Think Tank

Notes about public policy, by Steve Coll.

January 12, 2009

Talking Afghan Politics

Sayed Hamed Gailani, who is the First Deputy Speaker of Afghanistan’s Senate, dropped by my office in Washington last Friday. He wore a plaid sport jacket and a tie. He is fifty-four-years-old, about five feet tall, and stocky. He sports a trimmed beard, but the impression he conveys, like many others in his prominent and international family, is of a man comfortable in the West. Hamed is the eldest son of Pir Sayed Ahmed Gailani, a spiritual leader of a Sufi order in Afghanistan who, during the anti-Soviet war of the nineteen-eighties, led the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, one of the more liberal and pro-royal resistance groups. N.I.F.A. was one of the groups criticized during this period for being more effective in Congress than in the Afghan war. Ultimately, the Pakistan Army shunted them aside because they supported the centrist, exiled King of Afghanistan rather than the radical Islamist networks preferred by Pakistan’s intelligence agency.

Hamed Gailani wanted to talk, last week, because a presidential election is scheduled in Afghanistan late next year; just about every politician in the country seems to be maneuvering in advance of the campaign. President Hamid Karzai has said he intends to run for a second five-year term but there is a widespread sense that his position in the country, and as a client of the United States, is weakening; the effect of this perception has been to stimulate a sort of circling of political carrion birds. From week to week there are new rumors about who might decide to challenge Karzai; the Kabul “mentioner” has put into play Gailani’s father, a brother of the late Tajik guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, the former finance minister Ashraf Ghani, and several others—even Zalmay Khalilzad, outgoing U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (who has said he will not run). From my own less-than-purposeful rounds of the American national-security bureaucracy, I have the clear impression that there are at least some people working on Afghanistan from inside the U.S. government who would like to see a plausible opponent to Karzai emerge, but at the same time, that there is no sense of where such a candidate might come from, and little desire to force the issue. After all, down the path of electoral manipulation lies “The Man Who Would Be King”—and you will remember how that one ended.

Gailani had come to the United States on a private visit and had sought out meetings with State Department, U.S. A.I.D., and Pentagon officials before swinging around to my think-tank office. (He had hoped to meet some people involved with the Obama Administration’s transition team, but was unable to do so, he said.) It seemed clear that Hamed was hoping to stir interest in his father as a potential presidential candidate. Pir Gailani, as his father is known, is an ethnic Pashtun, like Karzai (and like the Taliban), and he is a religious figure with a popular following. However, he is also in his mid-seventies and has a reputation as a poor public speaker; some Afghan specialists I spoke to doubted he could be a serious contender for the presidency.

Nonetheless, Hamed Gailani had some interesting things to say about the political scene in Afghanistan.

On Karzai:

The president is losing ground, there is no doubt about it, whether in the senate or in the lower house. His graph of popularity is quite low. So I think it is with the common man….His chances are very very dim…. He’s not consulting anyone. He’s not sharing anything. He really doesn’t believe in collective participation. He thinks he’s Ahmed Shah Baba [an eighteenth-century king regarded as the father of modern Afghanistan] and that he’s going to keep it no matter what the cost.

On the proposal to dispatch thirty thousand additional American troops to Afghanistan:

A military surge for the sake of military surge serves no purpose. It is widening the ground of more confrontation and armed resistance and counterattacks. It’s not going to be confined to Taliban alone. That will lead to a purposeless war, a surging war…Your presence over there will just be for killing and being killed….The secret of success, and a continuous sustained presence of the United States of America is in a stable Afghanistan where the government has the confidence of the people and the people cooperate with that government.

On negotiating with the Taliban:

Mullah Omar will continue this fight. It doesn’t matter how I try to convince him. We tell him, “The West has no problem with you?” He says, “Pardon me? They don’t have a problem with me? If they don’t have a problem, why is my name on a list? Why is Guantanamo my minimum punishment?…The key to the Taliban’s pacification or channeling them into the political process is nowhere else in the world…but in Pakistan…The Pakistanis realize this fact that they can’t hold onto this situation for too long. Either they tame them or engage them or they will have to hand them over. The Taliban, they know it too. They are not very comfortable with Pakistanis.”

On Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former C.I.A. ally turned anti-American guerrilla leader, now loosely allied with the Taliban:

He says he’s tired of being in exile, living in exile….He is in Pakistan. He’s willing to come in….if there is a nationwide agenda.

On U.S. policy toward candidates who might consider a run against Karzai next year:

The signal as I have heard it directly from Ambassador Wood [in Kabul]—they favor the process, not one individual. That’s a sound argument to my mind. I’m going to encourage that.

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THE MAGAZINE: JUNE 28, 2010

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