In defence of Karzai

In Benazir Bhutto's last meeting with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President laid out the details of the startling intelligence that had come his way on the plot to assassinate the former prime minister of Pakistan.

Indeed, Karzai, who has survived several assassination attempts, was in a unique position to appreciate the kind of charmed existence Bhutto led in the 10 weeks since her triumphant return to her homeland, escaping death by a whisker first in Karachi and then again in Peshawar, only to meet her nemesis in Rawalpindi.

One of the best guarded leaders in the world, Karzai had repeatedly sent messages of warning to Bhutto through various emissaries since she had announced plans to return home, offering her the kind of security he enjoyed, courtesy the Americans. Unfortunately, for reasons brushed aside in the clamour to find her killers, Bhutto was not given the kind of security advice that would have saved her life.

Close aides say in the hours leading up to her assassination, the normally ebullient Bhutto, up all night writing the final chapter of her book on Islam, had returned from her meeting with Karzai markedly quieter and subdued and spoke to no one while she ate a simple lunch before she headed out to keep her date with death. Was she told who among her inner circle was complicit in the plot to assassinate her?

The parallels with Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi's assassination are uncanny. That assassination put paid to India's big power ambitions for at least another decade. Even today, Delhi's is a halting involvement in its own neighbourhood. The peace process in Sri Lanka sees an Indian nudge to the Mahinda Rajapakse government into empowering moderate Tamils as Colombo relentlessly annihilates the separatists, rather than the vigorous involvement that Gandhi adopted - albeit with disastrous consequences.

Afghanistan's rise as an independent nation may be fatally marred by Bhutto's assassination. At Karzai's one-on-one meeting with Bhutto in Islamabad, the Afghan president was reassured by the Pakistan Peoples Party leader that if her party was allowed to win the election, the war on terror would be uncompromising, fought shoulder to shoulder with the Afghans. Notwithstanding her dubious credentials as the mother of the Taliban - it was under her watch that then Interior Minister Nasrullah Babbar trained and readied the Taliban monster in a string of madrassas along the Afghan-Pakistan border to take power in Kabul in 1996 - Bhutto's public pronouncements on Afghanistan in the past year were what Kabul wanted to hear. This, unlike President Pervez Musharraf, who has gone from bluster and vigorous denial of a Taliban presence in the north-west to acceptance and outright finger pointing of Taliban-Al Qaida involvement in Bhutto's killing as his army struggles to quieten the forces that were once theirs to command.

Raised expectations

In contrast, the former Bhutto's promise to crack down on terror sanctuaries raised expectations in Afghanistan that conflict could end and development begin anew with a new partner for peace. Bhutto's assassination ended Karzai's hopes for a more congenial relationship with Islamabad, of an Afghanistan and Pakistan working in tandem to fight a common enemy. Clearly the Afghan president's comments in Davos yesterday at the annual World Economic Forum mark how much he had banked on a Bhutto comeback. "While Afghanistan is still a critical battlefield, a rapidly spreading war is engulfing the wider region," Karzai said. "Our strategies in this war have often been shortchanged by a host of deceptive rhetoric. Governments in the region need to move beyond rhetoric and cease to seek the pursuit of interests in the use of extremist politics."

When I first shook hands with Karzai he had come to pay a condolence call to the home of Commander Abdul Haq, the brave, one-legged Afghan warrior who had died fighting the Taliban alongside US forces soon after 9/11. Karzai was not yet the world leader he would grow into and indeed the soft spoken Afghan was often put in the shade by the far more forceful pronouncements on war and peace by his cabinet, many of them warlords with their own militia and fiercely loyal ethnic following. As foreign troops poured in, transforming battle-scarred Kabul into a garrison town and international aid agencies controversially and selectively disbursed funds for reconstruction, the great game of the nineteenth century was reinvented.

Karzai's inability to call a spade a spade turned many analysts like me into critics of his softly-softly approach. Particularly when despite his need for varied expertise in nation building he was forced into, as he himself admits, allowing more inept foreign troops to come into the south, even changing governors at their behest, earning the label of the United States' cat's paw in the region.

It was only when he spoke out openly, not once but over and over of Pakistan's ineffective tactics in staunching the Taliban tide into his country that he made Washington sit up and take notice of his neighbour's perfidy. Once again, in Davos, in the face of a sustained charm offensive, Hamid Karzai has done the same.

Neena Gopal is an analyst on Asia