By Humayun Akhtar, CA
The talk of Kabul’s streets centered on the new leader’s allegiances: Is Karzai more loyal to American and UN interests? Can he really end decades of ethnic-driven violence?
A hero in the making?
For weeks, rumors have circulated about the whereabouts of Hamid Karzai. Some said he was in the mountains of Uruzgan province fighting for a new Afghanistan. Others laughed, saying Karzai, not known as a fighting man, was in a luxurious villa in Pakistan.
But, then came the news that a B-52 inadvertently attacked a group of Karzai’s fighters and US Special Forces assisting them. Three Americans and several Afghans died; Karzai was among the injured”. Thus, it took a US bomb to prove Karzai’s detractors wrong.
“I am fine,” Karzai said in a satellite telephone interview from northern Kandahar province. “I just have a scratch on my face. It’s God’s way and will.”
“Throughout the day”, according to The Washington Post, “after the mistaken strike, Karzai neglected to tell a series of well-wishers and reporters about it. Even his family, who called him on his satellite phone from Quetta, was left uninformed. “What happened to me doesn’t matter,” Karzai said. “What matters is the task that we have -- to make Afghanistan good again and to get rid of terrorism in Afghanistan.”
But what happens to Karzai obviously does matter. He is among the few leaders of the Pashtun ethnic group, acceptable to other groups as head of the interim government. His job will be to lead an effort to end the country’s crippling internal rivalries and repair the damage of more than two decades of war.
According to media reports, “The bombing was not Karzai’s first brush with death in the current war. In early November, during a trip into Afghanistan to try to foment rebellion by fellow Pashtuns, hundreds of Taliban fighters attacked his men in Uruzgan province. US forces helped save him. “And now this happened,” Karzai said, speaking of the bombing. “It really is God’s will.”
The 43-year-old son of an Afghan tribal leader, Karzai is bookish, balding and fluent in English, French, Urdu and Pushtu. He holds a moderate view of Islam and favors rights for women. He is known for a cosmopolitan air, often wearing double-breasted blazers over a traditional Afghan knee-length tunic.
By all accounts, he was not the first choice to lead Afghanistan. The former Mujahedin commander, Abdul Haq, was the front-runner before he was killed by the Taliban on an ill-fated venture into Afghanistan in late October.
Karzai grew up in Kandahar and Kabul, where his father was speaker of the parliament, then went to India where he earned two university degrees from Hamachal Pardesh University. He joined the fight against the invading Soviet army in the 1980s, serving as spokesman in Pakistan for a Mujahedeen group. After the rebels overthrew a pro-Soviet government in 1992, he served as deputy foreign minister.
Karzai’s supporters say he offers something missing in Afghanistan for years -- an internationally respected and savvy leader with friends in the United States and around the world. When Karzai was involved in the anti-Soviet movement in his country, he made several trips to the United States, meeting with high-ranking CIA and other government officials. But, people say his US links will not be taken by Afghans to mean he is not a nationalist -- almost every Afghan leader these days has had similar US connections, a legacy of the fight against the Soviets.
Hamid Karzai was an early supporter of the Taliban, whose movement gathered steam as an alternative to the internecine struggles of the Mujahedeen. But by late 1995, Karzai was alienated from the strict Islamic militia, as it banned education for girls and imposed other socially conservative rules. In 1996, he rejected a Taliban offer to be the movement’s UN ambassador.
Karzai moved to Quetta and began working to topple the Taliban. Afghan observers remember him from those days as a leader with big dreams and no way to achieve them. “He always had these plans of launching a tribal uprising in Southern Afghanistan. Lots of pipe dreams. He never seemed to grasp the art of the possible,” said one foreigner who used to share a guesthouse with Karzai in Islamabad, Pakistan.
But Karzai also cultivated a broad spectrum of Afghans. He jetted from Quetta to Islamabad to Europe and the United States, establishing good relations with the Afghan exiles. Karzai also maintained close ties with the Northern Alliance, the main force fighting the Taliban inside Afghanistan in recent years.
Many who know Karzai said he is better known for his political skills than his military talents. He is not a pure military general, but the son of a powerful tribal chief. His father, Abdul Ahad Karzai was head of Popolzai tribe in southern Afghanistan. He was assassinated in 1999, relatives believe, on orders of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
‘’He’s young, he’s educated, intelligent, and the person who will put the interests of the Afghan nation above every other thing,’’ said Abdullah Abdullah, a Northern Alliance leader who became foreign minister under the new interim government.
He supported the Taliban when it first emerged in the mid-1990s because he felt the Islamic fundamentalist regime was a better alternative to the country’s divisive warlords. But he and his family have remained strongly attached to Western ideas - that was part of his appeal to UN and US officials, who guided the talks in Bonn.
All but one of his eight siblings live in United States and several were educated there; Karzai himself has spent time in America. Since he quit the Mujahideen government in 1994, Karzai has not been in Kabul, the capital, though his family still owns a house there.
Ahmad Wali Karzai, one of Hamid’s younger brothers who now serves as his spokesman, said in an interview, with The Boston Globe, in the family home in the Pakistani border city of Quetta that his brother is ‘’honestly not the type who would like to be prime minister. His mission is to bring peace, stability, and unity to Afghanistan. Whether he’s asked to be prime minister or some servant, he would accept the role.’’
Three of his brothers graduated from Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, and Oxford University in England. Four brothers live in Maryland. Two of them own a chain of Afghan restaurants, including one in Cambridge called The Helmand. His sister, Fozia Karzia, lives in Malden and manages the Cambridge restaurant with her husband. The other two brothers are engineers. One teaches at a university on Long Island. The other, Abdul Wali Karzai, Hamid’s spokesman, has lived in Kandahar and Quetta since 1992.
Two years ago, Karzai married an Afghan doctor, Zinat, who is active in assisting refugees in Quetta. They have no children.
In an unusual move in a society in which women are seldom seen or heard, his wife, Zinat, consented to an interview with The Washington Post, published in the latest issue.
Zinat talked about women’s rights and her plans to resume her career as a obstetrician-gynecologist. Because of the family’s security concerns, those plans were put on hold after her father-in-law was assassinated. “I want to get back to work,” she said.
“All the Afghan people, especially women, suffered under the Taliban,” Zinat Karzai said this evening here in the modest two-story house that she and her husband have shared since their arranged marriage three years ago. “Personally, I will try to pursue this policy of improving women’s rights in Afghanistan. Education for women, work for women -- they are part of society.”
She said she disapproved of the burqa, a head-to-toe flowing veil that the Taliban forced all women to wear. She hoped her husband would give Afghan women the right to wear what they wanted. “I don’t wear a burqa,” she said, pointing to the white scarf she had wrapped around her jet-black hair.