An Inside Look at Hamid Karzai's Rising Woes

By Romesh Ratnesar, Aryn Baker/Kabul

Hamid Karzai is a hard man to see. Even for those who gain access to the Presidential Palace in Kabul, his office is nearly invisible, tucked into the corner of a two-story building and marked only by a plainclothes security guard who sits outside its wooden door holding a machine gun. The interior of the office is adorned with large Afghan rugs, cream-colored sofas and a marble fireplace; behind Karzai's desk is a bookcase that prominently displays the collected writings of George Washington. From the serenity of that perch, it's tempting to gaze down at the blossoming rose garden below and convince yourself that the war being waged to save Karzai's country is far, far away.

But in Afghanistan, peace is still an illusion. Minutes before we are ushered in to meet Karzai, a distant blast shakes the windows of the palace. When he opens the door, he's in a typically affable mood, joking with his advisers, offering visitors coffee and apologizing for having a cold. As Karzai sits down for the interview, Amrullah Saleh, the head of Afghan intelligence, appears. "The chief of the spooks! How are you--good?" Karzai asks. But he knows the news is bad. The two men retreat into a back room, where Saleh tells him that a suicide bombing near the U.S. embassy, about a mile away, has killed two U.S. soldiers and 14 Afghans. It is the worst attack in the capital since the fall of the Taliban five years before, and for a moment, Karzai becomes grim. "Afghanistan has been going through this suffering for a long time," he says, "and you get very angry. Each time you get angrier." So how does he cope when every day seems to bring more tragedy? Karzai sighs. "We're used to it," he says.

Since becoming Afghan leader nearly five years ago, Karzai has been the face, voice and guiding spirit of the new Afghanistan, an urbane antidote to the depraved rule of the Taliban. In 2004, bolstered by billions of dollars in Western aid and the firepower of 18,000 U.S. troops, Karzai won Afghanistan's first presidential election in a half-century. Since then, nothing has gone right. Taliban guerrillas have overrun swaths of territory in the south, sparking a battle for control with NATO forces that has left 55 Western troops dead in five weeks. Squabbles between Western military commanders and the Karzai government over antidrug policies have allowed poppy growth to reach an all-time peak. It's a sign of how much security has deteriorated in Kabul that Karzai's movements are as restricted as ever. In his meeting with TIME, Karzai's aides would not allow him to be photographed beyond the door of his office, for fear that his whereabouts could be exposed. "The palace is like a jail," says Shukria Barakzai, a member of Afghanistan's parliament and a Karzai ally. "The walls are so high that he has become distant from his own nation." That helps explain why, as hope fades and parts of the country drift into lawlessness, Afghans have started to direct their anger toward Karzai himself.

As the insurgency has intensified, so has carping about Karzai's failings--not just his physical remoteness but also his willingness to placate the country's warlords, his failure to take on government corruption, even his inability to get the traffic lights working in Kabul. The very qualities that catapulted Karzai to power and burnished his celebrity abroad--his flair, openness and old-world gentility--now seem to be exactly the wrong traits for a leader of a developing country at war with itself. "He brought a new face to Afghanistan by being nice to everybody," says Ahmad Nader Nadery, head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. "But as the challenges have multiplied, he's revealed weaknesses that we never could have expected." Jan Mohammed, an adviser to Karzai and former provincial governor, is more blunt. "Kindness will not help him. If Karzai does not get stronger, it will be difficult for him to run the country."

Karzai isn't naturally imposing. In person, his slight frame, drawn countenance and trimmed white beard make him look a decade older than his 48 years. "If I adopt a style of not consulting, and of doing it alone, the country will not have the kind of harmony it has today," he says. "My problem is perhaps that I'm too much of a democrat for this time of the country's life. If you need a dictator, then go to the Afghan people. Let them elect a dictator. I am not one of those." Of course, what Karzai and his Western benefactors know is that the alternative to a democratically elected Afghan leader isn't despotism--it's all-out anarchy. "If Karzai isn't there," says Jamil Karzai, a member of parliament and second cousin of the President, "forget about democracy. Forget about human rights. Forget about Afghanistan." The dilemma is that even if Karzai is the wrong man for the job, he is also the only one who can do it.

Karzai says, "What the world should see is the desire of the Afghan people, not the problems we have along the way." A first-time visitor to Kabul is struck by the relative normality of the place, the absence of the barbed wire, blast walls and paranoia that have become familiar in Baghdad. The roads bustle with traffic--the number of cars in Kabul has tripled since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Garish new building projects loom over some of Kabul's oldest, poorest slums, dramatizing the extent to which the country is beginning to emerge from decades of underdevelopment. A late-afternoon walk through Shar-i-Naw Park offers a glimpse of the country's transformation: while Afghan boys play volleyball and girls mingle uncovered by burqas, local men gather with a member of parliament to voice complaints about the government. Although small-bore, all of those activities happen every day; none were tolerated by the Taliban.

So much for the good news. Venture outside Kabul, and the reality of the country's blight becomes overwhelming. Sixty percent of the country is still without electricity, 80% without potable water. Unemployment hovers around 40%. The absence of credible police and consistent government services in rural areas has created vacuums that are being filled by an array of antigovernment forces: Islamists in the south, '80s-era warlords in the west and drug runners in the north. Meanwhile, the fighting between coalition troops and the Taliban has halted new reconstruction projects and undermined the impact of finished ones. Only half the aid pledged to the country since 2001 has been distributed, and violence has rendered the road from Kabul to Kandahar--until now, the U.S.'s biggest reconstruction success--impassable.

The 20,000 U.S. troops that have until now been largely focused on hunting al-Qaeda are turning toward nation building. Not a week goes by without the launch of a new school, road, medical clinic or water project, but those successes are overshadowed by reports of schools burning and teachers being assassinated.

Few Afghans blame Karzai for the rise of the insurgency. They're more likely to share his view that culpability for the Taliban's resurgence lies with Pakistan, for harboring the movement's leaders (a charge Pakistan denies), and with the U.S., for not committing sufficient troops to fight them. In a visit to Kabul last week, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf vowed to do more to curb the support the insurgents receive from their brethren, but Karzai has yet to be convinced. "That is what I want the international community to focus on," he says.

However, ordinary Afghans do criticize Karzai and his government for failing to improve anything else. The most common complaint is the pervasiveness of official corruption. Karzai says he has addressed the problem by appointing a new attorney general and a chief justice, but no one expects results. Electrician Shapoor Malik Zada, 42, says he doesn't have electricity in his house because he refused to pay the $140 in extra "fees" to hook up his connection a few months ago. Now, he says, a standard bribe runs $600. (The average annual income is about $300 per capita.) Another man, Samiullah, 24, says the price for obtaining a driver's license has doubled in the past two months. "Now that the government says it is fighting corruption," he says, "everyone is trying to get as much money as they can."

It's debatable whether Karzai deserves blame for such abuses, since low-level graft has been a fact of life in Afghanistan, as in most poor countries, for decades. But it's indisputable that Karzai has been slow to expel corrupt government officials, nor has he taken on the warlords, many of whom helped overthrow the Taliban but also have records of drug trafficking and human-rights abuses. Far from being sidelined in the new Afghanistan, militia leaders have won seats in parliament and landed jobs in the Presidential Palace. Human-rights commissioner Nadery says the government's coddling of widely loathed strongmen is fueling resentment that the Taliban has managed to exploit. "There's a strong relationship between this policy of accommodating bad guys and the increase in the insurgency," he says. "In places like Kandahar, I see huge differences from what I saw a year ago. Last year we had the active support of the tribal leaders against the Taliban. But now they see the kind of people in power, and they've become convinced that the government won't help them either."

Karzai vigorously defends his decision to work with the warlords. "They have done a service to their country," he says. "We can't shun those who have served this country and throw them into nothing. That will bring us into another form of instability. My job here is to try to move forward, keeping this very delicate jar of the Afghan peace process and reconstruction and institution building in my hands, through troubled waters ... Along the way I may have to do things that some in the international community may not like. But I have my Afghan judgment, and that is what I use."

Those who have worked with Karzai say he can be generous to a fault with other Afghans, answering his own phones and holding listening sessions with dozens of tribal leaders in the palace every day. But those meetings often come at the expense of serious policy analysis, and Afghans and Western officials say Karzai's avuncular, consensus-building approach is ill suited to a time when what the country needs most is decisive action--not just against the Taliban and the drug lords but also against unaccountable, rogue officials who are undermining faith in the country's nascent democracy. "He does move too slowly," says a Western official in Kabul. "He is a ditherer. He's not always wrong, and he is doing better ... It's not like things aren't happening." The official adds, "But we still have a national government without broad-based institutions of governance across the country. So this is going to be really hard and slow."

Even those critical of Karzai sympathize with the demands he faces: working 14-hour days, he hasn't taken a vacation in five years. Karzai's burdens are compounded by his isolation. He rarely leaves his compound, although he says he recently slipped out of the palace in an unmarked car to press the flesh in Kabul. For all his ebullience, he can't help sounding weary from having to shoulder so much of the responsibility, and the blame, for Afghanistan's turbulent rebirth. "Our expectations were too high. My own expectations were too high," he says. "We came, we thought the neighbors were going to be good with us, that terrorism was gone, that everybody was cooperating, that the little politics around the region were no longer there to sabotage the process." Karzai adds, "You can't imagine how dispirited this country was. How miserable it had become. Unbelievable. When you go to the country, to the mountains where I was fighting the Taliban, I came across families and people who had nothing on earth. Nothing. We have to provide them a better life."

The next Afghan presidential election is in 2009, and Karzai has said he doesn't plan to run again. But he hedged on that vow at the end of our interview. "If there is an alternative three years from now that I can be comfortable with, who is patriotic, good and deserves to be elected, I would definitely quit in his favor." That's hard to imagine, both because of Karzai's ambitions and because the country's survival depends on the international support that only Karzai can guarantee. But sooner or later, both will run out. Karzai's biggest test, and his country's, will come when he is gone.