By 2009, the Arg Palace in Wazir Akbar Khan, where President Hamid Karzai lived, had recovered some of its grace from the degraded years of Taliban occupation. Palace staff tended the eighty-three-acre grounds, which held gardens, a pond, a mosque, and a parade ground. The staircase up from the main entrance displayed polished calligraphy inscribing “Allah” in gold script, ninety-nine different ways. The complex still contained a private residence for Karzai and his family. It also had to accommodate his official office, other offices for aides, and scores of security personnel. Karzai remained subject to a benign form of house arrest because of the risks of traveling outside. Kabul had evolved into a smoky, militarized city hunkered behind blast walls and razor wire. Tajiks in diverse hats wearing perpetual five o’clock shadows waved cars through checkpoints with the muzzles of their assault rifles. From his gardens Karzai could hear car horns, helicopter rotors, and the occasional distant thud of a suicide bomber.1
In his private quarters, the greatest change in Karzai’s life was the arrival of his first son, Mirwais, born in 2007 to his wife, Zeenat. She was his first and only wife; Karzai had married her relatively late in life. Mirwais plainly brought joy to Karzai. Yet the president increasingly seemed a man who suffered. He was often ill with colds and sinus ailments. He kept vials of pills and vitamins nearby during his endless meetings. He struggled to eat enough, sometimes ordering cakes that he would finish off eagerly.2
Karzai had a soft, sentimental side. He read poetry. His British interlocutors catered to his fondness for an imagined England of warm beer and immaculate cricket pitches. The British ambassador once delivered a boxed set of Karzai’s favorite television series, Last of the Summer Wine, a long-running middlebrow comedy about three friends in an English town.3
To relieve stress, Karzai would spend hours walking in the Arg gardens. It was little wonder that he displayed signs of agitation, given his constricted circumstances. Yet by 2009 Karzai’s mood swings had become so visible and intense that it was no longer plausible to explain them merely as manifestations of cabin fever. The British government circulated reports that Karzai had been treated for psychological issues in Quetta and India earlier in his life, but the State Department could not document these accounts. In any event, there was no need for a medical record to confirm Karzai’s volatility.
The president’s inner circle by now consisted mainly of Pashtun technocrats dependent upon his patronage, men with no substantial popular constituencies of their own. They included Rangin Spanta, who had fled to Germany during the Soviet war, where he became a professor of political science and an activist in the Green Party before returning after 2001. There was Zalmai Rassoul, another foreign affairs adviser, who had become a medical doctor in France during his years of exile, before joining Karzai. There was Hanif Atmar, a capable administrator who had connections with the Communist regime during the Cold War and later worked at a Norwegian nongovernmental organization. Rahim Wardak, a general who defected to the mujaheddin during the Soviet war, served as Karzai’s minister of defense. Umer Daudzai, a former administrator at the United Nations Development program, was his chief of staff. The Panjshiris who were still in Karzai’s orbit, such as Amrullah Saleh at N.D.S. and Ahmad Zia Massoud, the first vice president of Afghanistan, saw the president less frequently, in formalized cabinet meetings or at national security briefings. The sense among them was that U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad’s project to consolidate power for Karzai in 2004 had turned out to be a kind of ethnic putsch, reducing Tajik influence and elevating dependent Pashtuns around the president. Among the endless parade of foreign ambassadors and generals seeking Karzai’s time, he often favored the Indians and the Turks, although he had little choice but to accommodate the relentless Americans.
Karzai raged openly at his aides, even in the presence of foreign visitors. His behavior became so bad that his aides and ministers arranged to discuss the problem at the compound of Kai Eide, the Norwegian diplomat who was the U.N. representative to Afghanistan. They were concerned that Karzai was sabotaging Afghanistan’s relationship with the United States at a time when the country needed the alliance to survive and advance. In the garden, they asked, “What can we do with the President? We must stop this.”4
They urged Eide to help. He wasn’t sure he could. Eide counseled Karzai to raise his concerns about American conduct of the war in a less confrontational way, but as Karzai came to fear treachery by the Obama administration during the first half of 2009, he grew angrier and angrier.5
The president’s aides were sympathetic, up to a point. They agreed that the international media and the United States had mistreated Karzai. As one minister put it, Karzai went “from an Afghan Mandela” in 2002 to “an Afghan Mugabe” in 2007. That was not fair. But during 2009, Karzai’s own conduct crossed new lines.
“If we can’t run the government, we should bring the Taliban back—to punish both the Americans and the Panjshiris,” Karzai declared one day to this minister, as he recalled it.
Mirwais happened to be with them. “Do you want this boy to grow up under a Taliban regime?” the minister asked. “I don’t want that for my son.”
They took a walk in the palace gardens. “Mr. President,” the minister said, “yes, I believe the United States was not fair to you. But they bring some good things. We should take some responsibility, too, for the things we have done wrong.”
If the Kabul government collapses, he continued, “the U.S. will not be threatened, but we will be wiped out.”6
In the first half of 2009, Karzai’s principal goal was to be reelected president. The best evidence of his sanity was his tactical skill in service of this ambition. He maneuvered deftly to sideline potential rivals, one by one, without revealing his own designs until it was absolutely necessary. He seemed particularly worried about Gul Agha Sherzai, whom he feared Obama had anointed.
That spring, Karzai summoned Sherzai to the palace and demanded he withdraw from the presidential contest. Karzai’s “tone changed from diplomatic to angry to desperate to threatening,” as a U.S. embassy report put it. “The suddenness of his mood swings reportedly left most guests silent.” Sherzai resisted Karzai’s demand at first but then relented because he calculated “that Karzai’s extreme behavior foreshadowed the lengths to which he would bully his competition.”7
The American government increasingly regarded Karzai’s psychology as a subject for all-source intelligence analysis. Greg Vogle, the reticent C.I.A. paramilitary fighter who had accompanied Karzai into Afghanistan in 2001, argued that the matter was not overly complicated: Karzai was a proud Afghan loyal to family, tribe, and country who felt profoundly disrespected. The National Intelligence Council circulated more elaborate analysis drawing on the work of Jennifer Lerner, a psychologist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who specialized in “decision science,” and particularly the effect of stress and emotion on judgment. She documented that anger on the job may cause leaders to make riskier decisions. In Karzai’s case, stress interacted with the president’s increasingly independent-minded beliefs about Afghan history and regional geopolitics, the N.I.C. analysis held.8
Taliban propaganda constantly compared Karzai to Shah Shuja Durrani, a nineteenth-century Afghan king installed on the throne by imperial Britain. After the British withdrew from Afghanistan, Shuja was assassinated. There was also the example of President Najibullah, the Soviet client of the 1980s who had been hanged by the Taliban in the streets of Kabul after the Soviet Union collapsed. Particularly after 2008, Karzai worried acutely that civilian casualties caused by American air strikes and the deaths and arrests that took place during American Special Forces night raids would leave him badly exposed before the Afghan people, particularly before his own southern Pashtuns—another Shuja or Najibullah, complicit with the United States, the imperial power of his day. Karzai criticized the Pentagon about civilian casualties and night raids in public to establish credibility in an election year. He sometimes told American diplomats that this was all he was doing, that they should not take his rhetoric too seriously. This led some American policy makers at a remove from Kabul to conclude that Karzai was entirely in control of what he was doing, that his volatile moods were merely political theater. He was “not off his meds,” as one senior Obama administration official put it, noting the consistency of Karzai’s complaints about civilian casualties. “He was on his three-by-five card,” repeating talking points.9 But many Afghan aides and international diplomats who knew Karzai more intimately in Kabul thought that he was both tactically savvy and emotionally unstable.
Karzai believed that the United States might be an unreliable ally, even as Obama dispatched tens of thousands more soldiers to fight and possibly die on his behalf. In Karzai’s thinking, Afghanistan was an essential prize in a new Great Game, as the nineteenth-century struggle by imperial powers for influence in South Asia was called. Afghanistan, Karzai thought, had now become a vital part of American schemes of worldwide power projection, a foothold for the United States to challenge Russia and China in the twenty-first century. This was an inflated, inaccurate understanding of Afghanistan’s importance to the United States. In fact, although bipartisan elites in Washington believed in 2009 that it was both morally right and in the national interest to try to suppress the Taliban and establish stability and security in Afghanistan, they did not see a vital geostrategic interest in Afghan geography, beyond counterterrorism. The United States had more stable, accommodating allies of long standing in the Persian Gulf, particularly Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, which provided air and naval bases. Having a few bases in Afghanistan would allow the United States to launch helicopter or drone attacks inside Pakistan, which was not possible from the Gulf, but it was not clear how important that would be over decades. Karzai, however, interpreted the continuing American intervention in his country as evidence of the latest imperial landgrab in Central Asia. He was trapped by his position as the head of a weak client state, unwilling to be a stooge in an American colony but unable to stand on his own. He also believed by the spring of 2009 that the United States had tired of him and wanted to remove him from power. On this point he was on firmer ground.10
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It was in late 2008, as Zalmay Khalilzad served as the expiring Bush administration’s ambassador to the United Nations, that G.C.H.Q., the British eavesdropping agency, first began to document calls Khalilzad was making to warlords and politicians around Afghanistan. Khalilzad was sizing up who might be interested in running for president in the summer of 2009, besides Karzai. It seemed unmistakable from the intercept transcripts that the former American ambassador to Kabul was exploring whether to run himself.
As an intelligence matter, it was an awkward situation. Under U.S. law, the National Security Agency was not supposed to seek out or report on the communications of “U.S. persons,” meaning citizens or permanent residents, unless there was specific evidence of the person’s connection to terrorism, espionage, or the like. The British were under no such restrictions. To defer to U.S. rules, however, when Britain shared intercepts involving Americans, the reports would typically leave out the overheard person’s name, substituting “[U.S. Person]” instead. In this case, however, it was obvious from the context of the intercepts that the speaker was a high-ranking American diplomat based in New York with rich connections in Afghanistan. Just about everyone with access to such compartmented intelligence who was following Afghanistan knew Zalmay Khalilzad personally or by reputation. They could readily guess that he might be exploring a presidential run. If the United States wanted to dump Karzai and install a successor more firmly allied with American priorities, why not choose Khalilzad, who had already served successfully as a kind of viceroy in Kabul between 2003 and 2005?11
Karzai knew, too, about Khalilzad’s telephone conversations. Many of the ministers and aides with whom Khalilzad spoke reported to the president about them, to protect themselves from allegations of treachery. When confronted privately, Khalilzad insisted that his probes were being misunderstood. He wasn’t going to run. He had become an informal counselor to Doug Lute at the National Security Council. Khalilzad’s exclusive back-channel reporting during visits to Kabul and over the telephone about who was in or out of the presidential sweepstakes provided unique insight to the White House. Even so, it was quite possible, many who knew Zal agreed, that the purpose of his calls was not just to feed the White House timely analysis but also to try to decide whether to throw his hat in.
“Watching Khalilzad,” as a headline in a cable from the U.S. embassy in Kabul that spring put it, became an awkward subdivision of the intrigue surrounding Karzai’s reelection bid. “Despite former U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad’s statements that he will not run, his activities and those of his supporters are watched carefully by the political class” in Afghanistan, the cable noted. While meeting with Afghan political figures, Khalilzad seemed to be trying “to persuade opposition figures to withdraw their candidacy to unite behind one candidate” to take on Karzai. Who did Khalilzad have in mind? He did not say.12
He was such an operator, had such a transparent love of political games, that he did not necessarily require a master plan—it would be enough to be in the mix, talking and playing the politics forward, to see where it all led. Karzai, for his part, believed that such a well-known representative of the United States would never consider running for president in Afghanistan without at least the tacit support of the U.S. leadership. By late spring, the situation was becoming clearer. The Obama administration—or, more precisely, Richard Holbrooke—clearly wanted Karzai out. He was neither for nor against Khalilzad. Holbrooke’s attitude, recalled an adviser, was “the more people who challenge Karzai the better.”13
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David Miliband, the British foreign minister, and Sherard Cowper-Coles, now his special representative on Afghanistan, tried to convince Holbrooke early in 2009 that the presidential election should be postponed indefinitely and perhaps scrubbed altogether in favor of a new loya jirga, or traditional grand assembly. They argued that they were fighting a counterinsurgency campaign on behalf of a president who did not appear to have an adequate democratic mandate. The British advisers involved had divided views, but the most radical strain of thought held that the Bonn constitution ratified five years earlier should be reconsidered, to reduce the power of the presidency and strengthen the parliamentary and executive function of the cabinet, among other changes. This might allow Karzai to evolve into a symbolic and unifying role, akin to the former king of Afghanistan or the current queen of England or the president of India. That might in turn provide a face-saving way to remove Karzai from his position as the linchpin of N.A.T.O. ambitions in Afghanistan and allow more capable technocrats to run the government.
Holbrooke didn’t want Karzai to return either and he appeared intrigued by the British proposal, but Hillary Clinton ruled the idea out. She did not want to be seen as interfering with the Afghan constitution. Beyond that, Clinton never fully bought the British argument that Karzai wasn’t the right man and seemed to have a soft spot for him. She was always trying to understand his point of view. The British ended up in the “worst of all worlds,” as one official involved put it, where their government was known privately to want Karzai gone (Holbrooke told Karzai as much, they believed), causing him to harbor even more of a grudge and more of a fantasy about perfidious Britain than he held already. Yet London lacked a plausible path to remove Karzai without American partnership.14
Holbrooke seemed to believe he could find a candidate who could defeat Karzai in the summer election, or at least use the specter of such a candidate to pressure Karzai to improve his governance. Holbrooke’s methodology—diplomacy as jazz improvisation—in this instance threatened only to alienate Karzai and motivate his network of allies to generate fraudulent votes as a defense against any American scheme to overthrow him by ballot. In fact, Holbrooke had no rigorous plan for a successful electoral coup d’état. Nor did he have formal White House backing for his improvisations or any interagency plan to try to promote an opposition figure in the election. Some of the officials working with Holbrooke thought that he might have tacit backing from the White House, but Jim Jones, the national security adviser, thought it was clear that Obama opposed such maneuvering. Whatever his reasoning, Holbrooke repeatedly and indiscreetly told journalists in Washington that Karzai was “incompetent,” that aides such as Ashraf Ghani or Hanif Atmar would govern the country much more effectively. Karzai said at one point that he had obtained accounts of a meeting between Holbrooke and Ghani during which Holbrooke said there “should be a change” in Afghan leadership, that the new president should be someone “with experience,” and that Ghani should run.
“Before we took office everything was Bush’s fault, but since we’ve been in government, everything is Karzai’s fault,” Barnett Rubin, a political scientist specializing in Afghanistan whom Holbrooke brought in as an adviser, remarked half jokingly that spring.
“You’re learning,” Holbrooke answered.15
In Kabul, Holbrooke asked Kai Eide, “Can we live with Karzai for another five years? Who would be the best candidate to replace Karzai?” Holbrooke answered his own question by mentioning Hanif Atmar as a possibility. He said that he intended to speak with Atmar about getting in the race. Atmar declined, and Eide guessed that Karzai learned about the solicitation before the day was out.
A little later, Eide ran into Ahmad Zia Massoud, the late commander’s brother. “I must be the only person in Kabul whom Holbrooke has not invited to challenge Karzai for the presidency,” Massoud remarked.16
Early in April, Holbrooke flew in to Kabul again and made an appointment to see Karzai at the Arg. Holbrooke asked the reception room to be cleared of Karzai’s aides. He raised the issue of Karzai’s half brother in Kandahar, Ahmed Wali, the notorious C.I.A. ally, typically referred to as “A.W.K.,” who was “widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker,” as U.S. embassy reporting put it.
He had to go, Holbrooke insisted. “He’s hurting you,” he said. “He’s holding you back” because of his visible involvement in racketeering.
“Everybody always says this,” Karzai answered, “but nobody ever shows me evidence.” He refused to budge.17
Despite his disillusioning early experiences in Vietnam, Holbrooke embraced an essential premise of counterinsurgency doctrine as applied to Afghanistan in 2009: It should be possible to reduce corruption and improve the effectiveness of the Karzai government in a matter of five years and, by doing so, suppress the Taliban’s appeal and stabilize the country. Removing A.W.K. was just one plank in that campaign. Holbrooke’s engagement with counterinsurgency doctrine that spring was complex. He was confident from experience that the war could not be won militarily. He believed, as he once told aides, that the military escalation David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal were promoting constituted “a national goal that we cannot achieve but that people will die for.”18 Yet he did not have President Obama’s ear. Within the national security cabinet that spring, Petraeus, running all American military forces from Pakistan to Egypt, from Central Command, was the dominant figure. Holbrooke did not have the clout to successfully oppose a four-star general-hero’s promotion of counterinsurgency doctrine, so he rode along, seeking to create space for himself as a notional Petraeus ally. His boss, Hillary Clinton, obviously retained presidential ambitions; for that reason alone, she was unlikely to defy Petraeus at a time when his ideas seemed triumphant and his popularity looked unassailable. Besides, the emerging plans for counterinsurgency in Afghanistan included a call for a “civilian surge” from the State Department in parallel to a military escalation, a form of diplomatic activism that Clinton favored. Given his constrained mandate as special representative, tackling the Karzai problem seemed to Holbrooke a way to make concrete progress and establish his own authority within “his lane,” as Washington phraseology put it.
Over breakfast with Eide at one point, Holbrooke insisted, “I know how to handle Karzai.”19
Yet as summer arrived Holbrooke’s encouragement of opposition candidates remained unconnected to any plan by which one of them could win. It did not require secret information to discern that Karzai’s backers were preparing to commit fraud to reelect him. Taliban violence all but assured that voting in Karzai’s southern and eastern strongholds would be suppressed compared with the north of the country, where Karzai’s last-standing, most plausible rival, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, drew his greatest strength. Abdullah was of mixed ethnic heritage, and although he was associated with the factionalism of the Northern Alliance, he was educated, dignified, and able to speak to a wider narrative of Afghan nationalism. Between his general appeal and the fact that his strongholds were more peaceful, and therefore easier to vote in, than Karzai’s, the president’s allies faced a problem. The situation was clearly tempting southern and eastern governors loyal to Karzai to boost his position through fraud and manipulation. As early as February 2009, Martine van Bijlert of the nongovernmental Afghanistan Analysts Network published an extensive white paper reporting that an updated voter registration drive might have produced up to three million duplicate voting cards ripe for abuse. In addition, she described how the strange system of “proxy” registration of female voters in Pashtun districts, designed to protect the modesty of local women, was vulnerable to large-scale fraud. There were many other reports signaling preparations for fraud in open sources.20
Holbrooke backed the appointment of Peter Galbraith, who had served as ambassador to Croatia during the Clinton administration, as Kai Eide’s deputy at the U.N. political office in Kabul. Galbraith took up the fraud issue vigorously as Election Day neared. He and Holbrooke believed that if they brought international pressure to bear, they could disqualify fraudulent ballots and enforce a “clean” result, one that might allow the winner—presumably Karzai—to enjoy legitimacy. Galbraith insisted that the point was not to lift Abdullah to victory, but to prevent Karzai from undermining himself by rigging an election he could win cleanly. Holbrooke had gone looking for alternatives to Karzai in the spring, it was true, but by June he and Galbraith had concluded that their aspiration was fanciful. The mantra was to prevent Karzai from “pulling a Nixon,” that is, trying to steal an election he would still have won if he had played it straight.
Abdullah mounted a spirited campaign. He held rallies in Kandahar and sought to project a panethnic case for his election, to overcome his history as a Panjshiri partisan. But in July, the International Republican Institute and other American nongovernmental organizations released polls showing Karzai with a commanding lead. Karzai had to win 50 percent of all votes cast to avoid a second round and the polls showed him close to that threshold.
On August 20, Election Day, the Taliban unleashed attacks around the country, killing two dozen Afghans and several N.A.T.O. soldiers deployed to provide security. Millions of Afghans braved the violence to cast ballots, yet turnout was a disappointing 35 to 40 percent, just over half of the turnout in the presidential election of 2004.21
Holbrooke flew to Kabul to monitor the voting. It was clear that the announced count would be compromised by fraud allegations. In an extreme case, Abdullah might mobilize supporters to riot in Kabul and powerful northern leaders such as Atta Mohammad Noor, the former Massoud ally who now governed Balkh Province, might back an armed coup d’état, Holbrooke warned. Intercepts showed that Iranian officials had told Abdullah that there should be “no unrest”; Tehran did not want chaos on its border any more than the United States wanted its project in Afghanistan to collapse. The “top priority,” Holbrooke advised colleagues, should be that “no one goes to the streets.” He had a proposal: Abdullah should decide to stay out of government, lead a peaceful opposition, and cede victory to Karzai.
The most remarkable aspect of Holbrooke’s involvement in the election remained his indiscretion. On August 21, before any preliminary results had been released, but after Karzai had already claimed victory, Holbrooke organized a conference call with special representatives for Afghanistan from other N.A.T.O. and international governments. He held the call over open lines. From an intelligence collection perspective, Holbrooke might as well have stood in the middle of Kabul streets and spoken with a megaphone. Operatives from N.D.S. listened in and took notes. Karzai soon learned of the details.
Holbrooke laid blame for the mess on the Bush administration, because it had effectively forced the Obama administration to support a presidential election in this summer that was destined to make things worse. He emphasized that his fellow envoys should use their influence to make sure that no frustrated candidates or allied militias took their protests into the streets. “We have to respect the process,” Holbrooke said. The outcome of the vote “will be disputed” because of fraud allegations already being voiced by Abdullah, Ashraf Ghani, and other trailing candidates. The envoys’ common position should be to wait for a certified outcome, which might well include a second round of voting.
Only Abdullah had a prayer of winning in a second round, and even his prospects looked dim. Ghani, who had received less than 5 percent of the vote, urged Holbrooke into action, arguing that the election had been “entirely illegal.”22
The next day, Holbrooke returned to the Arg to meet Karzai. Citing the conference call they had just listened to, Karzai’s aides had informed the president that Washington and London were “pushing” for a second round. This may have been a distortion of Holbrooke’s comments but it reinforced what Karzai already believed. Furious, Karzai had already tried to telephone world leaders, including Obama, to protest outside interference in the election. His advisers assured him that he had crossed the 50 percent threshold and had been reelected—any effort to suggest otherwise was an American conspiracy to unseat him.
Karzai’s face darkened. He declared to Holbrooke, “I will not accept fake facts based on foreign interference.”23
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It required two months and countless meetings and threats to resolve the election. The essential problem was simple in form but very difficult to fix. Even setting aside the massive fraud carried out by Karzai’s allies, the president had won close to half the vote. In a second-round face-off with Abdullah, Karzai would almost certainly prevail. Yet if the two election commissions overseeing the vote certified that Karzai had won outright in the first round, Abdullah and others “will say he stole it,” as Holbrooke put it.
Karzai held firm, telling just about every diplomat who met him that the West was “trying to defeat him.” Gradually, through September, the Obama administration came to accept reluctantly that Karzai would likely be president for another five years, and an even unhappier partner than before. “One way or another Karzai is going to be president of Afghanistan,” Holbrooke told a private meeting of former Clinton administration foreign policy officials and other specialists on Afghanistan on September 12. “It’s a fact.”24 The truth was that Holbrooke’s improvisations during the election had not removed Karzai and only destabilized further Karzai’s strained relationship with the Obama administration.
Karzai was also suspicious of Karl Eikenberry, the retired general who became U.S. ambassador to Kabul in the spring of 2009, succeeding Bill Wood. Eikenberry knew Afghanistan from his three tours in uniform but in meetings with Karzai as ambassador he was stiff and formal, marching through structured agendas and taking it upon himself to educate Karzai about how he should conduct himself as a statesman. Eikenberry had a well-grounded skepticism about Karzai but he was too much a general to manage such an insecure and moody client.
Senator Chuck Hagel and Vice President Joe Biden recalled the role John Kerry, now Biden’s successor as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had played in mollifying Karzai during their difficult dinner in the Arg early in 2008. Kerry flew in to Kabul in October. The plan was to persuade Karzai to accept the recount; if he could achieve that, he was confident that Abdullah would forgo a second vote, to spare the country the risk of violence and instability.
Karzai was under enormous pressure. His standoff with Abdullah revived the tension with the Panjshiris going back to 2002. Karzai’s Pashtun aides worried that the Panjshiri groups backing Abdullah might act rashly. Karzai’s closest bodyguards included two Panjshiris who walked beside him with loaded rifles. Panjshiri snipers manned positions on the palace rooftops. They could take him out in an instant. The situation recalled Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi’s vulnerability after she ordered a violent raid on a Sikh temple to root out armed separatists. Two of Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards assassinated her. Karzai asked Rahmatullah Nabil, the trusted Pashtun who oversaw his personal protection, whether he should be worried. “Mr. President,” Nabil told him, “there are more than seventy Panjshiris around you. They are snipers, drivers, they are manning the I.D. checkpoints.” If he removed Panjshiris in the inner circle, he would “create a trust deficit” with all the others. That would only make things worse. In fact, to signal trust and his faith in the bodyguards’ professionalism, Nabil added Panjshiris to Karzai’s inner protection force. But the tension remained. Few presidential transitions in Afghanistan during the past century had occurred bloodlessly.25
Kerry walked with Karzai in the Arg gardens to try to resolve the stalemate. He discovered, however, that Zal Khalilzad was staying in the palace, dining with Karzai and counseling him as a friend. Khalilzad was now a private citizen, and he was in Afghanistan to work on a foundation to support education in the country. He always stayed at the palace as Karzai’s guest, because of their friendship and for the sake of security. Yet the situation bordered on the absurd: Both Kerry and Khalilzad had access to Karzai at a decisive moment of crisis. Kerry told aides that he was unhappy about Khalilzad’s presence because of the risk that it would create multiple channels of communication and confusion about who was talking to whom. He feared that whatever arguments he made to Karzai during his five-day marathon of garden walks, Khalilzad would unpack them over dinner and complicate Karzai’s thinking.
Khalilzad met with Karl Eikenberry, who told him that the policy of the Obama administration was that no one had won the first round of the election; that there should not be a second round; and that, instead, Karzai should remain as president of Afghanistan and should appoint Abdullah as chief executive, with powers that would be negotiated with the help of the United States and the United Nations.
Kerry asked to meet Khalilzad at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. They went out on the roof and talked. Kerry said his mission was to persuade Karzai to agree that he had not won the first round, to skip the second round, and to work out a power-sharing deal with Abdullah. Khalilzad advised against this strategy. He did not think Kerry could possibly persuade Karzai to go along.
Kerry said that President Obama had approved his approach. Then you should reengage with the White House and get new marching orders, Khalilzad insisted. Kerry said that would be difficult and asked Khalilzad to help him with the plan he had. Khalilzad declined. They agreed to remain in touch, but recognizing that Kerry was not receptive to his advice, Khalilzad left Kabul.
Kerry had always believed that Karzai was a nationalist at heart, and that the best course would be to appeal to his sense of Afghanistan’s national interest. During their walks, he cited his own decision to accept his close defeat in the 2004 American presidential election, when some supporters had urged him to challenge electoral snafus in the decisive state of Ohio. “Look, we’ve all had some tough decisions to make about the outcome of elections,” Kerry said. In the end, Karzai agreed to concede that he had not won the first round, and to allow the Obama administration to persuade Abdullah to stand aside, to avoid the violence and chaos of a second round. He would not consider the power-sharing plan Kerry had in mind.26
Despite their outrage at Karzai, Abdullah and other opposition powers such as Governor Noor had little incentive to attempt a coup. The Obama administration and N.A.T.O. and other allied governments had promised a major escalation of aid and military support if the election could be sorted out, a massive infusion of funds, manpower, and technology that might improve security and would certainly create economic opportunity for Kabul’s elites. Twelve days after Kerry persuaded Karzai to agree to a second round of voting, Abdullah withdrew and declared in a press conference in his Kabul garden that he would lead the opposition to Karzai’s second-term government peacefully.
To try to repair the damage with Karzai, the C.I.A. dispatched Greg Vogle for another tour as Kabul station chief soon after the election was settled. Vogle remained close to McChrystal, the new American war commander. Karzai might be a maddening partner, but any objective reading of his performance in 2009 had to account for the fact that he had outwitted his American doubters, including Holbrooke. He would be president for five more years. His half brother remained in power in Kandahar. His supporters in the south and east had gotten away with fraud. He had established himself with N.A.T.O. governments as intractable and independent minded, no longer pliant or passive, with new room to maneuver in Afghan domestic politics. The U.S. embassy, the State Department, and the White House might be frustrated and even disgusted with Karzai, but through his personal relationships with Vogle and McChrystal, he had also renewed private channels to the C.I.A. and the Pentagon, legendarily the true centers of American power. It was an outcome that other South Asian politicians with a bent toward conspiratorial thinking about America could only envy.
Holbrooke understood his own marginalization in Kabul. The State Department would be a “backseat driver in Afghanistan,” he told his aides. American policy in the country was becoming a “runaway car” steered mainly by the Pentagon, under Petraeus’s sway. He still saw room for diplomacy. With Mike Mullen, he could work to change the American relationship with Pakistan. And on his own, protected by compartmented secrecy, he could try to negotiate a way out of the war directly with the Taliban.27