Yes He Did! (Afghan Version)

Yeah, so Hamid Karzai went ahead and officially announced his candidacy for Afghanistan’s presidential election in August, and he went ahead and nominated as one of his VPs–you get two in Afghanistan–Marshall Fahim, warlord extraordinaire, putative leader of the essentially defunct Northern Alliance, and all around nice guy. Or not. Even knowing it was likely to happen, it’s still a huge disappointment. I’m not trying to pretend that Karazi is facing easy choices, or that it’s not understandable why he’d do such a thing–Fahim is powerful and a Tajik from the country’s second largest ethinc group–but c’mon. This guy has been roundly disliked, and in many corners loathed, since 2001 and 2002, when he was among the first to exploit his US-funded battlefield victories by gobbling up power and money and land. He’s kept a lower profile of late, and maybe he’s even got some legitimate ventures going, but for the Afghan people, the human rights community, and a whole lot of other people, this will leave a bad taste.

A while back I met up with a young guy, very professional, well-educated, experienced in the world of politics and business, who had gone back to Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban hoping to help rebuild the country. He was one of a group of what might be called Young Lions, reform-minded men, and women, who spent many of the war years studying and working in the West. They had great hopes. And most of them are now gone. Basically, they thought they could instill something new, some new system, a new way of governing, and, as this man told me, they were totally naive. The warlords still run things. Fahim, Sherzai, Sayaff, and all the other “commanders,” as they’re known–read the list of characters in Steve Coll’s invaluable “Ghost Wars” or Ahmed Rashid’s “Descent into Chaos” for the quick who’s who–they still know how to play the game. They still set the rules. They still cast long shadows. Case in point, the nomination of Marshall Fahim, by the man who was supposed to represent the enlightened future in country that would operate on the rule of law rather than the rule of muscle.

Maybe it’s something Karzai and Obama can discuss when the former drops in on the latter later this week in DC. And, if anyone cares, the other VP in Karzai’s rainbow-coalition–there’s a lot of blood red in this particular rainbow–is Karim Khalili, an ethnic Hazara who has served as VP during this first Karzai administration. They seem to have a good working relationship. Perhaps it’s because they have in common brothers who are behind massive construction projects, the size of which raises a lot of questions about where they got the money and the land to do so.