[An interesting overview.]
Financial Times; Dec 23, 2002
WORLD NEWS: Karzai's presence felt more strongly abroad than at home
Hamid Karzai is locked in a battle of wills with a group of regional officials who are refusing to stand down after he fired them. The sackings were one of the Afghan president's most assertive but most risky political moves since coming to office a year ago.
Mr Karzai dismissed about 20 mid-level regional officials on November 1, charging them with an assortment of crimes from smuggling and embezzlement of customs revenue to beatings and robbery. It was an opportunity for the president to disprove the widely held view that his writ ends at the limits of Kabul, the capital. But seven weeks after the dismissals, the gesture appears to have backfired, as many of the dismissed officials continue in their posts in open defiance of the president's orders.
It is a messy conclusion to a momentous year for Mr Karzai. He has presided over Afghanistan's longest period of peace in 23 years, overseen the return of 2m refugees, survived at least one assassination attempt and received a Nobel peace prize nomination.
"He's a skilled diplomat, politician and statesman," said James Dobbins of the Rand Corporation and former US special envoy to Afghanistan. "He conveys an - accurate - sense that he's an honourable, straightforward and reliable person."
But a year after he was chosen to lead his country out of decades of war and towards democracy, Mr Karzai is still isolated in Kabul, while a clutch of warlords largely control his vast, mountainous country.
An adept diplomat and talented linguist (he speaks at least five languages) who made the headlines with his sartorial flair, the president appears to wield greater influence among the international community that is helping rebuild Afghanistan than he does at home.
Last week was a case in point: Mr Karzai smoothly navigated two days of talks in Oslo with donors, emerging with pledges for another $1.2bn (£749m) of aid over the coming year, a substantially bigger share of it going straight to the Afghan government than last year.
He then returned to face the music at home: a number of attacks on coalition and international peacekeeping troops, continued clashes between warlords and an impasse with the dismissed regional officials, only a few of whom have conceded to his demands.
"It is damaging to his credibility," said Vikram Parekh, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group in Kabul.
Mr Karzai's capacity to enforce the dismissals is woefully absent. While some regional warlords have standing armies numbering in the tens of thousands, Mr Karzai relies on a fledgling national army that has about 1,500 soldiers, and he uses a US-based company, DynCorp, for his personal protection.
A plan to build the army up to 70,000 soldiers is likely to take at least two years. Repeated calls to expand the 4,800-strong international peacekeeping force, known as Isaf, beyond Kabul have been fruitless.
"Without an army and without an expanded ISAF or its equivalent there's not much he can do" beyond asserting his "moral authority", said Mr Parekh.
A new security strategy devised by the Afghan government and the US-led coalition that involves posting teams of about 60 military and reconstruction personnel in regional cities has been welcomed as a step towards improved security. However, it falls short of the aggressive presence needed to rein in the warlords.
Critics say the officials he chose to fire were in any case soft targets, and were largely outside the powerful Northern Alliance.
Among them were the mayors of two provincial capitals - Jalalabad and Nangarhar in the south-east - and three regional intelligence chiefs. Four said they were picked on because they belong to the Islamic party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a rogue warlord who opposes the government and is in hiding. Engineer Ghaffar, mayor of Nangarhar, agreed to step down.
The president also omitted to take on the powerful rival northern warlords, General Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Mohammed, who have resisted calls to halt clashes between their men, or Ismail Khan, governor of western Herat province, who has been accused of grave human rights abuses.
"Karzai is surviving merely because he is so weak. The moment he starts to flex his muscles, that's when the problems will start," said Hamid Gul, a former head of the Pakistani intelligence service who closely followed the development of the Taliban.
Mr Karzai has been weak in managing the ethnic divisions and diverging agenda within his cabinet and for failing to get Marshall Mohammed Qasim Fahim, the defence minister, and his powerful militias firmly behind him, say analysts.
Armed with moral authority but no army, and dependent on the support of a world whose mind is on Iraq, Mr Karzai must project himself as a political figure throughout Afghanistan, analysts say, using the means at his disposal such as the radio waves.
The president finished off his first year in office on Sunday by signing the Kabul Declaration, a non-aggression pact with its six neighbours. This serves as a reminder that while Afghanistan strives to retain the international community's commitment, it is not prepared to be the playing field for other countries' strategic games.