It wasn’t only the numbers that was a problem. The US had insisted that the peacekeepers be restricted to Kabul, giving the US forces of Operation Enduring Freedom free rein to comb the rest of the country for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. It was the birth of two parallel forces.
Nobody in Kabul seemed to have heard of their new president-to-be. ‘Who is he?’ people would ask. ‘Do you have a picture?’
Few people were aware that Karzai was already in the city and had moved into the Arg, the presidential palace. Shortly after I arrived in the city I got a message from his assistant Malik, inviting me over.
It was not easy to get in. The guards on the gate were those of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the head of the Northern Alliance, who had moved into the palace as soon as Kabul had fallen, and thought he should be President, so was refusing to leave. They said they had never heard of any Hamid Karzai. Eventually Karzai’s uncle Asis came out to find me and took me inside.
The driveway to the palace was lined with stone lions which had all been decapitated. ‘Taliban,’ explained Asis. He had been Deputy Chief of Protocol for King Zahir Shah, and knew the palace inside out. He showed us into what he called ‘the Peacock Room’, in which the Taliban had laboriously daubed white paint over the heads of the peacocks on the wallpaper. There was a dark patch on one wall, where Asis recalled a beautiful Gobelin tapestry of an English garden scene used to hang – a gift from Queen Victoria to King Abdur Rahman when his son visited London. ‘Afghans were very confused, and asked why did the stupid king put a horrid carpet on the wall, Afghans have much more beautiful carpets on their floors,’ he laughed.
Asis reminisced wistfully about Kabul in the old days. ‘We had lots of clubs,’ he said. ‘Club 25, Club Moon, a bowling alley, dancing at night, and the wonderful Khyber restaurant by the fountain where there was better food than in Italy or France. It’s like we’ve gone back five hundred years.’
Karzai was sitting in an armchair in another room which had a Philips freezer standing incongruously in the middle. The room was as cold as the inside of the freezer – there was just an ineffectual one-bar heater – and he looked dwarfed by the large chair. I was surprised to see him wearing a long, shiny chapan coat in striped green-and-blue silk, and an astrakhan hat. As long I had known him he had always been in jeans and leather jacket, or occasionally beige shalwar kamiz. ‘I didn’t have clothes so someone lent me these,’ he explained. ‘Everything is still in Pakistan.’
I was still cross that he hadn’t taken me on his return to Afghanistan. ‘The conditions were very cold and hard,’ he said. ‘We had to sleep in a shepherd’s hut. It wasn’t like when you and I went in the old days and people fed us in villages.’ He looked thin. Even so he claimed that everything had gone well in Uruzgan, people all coming out to support him. He did not tell me that he had been accompanied by special forces, only that the Americans had flown him on a transport plane from there into Bagram, a military camp just north of Kabul. He had been met by Marshal Fahim, the new Defence Minister, who was astonished to see him alone. Like all warlords Fahim never went anywhere without pick-ups crammed with heavily armed men. ‘Where are your militia?’ he asked Karzai. ‘I have no men,’ Karzai replied. ‘You are now my men.’
That was all very well, but they weren’t his men. They were Tajiks and he was Pashtun. And how could he trust Fahim? It was Fahim who had ordered his arrest seven years earlier when Karzai was Deputy Foreign Minister, and had him interrogated for hours.
I could see his shoulder was bothering him. He told me he’d fallen over in Uruzgan, but wouldn’t go into any detail. Something didn’t add up. Only later did I hear the whole story.
22 December, the day of Karzai’s inauguration, dawned grey. The ceremony took place at the Interior Ministry building just along the road from the Mustafa. Security was tight, roadblocks manned by soldiers and police patrolling in old Russian peaked caps decorated with red and gold braid. They were clutching an assortment of arms, including handheld rocket launchers. Alarmingly I saw one policeman drop his just outside our hotel. Fortunately it didn’t go off.
A motley band in uniforms with braided gold epaulettes played a sort of monotone oompah on the only remaining brass instruments in Afghanistan as dignitaries walked along the specially flown-in red carpet. It was all quite grim, not at all like the installation of the last Western-backed ruler, Shah Shuja, in 1839, when one British soldier and artist present wrote that ‘the wild grandeur of the whole pageantry baffles description’.10
The foreigners seemed satisfied. General Franks was there, the man who had made this all possible. Next to him was British General McColl, as well as the Foreign Ministers of Belgium, Iran, India and Pakistan, and many diplomats.
More interesting for me was watching the assortment of sworn enemies take their seats next to each other as part of the new administration after years of trying to kill each other. General Dostum was there, glowering and bearish as if he’d like to go and kill a few people. He was to be Deputy Defence Minister. Ismael Khan made an entrance by arriving late, thus outdoing Dostum, whose deputy had betrayed Ismael to the Taliban.
A Pashtun might be heading the new administration but it was clear who was dominating it. In prominent places were the Panjshiri trio – Marshal Fahim, the new Defence Minister, who still had his own army on the Shomali plains just outside Kabul; Yunus Qanuni, who was to be Interior Minister; and Abdullah Abdullah, the Foreign Minister.
Overlooking proceedings was a huge portrait of the late Northern Alliance commander Ahmat Shah Massoud in his trademark pakoul. Massoud was rapidly becoming the Che Guevara of Afghanistan. His photograph was everywhere, hindering visibility on the windscreens of the ubiquitous Toyota jeeps, decorating traffic islands and shops. One of the seats in the front row was left empty in deference to him, with his picture on the back and a bunch of plastic flowers on it.
Just as when the British were impressed by Shah Shuja’s appearance, Karzai was winning plaudits for his lambswool hat and green-and-blue-striped chapan. The fashion designer Tom Ford even called him ‘the chicest man on the planet’.
What they thought was his dress sense wasn’t the only reason for satisfaction among Western diplomats. They believed they had found the perfect President – a charming man who spoke immaculate English, loved English poetry and was from the majority Pashtun tribe yet was also a nationalist. And in some ways the fact that no one knew him seemed a good thing, as he was not compromised by his role in the jihad, unlike the warlords who most Afghans blamed for getting the country into such a mess.
After being sworn into office he spoke in his native Pashtu, then read a poem in Dari, one of the seven languages he speaks. He embraced Rabbani and called on Afghans to ‘forget the painful past’. He was just two days away from his forty-fourth birthday, and made reference to his lack of experience. ‘Oh God I am a novice so please help me.’
There was already one black cloud. A group of elaborately turbaned elders from Gardez who had come for the ceremony told us that a convoy from Khost they were supposed to be coming with had been bombed by the Americans, and as many as sixty-five elders killed.
When we journalists clustered round General Franks after the ceremony, he defended the bombing. ‘Friendly forces don’t fire surface-to-air missiles at you,’ he said. ‘We believe it was a bad convoy. We have reason to believe it was a good target.’
No surface-to-air missile had been fired. It would be the first of many such mistakes.
We should have realised then that instead of the end this was just the start. While Karzai was being sworn in as new leader of Afghanistan, a British man called Richard Reid was boarding American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami. The heels of his shoes had been hollowed out and packed with explosives.
It was the Saturday before Christmas, and the plane was packed with 185 passengers. Over the Atlantic, two hours out of Paris, some of them complained of smelling smoke. Hermis