The Washington Independent » zalmay khalilzad

Either Zalmay Khalilzad Is Messing With Christiane Amanpour or the Afghan Runoff Is Off

Spencer Ackerman — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:30:20 +0000

CNN is reporting that a “Western source close to the Afghan leadership” is saying talks for next week’s runoff election between Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah have broken down and over the weekend Abdullah will drop out. Christiane Amanpour’s only other source in the piece is Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and a close Karzai ally. Gee, who might have told Amanpour that Abdullah is dropping out?

How close to Karzai is Khalilzad? Jon Lee Anderson profiled Khalilzad in 2005, and included this paragraph:

In late 2003, Khalilzad was sent to Afghanistan as the U.S. Ambassador. The political capital he has in the Administration—which is considerable—is due to his successes there. While he was in Kabul, Afghanistan held its first free elections in history, which Karzai won handily. Karzai regarded Khalilzad as his close friend and adviser; he was very unhappy when, last April, President Bush nominated Khalilzad to replace Bremer’s successor in Baghdad, John Negroponte. Karzai appealed to President Bush several times to reconsider his decision.

There even used to be a wacky arrangement that the Obama administration considered to give Khalilzad some weird job to help Karzai govern somehow. So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Khalilzad is opining to Amanpour that Abdullah will just accept a job in a Karzai government, even though Abdullah has gone on record denying that he’ll accept any such option.

Still, we’ll see over the weekend, I suppose.

Update, 1:15 p.m., Oct. 31: Dexter Filkins reports from Kabul:

Abdullah Abdullah, the chief rival to President Hamid Karzai, will announce on Sunday his decision to withdraw from the Nov. 7 run-off election, effectively handing a new five-year term to Mr. Karzai, according to Western diplomats here and people close to Mr. Abdullah.

But Mr. Abdullah seemed to be keeping his options open until the last second, as he has done through the Afghan political crisis. Those close to him, speaking on condition of anonymity on Saturday, said he was still trying to decide whether to publicly denounce Mr. Karzai, whom he has accused of stealing the Aug. 20 election, or to step down without a fight.

Our Favorite Afghans

Spencer Ackerman — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:00:38 +0000

So it used to be that the Obama administration wanted Ambassador Zal Khalilzad to be something like a CEO for Afghanistan, because, you know, who doesn’t trust the competence and wisdom of a CEO? Now the administration thinks ex-Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, who’s opposing President Hamid Karzai in the election on Aug. 20, should be the CEO, and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and special envoy Richard Holbrooke are reportedly nudging Karzai to take the job. To some degree, the administration sees the position as a mitigation strategy to Karzai’s likely reelection. But as this guy quoted by The Washington Post’s Josh Partlow notes, the move is actually commensurate with the failed governing strategies that Karzai typically employs:

“Karzai doesn’t think in terms of growth in GDP in Afghanistan, unemployment, more services or security,” said Haroun Mir, director of Afghanistan’s Center for Research & Policy Studies. “He’s a consensus builder. As long as he could win a consensus of important power brokers, he thinks he’s a very successful man.”

And that goes a long way toward explaining why Karzai is the favorite to win. It’s ironic that the United States is turning to Ghani to provide a measure of what Partlow characterizes as “an Afghan government with a more technocratic bent,” since the line on Karzai during the years when no one in America cared about Afghanistan was that Karzai was a supreme technocrat. But no one ever accused the United States of failing to personalize institutional failures, and Joshua Foust has an excellent meta-observation:

[H]ere’s an idea: we stop playing “who’s your favorite pet Afghan” and actually try discussing the country’s needs and concerns. Despite years of unbelievable failure doing it, we’re still desperately searching for our favorite magic Afghan who will rule the land in peace and unity.

As a political strategy, I suppose the Obama administration can’t walk back its public antipathy for Karzai. But does the administration have to deepen it? How does Karzai not interpret the Ghani maneuver as a naked bid to undercut him, since that’s transparently what it is? And how will Karzai return the favor once he’s reelected?

Zalmay Khalilzad to Rule Afghanistan Behind the Scenes?

Spencer Ackerman — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:59:24 +0000

In one of the most rococo arrangements between patron and client-state imaginable, Afghan President Hamid Karzai might hire Zalmay Khalilzad — who was an extremely powerful U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 — to be something like a chief executive officer. Khalilzad, who was born in Mazar-e-Sharif, had been rumored to consider a run for the presidency, which was odd enough, but this is out-and-out crazy.

Helene Cooper reports for The New York Times:

The position would allow Mr. Khalilzad to serve as “a prime minister, except not prime minister because he wouldn’t be responsible to a parliamentary system,” a senior Obama administration official said. Taking the unelected position would also allow Mr. Khalilzad to keep his American citizenship.

Administration officials tell Cooper that they’re not necessarily behind the idea, which is encouraging if true, because having a former American official run the Karzai government behind the scenes is absolutely insane. A scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies remarks, “This has the makings of a really bad movie.” And an exceptionally bad one! Karzai will be effectively saying his most important priority is to repair his breach with the United States without regard for appearing like an American stooge. Why not just give the Taliban a radio station and tell them to have fun broadcasting the prospective Khalilzad appointment?

Treating Karzai Like a Bad Smell

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:44:30 +0000

Here’s a rigorously reported piece on the history of the relationship between the United States and Afghan President Hamid Karzai — as you’ll see from the piece, we only have a U.S.-Afghan relationship as a derivative effect — from Rajiv Chandrasekaran. It suggests this must be a perplexing time for Karzai: he spent the last seven years being alternatively cultivated by the Bush administration and providing it with a fig leaf, so to see the Obama administration being unimpressed with him and seemingly unwilling to change its perspective on him has to be difficult to understand. According to Chandrasekaran, now that it appears unlikely that anyone will successfully dislodge Karzai from office in the summer’s elections, the Obama administration’s approach will be to treat him as irrelevant:

Obama intends to maintain an arm’s-length relationship with Karzai in the hope that it will lead him to address issues of concern to the United States, according to senior U.S. government officials. The administration will also seek to bypass Karzai by working more closely with other members of his cabinet and by funneling more money to local governors.

Time will tell whether this amounts to irresponsibility. But it seems egregious to write off the probably reelected president of a major ally while fighting a war in his country, even if he’s failed to demonstrate his capability to govern responsibly. It would be nice to think that the administration’s approach is to broaden the U.S.-Karzai relationship into a U.S.-Afghan relationship. But it’s not like the governors of Afghanistan are a bunch of enlightened technocrats and statesmen. They’re people like Gul Agha Shirzai — warlords-turned-governors. In a country with a weak central government and limited history of competent central governance, efforts to rebalance the relationship between the capitol and the provinces by well-intentioned foreign actors can easily end up as destabilizing vectors.

I defer to Joshua Foust, but it doesn’t take a Karzai apologist (or Bush apologist) to start wondering if the administration’s approach to Karzai isn’t beginning to seem like anything-but-Bush-ism.

When Ryan Crocker Backs You, You’re Going to Be the Next Iraq Ambassador

Spencer Ackerman — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:58:05 +0000

Bad news for those who don’t want Chris Hill to become the next ambassador to Iraq:

Also in Mr. Hill’s corner are three former Iraq ambassadors: Ryan C. Crocker, Zalmay Khalilzad and John D. Negroponte. The three wrote a letter supporting Mr. Hill for the post and urging the Senate to approve his nomination.

“We need his experience during this crucial time in Iraq,” they wrote in the letter. “His previous experiences will serve him greatly when addressing extreme challenges in Iraq.”

One administration official told me, “There’s not another Ryan Crocker.” For Crocker, the highly esteemed diplomat who left Baghdad last month, to vouch for Hill is a surefire way to take the legs out from under the he’s-not-experienced objection.