I wrote the chapters of this book over a period of more than a decade, while I was employed by the Council on Foreign Relations and then the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. For much of that time I worked as an official or unofficial consultant to the United Nations mission to Afghanistan. Les Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, regarded the works included here that I wrote during 1996–2000 as distractions from the job he was paying me to do as director of the Center for Preventive Action, but he tolerated my behavior for as long as he could. Since the premature death of our mutual friend Richard Holbrooke (about whom more later), we have had many conversations on the wars in Afghanistan, which have outlived not only Holbrooke but both of our jobs at CFR.
Shepard Forman, founder and director (now emeritus) of the Center on International Cooperation, first allowed me the time to complete the book I would have finished at CFR had I not spent so much time on Afghanistan, Blood on the Doorstep (2002). Just as I finished that, the events of September 11, 2001, destroyed, among other things, our plans for the future of CIC, but together we pivoted with events to create the Afghanistan Reconstruction Program, which continues today as the Afghanistan Regional Program (ARP), and which sponsored most of the work collected here. He and his successor as CIC director, Bruce Jones, managed to use my obsession to add a new program to CIC’s multiple activities, an arrangement from which I have benefited enormously. I hope they feel the same way. Bruce, who has written a foreword for this book, gave support over the past few years without which I could not have assembled this work.
When Lakhdar Brahimi became the UN Secretary-General’s personal representative for Afghanistan in 1997, he reached out to me, starting a relationship that has endured and deepened. Originally I helped him convene an informal advisory group, including Ashraf Ghani, Ahmed Rashid, Olivier Roy, and William Maley. After September 11, he brought Ghani and me into the team that organized the UN Talks on Afghanistan in Bonn. Lakhdar’s support throughout his tenure as UN special representative for Afghanistan and long after made much of this work possible. If this work shows any of the wisdom I have tried to learn from him, all the credit is his.
The friendship of Brahimi’s predecessor as head of the UN Special Mission for Afghanistan, Francesc Vendrell, who later served as the European Union’s special representative to Afghanistan, provided many chances for reflection over the years. Brahimi’s successor as SRSG, Jean Arnault, enabled me to continue the work I had done on the Bonn Agreement through the Afghanistan Compact and the Afghan National Development Strategy. At UNAMA I benefited from the friendship and collaboration of Chris Alexander, Rina Amiri, Anders Fänge, Ameerah Haq, Talatbek Masadykov, Janan Musazai, Mervyn Patterson, Thomas Ruttig, Eckart Schiewek, and Michael Semple among others. I owe them and many other UN colleagues a lot of gratitude. In Kabul I appreciated the hospitality and insights of Kate Clark and Andrew Wilder.
Although I never worked for the U.S. government until 2009, officials of all the administrations spanning the years in which I wrote these chapters were willing to talk and help test my ideas against their experience. They included Richard Boucher, Ryan Crocker, James Dobbins, Karl Eikenberry, Robert Finn, Rick Inderfuerth, Doug Lute, Ronald Neumann, Ann Patterson, Robin Raphel, William Wood, and my University of Chicago classmate Zalmay Khalilzad.
Ashraf Ghani’s vision led to a partnership that inspired much of the work here. Our joint work as unofficial advisors to Brahimi led Ashraf to propose that we establish the ARP; we drafted the first proposal in a hotel room in Washington on October 1, 2001, just before we were both called by Brahimi to serve as official advisors. I owe him an intellectual debt greater than can be acknowledged in scholarly notes.
All of this work required funding, and I have had good fortune in finding support. I am grateful to the donors to CFR’s Center for Preventive Action who unwittingly subsidized my work, especially to the Carnegie Corporation of New York and David Hamburg, then of the Carnegie Commission for Preventing Deadly Conflict, and the Century Foundation, led by Richard Leone until his retirement in 2011.
Since September 11, the government of Norway has supported CIC’s work on Afghanistan practically without interruption. The donor relationship with Norway has added an important dimension to both my work and my life. I benefited in particular from the support of Vidar Helgesen, Kai Eide, and Kåre Aas. During Eide’s tenure as UN SRSG and especially Aas’s tenure as ambassador to Afghanistan and then political director of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, this relationship deepened into a true partnership.
At ARP’s inception, George Soros, Aryeh Neier, and Anthony Richter of the Open Society Institute offered the quick and flexible funding that enabled us to get off the ground. This collaboration later led to establishment of OSI’s programs in Afghanistan. The UK, both the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Foreign and Commonwealth office, quickly saw potential in our work; I appreciated in particular the help of Mukesh Kapila and Tom Phillips.
Canada provided strategic assistance to CIC’s work on the Afghan Constitution. At various times the work published here benefited from support from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Government of Japan, for which I owe Sadako Ogata particular gratitude. The World Bank, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation all helped make this book possible.
I could never have done all of this without the many colleagues who became friends. Several of these chapters were coauthored with some of my colleagues at CIC. Helena Malikyar helped launch ARP in the fall of 2001 and went on to carry out the revelatory field research that formed the foundation for our study of the debate over the form of the state in Afghanistan. Abby Stoddard, in addition to her work as head of CIC’s program on humanitarian action, constructed a pioneering database on donor contributions to Afghanistan. Humayun Hamidzada and I collaborated through all of the work on the Afghan constitutional process and much more. He accompanied me on several visits to Afghanistan and provided help on the ground both during and after his tenure at CIC. CIC and I had the good fortune of benefiting from Abubakar Siddique’s collaboration during the Fulbright fellowship that enabled him to graduate from NYU’s school of journalism, though we had already decided to write together on Afghanistan-Pakistan relations after several conversations we had while he was covering the Constitutional Loya Jirga in Kabul in December 2003. Malalai Wassil Wardak’s help was indispensable in the work that Patricia Gossman and I did in 2004 for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the “mapping report” on human rights violations in Afghanistan.
Compiling this book out of scattered fragments of text, all in different formats, would have been beyond my own capacities. Parnian Nazary of CIC worked assiduously and independently to format text, obtain rights and permissions, list tables and figures, and encourage me to finally get the job done. Her work for ARP has entailed far more than that, but she deserves special thanks for her patience nonetheless with these painstaking details. Darcy Courteau’s outstanding editorial skills were also essential for transforming all of these documents into a coherent manuscript.
I have heard that Afghans hate foreigners, and perhaps someday they will feel comfortable enough with me to express their xenophobia. Thus far they have concealed it behind an impenetrable façade of hospitality and friendship. I could not possibly acknowledge all the relationships that have come to form so much of my life since this work started, and an attempt to explain them would turn this prefatory note into a memoir. I can do little here other than list names, while emphasizing that none of them is implicated in what I have written. In addition to those mentioned previously, I relied on my relationships with Abdullah Abdullah, Anwar-ul-Haq Ahady, Hidayat Amin-Arsala, Abdullah Arsala, Orzala Ashraf, Muhammad Haneef Atmar, Umer Daudzai, Muhammad Eshaq, Adib Farhadi, Fatima Gailani, Ali Ahmad Jalali, Sayyid Tayeb Jawad, Kawun Kakar, Mujahid Kakar, Massoud Karokhail, Hamid Karzai, Hekmat Karzai, Qayum Karzai, Fawzia Koofi, Jawed Ludin, Ahmad Wali Massoud, Ahmad Zia Massoud, Saad Mohseni, Muhammad Muhaqqiq, Janan Musazai, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakkil, Nader Nadery, Ishaq Nadiri, Ghulam Jilani Popal, Yunus Qanuni, Ahmad Idrees Rahmani, Zalmai Rassoul, Daud Saba, Nilofar Sakhi, Amrullah Saleh, Seema Samar, Hamid Siddiq, Dadfar Rangin Spanta, Massoum Stanekzai, Humayun Tandar, Abdul Hakim Taniwal, Wahid Waissi, Faruq Wardak, Abdul Salam Zaeef, and Omar Zakhilwal. I wish I could tell how each contributed, and I wish I could mention many more.
Afghanistan is forever twinned with Pakistan, and my friends east of the Durand Line were equally important. Ahmed Rashid belongs to a special category: as already mentioned, we worked together to advise Brahimi, and our friendship developed into a true partnership, including but exceeding coauthorship. All members of Ahmed’s extended clan of friends expect to be awakened at any time by a phone call starting with his trademark greeting—“It’s a disaster!”—and he and I have experienced quite a few disasters together. With him, even that has been a pleasure.
Asma Jehangir, in addition to providing me with her clear-eyed vision of Pakistan, also gave me an important opportunity in her role as the UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings. In 2004 she asked me to help draft a “mapping report” of major human rights violations in Afghanistan from 1978 to 2001. Perhaps someday that still-secret report—based entirely on public documents—will be released.
Aisha Ahmad (actually a Canadian) organized a door-opening trip to Islamabad for me in 2008. That trip introduced me to people I would otherwise not have met. I continue to learn from her. Mushahid Hussain provided me with the unique opportunity to address a gathering in a Sufi shrine in Rawalpindi on the occasion of the eight hundredth birth anniversary of Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi (known to Afghans as “Balkhi”). He also offered a window into the thinking of the Pakistani establishment. Maleeha Lodhi, whom I first met in Mushahid’s office in 1985, has provided invaluable insights and introductions and continues to do so. Afrasiab Khattak has been an inspiration for years, as we met on both sides of the Durand Line, in Kabul, Peshawar, and Islamabad. He enabled Ahmed Rashid and me to attend the Pakhtun Peace Jirga in Peshawar in November 2007. Khalid Aziz’s hospitality also opened many doors. I must also thank Salman Bashir, Asad Durrani, Tariq Fatemi, Husain Haqqani, Abida Husain, Fakhr Imam, Sughu Imam, Riaz Muhammad Khan, Rustam Shah Mohmand, Muhammad Saad, and Rahimullah Yusufzai.
Several Iranians have helped me over the years, but under current circumstances it might not be an act of friendship to thank them by name. They know who they are. Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh helped open that gate during my first visit to Iran in 1994, when she was still a Ph.D. student at Columbia. Since then we have collaborated on much more in Central Asia and Afghanistan.
I am sad that Richard Holbrooke will never have the chance to see this book. I’m even sorrier that he won’t be around to make people buy it. We first met in 1995, when I was preparing a mission to Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania for CFR’s Center for Preventive Action. Even during that frenetic time, just after the signing of the Dayton Accords, he took time out to get us a meeting with Slobodan Milosevic. Thus began a unique friendship that ended abruptly on December 13, 2010, when Richard died in a hospital in Washington of a ruptured aorta, while I was in Dubai helping CIC and Norway organize a meeting of regional stakeholders in Afghanistan.
This book ends when our closest partnership started: the day after the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, when Richard sent me a text message at 6:00 A.M., asking if I was still interested in the job we had discussed, advising him as U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. From April 2009, when I got my security clearance (something for which Richard claimed personal credit), until his death twenty months later, and after, the incomparable opportunity he gave me has required me to observe public silence. It has been worth it. Though I missed the chance to thank him on his death bed for that opportunity and for all I learned from him, I will do so in print here, where he can scrawl his edits in the eternal unseen margins of history.
September 11 blew apart the plans I had made for a somewhat calmer life, and no one knows better what that has meant than my wife, Susan Blum. Through these years of constant travel and distraction, we have grown closer than I thought two people could be. We both have struggled with the pains of separation. Eventually we both gave up on—or at least postponed—the dream of a calmer life, as I became a government official and Sue transformed herself with immense commitment and dedication into a skilled and caring psychotherapist. An old friend, a linguist from Transylvania, recently characterized our lives as “eventful and dynamic,” and that is equally true of our love.