The Great New Afghan Hope

By Tim McGirk/Chaman

At work last Thursday in the office of his headquarters, a huddle of mud huts in the southern Afghan desert, in Shahwalikot, Hamid Karzai had no reason to be concerned by the rumble of a B-52 bomber overhead. The Americans were his strong supporters. Just outside his window there were U.S. commandos working with anti-Taliban Pashtun fighters. Besides, he had plenty of other things on his mind. The night before, the soft-spoken Pashtun tribal leader had received word that he had been chosen as Afghanistan's interim Prime Minister by the U.N.-sponsored gathering of Afghan factions in Bonn, Germany. And that afternoon several high-ranking Taliban commanders were driving out to Shahwalikot to lay down conditions for their surrender of Kandahar, the last city in the Taliban's grip.

Even when the B-52 started circling overhead in a slow, white-tailed arc, Karzai was unperturbed. All morning U.S. bombers and fighter planes had been hammering Taliban positions several miles away at the Kandahar airport. Then suddenly Karzai's world blew apart. The mud walls of his office shook as if they were turning to dust, and the windows blasted in, cutting his face with flying glass. Just a few hundred yards away, a stray 2,000-lb. bomb from the American plane had slammed down. The same bomb killed three American servicemen, as well as seven Afghans, including two of Karzai's top lieutenants, and very nearly killed the man on whom the world has pinned its hopes for the immediate future of Afghanistan. "We were still picking up the wounded 1 1/2 hours later when the Taliban came," Karzai told TIME. "In those circumstances, you just try your best to function normally."

Karzai, 43, is good at keeping a cool head in extreme circumstances. He describes himself as "a politician, not a fighter." Educated partly in India, he speaks English fluently, as well as six other languages. Over his Afghan tunic he often wears a double-breasted blazer. But his quiet, reassuring manner masks the determination of a man single-mindedly intent on ousting the Taliban. After two sessions with the Taliban commanders last week, he secured the surrender of Kandahar, a city Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar once promised his fighters would defend to the death.

While the Taliban fled before the handover could take place, Karzai's diplomatic efforts suggest that the faith placed in him by the Bonn conference is well founded. Afghans who think that Afghanistan can be led only by battle-hardened fighters are skeptical of Karzai. But a country devastated by the misrule of warlords could do worse than be guided for a while by someone with the manner and judgment of a civilian. As an elder of the half-million-member Popolzai tribe in southern Afghanistan, he has leadership experience. Karzai's father was also chief tribal leader until July 1999, when the 75-year-old was shot to death on the street in the Pakistani city of Quetta, where father and son had both fled from the Taliban. The killing is presumed to have been carried out by Taliban agents. All but one of Karzai's siblings--he has six brothers and one sister--have built successful careers in business or academia in the U.S. Two Maryland-based brothers own Afghan restaurants in three states--named Helmand, after the province just west of Kandahar. Though he has visited the U.S. several times, on occasion meeting with high-ranking CIA, State Department and other government officials, Karzai has remained mostly in Afghanistan or in exile in Pakistan, embroiled in the tortured politics of his homeland.

"He has been the strongest foe of the Taliban," says Mahmood Karzai, 47, a brother living in Boston. "I always told him to leave Pakistan because I thought he was in danger, but he stayed because he is hardheaded." Unlike most Afghan men, who marry in their early 20s, Karzai remained a bachelor until just a couple of years ago. "Having a wife was not a priority to him," says Pat Karzai, who is married to Hamid's older brother Qayum in Baltimore. "He was only dedicated to Afghanistan." Family members say it was the final illness of his mother, who had expressed the wish to see him settled before she died, that led Karzai to marry at last, in January 1999. His wife Zinat is an obstetrician-gynecologist active in assisting refugees in Pakistan.

After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Karzai fled to Pakistan, where he built supply lines between anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas and American backers. When the mujahedin took power in 1992, he returned to serve for two years as Deputy Foreign Minister in the government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani. Disillusionment with the infighting of that regime led him to switch over, briefly, to the Taliban, which once tried to make him its U.N. ambassador, a post he declined. But Karzai, an Islamic moderate, soon turned against the Taliban's stringencies, especially its brutal restrictions on women, and returned to Pakistan. Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Karl Inderfurth, a friend of Karzai's, says that after the murder of his father, Karzai approached Washington with plans for leading resistance to the Taliban. "It did seem like a mission impossible," says Inderfurth, "because he'd be putting himself at great risk."

Karzai has never shied from risks. On Oct. 7 he slipped inside southern Afghanistan, heading first to his ancestral village of Karz, near Kandahar. From there he set off to the mountains of Oruzgan province, recruiting tribal elders to join an anti-Taliban coalition. It was not long before the Taliban got on his trail. He escaped ambush and certain death by calling in U.S. forces to rescue him by helicopter. The U.S. says it whisked him out of the country; he insists he never left--perhaps concerned about being seen as too close to the U.S. Since then, Karzai has been back in the mountains, while his Pashtun recruitment drive has picked up speed as one Taliban city after another has fallen to the Northern Alliance.

Having secured the peaceful fall of Kandahar, Karzai is heading up to the capital, Kabul. "That's where my focus is now," he says. When he formally takes charge there on Dec. 22, he will find his 30-member Cabinet assailed by regional warlords who were elbowed out in Bonn. Top of the list: Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum, who controls a big chunk of northern Afghanistan and who has already announced that the Uzbeks will boycott Karzai's government. Dostum is angry that the three most important government portfolios--Defense, Interior and Foreign Affairs--went to his Tajik rivals within the Northern Alliance. Another potential spoiler is Rabbani, the Alliance leader who was President from 1992 to 1996 but was excluded from the new government. Intelligence sources in Islamabad say that Rabbani's men, using money from Iran, are paying off Pashtun elders in the eastern regions to oppose both Karzai and the return of former King Mohammed Zahir Shah, 87, whom Karzai supports.

One notable element of Karzai's Cabinet is that it will include two women. Suhaila Seddiqi, a doctor in Kabul, will be the Minister of Public Health. Sima Samar, who works with a nongovernmental organization in Quetta, will be Minister of Women's Affairs, as well as one of Karzai's five deputies.

The Bonn plan calls for Karzai to stay in power for about six months, at which time a loya jirga, or tribal assembly, of 1,500 Afghans will meet to choose a transitional government. That government in turn will last about two years, during which a new constitution will be drawn up. Elections will follow. Until then, the U.N., the U.S. and Pakistan are counting on Karzai to be evenhanded in doling out $600 million in foreign aid and patching up tribal and ethnic grudges. It helps that Karzai knows all the major players, is fluent in all the local dialects and considers himself an Afghan first, a Pashtun second.

To succeed, Karzai must first persuade the warlords and defeated Taliban fighters to hand over their guns. The U.N. plans to have peacekeepers begin patrolling Kabul on Dec. 22, when Karzai's temporary government takes over; then they will fan out to other Afghan cities. But in Bonn, the negotiators were in such haste to secure an agreement that they never spelled out who would be empowered to disarm the Afghan combatants. "We need peace and security," Karzai says. "That's our first priority." Everyone, friend and foe alike, will be watching now to see if he is the man who can deliver them.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson/Washington, Ron Stodghill II/New York and Charles P. Wallace/Bonn

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson/ Washington, Ron Stodghill II/New York and Charles P. Wallace/Bonn