Showing posts with label alliances. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alliances. Show all posts

Dec 19, 2009

US launches cruise missle strikes against al Qaeda in Yemen

The old part of Sana'a, YemenImage via Wikipedia

Written by Bill Roggio on December 19, 2009 12:31 AM to The Long War Journal

The US military carried out cruise missile attacks against two al Qaeda camps in Yemen, killing several terrorist commanders and fighters as well as civilians.

The attacks, which took place on Dec. 17, were carried out in conjunction with the Yemeni military, who targeted al Qaeda bases in the provinces of Sana'a and Abyan. The Yemeni government and the US launched the raids after intelligence indicated al Qaeda was planning to conduct attacks against Yemeni and US installations in the region.

Abyan is a known al Qaeda haven. The terror group opened a large training camp in Yemen this year, which reportedly housed more than 400 al Qaeda fighters from the Middle East [see LWJ report, "Al Qaeda opens new training camp in Yemen"]. Many of the fighters were Yemenis, Saudis, and Somalis.

The Yemeni government claimed 34 al Qaeda fighters were killed and 17 more were captured in the joint air and ground strikes. Muhammad Salih al Awlaqi, al Qaeda's leader in Abyan province, and commanders Muhammad al Amburi and Munir al Amburi were also reported killed in the Abyan strikes, according to reports in Quds Press and Al Sahwah.net.

Qasim al Rimi, a member of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's shura, or executive council, was reportedly the main target of the strike. He is thought to have escaped. Al Rimi is a senior lieutenant to Nasir al Wuhayshi, the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a senior US military intelligence official told the Long War Journal.

Leaders in Abyan disputed the government's claims that only al Qaeda fighters were killed, and claimed more than 60 civilians have died in the strikes. Ali Husayn Ashal, a Member of Parliament and a leader in the opposition Islah Party, accused the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh of intentionally targeting civilians.

The 1000-year old Bab Al-Yemen (the Gate of Ye...Image via Wikipedia

"The government took pride in saying that some al Qaeda members have been targeted in this monstrous operation, while it knows very well where do these wanted elements move around," Ashal said, according to Al Sahwah.net. "These elements move around openly and publicly before the government's eyes. The government can, at any given time, target those who are believed to be outlaws, without inflicting dozens of innocent casualties."

Backstreet in Sana'a, YemenImage via Wikipedia

The Islah Party is closely aligned with the radical cleric Sheik Abdulmajid al Zindani, who is designated as a terrorist financier by the UN's 1267 committee and as a spiritual adviser to bin Laden by the US Treasury. Zindani is also close ally to the Yemeni government.

Saleh and the weak Yemeni government are also known to collude with al Qaeda, including using the terror group's foot soldiers to battle the Houthi rebels in the North in exchange for safe haven.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula retaliates

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula [AQAP] has reportedly battled back after the cruise missile strikes and ground operations in Abyan. According to a report in Al Hayat, AQAP "raided government centers" in the Ludat district in Abyan.

Heavy fighting took place between AQAP and government forces, and AQAP apears to have gained the upper hand in much of the province. "parts of the governorate, which is one of the hard-line groups' strongholds, fell into the gunmen's hands," Al Hayat reported.

Latest covert strike in Yemen

The cruise missile strikes, which were first reported by ABC News, took place within a week after it was disclosed that US Special Forces have deployed to Yemen to work with the country's army. The US has also recently deployed unmanned Reaper strike aircraft in the region, under the guise of supporting anti-piracy operations off of the coast of Somalia. Reapers and Predators are used extensively in the covert US air war in Pakistan's tribal areas.

The US has conducted at least one other covert strike in Yemen. In November 2002, Abu Ali al Harithi, an al Qaeda operative who was the mastermind of the suicide attack on the destroyer USS Cole, Ahmed Hijazi, a US citizen, and four other al Qaeda fighter were killed in a Predator strike in Marib.

Yemen is an al Qaeda stronghold

Yemen has become one of al Qaeda's most secure bases as well as a hub for activities on the Arabian Peninsula and on the Horn of Africa.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is based in Yemen and carries out its attacks against the Saudi government from there. The group is also known to operate terror camps in Aden, and in the Alehimp and Sanhan regions in Sana'a. It has conducted attacks on oil facilities, tourists, Yemeni security forces, and the US embassy in Sana'a.

The terror group has also been instrumental in supporting al Qaeda's operation in Somalia, US intelligence officials told The Long War Journal. Yemen serves as a command and control center, a logistics hub, a transit point from Asia and the Peninsula, and a source of weapons and munitions for the al Qaeda-backed Shabaab and Hizbul Islam.

"Yemen is Pakistan in the heart of the Arab world," one official said. "You have military and government collusion with al Qaeda, peace agreements, budding terror camps, and the export of jihad to neighboring countries."

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Dec 6, 2009

Afghanistan: No Shortcuts to Security

An MI-17 helicopter door gunner from the Afgha...Image via Wikipedia

Obama Should Commit to Long-Term Strategy for Civilian Protection
December 1, 2009

(Washington, DC) - US President Barack Obama's new Afghanistan plan needs to strengthen civilian protection through ending the impunity and warlordism that have fuelled the insurgency, Human Rights Watch said today.

There is no magic number of US troops that will bring security to Afghanistan," said Rachel Reid, Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch. "What matters is what the troops are there to do, and how they can enhance a long-term strategy to improve Afghans' human rights."

Human Rights Watch said that the recent focus of the US government on corruption and rule of law in Afghanistan is long overdue, and will require sustained institutional reform. Improving governance and rule of law depends upon a clear strategy for combating corruption, removing warlords, and holding rights violators accountable.

"If the US wants Afghans to have a government they can believe in, there needs to be effective mechanisms for bringing human rights abusers to justice," said Reid.

Human Rights Watch said plans to focus on building the capacity of the Afghan army and police are encouraging, but pointed out that expansion ambitions need to be restricted to a force that is sustainably sized with sufficient training to ensure basic rights protections. The police should be capable of fighting crime as well as providing security against insurgents.

Human Rights Watch expressed concern regarding the US military's interest in increasing use of tribal militias through the Afghan Public Protection Force and the Community Defense Initiative. Previous attempts to foster such auxiliary forces in Afghanistan have shown that they can increase insecurity and human rights abuses if recruits have little training, vague rules of engagement, and a weak chain of command.

In November the US Congress agreed to allow the US military to use unspecified sums from a 2010 $1.2 billion fund for "reintegration" programs with insurgent factions, without identifying who or how such programs will be implemented.

A poorly implemented program using large sums of cash to buy the short-term allegiance of fighters has the potential to add to the corruption and empowerment of malign actors," said Reid. "Improving security, governance, and the rule of law will take time - there are no shortcuts."

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Nov 11, 2009

The Iraqi Elections: Same Names, Different Teams - At War Blog - NYTimes.com

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - MAY 28:  Iraqi Prime Minister ...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

After much delay, the Iraqi Parliament finally passed a law on Sunday allowing for national parliamentary elections — the third since the American invasion in 2003. Voting is scheduled to take place in the second half of January.

For Americans, the elections will be a crucial test of how secure Iraq has become, and thus how quickly U.S. soldiers can leave. The stakes will also be high for Iraqis, who will be putting in place a political infrastructure that, in theory, will outlast the American presence in their country.

As the elections approach, one major worry will be how much ethnic and religious allegiances, which plunged Iraq into deep violence in 2006, influence voters’ choices. The early 2009 provincial elections, in which the two main Shiite and Sunni Islamic Parties lost their ground to nonreligious parties, have given much hope that sectarianism will play a lesser role this time, too. But while the coalitions look different than they did during the last national vote in December 2005, many of the same candidates remain on the lists. Are voters less likely to vote along religious lines? How many Shiites will vote for Sunni candidates?

In addition to the question of religious allegiances is the fragmenting of what were essentially Iraq’s Big Three voting blocs — Shiite, Sunni, Kurd — in politics. Voters have new options in the upcoming election. Secular Shiites, for instance, have a choice beyond the National Iraqi Alliance that most Shiite Islamic parties have joined. Most prominent is the State of Law slate formed by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite. Sunnis have similar alternatives to the Iraqi Islamic Party, the most powerful Sunni party since 2003. Even with this diversification, though, voters will probably support their sects’ parties.

The number of new choices may actually make forming a new government much harder. At best, the strongest coalition seems likely to gain less than 20 percent of the total voters, too weak to dominate the process of choosing the prime minister and president. After the previous elections, just three Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish coalitions dominated Parliament, occupying more than two-thirds of the seats.

Four years ago, the American government played a significant role in pushing the Iraqis to form the current governments. Most significantly, they succeeded in halting Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s bid to become the prime minister in 2006. Now, however, United States officials have limited influence in Baghdad. If the debate over the long-awaited electoral law took several months, how much longer will it take to pick the next president, the prime minister, speaker and the cabinet? How effectively would a lame-duck government be able to rule in the interim? Would delay and infighting make Iraq less stable?

Finally, there is the thorny issue of the Kurds. Since 2003, they have been the kingmakers, so to speak. How much time and political capital should the Arab coalitions spend on the Kurds? It is not likely that any coalition can form the majority without them.

Much attention has been paid to the issue of security in Iraq prior the election, yet I would be much more worried about tensions after the election.
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Oct 27, 2009

German Limits on War Face Afghan Reality - NYTimes.com

Published: October 26, 2009

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — Forced to confront the rising insurgency in once peaceful northern Afghanistan, the German Army is engaged in sustained and bloody ground combat for the first time since World War II.

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Moises Saman for The New York Times

A German soldier stands guard in a compound in Kunduz Province. Two men from his company were killed in June, among 36 German soldiers who have died in the Afghan war. More Photos »

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Moises Saman for The New York Times

Germans in Kunduz Province have had to strike back against an increasingly fierce Taliban. More Photos >

Moises Saman for The New York Times

German soldiers mapped an area before setting a temporary camp near the northern city of Kunduz. More Photos >

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Most of Germany’s 4,250 soldiers are in Kunduz Province. More Photos >

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Soldiers near the northern city of Kunduz have had to strike back against an increasingly fierce campaign by Taliban insurgents, while carrying the burden of being among the first units to break the German taboo against military combat abroad that arose after the Nazi era.

At issue are how long opposition in Germany will allow its troops to stay and fight, and whether they will be given leeway from their strict rules of engagement to pursue the kind of counterinsurgency being advocated by American generals. The question now is whether the Americans will ultimately fight one kind of war and their allies another.

For Germans, the realization that their soldiers are now engaged in ground offensives in an open-ended and escalating war requires a fundamental reconsideration of their principles.

After World War II, German society rejected using military power for anything other than self-defense, and pacifism has been a rallying cry for generations, blocking allied requests for any military support beyond humanitarian assistance.

German leaders have chipped away at the proscriptions in recent years, in particular by participating in airstrikes in the Kosovo war. Still, the legacy of the combat ban remains in the form of strict engagement rules and an ingrained shoot-last mentality that is causing significant tensions with the United States in Afghanistan.

Driven by necessity, some of the 4,250 German soldiers here, the third-largest number of troops in the NATO contingent, have already come a long way. Last Tuesday, they handed out blankets, volleyballs and flashlights as a goodwill gesture to residents of the village of Yanghareq, about 22 miles northwest of Kunduz. Barely an hour later, insurgents with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades ambushed other members of the same company.

The Germans fought back, killing one of the attackers, before the dust and disorder made it impossible to tell fleeing Taliban from civilians.

“They shoot at us and we shoot back,” said Staff Sgt. Erik S., who, according to German military rules, could not be fully identified. “People are going to fall on both sides. It’s as simple as that. It’s war.”

The sergeant added, “The word ‘war’ is growing louder in society, and the politicians can’t keep it secret anymore.”

Indeed, German politicians have refused to utter the word, trying instead to portray the mission in Afghanistan as a mix of peacekeeping and reconstruction in support of the Afghan government. But their line has grown less tenable as the insurgency has expanded rapidly in the west and north of the country, where Germany leads the regional command and provides a majority of the troops.

The Germans may not have gone to war, but now the war has come to them.

In part, NATO and German officials say, that is evidence of the political astuteness of Taliban and Qaeda leaders, who are aware of the opposition in Germany to the war. They hope to exploit it and force the withdrawal of German soldiers — splintering the NATO alliance in the process — through attacks on German personnel in Afghanistan and through video and audio threats of terrorist attacks on the home front before the German elections last month.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior American and allied commander in Afghanistan, is pressing NATO allies to contribute more troops to the war effort, even as countries like the Netherlands and Canada have begun discussing plans to pull out. Germany has held out against pleas for additional troops so far.

Ties between Germany and the United States were strained last month over a German-ordered bombing of two hijacked tanker trucks, which killed civilians as well as Taliban. Many Germans, from top politicians down to enlisted men, thought that General McChrystal was too swift to condemn the strike before a complete investigation.

Germany’s combat troops are caught in the middle. In interviews last week, soldiers from the Third Company, Mechanized Infantry Battalion 391, said they were understaffed for the increasingly complex mission here. Two men from the company were killed in June, among 36 German soldiers who have died in the Afghan war.

The soldiers expressed frustration over the second-guessing of the airstrike not only by allies, but also by their own politicians, and over the absence of support back home.

While the intensity of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan’s south has received most attention, the situation in the Germans’ part of the north has deteriorated rapidly. Soldiers said that just a year ago they could patrol in unarmored vehicles. Now there are places where they cannot move even in armored vehicles without an entire company of soldiers.

American officials have argued that an emphasis on reconstruction, peacekeeping and the avoidance of violence may have given the Taliban a foothold to return to the north.

German officers here said they had adjusted their tactics accordingly, often engaging the Taliban in firefights for hours with close air support. In July, 300 German soldiers joined the Afghan Army and National Police in an operation in Kunduz Province that killed more than 20 Taliban fighters and led to the arrests of half a dozen more.

The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the operation “a fundamental transition out of the defensive and into the offensive.”

Germany’s military actions are controlled by a parliamentary mandate, which is up for renewal in December. The German contingent has unarmed drones and Tornado fighter jets, which are restricted to reconnaissance and are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.

German soldiers usually stay in Afghanistan for just four months, which can make it difficult to maintain continuity with their Afghan partners. The mandate also caps the number of troops in the country at 4,500.

A NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, called the mandate “a political straitjacket.”

A company of German paratroopers in the district of Chahar Darreh, where insurgent activity is particularly pronounced, fought off a series of attacks and stayed in the area, patrolling on foot and meeting with local elders for eight days and seven nights.

“The longer we were out there, the better the local population responded to us,” said Capt. Thomas K., the company’s commander. Another company relieved them for three days but then abandoned the position, where intelligence said that a bomb was waiting for the next group of German soldiers.

“Since we were there, no other company has been back,” the captain said.

Stefan Pauly contributed reporting from Berlin.

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Oct 11, 2009

Lobbyists Fight Last Big Plans to Cut Health Care Costs - NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — As the health care debate moves to the floor of Congress, most of the serious proposals to fulfill President Obama’s original vow to curb costs have fallen victim to organized interests and parochial politics.

And now the last two initiatives with real bite that are still in contention — a scaled-back “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans and a nonpartisan Medicare budget-cutting commission — are under furious assault.

Most economists’ favorite idea for slowing the growth of health care spending was ending the income tax exemption for employer-paid health insurance to make lower-cost plans more attractive. But that would hurt workers with big benefit plans, and a labor-union lobbying blitz helped kill that idea by the Fourth of July.

Lobbying by doctors, hospitals and other health care providers, meanwhile, dimmed the prospects of various proposals to cut into their incomes, including allowing government negotiation of Medicare drug prices and creating a government insurer with the muscle to lower fee payments.

“The lobbyists are winning,” said Representative Jim Cooper, a conservative Tennessee Democrat who teaches health policy.

Total health care costs in the last 20 years have doubled to about 16 percent of the economy, with no signs of tapering. Along with universal coverage, Mr. Obama has made controlling those costs a central pillar of his health care overhaul, calling the current course “unsustainable.” The effort is a pivotal test of his campaign promise to break the stranglehold of special interests.

In his weekly radio address on Saturday, Mr. Obama applauded the bill set for a vote next week in the Senate Finance Committee. “By attacking waste and fraud within the system,” he said, “it will slow the growth in health care costs, without adding a dime to our deficits.”

In an interview, Peter R. Orszag, the White House budget director and the official most associated with the drive to cut costs, singled out the proposed Medicare commission and the “Cadillac tax” as evidence of progress. “A key priority now,” Mr. Orszag said, “is to make sure cost containment holds up as we move through the legislative process."

Neither element appears in any of the other four health care bills on Capitol Hill, and both face dug-in resistance in the House.

Although the bills contain other measures aimed at medical costs, most of the surviving ones do not antagonize any organized interest. Among them are voluntary efficiency measures like encouraging the coordination of medical records, disseminating information comparing the effectiveness of treatments and various pilot projects.

White House officials argue that in any case it is prudent to start with such tests, and that many could be expanded to more comprehensive programs. But their real impact is hard to gauge, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office assigns them little weight. (The budget office credited the Finance Committee bill with reducing the federal deficit, but how much it will slow the growth of total public and private health spending is another question.)

The tax on gold-plated insurance plans is the last vestige of most economists’ favorite idea, eliminating the tax exemption for employer plans. The finance bill would impose a 40 percent excise tax on insurance plans that cost more than $8,000 a year for an individual or $21,000 for a family.

The bill has aroused the frantic opposition of labor and business lobbyists who appear to have found friends in the Capitol. On Wednesday, 157 House Democrats — a majority of the party — signed a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposing the tax.

“It has no legs in the House,” said Representative Pete Stark, the California Democrat who is chairman of the health subcommittee of the tax-writing panel.

The proposed Medicare commission, aimed at providers instead of consumers, is becoming a case study in the political difficulty of reducing medical payments.

The commission was intended to side-step the interest-group pressure that often stymies Congress. Modeled after the nonpartisan commission for military base closings, it would present a roster of Medicare cuts that Congress could block only with legislation.

But along the way, the White House and the Senate Finance Committee have cut deals for political support with lobbyists that may circumscribe the cost cuts, potentially including the recommendations of the commission.

For example, the White House and the panel’s chairman, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, reached an agreement with the drug industry for its companies to contribute a total of $80 billion — but no more — over 10 years in reductions to their government payments.

Many Democrats would like to see the government negotiate far lower prices for the Medicare drugs it buys. But drug industry lobbyists say — and the debate on the finance bill appears to confirm — that Mr. Baucus’s agreement to limit the industry’s costs excludes such price negotiations. Now the drug lobbyists are pushing to be sure the Medicare commission could not force negotiations either. The relevant text of the bill is still being written.

Some analysts contend that in other ways the drug industry deal could even encourage unnecessary spending on brand-name drugs. As part of its $80 billion, the industry would provide discounted drugs for certain Medicare patients who had previously been forced to pay for them until their bills reached a certain level. The deal will thus eliminate what had been an incentive to switch to cheaper generics. “It is market protection,” one drug company lobbyist said of the deal, speaking anonymously for fear of alienating the White House.

Senate finance staff members counter that their bill encourages the use of generic drugs in other ways by waiving the first co-payment for patients who try them.

A parallel White House deal with hospital lobbyists is posing a more serious political problem for the Medicare commission. The White House and the Senate finance chairman agreed to limit the hospitals’ payment reductions to $155 billion over 10 years, and in this case they added a guarantee to the hospitals that for that 10-year period the proposed Medicare commission would not extract any more. (The hospitals are also gaining new income from the expansion of insurance.)

A Senate Democratic aide said the hospitals had already agreed to significant cuts and noted that 10 years was not very long. (White House officials previously disputed the hospital lobbyists’ account of the deal, but the Senate finance bill confirms it.)

Now other heath care interests, led by the powerful American Medical Association, are complaining that it is unfair to protect hospitals from the commission, especially since they are the biggest recipient of Medicare money.

“This presents a serious inequity,” the group said in a letter to Mr. Baucus. The association and others also complain that the commission could cut only provider payments, without authority over benefits or premiums.

Some Democratic lawmakers are upset, too. “To work, it has to look at the full picture,” Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, one of the commission’s principal sponsors, said in an e-mailed statement. “There can be no carve-outs for specific provider groups.”

Mr. Cooper, the Tennessee Democrat and another supporter, predicted the end of the commission. “This will start a race for the exits,” he said. “Every other provider group will say, why are you letting these guys out? Why should we have to participate?”

The House committee chairmen were already hostile to the commission as an unconstitutional intrusion on their budgetary powers. At a dinner with Democratic lawmakers at the Capitol Hill home of Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut a few months ago, Representative Henry A. Waxman, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, practically “tackled Orszag” in a dispute over the commission, one lawmaker present said.

Mr. Waxman confirmed a “spirited” disagreement. When he learned last week about the hospital exemption, “it amazed me,” he said. “If they think Congress is too political to be involved in Medicare cuts, it seems rather political to have exempted the hospitals.”

A spokesman for Ms. Pelosi said she also opposed the commission.

How the measures fare in the final weeks of debate could determine how well the bill lives up to its original promise of curbing health care costs, said Dr. Mark B. McClellan, an administrator of Medicare and Medicaid in the Bush administration who is now tracking the legislation at the Brookings Institution.

“It is still up in the air,” Dr. McClellan said, adding, “I’d give them an A for effort, but there is a lot more they could do.”

Sep 13, 2009

Taking Helm in Japan, Party Is Wary of Divisions - NYTimes.com

TOKYO - MAY 16:  Newly elected President of th...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

TOKYO — As the newly elected Democratic Party works to assemble what will be only the second government in Japan’s postwar history not to be led by the Liberal Democratic Party, it is treading carefully to avoid infighting that could split the ideologically diverse party or drive a wedge between it and its coalition allies.

Since smashing the Liberal Democrats’ nearly uninterrupted half-century monopoly on power two weeks ago, the center-left Democrats and their leader, Yukio Hatoyama, 62, have hurried to fill top posts in the party and his incoming cabinet and to cobble together a coalition with other parties before their government’s formal accession to power on Sept. 16.

The party is working under unrelenting scrutiny from the news media and from Japanese citizens still affected by the bitter aftertaste of their only previous experience with non-Liberal Democratic rule since 1955. That government, which took power in 1993, lasted less than a year before collapsing amid bickering and defections.

Nightly news broadcasts, which are dominated by detailed coverage of the political maneuverings within the newly formed coalition, frequently feature veterans of the earlier failed government who offer lessons from their brief, rocky time in power.

While there have been no major bumps so far, warning signs are already appearing.

On Wednesday, when Mr. Hatoyama and the heads of two smaller anti-laissez-faire parties, the Social Democratic Party and the People’s New Party, agreed to form a coalition government, they left unresolved disagreements over the status of 50,000 American service members in Japan. Mr. Hatoyama has spoken in vague terms of re-examining the American military bases, while still trying to remain close to Washington, but the leftist Social Democrats want the bases removed.

There have also been signs of division in the Democratic Party since Mr. Hatoyama gave a top party position to one of the party’s most powerful men, Ichiro Ozawa, in what analysts say was an attempt to keep his loyalty. But in doing so, Mr. Hatoyama raised concerns by other Democrats that the party was embracing a shadowy kingmaker whose money-oriented political style closely resembled that of the Liberal Democrats they defeated.

Those critics fear that Mr. Ozawa, 67, will compete with Mr. Hatoyama for control of the party; Mr. Ozawa was a member of the 1993-1994 government, and political analysts have blamed his clashes with other coalition members for contributing to its demise. On Thursday, many Democrats lobbied to have Seiji Maehara, a young proponent of clean politics, included in the new cabinet to help offset Mr. Ozawa’s influence.

Mr. Hatoyama has tried to dispel concerns that he is creating competing centers of power.

“This will not create a dual power structure,” Mr. Hatoyama, the presumptive next prime minister, told reporters. He added that policy would be set by his cabinet and not the party.

Still, the barest hints of fissures within the party have made news in a nation keen to see if the Democrats can pull off the daunting task of essentially dragging the country into a true multiparty system.

The 1993-94 government, which included eight small parties and groups and was first led by Morihiro Hosokawa as prime minister, lasted only 11 months. Its quick collapse drove disappointed Japanese voters back into the arms of the Liberal Democrats, where they stayed until the election.

While there are many differences between now and 1993 — the biggest being the fact that a single, large party, the Democratic Party, has beaten the Liberal Democrats — the mistakes of that earlier government still cast a shadow, according to veterans of that coalition.

“It took 16 years to get this second chance,” Mr. Hosokawa, who retired from politics in 1998, said in an interview. “Lack of cohesiveness has always plagued efforts to build a second big political party.”

Mr. Hosokawa said the Democrats’ main weak point might be their broad manifesto of campaign promises, which would be hard to achieve quickly enough to satisfy Japan’s recession-weary voters. The party is trying to reinvigorate Japan’s sclerotic system of government by empowering elected politicians and consumers over the bureaucracy and industry, and to blunt the pain from globalization with a stronger social safety net.

Instead, Mr. Hosokawa said, focusing on a few high-profile policies would make it easier to keep the party on the same track and offer voters results.

“They need a single flag to stand under,” he said.

Adding to the difficulty will be the fact that Mr. Hatoyama heads a party that is broad and often hazy in its identity.

The party was formed in 1998 as a motley grouping of former Socialists and defectors from the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. Since then, it has tried to forge a unique culture and identity, with mixed success.

By finally winning power, the party has been robbed of its main source of unity, say political analysts and former politicians. The glue that held the Democrats together has been a shared desire to end the Liberal Democrats’ rule.

“The Democrats are like wet, unformed concrete, which still lacks a mold,” said Atsuo Ito, an independent political analyst who wrote a book on the party. “Just holding power may be enough to keep the party together at first, but eventually the party will need shared beliefs to keep from flying apart.”
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Aug 11, 2009

Myanmar's Suu Kyi Is Detained 18 More Months

Pro-democracy dissident Aung San Suu Kyi was sentenced to spend 18 more months under house arrest after a Myanmar court found her guilty of violating the terms of her detention in May.

Take a look at major events in the life of famed dissident Aung San Suu Kyi.

Tuesday's verdict means Myanmar's military junta will be able to keep the 64-year-old Nobel laureate -- who has already spent 14 of the past 20 years as a prisoner -- out of sight until after it wraps up a controversial election planned for next year.

It also complicates decisions for foreign governments, including the U.S., that have been trying to bring about change in Myanmar for years and that until recently were weighing options to soften their approach toward the country's harsh military regime.

Condemnation of the verdict came swiftly, with some foreign leaders and dissidents calling for a new round of punitive measures, including steps by the United Nations Security Council to publicly sanction Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon "strongly deplores" Myanmar's action and urged the ruling generals "to immediately and unconditionally release" Ms. Suu Kyi, the Associated Press quoted his office as saying. It also said he was "deeply disappointed by the verdict." The AP said the Security Council, at France's request, planned to meet Tuesday afternoon.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at a news conference in Congo, said of Ms. Suu Kyi: "She should not have been tried. She should not have been convicted. We continue to call for her release."


Ms. Suu Kyi's trial has been condemned around the world.


British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Myanmar's leaders are "determined to act with total disregard" for international law, while the European Union promised to reinforce its sanctions against Myanmar.

Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group, called the verdict "a reprehensible abuse of power." The U.S. Campaign for Burma, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group, urged a global arms embargo against Myanmar and an investigation into crimes against humanity in the country.

The verdict "should really make it clear that it's game over. ... [The junta leaders] have no intention of bringing changes about in their country," said Jeremy Woodrum, a spokesman for the group.

A group of 14 Nobel laureates wrote to the U.N. Security Council, saying that body must hold Myanmar's leadership "accountable for its crimes" and investigate "the full extent of its brutality."

The Yangon court sentenced Ms. Suu Kyi to three years in prison for allowing an American well-wisher to visit her home in May without notifying state authorities. But in a move apparently intended to appease the country's many international critics, Senior General Than Shwe ordered the court to cut the sentence in half and allow her to serve it at home.

Gen. Than Shwe said in a statement that he made the decision to "maintain peace and tranquility"' and because Ms. Suu Kyi was the daughter of Aung San, a national hero who helped win the country's independence from Britain, the Associated Press reported.

Singapore, a fellow member with Myanmar in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, said it was "disappointed" with the conviction and sentence, but added, "We are, however, happy that the Myanmar government has exercised its sovereign prerogative to grant amnesty for half her sentence and that she will be placed under house arrest rather than imprisoned."

The Yangon court also convicted John Yettaw, the 53-year-old Missouri resident who triggered the case after he swam across a Yangon lake to reach Ms. Suu Kyi's residence, uninvited, on May 4. He later told officials he had had a dream she might be assassinated and wanted to warn her.

Mr. Yettaw was declared guilty of breaching conditions of Ms. Suu Kyi's house arrest as well as immigration rules. The court sentenced him to up to seven years imprisonment, including four with hard labor, though some analysts said they believe the government might soon deport the American.

The regime also convicted two aides that live with Ms. Suu Kyi, sentencing each for 18 months.

There were no immediate reports of serious unrest in Yangon, the country's commercial capital, which is tightly monitored by military authorities. Still, dissatisfaction with the decision was widespread, including among some elites who ordinarily would be expected to side with the junta.

Residents said that security measures had been stepped up across the city, with police trucks patrolling the streets, and plainclothes officers believed to be monitoring Internet cafes where young dissidents often gather.

"The court proceedings were just a sham," said a 42-year-old lawyer who works in Yangon. "From the beginning, she was predestined" to lose.

A retired army major sitting in a teahouse said, "I had already expected this kind of ruling. Justice has been raped by the generals."

The need to bring about some kind of regime change in Myanmar -- or at least reach some kind of diplomatic breakthrough with the junta -- is growing, dissidents say. Economic and social conditions have deteriorated significantly in the country in recent years, despite the fact that the government's financial strength has increased, largely due to surging trade in natural gas and other resources with China, Thailand and other Asian neighbors.

There is also growing concern that Myanmar's junta may be developing more-advanced weapons systems, possibly with help from North Korea, with a goal of gaining more control over its population and increasing its leverage in discussions with the West.

Several Myanmar citizens, some of them expatriates, have claimed direct knowledge of a nuclear-weapons program involving a reactor under construction in a remote part of the country. However, the area is off-limits to outsiders without government permission and the reports haven't been independently confirmed.

Myanmar officials rarely speak directly to the foreign media or to senior Western diplomats, and representatives at the government's Ministry of Information and in embassies overseas haven't responded to questions from The Wall Street Journal about the country's alleged weapons plans. North Korea has denied assisting with nuclear equipment.

Foreign governments were watching the Suu Kyi trial to see if Myanmar was willing to signal a desire for more engagement with the West. The junta has mostly declined to bow to foreign pressure, arguing it had to hold Ms. Suu Kyi under house arrest for much of the past decades for her own safety and to maintain political order, given her history of organizing residents opposed to a military regime that has ruled Myanmar since 1962.

Ms. Suu Kyi's political party, the National League for Democracy, won a resounding victory in the last Myanmar elections held in 1990. But the regime ignored the results and subsequently tightened its grip, imprisoning several hundred opposition figures. It has also cracked down hard whenever residents expressed serious discontent, including killing 30 or more people in street protests led by Buddhist monks in 2007.

Foreign governments, including the U.S., responded to the government's tactics with repeated calls for Ms. Suu Kyi's release and with increasingly stiff economic sanctions, including rules that have prevented all but a few Western companies from doing business there. More recently, a growing number of policy makers and dissidents had been arguing that the outside world needs to soften its approach and pursue more discussions with the regime, because sanctions and other punitive measures had failed to generate meaningful change.

The Obama administration earlier this year signaled it was reviewing policies toward Myanmar, and last month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that if the regime freed Ms. Suu Kyi, it could open the way for the U.S. to allow more investments in the country. Charitable groups have called for a big rise in humanitarian aid to increase interaction between local citizens and the outside world. Leading members of the exile community -- including the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, which describes itself as Myanmar's government-in-exile -- have discussed a new reconciliation program that would involve more dialogue with the junta.

However, the conviction of Ms. Suu Kyi complicates those efforts. Although the regime is planning an election next year, presumably to boost its legitimacy to the outside world, many opposition members have said they won't participate if Ms. Suu Kyi isn't allowed a voice. That increases the odds that foreign governments and dissidents will reject the outcome of the vote.

Asian Companies’ Thirst for African Oil

Source: Chatham House

A new report on the activities of Asian oil companies in Africa exposes the flaws in many general assumptions about Asian engagement with Africa. Thirst for African Oil: Asian National Oil Companies in Nigeria and Angola analyses the impact of these companies in the two leading oil producing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and contrasts the stability and policy consistency that are features of the Angolan system with a more insecure and unstable system in Nigeria.

The report finds that fears in Western capitals about an Asian takeover in the Nigerian and Angolan oil sectors are ‘highly exaggerated’ - the oil majors still dominate production and hold the majority of reserves. Indeed, in Angola, there is growing fatigue among officials about the West’s fixation with China’s engagement with Angola.

Thirst for African Oil concludes that neither Nigeria nor Angola fits the stereotype of weak African states being ruthlessly exploited by resource hungry Asian tigers. In Nigeria’s case, a cash-hungry political class sought to profit from its Asian partners’ thirst for oil whilst in Angola the relationship with China was nurtured in a pragmatic, disciplined way to the mutual advantage of both countries.

The report also compares the experiences of Chinese companies with those of India, South Korea and Japan and assesses the growing competition between China and India where China’s deeper pockets have put a brake on India’s ambitions.

+ Full Report (PDF; 1.7 MB)

Aug 10, 2009

U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Drug Lords Tied to Taliban

WASHINGTON — Fifty Afghans believed to be drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed, reflecting a major shift in American counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan, according to a Congressional study to be released this week.

United States military commanders have told Congress that they are convinced that the policy is legal under the military’s rules of engagement and international law. They also said the move is an essential part of their new plan to disrupt the flow of drug money that is helping finance the Taliban insurgency.

In interviews with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is releasing the report, two American generals serving in Afghanistan said that major traffickers with proven links to the insurgency have been put on the “joint integrated prioritized target list.” That means they have been given the same target status as insurgent leaders, and can be captured or killed at any time.

The generals told Senate staff members that two credible sources and substantial additional evidence were required before a trafficker was placed on the list, and only those providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.

Currently, they said, there are about 50 major traffickers who contribute money to the Taliban on the list.

“We have a list of 367 ‘kill or capture’ targets, including 50 nexus targets who link drugs and the insurgency,” one of the generals told the committee staff. The generals were not identified in the Senate report, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The shift in policy comes as the Obama administration, deep into the war in Afghanistan, makes significant changes to its strategy for dealing with that country’s lucrative drug trade, which provides 90 percent of the world’s heroin and has led to substantial government corruption.

The Senate report’s disclosure of a hit list for drug traffickers may lead to criticism in the United States over the expansion of the military’s mission, and NATO allies have already raised questions about the strategy of killing individuals who are not traditional military targets.

For years the American-led mission in Afghanistan had focused on destroying poppy crops. Pentagon officials have said their new emphasis is on weaning local farmers off the drug trade — including the possibility of paying them to grow nothing — and going after the drug runners and drug lords. But the Senate report is the first account of a policy to actually place drug chieftains aligned with the Taliban on a “kill or capture” list.

Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, would not comment on the Senate report, but said that “there is a positive, well-known connection between the drug trade and financing for the insurgency and terrorism.” Without directly addressing the existence of the target list, he said that it was “important to clarify that we are targeting terrorists with links to the drug trade, rather than targeting drug traffickers with links to terrorism.”

Several individuals suspected of ties to drug trafficking have already been apprehended and others have been killed by the United States military since the new policy went into effect earlier this year, a senior military official with direct knowledge of the matter said in an interview. Most of the targets are in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where both the drug trade and the insurgency are the most intense.

One American military officer serving in Afghanistan described the purpose of the target list for the Senate committee. “Our long-term approach is to identify the regional drug figures,” the unidentified officer is quoted as saying in the Senate report. The goal, he said, is to “persuade them to choose legitimacy, or remove them from the battlefield.”

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing delicate policy matters.

When Donald H. Rumsfeld was defense secretary, the Pentagon fiercely resisted efforts to draw the United States military into supporting counternarcotics efforts. Top military commanders feared that trying to prevent drug trafficking would only antagonize corrupt regional warlords whose support they needed, and might turn more of the populace against American troops.

It was only in the last year or two of the Bush administration that the United States began to recognize that the Taliban insurgency was being revived with the help of drug money.

The policy of going after drug lords is likely to raise legal concerns from some NATO countries that have troops in Afghanistan. Several NATO countries initially questioned whether the new policy would comply with international law.

“This was a hard sell in NATO,” said retired Gen. John Craddock, who was supreme allied commander of NATO forces until he retired in July.

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the secretary general of NATO until last month, told the Senate committee staff that to deal with the concerns of other nations with troops in Afghanistan, safeguards had been put in place to make sure the alliance remained within legal bounds while pursuing drug traffickers. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, is also informed before a mission takes place, according to a senior military official.

General Craddock said that some NATO countries were also concerned that the new policy would draw the drug lords closer to the Taliban, because they would turn to them for more protection. “But the opposite is the case, since it weakens the Taliban, so they can’t provide that protection,” General Craddock said. “If we continue to push on this, we will see progress,” he added. “It’s causing them problems.”

In a surprise, the Senate report reveals that the United States intelligence community believes that the Taliban has been getting less money from the drug trade than previous public studies have suggested. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency both estimate that the Taliban obtains about $70 million a year from drugs.

The Senate report found that American officials did not believe that Afghan drug money was fueling Al Qaeda, which instead relies on contributions from wealthy individuals and charities in Persian Gulf countries, as well as aid organizations working inside Afghanistan.

But even with the new, more cautious estimates, the Taliban has plenty of drug money to finance its relatively inexpensive insurgency. Taliban foot soldiers are paid just $10 a day — more if they plant an improvised explosive device.

Not all those suspected of drug trafficking will end up on the Pentagon’s list. Intelligence gathered by the United States and Afghanistan will more often be used for prosecutions, although American officials are frustrated that they still have not been able to negotiate an extradition treaty with the Afghan government.

A major unresolved problem in the counternarcotics strategy is the fact that the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan remains wide open, and the Pakistanis are doing little to close down drug smuggling routes.

A senior American law enforcement official in the region is quoted in the report as saying that cooperation with Pakistan on counternarcotics is so poor that traffickers cross the border with impunity.

“We give them leads on targets,” the official said in describing the Pakistani government’s counternarcotics tactics, adding, “We get smiles, a decent cup of tea, occasional reheated sandwiches and assertions of progress, and we all leave with smiles on our faces.”

Aug 9, 2009

Karzai in His Labyrinth

On a sunny June morning in Kabul, I sat among hundreds of turbaned men from Afghanistan’s Helmand and Kandahar provinces in a chandeliered wedding hall where they had gathered for a campaign rally to re-elect President Hamid Karzai. War was raging in Helmand and Kandahar. And yet there was an atmosphere of burlesque about the place. Waiters hammed up their service, skidding across the floor balancing mounds of rice, bananas and chicken, whirling shopping carts of Coke and Fanta. The organizer of the event and master of ceremonies was none other than Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the five-foot-tall ex-governor of Helmand and probably the country’s most infamous drug trafficker. From a velvet couch he barked out to the speakers: “Not so many poems! Keep your speeches short!” — but no one was listening.

At my table, an elderly Helmandi engineer described how awful things were in his region — families killed in coalition airstrikes, villages overrun by the Taliban. So why more Karzai? “If we choose someone else, it will only get worse,” he said through an interpreter. Another man said that at least Karzai had brought education and unity. “They are all lying,” a third said in English. He was the son of a prominent Kandahari elder who, a year before, was assassinated outside the family’s house. He’d also lost his uncle, brother and 45 other members of his extended family, he told me. He blamed the government. He was shaking his head at the spectacle in the wedding hall. “I told the men at my table, ‘You just came to show your faces on camera so if Karzai wins he will give you privileges.’ ” He laughed and said, “They told me they just came for lunch.” I asked what he thought would happen during the election in Kandahar. “Fraud,” he said. He himself claimed to have made 8,000 fake voter-registration cards. They were selling for $20.

After lunch, in a downstairs room filled with mannequins in pink and green wedding gowns, I had a chat with Akhundzada, the ex-governor. He is campaigning in the south for Karzai. First he wanted to explain that the nine tons of drugs found in his compound in 2005 were planted there by the British to frame him. Then he changed tack: “If people think I was a smuggler, O.K. But at least I spent the money on government and soldiers! Now the money goes to the Taliban and kills British and Americans and Afghan soldiers.” This is the same logic that Karzai used to try to get Akhundzada reinstalled as governor of Helmand. The British would not accept it. This seemed distinctly unfair to Akhundzada, given the other characters on the political stage: “They don’t take Fahim out of elections? Dostum is not criminal? Mohaqiq is not criminal? Just me?”

It was a comical and sinister and telling performance — a prominent Karzai backer damning key members of the president’s re-election team (locally dubbed “the warlord ticket”). The ethnic-Tajik Muhammad Fahim is running as Karzai’s first vice president (having previously served in the same post and as defense minister); the ethnic-Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum is returning from Turkey to deliver Uzbek votes to Karzai; and the ethnic-Hazara politician Muhammad Mohaqiq is a key Karzai ally to whom Karzai pledged five ministerial posts.

“I swear,” Akhundzada went on, eyes agog, “I have not killed a cat in all my life.” With that he took off with his rifle-toting guards and disappeared into his armored S.U.V.

Karzai applauds himself for his big-tent, forgive-and-forget approach. But his opponents are thrashing him for it. “If the goal is to consolidate a group of drug dealers as the government of Afghanistan so that you have relative peace, then what is the vision?” asked Ashraf Ghani when we met at his gracious villa on the southwestern edge of Kabul in February, a few months before he decided to run for president himself. “Is that what the 20-year-old girl who wants to become a computer engineer or doctor has in mind? Or the 22-year-old Afghan who won two gold medals in computers? Can they become stakeholders in an Afghanistan run by Sher Muhammad Akhundzada?”

The presidential campaign has put Karzai’s style of politics on trial. There are 41 candidates running in Afghanistan’s second-ever presidential elections, which take place on Aug. 20. Karzai’s main competitors are two of his former ministers — Ghani, who was finance minister from 2002 to 2004 and an adviser to the World Bank for 10 years; and Abdullah Abdullah, an ophthalmologist who became a close adviser to the legendary mujahedin commander Ahmed Shah Massoud (assassinated by Al Qaeda just before the 9/11 attacks) and served as foreign minister under Karzai until 2006. When I asked Abdullah what he’d do to stop drug smuggling, he said, “I wouldn’t let my brother touch it.” He was referring to Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half-brother, who is accused of running Kandahar like a mafia don and overseeing one of the local drug cartels. “Seriously, you lose your legitimacy if the perception is that your brother is doing it and benefiting from millions of dollars.”

Ghani, on his Web site, has branded the Karzais a mafia family, “Karzai Incorporated.” “The largest threat to Afghanistan now is this government,” he told me recently. “Just take one figure: last fiscal year from March 2007 to 2008, the Ministry of Finance collected 40 billion Afghanis, which is equivalent to around $800 million. The same ministry declares that the real revenue should have been 120 billion Afghanis. They are acknowledging that, due to corruption, 80 billion is being lost.” That, he said, worked out to $1.6 billion. “We go beg the entire world: ‘Please give us budget support; we need to pay our poor teachers and civil servants.’ If the revenue was collected we wouldn’t have needed a cent from the international community for the budget.”

Does Karzai care? Is this what he wants? “I don’t think so,” Ghani said. “But I don’t judge a president by his desires. I judge a president by his record and his company. We ranked 117 on Transparency International in 2005. Now we rank 176, the fifth-most-corrupt country on earth. It happened under his watch. And then he wants to run for office for another five years? Based on what? And the team he put together: isn’t it a declaration of war against the people of Afghanistan?”

Over the winter I spent several days in the presidential palace, the Arg, with Karzai and his entourage. I was hoping to find out who Karzai really is. Does he condone the venality of his friends and family? Is he unable to stop it? Is this just what life is in a country long torn by war? Did the West misjudge his character — or did it make it impossible for him to rule? Is he just in love with power and pomp? And why, with all the accusations of criminality, the unfulfilled promises, his plummeting popularity, would Hamid Karzai even want to run again?

I put this last question to him on a gloomy afternoon over tea at the Arg palace, where he lives and works and is confined much of the year. The question appeared to stump him. He said he had tried and failed to find a suitable replacement. Then he said, in his practiced English: “I don’t know what happened. I decided to run.” Then he said: “Look, I will tell you. But then I’ll leave it up to you whether you want to print it or not.” I was expecting some shocking revelation. But instead he fumbled about and said, “When needed, my extreme toughness with our allies is an asset I want the Afghan people to have if they choose so.” And, “The second reason, I don’t know how to put this. . . . I feel for the Afghan people, and they know that.” It all sounded so cryptic. As his train of thought neared its destination, he suddenly said: “I’m a very, very, very simple person. I have no property. I have no money. I have no love for luxury. If I find someone tomorrow that will combine all these three. . . . ” He sighed and took a deep breath. “I’m an exhausted person. I’ve not begun this seven years ago. I’ve begun this when I was 22. I’ve not had a private life since then. I deserve one. I long for one.” He lingered on the O of his longing. “The moment I get this choice, I would leave.”

It was clear that Karzai believes in the image he has fashioned of himself as protector and father of the Afghan nation. Or does he? Karzai is a theatrical man — a ham, even — funny and charming. He flourished in the adulation of his early years as head of state, when the fashion designer Tom Ford dubbed him the chicest man on the planet. His theatrical qualities have carried him along for some time. But what he actually believes is often hard to pin down. And lately the wear and tear of performance is beginning to show, like the creases in a fading diva. His friends told me he has health problems. He’s skin and bones. He always has a cold or a cough and takes effervescent vitamin-C tablets compulsively, which he did as we spoke. “He is stressed, short of patience, short of temper,” a friend said. He snaps easily. Promotes flatterers. Kills the messenger. Hugs his enemies. Abuses his friends. And his twitching eye — a nervous tic, they say — is unusually active.

Still, Karzai seems to feel he has a mission. Friends say he knows how bad his reputation is and wants to redeem his legacy. When I asked who his role model is, he said without hesitation, “Gandhi.” Ever since his days as a university student in India he has been fascinated by the man’s life and his ideas of nonviolent liberation. Karzai clearly abhors violence. Tears came to his eyes whenever we spoke about civilian casualties. He once had an aide, in the middle of the night, go buy back a child bride whose parents had given her away to repay a debt. Karzai and his aristocratic Pashtun family revere Ghaffar Khan, the nonviolent Pashtun leader who lived from 1890 to 1988. Through his charisma and belief in education, Ghaffar Khan mobilized a pacific movement known as the Red Shirts, first against the British and then against Pakistan. It was a remarkable feat, given the warrior nature of the Pashtun tribesmen. Khan became known as the “frontier Gandhi.”

Gandhi is also a model for Karzai, he told me, in terms of tolerance. “You can’t imagine how much I’ve tolerated,” he said, glaring from under his brow and leaning into his desk where he keeps two photographs, one of his 2-year-old son, Mirwais, and the other of the late King Zahir Shah. “I was like a person carrying a very delicate jar, a vase, in my hands, a very precious, delicate one that is so valuable that you don’t want it to drop, and you are walking through storms, through rains, through wind, through excesses of all kinds,” he said, elongating his vowels and carrying himself away in the drama of his metaphor. “You fall but you keep the vase, delicately holding it so it doesn’t break. That’s how Afghanistan was,” he said. “Carrying it for so long you have to be very accommodating. That weakens you.”

What accommodations? The warlords? The foreigners?

“Everything,” he said. “Everything, everything, everything! I had to balance the U.S. and Iran in Afghanistan. I had to balance other countries in here. I had to balance Europe. I had to balance the Muslim world. I had to make Afghanistan a country where all work together for it. And that I have managed. Fortunately. But, you know, at great personal stress and cost.”

The cost? Loneliness. A man painted into a corner. Every day he wakes to another round of punches from the world’s diplomats and news media. He studies the press clippings, CNN, the BBC, the local news channels, ravenously and angrily. They blame him and his brothers and his ministers for the country’s corruption, for the insurgency eating away at the nation, for running a narco-state (in Hillary Clinton’s phrase) and even for the food shortages facing eight million Afghans. In January, when Karzai lashed out at one of his vice presidents in a cabinet meeting, accusing him of conspiring with foreigners, then threatened to go to the mountains to fight the invaders himself, word went around that Karzai was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

It wasn’t hard to see why. “No one is on his side,” a foreign observer told me with mild pity. “He’s trapped in the palace, trapped by his family.” When a bomb went off at the German Embassy in January, all the windows of his house were blown out. “And little Mirwais,” he said, “was running around the house going bam-bam-bang-bang! Nobody had told Karzai. He was in his office. He got home and they were mending the windows.”

The president’s residence sits within the Arg palace grounds along a tree-lined path behind the Gul Khanna (the House of Flowers), where Karzai has his office. At the end of the workday, the president takes a brisk 10-minute walk. When I followed after him one cold evening, 10 men or more covered him as he walked along. His cellphone rang. He slipped aside. The men tried to stay near. Assassins have repeatedly tried to kill Karzai. A bullet just missed him in Kandahar in 2002. In 2007, he was rocketed during a speech in Ghazni, between Kabul and Kandahar — but he stayed onstage. He insisted on holding an Independence Day parade last year despite security warnings. And sure enough, a well-trained hit squad fired on the parade, killing several officials and narrowly missing the president. For the last two years security has been so tight, friends say, that the president is getting what they call the Arg syndrome. Sometimes at night he has been known to slip out of the palace with a bodyguard in a beat-up car just to drive around Kabul and see what’s going on. He will express surprise, delight, even, at the new buildings and sights.

I recently asked an old friend of Karzai’s why Karzai would choose as his running mate Muhammad Fahim, a controversial figure who has been accused of multiple human rights abuses over many years. “Karzai believes that his two greatest mistakes as president were the removals of Sher Muhammad Akhundzada and Marshal Fahim,” he said. Both happened under intense Western pressure. The reason he regretted their removal was not that he thought they were honest statesmen but that he found they were more trouble out of office. Fahim’s removal lost him mujahedin support, and Akhundzada’s removal triggered the fall of Helmand Province to the Taliban.

To understand why everyone was so shocked that Karzai chose Fahim as his running mate, you need to know a little of the personal history between the two men. It shows how warlordism does and doesn’t work — and, in a sense, what Karzai will forgive to stay in power. Back in 1994, the mujahedin factions who fought off the Soviets were supposed to be cooperating in a coalition government. Instead they were deep in a civil war, rocketing one another and Kabul to smithereens.

One of these factions belonged to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, today an outlawed insurgent but then prime minister and head of a large, mostly ethnic-Pashtun political party. Another belonged to the man who was then Afghanistan’s president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, leader of a largely Tajik party. In this government, Karzai was deputy foreign minister and trying, as is his wont, to play conciliator between the factions. But Rabbani and his men began to suspect that Karzai was plotting something with Hekmatyar. Rabbani’s head of intelligence was none other than Muhammad Fahim. Karzai was hauled into an interrogation center in Kabul from which few returned alive. But just as the interrogation got under way, a rocket slammed into the roof of the building. Karzai fled to Pakistan.

In 1996, after the Taliban captured Kabul and threw out the mujahedin factions, Karzai briefly considered becoming an ambassador for the Taliban government. After all, the Taliban were mostly, like Karzai, Kandahari Pashtuns; he knew many of them. But the position went to someone else. From that time until 2001, he joined a broad coalition of friends and enemies seeking a grand loya jirga, or tribal council, to bring peace to Afghanistan.

With the overthrow of the Taliban, the ethnic Tajiks who made up the bulk of the Northern Alliance considered themselves the victors. At the Bonn Conference held in Germany in December 2001 to create the future Afghan government, the Northern Alliance Tajiks demanded and got the most important ministries. Given Afghanistan’s demographics, everyone knew they needed an ethnic Pashtun as president, and Abdullah Abdullah, who was then with the Northern Alliance, pressed the case for Karzai. He seemed the perfect choice at the time, Abdullah recently told me: a Pashtun from a landed family in Kandahar, known to the Northern Alliance through years of jihad and then various peace processes. “After fighting all those years against the Taliban, who were a southern Pashtun movement,” Abdullah told me recently, “for the north to push for someone from the south was breaking the ice and a milestone that we could build a future on.”

Karzai’s personal tale didn’t hurt. Two weeks after 9/11, he hopped on the back of a friend’s motorcycle in Quetta, Pakistan, and journeyed into the Taliban-infested Afghan mountains to persuade the tribes to revolt. He had no gunmen with him. Just a satellite phone from the C.I.A. and faith in his powers of persuasion. He and the men he gathered were chased by the Taliban but fought them off. “They called for help to the C.I.A.,” recalls Jason Amerine, who was a Special Forces captain assigned to make contact with Karzai. Navy Seals landed, pulled Karzai and tribal leaders out and flew them to a base in Pakistan. Even then, Karzai understood that appearances mean everything in a part of the world where conspiracy is taken as truth. He was willing to fudge the facts to seal the legend of his heroism. Live on the BBC, he insisted he was somewhere in Afghanistan. In fact, he was with Amerine in Pakistan. Nevertheless he did persuade the very reluctant Americans to help him return to Taliban land. “Karzai was such a dark horse in all this that there was no real reason for anyone to risk it,” Amerine said. “He had no guys in the south. His plan was very idealistic: ‘If we show up, the south will rise.’ ” In the end, Afghans did rise against the Taliban, including in the south. Karzai was right. And his legend stuck.

So it was that on a cold December evening in 2001, Hamid Karzai flew from Kandahar to Kabul to become the interim leader of the new Afghanistan. He had just a few men with him, including his uncle Aziz and his younger half-brother, Shawali, when he stepped onto the tarmac. There to greet him was Fahim, brow furrowed, as it always is, along with more than a hundred of his soldier-bodyguards.

“Where are all your men?” he asked Karzai.

“You are my men,” Karzai said to Fahim and his band of Northern Alliance fighters. “All of you who are Afghans are my men.”

Fahim was stunned. No tribesmen? No bodyguards? No soldiers? A civilian leader all alone? A southern Pashtun aristocrat putting himself in the hands of the Tajik northerners? Karzai entrusting his life to his former tormentor? It was a gesture of infinite faith.

From that day onward, Fahim became a thorn in Karzai’s side, always reminding Karzai that his life depended on him. After Karzai’s Pashtun vice president, Haji Qadir, was assassinated in July 2002, Karzai so distrusted Fahim’s bodyguards (Fahim was then in charge of the army) that he accepted protection from U.S. forces. Cabinet meetings featured regular clashes between the so-called warlords on one hand and the technocrats — or dogwashers, as the educated Afghan returnees were known — on the other. In particular, men like Fahim and Ashraf Ghani (then minister of finance) were at each other’s throats. And Karzai was once again in the middle.

Zia Mojadedi, an old friend of Karzai’s and now the ambassador to Poland, put much of the blame for the dysfunctional cabinet on the international community. “Most of the NATO members have a gentleman in the cabinet,” he told me. “Each one defends his own man. And those who make donations are the ones deciding. So he was confused.” One famous example is Dostum, the Uzbek warlord from the north. After he beat up and detained a political rival, he drank himself into a wild state and, in King Kong fashion, took up a position on the roof of his garish mansion in Kabul, baiting the police and vowing that they’d never take him alive. Karzai wanted to arrest him. But the Turks, who are major donors and are ethnically related to the Uzbeks, vehemently opposed the move. Finally a deal was worked out for Dostum to go for some rest and rehab in Turkey.

For years everyone was telling Karzai to get rid of Zarar Ahmad Muqbil, his minister of the interior, whom senior U.N. officials accused of taking kickbacks from organized-crime rings within the ministry. But the Americans loved him on account of the glowing reports submitted by his American mentor. The internationals referred to her as “Rosa Klebb,” after the infamous Russian counterintelligence agent in the Ian Fleming novel “From Russia With Love,” who sported a venom-laden dart in her shoe. Even Karzai used to tease Muqbil, saying to him, “How is your godmother?”

“In a microcosm, the problem with the whole of Afghanistan was Muqbil,” says Jawed Ludin, Karzai’s former chief of staff, who watched the whole fiasco with Zarar Muqbil unfold firsthand. “To what extent do you blame Karzai? On the one hand, the British ambassador and friends would tell him Zarar was incompetent and should be removed. On the other, the American would praise him and say he’s doing a fine job. And the Americans were the largest donor to police reform.”

Lynsey Addario/VII Network, for The New York Times


Karzai told me, “I was a president without any resources directly in my control.” It was a defensive response, but it was also true. According to one palace official: “Early as 2003, in discussions with Donald Rumsfeld, Karzai would say: ‘Look, we cannot live with this situation, when you think I am the president, but I am not. We cannot leave Dostum in the north, Shirzai in Kandahar, Ismail Khan in Herat.’ And you know what Rumsfeld said? ‘Look, Mr. President, they are our friends, and we do not want a green-on-green situation.’ I didn’t know this phrase then.” Green on green: friendly soldier against friendly soldier.

Later that year, Karzai threatened to resign if the warlords who were hogging all the customs revenue didn’t turn their dividends over to the central government. A compromise was reached: the first of many. Karzai began to make peace, accommodating jihadis, Communists, technocrats, dogwashers, war criminals, democrats. All had a place in Karzai’s big tent. The next two years could be called Karzai’s honeymoon period. Two pillars were essential to his stability — Lakhdar Brahimi, the wise old Algerian resistance leader and diplomat who headed up the U.N. mission, and Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American steeped in the traditions both of Afghan tribal horse-trading and American bureaucracy. They could help Karzai make tough decisions and back them up with American muscle.

Then, in 2004, he won the first presidential elections ever held in Afghanistan. Brahimi and Khalilzad left — and by 2005, most of the reformers around Karzai either walked away or were not invited back into his cabinet. Among those who left was Ashraf Ghani. “In 2005, Karzai could have taken the country in any direction he wished,” Ghani told me. “His legitimacy knew no bounds.” What happened? “He failed to lead,” Ghani said.

Or maybe he led the only way he knew how. At heart, Karzai is a Pashtun tribal leader, just like his father was. What are the responsibilities of the tribal leader? To protect his property (livestock and women), his land and his people. If one of your people is put in jail, whether he lays mines, steals or murders, you’re obliged to get him out and let the tribe deal with him. If the law helps your case, great. If not, tradition will do. That tradition is evident all over the campaign trail, where Karzai has even released criminals from prison so they can campaign for him.

When Karzai’s father was killed in Pakistan in 1999, his family and tribesmen decided that, because his older brothers were living in America, Hamid would take over as a leader of the tribe and, in keeping with tradition, they placed the turban on his head. When he assumed the presidency, he took what he knew from tribal leadership and applied it to his method of rule. He sees himself as the tribal leader of all Afghans. As such he’s the last resort for those seeking to rectify injustice. “In his dream he is a king,” one friend says.

Other close friends of Karzai describe his leadership style as a kind of three-card monte where you never know which card will appear. One card is tribal. “His father was head of the tribe, and in tribal culture you depend on loyalty of individuals rather than institutions,” said Ali Jalali, his former interior minister and a friend from refugee days in Pakistan. “You always try to be a patron to people close and loyal to you.” The second is the factional politics of resistance in Peshawar, where mujahedin leaders organized their resistance to the Soviet occupation. “Jihadi politics is mostly wheeling, dealing, no strategy, all tactical,” Jalali continued. “Please people here. Break promises there.” And the third is democracy. He cherishes the values of democracy but has no faith in its institutions. “How he reconciles these competing demands creates his style of leadership,” Jalali said. In reality, said another friend, “he sees human rights, freedom of the press, the law, the constitution as chains around his hands and legs.”

He is in his element playing Solomon, hosting elders for lunch in the palatial dining hall. They request a dam or a road or the release from custody of a tribesman accused of terrorism or kidnapping. If they are important politically — and, in the case of a prisoner, can vouch for his future behavior — Karzai often agrees, in kingly fashion.

He resists looking deeply into the consequences of his decisions. Last year, Karzai’s wife, Zeenat, a gynecologist, saw a report on television about the rape of a very young girl and her family’s futile quest for justice. Karzai was horrified. He had the police and prosecutor fired. He put the fight against rape on the national agenda.

Not long after, the other Karzai, the political animal, meddled in an obscure case in which a woman named Sara was raped by three men who were brothers. The evidence was overwhelming, and the brothers’ conviction was upheld to the highest court. But Karzai issued a decree releasing them. Sara went mad, and her husband was murdered.

I asked Karzai in February: “Why did you do that?”

“The story turned out to be different,” he said. He couldn’t remember the details and asked an aide to look into it.

In fact, the brothers reported to a local strongman, Mawlawi Islam, who was a member of Parliament and an important ally of Karzai’s. Islam’s son, who works in the Arg palace, told me that he had asked the palace staff to examine the case. The palace’s administrative office then developed another story — told to Karzai, and later to me — claiming Sara’s rape never took place and adding that her son had raped the wife of one of the convicted brothers. It became so convoluted that Karzai probably didn’t know the details. Still, he signed a decree releasing the brothers in the name of Islamic mercy for their mother.

“We have a saying, When you come to power your eyes go blind, your ears go deaf and you don’t know anything anymore,” an old Kandahari friend of the president’s told me.

Hence, perhaps, Karzai’s willful blindness about what his own brothers are up to. In explaining Karzai’s relationship to his brothers, Karzai’s family and friends allude to his outcast childhood — of the seven sons, he was not one of his father’s favorites, they say. “The mad one,” that’s how his father called him. The pet name stuck. A quiet boy, a dreamer, an odd one who could scare the other boys with his strange faces and moods, who loved to jump on his horse in jeans and cowboy boots and ride around as if in an American movie.

Amin Arsala, an avuncular former diplomat and adviser to Karzai who considered running for president, often warned Karzai about his brothers ruining his reputation. But either he cannot or will not stand up to them. There’s a revolving door of diplomats, politicians and tribal leaders who all see Karzai, complain about his brothers and then leave, knowing he’ll do nothing.

Qayum, an older brother, has spent most of his life in America running Afghan restaurants and, during the days of jihad, he introduced Karzai to U.S. government officials. He is a political guru for Karzai, though he complains Karzai doesn’t listen to him. He resigned as a member of Parliament for Kandahar and spends much of his time in Saudi Arabia, trying to bring the Taliban in from the cold. Mahmoud is the hotblooded business mogul, vice chairman of the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce. He says he wants to promote free-market capitalism and complained to me one morning at his home in Kabul that his brother doesn’t understand economics and can’t run the government. “It’s mujahedin,” he told me, “it’s personal relationships, cash basis, no institutions.”

Many Afghans consider Mahmoud a bully who has muscled his way into the biggest business projects. He has 50 percent of Afghanistan’s Toyota distributions by way of Jack Kemp, who introduced Mahmoud to Toyota executives. Karzai was unhappy about his family’s involvement in such dealings, recalled Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the American ambassador at the time, adding, “He had the Japanese ambassador summoned to the palace to tell him, ‘Don’t give the dealership to my brother Mahmoud.’ ” But the Japanese listened to Kemp, not Karzai. Mahmoud is a major shareholder in Kabul Bank and, according to The New York Times, purchased the shares with a loan issued by the bank’s founder. And he persuaded the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a U.S. government agency, to offer him loans for a real estate development in Kandahar that everyone considers at once lovely and dodgy. Nice homes, grounds, guards, school. But it was government land purchased by the Karzais at $250 a jereb and sold at $28,000 a jereb.

Karzai’s response? “My brother is an American businessman,” he told me. “Business has got nothing to do with me. I don’t know if he has shares in the Kabul Bank, but if he has, what can I do?” This habit of saying “What can I do?” is precisely what has undermined Karzai among many Afghans.

The brother who really gives the president heartburn is Ahmed Wali, his younger half-brother. A possibly apocryphal story that Afghans and diplomats love to repeat involves the president asking Ahmed Wali: “Are you engaged with the drug networks? Are you aiding x, y and z?” In the story, Ahmed Wali storms out of the meeting saying: “Well, Hamid, at least I’m only ruining Kandahar. You’re ruining the whole country.”

To me, Karzai claimed that after an article about his brother and drugs appeared in The New York Times: “I called the U.S. government and intelligence here to ask them, and they said: ‘Totally wrong. We are sorry for that article.’ ” (A State Department spokesman would not comment on whether this conversation even took place.)

Then he added, “So I’ve done my job on that.”

Yet on every trip I’ve made to Kandahar, I have heard another story about Ahmed Wali and drugs. Some of the people who have recounted the incidents are now dead. Like Malim Akbar Khakrezwal, an elder of the Alakozai tribe. In 2006, he took me around the fertile lands of his district, which are now infiltrated by Taliban. He told me that when he was provincial-intelligence chief, he captured 1,400 kilograms of opium belonging to Jan Muhammad, then governor of Uruzgan and a very close friend of the president. Jan Muhammad told Akbar to release the opium, and he refused. “My brother called me and said, ‘We are not able to fight these big people,’ ” Akbar told me. “ ‘We are weak. Release them.’ So I went to Ahmed Wali and said: ‘You are my commander; what should I do with this opium? Should I give it back to Jan Muhammad?’ ‘Yes. Give it back,’ he said. Twenty days later I was released from my position.” Last year he was assassinated.

A Western intelligence official who has spent much of the last seven years in Kandahar and, for obvious reasons, wanted to remain anonymous, told me: “The Karzai family has opium and blood on their hands. They systematically install low-level officials up to provincial governors to make sure that, from the farm gate, in bulk, the opium is moved unfettered. When history analyzes this period and looks at this family, it will uncover a litany of extensive corruption that was tolerated because the West tolerated this family.”

Perhaps. Or not. As many Afghans have pointed out, U.S. history is full of robber barons and of families who made their fortunes during Prohibition, and in the words of Ashraf Ghani “turned very decent as families.”

“Karzai should see this as ‘Godfather II,’ ” a U.N. official says. “You got to get out of the business and go legit.”

This winter, as the stakes became higher and the new Obama administration appeared to snub Karzai, his theatrics began to take a more menacing turn. He was becoming less decisive and more distrustful of his advisers. He saw plots in every corner, interpreting the moves of Afghans, Americans and especially the British as proof that “they” were trying to unseat him. And in fact they were and maybe still are. The new U.S. ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, barely a month into his term, made a point of showing up at news conferences with other presidential candidates, including Ghani and Abdullah. Karzai threw a kind of presidential tantrum at his own press conference and accused the foreigners of intervening in Afghanistan’s national sovereignty (which, as financiers, administrators and protectors, they do every day). “That is of immense sensitivity to the people of Afghanistan and to myself, and that is something that we will fight tooth and nail,” Karzai said.

The American tactic seemingly worked. Afghans began talking overnight about how the Americans had adopted a new candidate — either Ghani or Abdullah. And while few Afghans knew much about either rival, thanks to Karzai’s anger at Eikenberry, the names of Ghani and Abdullah were mentioned over and over in the news.

Paranoid people usually do, of course, have enemies. Diplomats smile over meals with Karzai, bring him gifts from abroad and then send reports home saying he’s unsteady. One diplomat seasoned in the Middle East and Asia told me, “He’s the most conspiratorial leader I’ve ever met.” Perhaps. But you have to see his presidency from Karzai’s point of view.

If there was a clear turning point, a moment when the Karzai government began to lose its grip, it was in the spring of 2006. On a sunny morning at the end of that May, on the northern outskirts of Kabul, an American soldier in a convoy lost control of his truck and careered into rush-hour traffic. Five people were killed. Many more were wounded. Afghans began pelting the American vehicles with stones. The Americans fired in the air. By the time word spread across Kabul, the story had ballooned into a massacre of civilians by drunken American soldiers. Waves of young Afghan men set buildings ablaze, attacking anyone and anything associated with foreigners and the government. They shouted, “Down with America,” and “Down with Karzai,” as they burned a billboard-size portrait of the president. Even medical students joined the mob. The police were nowhere to be seen; or if they were, it was as ordinary rioters who’d thrown off their uniforms.

The mob raged on for six hours. A dozen people were killed and a hundred wounded. The defense minister finally deployed troops onto the streets. Karzai ordered a curfew and went on TV to reassure the population.

Inside the Arg palace, no one was reassured, least of all Karzai. “He was shocked at how vulnerable we all were,” Jawed Ludin, then Karzai’s chief of staff, told me not long ago. “And he was angry with the Afghan police and international security forces.” This wasn’t the Taliban. This wasn’t Pakistan. It was a public revolt. And there were no government institutions that could stop it.

Karzai began to suspect a plot to unseat him. “He knew that Marshal Fahim was unhappy with him ever since he was removed as vice president and minister of defense,” one palace official recalls. Karzai was desperate to find out whether the riots were spontaneous or whether Fahim orchestrated them. For hours on end, he sat in a room behind his office watching footage collected from various sources. Much of it showed the mob arriving at Parliament. Why, Karzai wondered, did Yunous Qanooni, the speaker of the Parliament, send out a delegation to negotiate with the rioters as if they were a legitimate group and not a bunch of hooligans? Qanooni and Fahim (both Tajiks from the Northern Alliance) must have been up to something. But what?

“Every Pashtun was convinced it was a Tajik plot led by the Northern Alliance,” Ronald Neumann, the U.S. ambassador at the time, told me. Most Kabulis agreed. Some medical students, who happily participated in the mayhem, told me that Northern Alliance commanders were “among us.” A British adviser to the government told me: “I was with Rabbani’s son in his hotel while he claimed to be organizing the riots from his mobile phone and boasting about it. It was completely bizarre.” Whether or not it was organized, the students and young men happily joined in the fray to let off four years of pent-up frustration. They were fed up with the arrogance of American soldiers. They were fed up with hearing about the billions of aid dollars that came to Afghanistan and went into the pockets of American contractors and their Afghan partners. And they were terrified by the return of the Taliban, not just in the south but sneaking around various neighborhoods of Kabul.

Karzai couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone. And when he didn’t get to the bottom of it, he suspected his own intelligence apparatus. Amrullah Saleh, his head of intelligence, had been Fahim’s translator back in the anti-Soviet days of jihad. Saleh was America’s man, not Karzai’s choice. Frustrated and rash, Karzai questioned Saleh’s loyalty in front of other officials. Saleh submitted his resignation (which was not accepted). It wasn’t the first and certainly wouldn’t be the last time Saleh tried to resign.

And what about the Americans? The C.I.A.’s station chief in Kabul at the time was a friend of Karzai’s from their days together in the Uruzgan mountains fighting the Taliban. Karzai met with him and Ambassador Neumann. Karzai was livid and unnerved. If the riots were spontaneous, Karzai told them, he should resign. It means they don’t want you here and they don’t want me, and I don’t want to remain the president. I want to leave.

The station chief was firm, according to a source who was present. No, Mr. President, you are not leaving.

“I felt really bad for him,” Jawed Ludin recalled. Karzai was so alone. He continued to watch the riot footage in his back room, trying to glean the plot. “I realized that, at that time, he had no dependable instrument of power,” Ludin said. “He didn’t have the money, the police, the intelligence. He had nothing.”

It was Karzai’s Nixon moment. People inside and outside the palace spoke of life “before the 8th of Jowza” (the date of the riots) and “after the 8th of Jowza.” That is, before May 29, 2006, and after.

Whom could he trust? All he could do was begin recasting the play, substituting Pashtun jihadi commanders for non-Pashtun ones. He began to surround himself with the former loyalists of his old friend Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. This was the same commander whom the Americans named, in 2003, as a “specially designated global terrorist.” This was the man who had recently declared himself an open ally of Al Qaeda. But while Karzai’s new cohort might still have had loyalties to Hekmatyar, they could at least be organized, disciplined and trusted to a certain extent.

The riots woke Karzai up to the fact that, in choosing not to have a political party, he had completely isolated himself. He had no constituency. He had thought he could be a symbol of unity for all Afghans, but even a Mandela or a Gandhi needed a party or a grass-roots movement. Karzai had little more than his own family and weekly video conferences with President George Bush. So the Pashtun jihadis gradually became his constituency and insurance policy.

The riots coincided with the resurgence of the Taliban, the American withdrawal from the south and the slow arrival of disjointed NATO forces. Every NATO country came with its own mandate and its own rules of engagement. And most of them thought they were deploying to a peacekeeping mission. Meanwhile, elements in the Pakistani military-intelligence agency were sending in suicide bombers and Taliban foot soldiers to take over Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan, Zabul. Such a chaotic scene needed a firm, decisive and confident hand.

In 2005 Sima Simar, the chairwoman of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, who knew Karzai from exile days in Pakistan, along with Louise Arbour, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, presented Karzai with a survey titled “A Call for Justice.” The findings were astounding. Seventy percent of Afghans said they had suffered direct losses, injuries and violations over two decades of war. They wanted war criminals brought to justice and barred from public office. Karzai told Arbour at the time: “Madam High Commissioner, I know justice is very important. Human beings are prisoners of their memories. If you don’t deal with them properly you cannot get rid of them.”

“He spoke like Mandela, Martin Luther King,” recalled Nader Nadery, a member of the commission that had been fighting to get Karzai to support dealing with the crimes of the past. Karzai appointed a special committee to create an action plan for transitional justice — including ministers and judicial advisers who would work alongside the U.N. By late 2006, they had arrived at a compromise plan. There would be a vetting process, truth commissions and even the possibility of tribunals.

On Dec. 10, 2006, Karzai attended the international Human Rights Day event at the national television and radio hall in Kabul. Nadery showed a documentary in the middle of the event — a collection of harrowing tales by survivors of war crimes from the last two decades. The film silenced the hall. Karzai then got up and set aside his prepared speech.

He spoke about the courage of a girl in the film who jumped from the fifth floor to save her honor because warlords wanted to rape her. He spoke of the mass graves and massacres and announced that he was launching the long-awaited action plan for peace, reconciliation and justice. And from now on, this day would be reserved to give dignity to the victims.

Karzai then moved from the sufferings of the past to the present. Not only did he have no power to stop the warlords, he said, “we can’t prevent the terrorists from coming from Pakistan. And we can’t prevent the coalition from bombing the civilians. And our children are dying because of this.” He told the story of a 2-year-old girl from Kandahar who’d just been brought to the palace. A NATO airstrike killed her entire family and left her paralyzed. The toll of the year, his helplessness, the dying children — it was all too much. The president’s voice broke, his lips trembled and he began to cry. He took a handkerchief from under his glass to dry his eyes. “Cruelty at the highest level,” he quivered. “The cruelty is too much.”

The president, too, was suffering. Everyone in the hall was weeping.

A few days later, Human Rights Watch released a report documenting 22 years of war crimes by the communists, the mujahedin and the Taliban. The list included current and former government officials like Rabbani, Fahim, Dostum.

The warlords smelled a plot. Using their parliamentary power, they drafted legislation to give themselves amnesty for all past crimes. They bused their supporters in from all over the country. Ten thousand people gathered in Ghazi Stadium, the site of the Taliban’s notorious public executions. They waved placards, “Long Live Dostum,” “Death to America,” “Death to Human Rights,” “Death to Dogwashers.” Most of the leaders of the civil-war factions showed up for the fun.

“After that, Karzai became afraid,” Nadery said. Though he never rejected the amnesty law, he also never signed it. It was another turning point in Karzai’s presidency. Rangin Spanta, who was part of the transitional-justice action committee and is now foreign minister, told me he tried to resign: “Karzai rejected my resignation. ‘You must be quiet,’ he said. ‘Let us look forward, because the balance of power is not in our interest.’ ” Maybe. But there are more Afghans who were victims of the warlords than who supported them. And most of those warlords — Sayyaf, Dostum, Fahim, Khalili, Mohaqiq — went on to join Karzai’s presidential re-election campaign.

When I asked Karzai about the return of warlords to power, he said: “It’s a great thing to talk about the kind of justice that is ideal and that we all should have. But do we have the means? Do we have the luxury of that?”

By late 2007, Karzai’s turn toward accommodation with warlords, tribalism and semiretired jihadis — and away from the international community — seems to have been completed. The palace had become like a Shakespearean stage, its officials, like so many Iagos, filling Karzai’s mind with plots and treachery. The British and the Americans, worried that Afghanistan was sinking beyond repair, conceived the position of a civilian czar who could coordinate the U.N. mission and the NATO mission and possibly bring some order into the chaos of the Arg palace. The man they chose was the British diplomat Paddy Ashdown, who had been the international community’s high representative to Bosnia until 2006. Karzai was at first intrigued by the idea and even accepted it. But the Iagos in the palace feared they would lose their gatekeeping status and the money they earned from it. They persuaded Karzai that the choice of Ashdown, who was born in British India to a colonial family and who had served as a British spy, was evidence of a British conspiracy.

Karzai has a complicated relationship with the British. He favors English shoes. He was a fan of “Last of the Summer Wine,” a three-decades-long BBC sitcom about the madcap adventures of elderly friends in the Yorkshire countryside. He has a romantic fascination with British royalty and rearranged his schedule to attend the Prince of Wales’s 60th birthday. Most of the other attendees were real royalty. “He thinks the Prince of Wales is a sensitive man, who understands him and Islam and the region,” one diplomat explained. On another occasion he visited the prince’s house in Scotland, seizing the chance to break out of his palace prison and stride across the moors for hours. Perhaps it reminded him of his days at college in Simla, where he used to walk for miles across the Indian hills.

“Maybe he just pretends to be a great lover of English culture,” the diplomat told me. “He thinks they’re in league with the Pakistanis and that they are two-faced and tricky and if they wanted to they could defeat the Taliban but they don’t because they want to keep their troops there.”

Karzai believes that evidence for a British conspiracy can be found in the story of Musa Qala, a collection of villages in the deserts of Helmand and a crossroads in the drug-transport routes. The tale has become a “Rashomon”-like parable. For Karzai it is a story of British duplicity. For the British it is a story of Karzai’s treachery and American bullying. And for the Americans it’s a story of European appeasement and Karzai’s madness.

In October 2006, after months of fighting between the British and Taliban that had left everyone exhausted and bloodied, all sides agreed on a truce. The British and the Taliban pulled back. The elders promised to keep the Taliban out. But almost immediately there were problems. The Taliban began creeping in. The town fell again. The Americans accused the British of wimping out of a fight. They pressured Karzai to distance himself from the whole scenario.

Gen. David Richards, the British officer in charge of NATO forces in Afghanistan, was caught in the middle of it all. Karzai liked and trusted Richards and appreciated his style. “He’d sometimes get me over three or four times a day to talk about all sorts of things, not just military,” Richards recalled. Karzai gave Richards and Helmand’s governor, Muhammad Daud, who helped organize the truce, his blessing. “The U.S. military and, I suspect, the C.I.A. were pretty hostile to it from the outset,” Richards told me. Gen. Dan McNeill of the U.S. Army made no secret of his feelings. Later, when he replaced Richards, he vowed that there’d be no “Musa Qalas” on his watch. And to drive the point home, McNeill began bombing targets around the district as soon as he took over from Richards.

Karzai was, of course, caught in the middle between the British and the Americans. The Americans had more money, more troops, more power. To make matters worse, on the heels of Musa Qala, General Richards flew to Islamabad to see Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. “I delivered Musharraf a pretty sharp message that we expected him to do more to help, but I think Karzai believed that I was getting too close to Musharraf,” Richards told me. Richards began passing notes between the two hostile presidents, trying to get them to work with each other.

The palace advisers seized on those visits as proof that the British were going to sell out Afghanistan. They told Karzai that Richards and Musharraf didn’t talk about Afghanistan at all. They talked about London and terrorism. Look at Helmand, they’d say. It used to be so peaceful. Until the British forced you to remove Sher Muhammad Akhundzada. Whom did they replace him with? Muhammad Daud, plucked from the National Security Council. Who constructed the National Security Council? The British. Who paid for it? The British. Who has advisers there? The British.

The advisers pushed Karzai closer to the edge. Look around you, closer to home, they said. Is that not a coup in the works? Jawed Ludin, the chief of staff, and Hanif Atmar, minister of education, had both studied in Britain. They have nightly dinners and meetings with the minister of defense, the minister of foreign affairs. . . .

One day in front of several people inside the palace, Karzai turned accusingly on Ludin and Atmar: There’s news the British are conspiring against us, against me personally. There’s news that you are meeting very frequently. What is happening? Why are you meeting?

They replied that they were just getting together socially.

Karzai said he didn’t believe them, according to an Afghan official present at the incident.

The next day Karzai regretted his words, as he often does. He apologized. It was too late. Both men submitted their resignations. Ludin became ambassador to Norway. Atmar stayed on as minister for education, but he and the president hardly spoke for months until Karzai appointed him as the new minister of the interior. These rifts have since healed and Karzai’s men have rallied for the presidential campaign.

“Every conceivable lie is told to the president to alienate him from his friends,” Ashraf Ghani told me. “He accused me in front of Secretary Rice and the British secretary of joining Ashdown in a conspiracy to unseat him. I had a family illness in Dubai around the clock. I met with Paddy Ashdown once in my life. Yet the Afghan government for a week was concentrating on an alleged conspiracy.”

By the end of 2007, Karzai’s worst fears seemed to come to fruition. The new governor of Helmand, an old friend of Karzai’s father, claimed to have uncovered a plot by the British for a Taliban training camp. The allegations were so far-fetched that the entire diplomatic community began to think Karzai had gone mad. In reality, Michael Semple, then the European Union’s political adviser, had come up with a plan for a Taliban re-education camp in Helmand, and several of Karzai’s advisers had agreed to it. Yet, in front of his security team, Karzai accused the British of total treachery.

According to one diplomat, the British responded that they had been trying to pursue reconciliation and had documents approving the project signed by Afghanistan’s ministry of the interior and by its intelligence service. Karzai’s advisers squirmed and said nothing. Apparently no one had dared to tell Karzai about the camp.

The damage was done. Enraged, Karzai had Michael Semple and Mervyn Patterson, two of the foreigners most knowledgeable about Afghanistan, thrown out of the country and an Afghan general imprisoned.

I asked Karzai if he really believes, as so many Afghans do, that the British and Americans don’t want the Taliban defeated. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I wonder. After all, I am also an Afghan. So I have to believe in what the majority of the Afghan people believe in.” And that the British want the Taliban to take over Helmand and Kandahar? “The Taliban are already in Helmand,” he said with a knowing look.

“In my experience of working in 21 countries, one thing I’ve learned,” the American election guru James Carville told me over the phone in his Southern drawl, “unpopular incumbents do not do well in anything approaching a fair election.” Carville has taken on the job of consulting for Ashraf Ghani’s campaign. It’s not for the money, he told me. It’s more for sentimental reasons. “I really want to help,” he said. “This is an instance where you know in your heart the difference in Afghanistan in five years under Ashraf or under Karzai will be really profound for the average person’s life.”

The consensus in Afghanistan is that if the Aug. 20 elections are somehow fair — which is impossible to guarantee — there will most likely be a runoff in a second round. That is what the opposition is counting on. Despite the belief across the country that the Americans or someone else will decide who becomes president, I found people in remote corners campaigning for Abdullah, Ghani, Karzai and others.

Karzai remains well ahead. What happens if he wins? “What will you do then?” I asked an American working for the Obama administration.

“The first step is to shift away from the weekly pat on the back he got from Bush but not be as removed as Obama was,” he said. “Then if we can reduce his paranoia and if he has a renewed mandate and if we get the good Karzai, the charming Karzai. . . . ” It was a lot of ifs.

As for Karzai, he has patched up his relations with his ministers, his staff, his enemies and various opponents, promising more positions than he can possibly fill. What is most disturbing to Afghans, however, is the criminal personalities he has brought into his campaign. They dominate both politics and the economy: the glitzy new Kabul neighborhood of Sherpur, with its “narcotecture” palaces, has become their home and the symbol of their power. In Sherpur’s shadow, as I sloshed through the streets of the other Kabul, past refugees in muddy tents and a woman left like detritus on the road, quivering, I wondered how Afghanistan’s warlords, steeped in the jihadi tradition of intimidation, could ever bring peace, or economic hope, to the Afghan people. “With enough resources,” the American official said, “a lot of these guys can clean up their act.”

That is not the belief of Dr. Azam Dadfar, the minister of higher education and one of the few psychiatrists in the country trained in psychoanalysis. In the 1980s he ran a trauma clinic in the Peshawar refugee camps. Today, he said, out of these decades of war, a new Afghan character type has emerged — a borderline personality characteristic of jihadis. “Multiple-personality disorder is a coping mechanism,” he said, speaking about the whole generation of men who grew up in jihad. “A young man who lost his father, his home, he looks to become the cleverest, the most criminal, the lion. In the jungle, there are no values but self-preservation. There’s no law. And this character learns to lie even to himself.”

Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer and Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has reported extensively on Afghanistan for the magazine, most recently from the Korengal Valley in “Battle Company Is Out There.”