My Dinners with Karzai

In his new book, Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan (Wiley), Nick Mills, a College of Communication associate professor of journalism, recounts the life of Hamid Karzai and the difficulties faced by his war-torn country since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001. Mills speaks about the book tonight at Barnes & Noble at BU at 7 p.m.

Mills had known Karzai in the 1980s, when he traveled to Pakistan as the field director of the Afghan Media Project, a BU-organized effort that was paid for by the U.S. Information Agency. The goal of the project was to create a skilled Afghan media that could objectively document the war with the Soviet Union and its impact on Afghan citizens, and Mills was among those who signed on to teach crash courses on the basics of newswriting, photojournalism, and video production to about 30 Afghan refugees. In the final years of the war, images created by photojournalists and cameramen trained by BU, and later at the Afghan Media Resource Center (AMRC), which emerged from the BU project, were aired by major news networks, including the BBC and CNN.

When Karzai (Hon.’05) came to Boston University in May 2005 as the Commencement speaker, Mills approached him with the idea of producing a book. Karzai agreed, and over the course of the next few months, Mills met regularly with Karzai in Kabul.

BU Today: How did you come to write a book about Hamid Karzai?
Mills: I had first met Karzai in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1987, when I was there as field director of the controversial Afghan Media Project. He was then spokesman for one of the major Afghan factions fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

I understand that you were initially helping him write an autobiography, but that he decided not to pursue the project. Why did you decide to turn it into a biography?   
I spent three months in Kabul in the fall of 2005, meeting in the evenings with Karzai to gather material for what was meant to be a ghostwritten Letter from Kabul, which would have been Karzai telling his personal story and appealing to the world not to abandon Afghanistan again, as it had done after the USSR left Afghanistan in 1989. After the book was ready for publication, Karzai decided not to go ahead. The publisher then asked me to take the material, add to it, and turn it into a whole new book, which is part biography, part history, part exposition of current problems.

Why was Karzai chosen to lead Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban?
Karzai comes from a line of tribal chiefs, and when his father was assassinated by the Taliban in 1999 in Pakistan, Karzai became chief of the Popolzai tribe, one of the larger Pashtun tribes. He was literally born to lead. His family was very close to the king, and even after the long years of civil warfare and Taliban rule, Karzai had almost no blood on his hands, few enemies, many admirers, and was, as far as I could see, the best man for the job at the time.

Karzai is in a difficult position — pleasing the U.S. government on one hand, since it helps keep his enemies at bay, but trying not to be seen as a puppet of the United States. How does he keep that balance?
The balance became easier and easier as time went on, as he became more confident of his power and as the United States got a bit smarter about not playing such a heavy hand in affairs of state. The first U.S. special envoy and later ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, was perceived as having undue influence, partly because he and Karzai were close friends and partly because at that stage of the country’s recovery, the U.S.-led coalition had all the real power. After Khalilzad left for Iraq (he’s now at the UN) and the Afghan government got itself better organized, Karzai’s power increased. That’s not to say that he is in firm control, because he has many disparate factions in the parliament to contend with and a potent insurgency to deal with, which his own security forces are not yet competent to defeat.

Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium, a fact that puts the country on a collision course with the United States, which wants Afghanistan to eradicate its poppy fields. How is Karzai dealing with this dilemma?
I think Karzai feels that he is being unfairly blamed for the poppy problem, because the demand for heroin is almost entirely in the West. I think he feels that not enough is being done to decrease the demand, while Afghan farmers have no better way to make a living at the moment. And many farmers are forced to grow poppy. But he looks at both sides of the problem, demand and supply. As long as there is demand, someone is going to fill it.

Afghanistan is notoriously unstable politically, at the crossroads of Central Asia and with many meddling neighbors. How will Karzai stay in power?
Few Afghan leaders leave office peacefully — or even alive — and Karzai has survived assassination attempts. He has to cope with enemies foreign and domestic, and his job is one of the most difficult in the world, I think. Every day he must feel fortunate to be alive. Still, he has the support of a large number of Afghans who still remain optimistic about their future.

What are Karzai’s greatest strengths — and his greatest weaknesses?
He is charismatic, forceful when he wants to be, intelligent, educated, persuasive. I think he is the best possible bridge between Afghanistan and the rest of the world and between the past and the future. His weakness really is that he is a democratically elected leader at a time when perhaps there’s a need for a stronger form of chief executive.

When and under what circumstances did you meet with Karzai to interview him? What was it like being in Kabul at the time?
I was staying in a guesthouse operated by a journalist friend of mine, about a mile from the presidential palace. I would get a call from an aide telling me the president wanted to meet that evening, and a car would be sent for me. I would go either to Karzai’s office or sometimes to his residence, and we would spend an hour or an hour and a half talking about his life and the events surrounding it. Sometimes after the sessions, which I recorded, he would invite me to stay for dinner.

Kabul at the time was a very interesting place, but it was getting more dangerous than it had been in 2004, when I spent four months there working as an advisor in the office of Karzai’s spokesman. I would spend my free time walking around the city, into the bazaars, to the shops. I never once felt unsafe or threatened, and the Afghans were always warm and eager to talk (if they spoke a bit of English). In 2005 I continued my solo expeditions around the city, but perhaps with a bit more caution, as the insurgents had by then begun to use suicide bombs in Kabul. The city had a number of good restaurants, including Thai, French, Chinese, and a good pizza place.

What was it like working with Afghans in the late 1980s on the journalism project?
The Afghan Media Project trained Afghans from the full spectrum of Afghan factions, and established the Afghan Media Resource Center in Peshawar, Pakistan. AMRC was a bona fide news agency, which provided photos, video, and information to many international news agencies. I feel it was a great success.

My hope then, in the late 1980s, was to see Afghanistan become free and independent and to simply visit with all my Afghan friends after the USSR pulled out. But when it pulled out, real chaos ensued and order was restored only by the Taliban and at great cost. So I didn’t get to visit Afghanistan until 2004, when Karzai was head of the interim government. I  never dreamed I would write a book about him. Sometimes when Karzai and I were meeting and drinking coffee in his inner office or eating dinner in his residence, I would think to myself, “Here I am, sitting at the right hand of the president of Afghanistan, writing his story. How cool is that?”

Nick Mills will be speaking about his book Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan tonight, November 13, at 7 p.m., at Barnes & Noble at BU, 660 Beacon St., Kenmore Square.

Taylor McNeil can be reached at tmcneil@bu.edu.