for an interview. I watched him in meeting after meeting. He was always folksy and cheery and slightly forced. He was in an impossible position. The elders complained of civilian casualties, the police complained of not having enough weapons. Karzai could not promise anything because he could deliver little. Instead, he whined about the foreigners. In one meeting, he sat at the head of a long table with sixty tribal elders from eastern Nangarhar Province, all angry that Karzai had removed the provincial border police commander. Karzai said he would try to help, but that he had to balance the needs of Afghans and the desires of foreigners.
“Do you agree with me?” Karzai asked. The room of turbaned men sat silently, arms folded, some obviously pouting. “Why are you quiet? Do you agree with me? Do you support me?”
“No!” several men shouted, not unless Karzai reversed his decision.
“You are the president,” one elder said. “You can do it. You should do it for us. Otherwise we will not support you.”
After another lunch, with elders from Uruzgan Province, Karzai showed what he really believed in—Afghan unity. He wanted people to consider themselves Afghans first, not Pashtuns, Tajiks, or the other major ethnic groups of Hazaras and Uzbeks. He called me to the front of the room as a stage prop.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Please come up here.”
Karzai always called me “ma’am.” I don’t know that he knew my name. He pointed to four elders from one Uruzgan district and asked me to identify their ethnicity. I was being set up, but I played along. “Pashtun?” I said. This made him happy because he could deliver his punch line. They were Pashtuns and Hazaras, he said, but they were all Afghans, men who lived side by side in peace, sharing the Pashto language.
“That’s how good this country was,” Karzai said. “That’s how we want to make it again.”
Performance over, I returned to my seat. But this idea of unity was not enough to save Afghanistan—not when Afghans still referred to themselves largely by ethnic group, not when the Pashtun-dominated Taliban insurgency was making inroads down south, and not when the Tajik-led Northern Alliance was accused of organizing the Kabul riots. No ethnic group held a clear majority in Afghanistan, even though the Pashtuns had run the show for almost three hundred years, a fact that had fueled resentment and rivalries. About 42 percent of Afghans were Pashtuns, mainly in the south, southwest, and east; about 27 percent of Afghans were Tajiks, mainly in the north; about 9 percent were Hazaras, mainly in central Afghanistan; about 9 percent were Uzbeks, mainly in the north; and the rest of the population was spread among smaller ethnic groups like the Aimak, Turkmen, and Baloch. (Those numbers, of course, were hotly disputed, each Afghan ethnic group always claiming a bigger pie piece. There had never been a census.)
To show who was boss, Karzai, a Pashtun, needed to do something more than an Afghan version of Free to Be … You and Me. He needed to take charge, to stop making excuses, to stop blaming the foreigners for everything. In short, he needed to man up.
Farouq and I decided to get out of Kabul and go to Kandahar, which doubled as the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban and Karzai’s home stomping grounds. As I listened to his plans, I realized that Farouq had not lost his edge. His wife, after all, had just given birth to a son, and he was still game for a road trip. He was just being careful—he had seen how quickly Afghanistan had taken a U-turn in the past, as quickly as a donkey outfitted with a suicide vest. Another journalist, my new housemate Tom, decided to come on our trip