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com/features/archive/2014/06/after-karzai/372294/

In the shadow of the Kandahar City mausoleum of Ahmad Shah Durrani, the warrior-king who founded the
modern state of Afghanistan, sits a small shrine, the blue plaster of its dome peeling off. Here rests the
martyred champion Azimullah, reads the headstone inside the shrine, black calligraphy on white marble whose
once-brilliant color is fading to gray.
An 18-year-old shopkeeper with dark almond eyes, Azimullah Khaksar gave his life on September 5, 2002, so
that Hamid Karzai, the recently appointed interim leader of Afghanistan, could live. He wrestled a gunman who
had opened fire on Karzai as the president waved through a car window at a crowd outside the governors
compound in Kandahar. In the free-for-all shooting that followed, as Karzais motorcade made a clumsy effort to
flee, Azimullah caught bullets in his chin, stomach, and legs. Which of the bullets came from the assassin and
which from Karzais bodyguards, no one knows.
The arrival of Hamid Karzai, on the heels of the U.S. invasion in 2001, promised Afghans a break from the recent
bloody past. Karzais lack of involvement in the long, brutal civil war that followed the Soviet retreat in 1989
raised the possibility of a unified country after a decade of battling fiefs. His international backing promised
reconnection to the world after years of isolation. While not all Afghans welcomed Karzaiseveral circles within
the Northern Alliance, for instance, wanted power for themselvesmany ordinary people looked upon him with
hope.
I remember hearing Karzais name on the radio for the first time, when I was a teenager in Kabul, as fires caused
by American bombs burned throughout the city. The name had a ring to it, a lightness that itself seemed to
promise new possibilities. For more than a decade, we had been ruled by men whose names and titles were a
mouthful; the last was the one-eyed self-proclaimed Leader of the Faithful, Emir of the Islamic Emirate of
Afghanistan Mullah Mohammed Omar Mujahed. He had been more myth than manmost Afghans did not hear
his voice or see his image until after he was toppled. The simplicity of Hamid Karzais name, without a credential
affixed to it, seemed to suggest humility and an unpretentious nature.
The name struck a chord with Azimullah, too, and sparked his curiosity. Karzai, Azimullah had said at home on
many occasions in the days after he first heard it. I wonder what he is like. As Karzai and the forces around him
pressed closer to Kandahar City, Azimullah found a photo of him at the buzzing Charso bazaar. He brought the
photo home and showed it to his family. This, they say, is Karzai, he explained, pointing at the bald,
mustachioed man in a suit.
Charismatic and youthful, Karzai in 2002 was a man with an enormous talent, as Amrullah Saleh, his former
intelligence chief, recently put it to me, who showed no celebration, jubilation, or a sense of triumph as he
took power; he was a man who moved with the mood of the country and spoke to the peoples exhaustion and
deprivation and exclusionand to the countrys ability to heal.
I remember hearing Karzais name for the first time, when I was a teenager in Kabul, as fires caused by
American bombs burned throughout the city.
Some 12 years later, as Karzai prepares to leave office, the flush of hope that greeted him has been replaced by
more-complex sentiments. Americans officials, who adored him at the beginning of the war, have come to see
him as a manic-depressive: erratic and mercurial. To Afghans, he leaves a series of contradictions. Under Karzai,
Afghanistan got a new constitution, but not the will from its leadership to adhere to it; a national security force,
380,000 strong, but without adequate equipment or a clear definition of the enemy it fights. Genuine progress
the return of more than 5 million refugees, the enrollment of more than 8 million children in school, an estimated
20-year rise in life expectancy, and possibly as much as a 40 percent drop in the infant-mortality ratehas often
been overshadowed by rampant corruption and failures of governance. In recent years, Afghanistan has vied
with Somalia and North Korea for standing as the most corrupt country in the world.
This spring, I met Azimullahs elder brother, Haji Hekmatullah, at his bakery in a Shia neighborhood of Kandahar
City. A half-melted can of cooking oil hung over a small fire in the back of the shop, the walls of which had been
darkened by smoke. At the front, Hekmatullah, distracted by his young sons demand for ice cream, poured me a

cup of green tea. Just weeks earlier, Karzai had visited Kandahar again. In contrast to his 2002 visit, when the
president walked freely around the bazaars, this time most shops had been closed as a security precaution.
I asked Hekmatullah whether his brothers sacrifice had been worth it.
Sometimes, when I think about itwe have everything: a decent house, some land, and two shops. All I want is
my brother back, he said. Hekmatullah had gotten engaged six days before the killing; Azimullah had died in
the new coffee-colored clothes hed had made for the engagement party. Other times, when I look at my
daughter, who is going to fourth grade now, I think that might not have been possible if Azimullah had lived.
There could have been more chaos, more bloodshed.
Whether chaos and bloodshed have merely been deferred by the abundance of Western troops and drones and
money; whether anything like a sustainable democracy, capable of standing on its own, has taken hold during
Karzais time in officethese are open questions. On one level, it is amazing that Hamid Karzai has even
survived his presidency. Given the immense challenges of governing Afghanistan, perhaps it is unreasonable to
expect much more than that. And yet, as he leaves office, it is important to appreciate what, beyond survival,
has motivated Karzaiand what has constrained him. Only through such an appreciation can one glimpse the
legacy he is likely to leave behind.
Karzai is highly social, and his approach to governance has been inclusive. At his palace, he regularly mixes with
both Western-trained ministers and tribal elders, former Communists and former Taliban.
On Fridays, Karzais palace hosts a congregational prayer followed by a banquet-style lunch for an exclusive
group of about 100 tribal elders, clerics, former members of the Taliban, and cabinet ministers (many of them
returnees from the West who, by reputation, do not care much about religion). On these occasions, the highly
social president is in his elementmixing politics and prayer and small talk, and telling stories that make the
otherwise incoherent mix of people laugh in unison, over lamb, rice, and vegetables.
I attended one such gathering with Karzai in April. As the president made his way to lunch after the prayer,
walking quickly, the crowd of men around him struggled to keep up. Karzai noticed the Kabul police chief and the
deputy minister of the interior, and stopped for a moment.
Oh, commanders! Oh, commanders! the president called out. The house of Mawlawi Qalamuddin was robbed
last night, and you still dont know about it. The intonation was teasing, but the subtext clear: Karzai seldom
misses a chance to let other officials know that he has many informal sources of information, that he is as
knowledgeable as they are about matters large and small, that he is in no way reliant on them. The comment
also underlined Karzais genuine commitment to an inclusive approach to governance, with equal protection for
all: Qalamuddin is a former Taliban minister of the notorious Vice and Virtue Police. He, too, was on his way to
the luncheon, where he and the police chief exchanged phone numbers.
Before the gathering, I had sat down with Karzai in his office to talk about his leadership and legacy. The
president was wearing a long gray tunic beneath a loose navy sport jacket. His signature fur cap was folded on
his desk, amid framed pictures of his three young children. Among the many books on the shelf behind him was
a four-volume set of Tolstoys War and Peace, translated into Pashto. I had been warned by a longtime former
aide that the president, 56 years old and remarkably fit (he spends 45 minutes on an elliptical trainer three
times a week), hasnt come to terms with the fact that his time in office is ending. Yet Karzai has also confided to
people close to him that he believes America would do anything to get rid of himeven kill himif he tried to
extend his stay in the presidential palace.
The Karzai I met was, for the most part, relaxed, reflective, and confident of a smooth transfer of power, the first
democratic transition in Afghan history. But the hour-long interview, as well as the four additional hours I spent
with the president over two days, was punctuated by bursts of heartfelt anger at American officials for what he
described as their betrayal.

Sometimes Karzai went on emotional tangents that seemed to confirm the widely held perception that he sees
an American hand in everything that has gone wrong during his 12 and a half years in powera deeply

conspiratorial way of thinking that has seemed to grip him especially tightly since his 2009 reelection campaign,
when the U.S. mission in Afghanistan (led by the late Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administrations special
representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the time) tried to oust him. Western media attention has recently
focused on Karzais refusals to sign a new agreement with the United States that would enable a continued U.S.
military presence beyond this year. In fact, this refusal is mostly theatrics. The next president will have plenty of
time to sign that pact; Karzai, meanwhile, can leave office brandishing evidence that he was not a foreign
stooge. Even so, there is no doubt that Karzai, a master tactician, has long since come to see the Americans as
rivals rather than supporters.
Western officials wanted me weak, Karzai told me. They wanted an isolated president, a president they could
use.
My purposes were different from those of the Americans, Karzai told me in his immaculate English. The
president said he sees the counterinsurgency effort championed by the West as fundamentally misguided: the
roots of the insurgency lay in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. The war, he said, was centered in the wrong place. He
noted that Western support of him, from the start, was hedged and incomplete. The West wanted me weak, and
in conflict with the rest of the leadership of this country, he told me. Western leaders wanted an isolated
president, a president they could use.
Mostly, Karzai seemed satisfied with how far he had carried his fragile, cracked vasean image he has often
invoked to describe the country he inherited after 30 years of war and isolation. I had a vision for a democratic
Afghanistan, for human rights, and for the freedom of the press and freedom of expression, Karzai told me.
Those were visions, and the last elections a few days ago proved that was achievable and we achieved it.
More than 6 million Afghans (about half of those eligible) voted on April 5 to choose a successor to Karzai, in the
first round of an election that many of the presidents critics had warned would not happen. Karzai, they argued,
would change the constitution and extend his rule. When the election seemed to be proceeding according to
schedule, they then warned that Karzai would engineer the vote to elect a puppet president of his choosing. But
that scenario didnt materialize either. The elections were held, and Karzais reported favorite, Zalmai Rassoul, a
71-year-old former cabinet minister, came in a distant third. (A runoff between the top two candidates was
scheduled for mid-June.)
I had a vision for this country of unitythat we have achieved, the president said as he leaned back in his
chair. Afghans of all colors, all political thinking, of all parts of this country feel absolutely free.
Making generous allowances for political overstatement, Karzais list of his accomplishments is at least
notionally accurate: rights and freedoms have expanded widely during his tenure, especially in urban areas,
which are growing rapidly. Yet in many ways, the vase that is Afghanistan remains just as fragile as the day
Karzai picked it up. The lunch I attended with him calls to mind the best and worst aspects of his presidency: his
ability to bring together diverse constituencies, his preference for the informal and general disregard for the
chain of command, and above all his personalization of politicswhich, paradoxically, has both enabled parts of
Karzais agenda and imperiled much of what Karzai says he holds dear.
Karzai is convinced that the U.S. government would do anythingeven kill him to stop him from extending his
rule.
Before he became president, Karzai, a polished former diplomat turned guerrilla leader, was largely an unknown
figure. The scion of a prominent Pashtun family in Kandahar, he had served briefly as the deputy minister of
foreign affairs after anti-Soviet forces took over the government in 1992. He made his name among Washington
elites through years of anti-Taliban lobbying at Western embassies in Pakistan, after the group allegedly
assassinated his father in 1999. In December 2001, when major Afghan leaders gathered in Bonn, Germany, to
determine who would lead the countrys interim government, Karzai was not the first choice. Abdul Sattar Sirat,
a former justice minister and the favorite of the exiled former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, was turned down by
the representatives of the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban force that had served as the United States partner
on the ground. Sirat, a member of the Uzbek ethnic minority, would have been a divisive figure for both the
Pashtuns and the Tajiks, who together make up the majority of the countrys population. Late in the night, the
old king was woken up and asked to persuade Sirat to withdraw.

Who is the alternative? the king asked.

Hamid Karzai, he was told.
Who is that? the king responded in a half-asleep daze.
The reasons behind Karzais ultimate selection were straightforward: he was a Pashtun from the south, the
traditional homeland of Afghan leaders; he had the support of the West; and he was on the ground already. He
had snuck from Pakistan into Afghanistan just south of Kandahar City as U.S. B-52 bomber jets pounded Taliban
targets and Northern Alliance forces advanced toward Kabul. When he received the call that he had been chosen
to lead Afghanistan, he was reportedly covered in blood and shrapnel, having miraculously survived a 2,000pound bomb the U.S. had dropped by mistake, killing three of its own Special Forces troops and at least 23 of
Karzais men.
That gory moment aside, Karzai, in his white tennis shoes, bore little resemblance to the strongmen leading
Afghanistans guerrilla forces. (After members of the U.S. Special Forces were dispatched to help Karzai in the
south, one team member asked another, whod already met him, Is he a badass? The reply: Well not
exactly.) Karzai carries himself with the air of an intellectual, especially when he speaks in English, and he is
empathetic by nature. His way of thinking about politics grew from his observations of his father, the head of a
Pashtun clan and a member of parliament in the 1960s under Zahir Shah, and from his formal study of political
science, history, and Western philosophy at Simla University, in India, where he obtained his undergraduate and
masters degrees. In a 1988 essay analyzing Zahir Shahs relatively peaceful reign, Karzai described how the
king had managed to earn the absolute support, confidence, and trust of the tribes deemed crucial to the
stability of his government. Afghanistan, even after its consolidation as a state in the 18th century, has often
seemed like a confederation of hundreds of tribes and subtribes, all with a sensitive relationship to the central
government. He noted, quite correctly, that statesmen who lost touch with the tribes, preferring to govern
through institutional intermediaries, did not tend to last very long in power.
The president took to mourning dead Taliban just as intensely as he mourned the armys fallen.
When Karzai finally arrived in Kabul, in December 2001, he was installed at the helm of a government bankrolled
by foreign money and staffed by officials he had not chosen. Under the Bonn agreement, brokered by the West,
many key roles had gone to warlords in return for their cooperation with the United States. Karzai never
overcame the legacy of Bonn, where everyone else at his cabinet given to him had the same legitimacy as him,
says a longtime aide. So he never really embraced the government as his, always mistrusted it. Seventeen of
the 30 cabinet members were Northern Alliance commanders, and those commanders also got a share of power
at the local level, installing men who had served under them. Over one meal at his palace, Karzai asked General
John Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command at the time, why America was supporting certain warlords who
were causing his government trouble. They are one of us, just like you are one of us, Abizaid responded, in an
attempt, he later said, to encourage political accommodation. Afghan forces allied with the American
counterinsurgency mission are designated green by the U.S. military. We are not going to be green on green,
Abizaid said.
It is perhaps unsurprising that Karzai, presented with this state of affairs, quickly began trying to establish his
own power network, going around and beneath appointed officialsparticularly through outreach to tribal, clan,
and village elders. Yet it can be difficult to appreciate just how much of Karzais attention, throughout his
presidency, was devoted to this effort, or how much he ignored the formal government apparatus set up around
him once his own, informal network was in place.
Throughout his presidency, the doors of Karzais palace would open, daily, to flocks of supposed tribal leaders,
some with official local or regional positions, some without. Karzai would consult with them for hours, collecting
information, dispensing favors and cash from slush funds, attempting to convince them that the Afghan
governmentor, more precisely, Karzai himselfwas a good and trustworthy long-term partner. Many of these
meetings were hard to sit through, Saleh, the former intelligence chief, told me: the room stank of sweat and
bodies unwashed for weeks. Every man in power wants to be nicely cologned, Saleh said. We should admire
[Karzai] for sharing his palace.

Tactically, Karzais approach was brilliant. It allowed him to steadily consolidate power and destabilize potential
rivals. Many of those rivals were warlords, and the diminishment of their authority must be counted as a triumph
of Karzais early years. And yet this strategy was also directly at odds with the establishment of a modern,
democratic government, rooted in stable institutions rather than personality. Its flaws grew ever more
pronounced as Karzais tenure stretched on.
Karzai is not fully ready to leave the presidential palace, according to one aide.
I raised the government flag in seven districts previously held by the Taliban, the former governor of Helmand
province, Gulab Mangal, told me recently at his home in west Kabul. And not once did the president call me to
say Well done, or to instruct me as to what to do next. Out of office for more than a year now, Mangal still
brims with disappointment at how Karzai treated him, and how the president approached regional security and
development.
In Afghanistans highly centralized system, governors are directly appointed by the president and essentially
serve as his representatives to the 34 provinces. Mangal served as the governor of three different provinces over
nine years. But Karzai was suspicious of his governors, particularly those with Western support. The presidents
whole approach to governance, Mangal told me, involved the balancing of the powers beneath him and the
pursuit of shortsighted alliances, all with the goal of ensuring that no single official grew too strong. The more
our success increased, the more he suspected us. The more we extended the governments reach, clearing new
districts and raising the government flag, the more he got jealous. Karzais psychology is suchhe operates
more like a malik [a tribal chief] than a president, Mangal told me.
On one occasion, Mangal went to Karzai and asked him to refrain from supporting a former police chief who still
controlled parts of a ragtag force accused of aiding drug traffickers and abusing civilians. Several men loyal to
the chief had recently surrendered their posts during Taliban offensives. Mangal saw an opportunity, once the
posts were retaken, to break the chiefs old network and instead bring professional police to show people that
we are honest about good governance.
Yet Karzai, Mangal says, gave more weight to the short-term benefits of keeping the former police chief on the
governments side. If he is such an important person, Mangal recalls the president telling him, why dont you
side with him?
Karzais task in Helmand was complicated by the fact that British troops had, by most accounts, made a mess of
the situation there. Five of Helmands 13 districts were under Taliban control in 2008. Musa Qala, a district of
about 50,000 residents, had slipped back into insurgent hands in 2006, and become a hub for the production of
suicide bombers. So Karzai was forced to experiment. One effort involved funding an uprising by Mullah Salaam
Alizai, a burly former Taliban commander in the region, and then appointing him as the district governor.
The idea was good, but the character was dubious, Saleh, Karzais former intelligence chief, told me. Mullah
Salaam wanted to be his own authoritythe little autonomous king of Musa Qala but financed by the
government.
Salaam told me that, as district governor, he often called Karzai directly by satellite phone, bypassing Mangal.
After dozens of his bodyguards were drugged and killed by a turncoat, Salaam got the president to assign him
more than 100 soldiers as guards, even though the law does not allow local officials to have such militias outside
the normal police structure. On at least two occasions when Salaam came to Kabul, the president called a
cabinet meeting for him, where the district governor made demands and launched into diatribes, calling the
cabinet ministers foreign stooges to their faces. Karzai had the whole cabinet report to a district governor, a
minister present during one of the meetings said. With a triumphant smile, Salaam said he called one minister a
gaw-mesh, an ox.
Amid the rival interests at play, it was often unclear who was really in charge in Helmand. The president did not
trust Mangal, thinking of him as a British lackey. In addition to empowering Salaam and other players beneath
Mangal, Karzai made a point of keeping in close contact with Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, a previous governor
of Helmand. The British had pressured Karzai to remove Akhundzada in 2005 because of his frequent violence
against rivals and his alleged involvement in the drug trade. The president, however, found Akhundzada useful:
his tribe was the largest in Helmand. Whenever Karzai traveled to Helmand, he would fly Akhundzada with him

and sit next to him in meetings with tribes. In one speech in the provincial capital, Karzai mentioned Akhundzada
more than 25 times in front of Mangal, who got little recognition. In the eyes of the locals, it was Akhundzada
still called the esteemed Mr. Governor by manywho was the real power.
Karzai is unapologetic about his reliance on informal networks and ad hoc governance. He relied the very least
on his own government institutions, he told me. The fact on the ground was that the Afghan government was
weak, that it had no capacity, that it had no means of movement, that it could not provide the president of the
country with the information that related to the facts on the ground, he said. One of my greatest victories, if
you can call it that, was my contact with the people.
Yet many of those people were unreliable, and had hidden agendas. Years of warfare had created a new class of
local leaders who had not necessarily gone through traditional rites of passage, and did not have the legitimacy
associated with tribal chiefs; they had guns and drugs. Some of Karzais advisers believe that many villagers
would have supported a more formal system of institutional government, if only Karzai had developed it.
Instead, the president relied on this new class. Among the elders who would line up at his office were many
violent opportunists, different from the warlords only in the smaller reach of their influence. Karzai gave them
access to resources, and standing that will last long after he is gone.
Perhaps most significant, the unfiltered access Karzai granted to local, informal leaders exposed the president to
Taliban sympathizers who played upon his distaste for violence and in many cases misled him. A governor of a
restive eastern province once told me that 80 percent or more of the elders from his province who were
complaining to the president about military actions were Taliban sympathizers. Karzai never consulted the
governor about any of the elders identities or motives. The president created a dangerous parallel system
with enormous sway, he said. And this network persuaded Karzai, at various points, to cut back the night raids
by American Special Forces, which were considered a major blow to insurgents; to release prisoners; even to
replace local security commanders.
Karzai acknowledged to me that he never really became a commander in chief. By the time the Afghan army
grew into a relatively professional fighting force, he no longer believed in the war it had been trained to fight.
One reason, perhaps, is dispositional: Karzai described himself to me as a pacifist in my heart, in my core, and
while his support of several violent regional leaders complicates this claim, most people I talked with who know
Karzai well said he makes it in earnest. But another reason surely has to do with the distorted nature of the
information Karzai was receiving each day, and with his paranoia regarding the foreign forces in his country.
The Taliban left without a fight at first, the president told me. But then the AmericansI was without access
to the country in the initial days, and without the tools of governance, which are still very weakthey went
around with thugs from our own country and, with their violence, forced the Taliban back into taking guns. And
Pakistan was willing, and ready to use the opportunity. He stressed, throughout our conversation, his
differences with the American leadership in the country. I didnt see a war in Afghanistan we should have
fought.
As Afghan soldiers were dying at a rate of 10 a day in recent years, the president took to mourning dead Taliban
just as intensely as he mourned the armys fallen. One morning in February of this year, the bodies of 21 army
soldiers, killed in the eastern province of Kunar, were brought to the military hospital in Kabul. Karzai used the
incident as a pretext to cancel a trip abroad, but instead of attending the funerals, he remained in his palace,
busily politicking. When I told him the public thought he was a leader who did not stand up for his soldiers, the
president became defensive.
But I do. I have done it very often. Thats Western propaganda, he said, thumping his desk. They are the sons
of this soil, they are giving their life. But that life is gone in a war thats not ours.
On the same day he said those words, Karzai ordered the questioning of three of his brightest special-forces
officers on vague charges of, among other things, spying for Western countriesan odd charge, considering
they are equipped and advised by NATO. The special forces, some 14,000 strong, are crucial to repelling Taliban
attacks. They also played a central role in securing the first round of the presidential election. I had met one of
the detained officers last year, at a social gathering. Well built, knowledgeable, and courteous, he was the kind
of soldier-thinker one would believe to be essential to the largely illiterate force.

In the final years of his presidency, Karzai, who had once been called the mayor of Kabul because of his
limited reach, focused almost entirely on the plight of the rural areas that continue to bear the brunt of the war.
He bent over backwards to try to appease the Taliban and condemned the missteps of foreign soldiers. He
engaged in many talks that he hoped might lead to peace, none of them bearing much fruit. And he made many
efforts to co-opt or isolate individual Taliban leaders, although he repeatedly declared that he would not
compromise constitutional freedoms to win them over. His approach has, unquestionably, caused some degree
of confusion and fragmentation in the Taliban ranks. And yet, it has also confused his own forcesrestraining
them against a brutal enemyand brought the president harsh criticism from civil groups.
Look at his cabinet, his government, and elsewherefrom Taliban, to Communists, to mujahideen, to those who
returned from the West. They are all there. This was the art of Hamid Karzai, said Rangin Dadfar Spanta, the
presidents national-security adviser, when I asked him whether Karzai was a visionary leader. But this is not
enough for a statesman trying to rebuild a post-conflict nation, helping it transition towards democracy. Spanta
and several other people who have worked closely with Karzai told me he never articulated a clear model of
government to strive toward, or a vision of what Afghanistan should become.
The Afghanistan that Karzai leaves behind is certainly a more inclusive and cohesive country than the fractured
mess he inherited. Among my own peerseducated young urbanites, connected to the world and provided with
free space for expressionthere is a growing sense of nostalgia for him; he is largely seen as a man of great
personal dignity who, despite his shortcomings, tried to minimize the bloodshed that my generation was born
into. Our Afghanistan is shaped by the principles Karzai saw as essential and nonnegotiable. But because of the
presidents leadership style, these gains appear tenuous. Under Karzai, a relatively free press has blossomed,
but every time threats against it have emerged, they have been blunted not by the institutions or laws Karzai
put in place, but by the presidents personal intervention. The same can be said for womens participation in
society, which has grown tremendously, but with few institutional safeguards.
Even the future role of the countrys warlords is uncertain. Karzai has kept most of these men off balance and
relatively weak during his tenure, and deserves credit for doing so. Yet these men are not gone from public life.
They have continued to profit from contracts and investments largely tied to the presence of foreign militaries:
vested economic interest is a major factor that keeps them loyal to the democratic system. Indeed, in the 12
and a half years of Karzais rule, many have sanitized their imagesshorter beards, fancier suits, more politically
correct language. For better or worse, their sons and daughters, who seem more attuned to democratic
practices, are now beginning to step into their fathers shoes.
Spanta says he doubts anyone could have fared better than Karzai in such a fragmented society. And yet the
next president of Afghanistan will inherit a broken chain of command, weak institutions, and a variety of local
powers that may prove difficult to bring to heelall the more so because he will lack the personal connections
that Karzai worked so hard to cultivate. The question of whether the forces from the past will succeed again or
whether modernizing forces will take the country forwardthis has not been finalized. Almost none of the
achievements made under Karzai appear irreversible, Spanta lamented. Instead, Afghanistan remains a place
stuck between modernity and its own splintered history. Which way it will move next is anyones guess.