The Foreign Service Journal, December 2014

22 DECEMBER 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL and never fought the Taliban. (He did show bravery by enter- ing Kandahar to oppose the Taliban after 9/11, but had to be rescued by U.S. forces.) Moreover, Karzai had lived and worked in Pakistan for many years, raising suspicions about his loyal- ties in some quarters. For that reason, his selection to lead the post-Taliban administration, a decision strongly pressed by the United States and ultimately accepted by other participants in the December 2001 Bonn Conference, necessitated some surpris- ing diplomacy. Afghan Tajiks at the conference, in particular, strongly resisted Karzai’s elevation, and only agreed under heavy pressure from their principal patron, Iran, which worked quietly behind the scenes with the United States at the conference. e deal was facilitated by assurances that Mohammed Fahim, successor to Ahmad Shah Massoud (a key resistance leader whom the Taliban assassinated just days before 9/11), would be the second-most powerful gure in the administration. e resulting government was an unwieldy alliance, under nominal Pashtun leadership but with northern ethnic (Tajik and Uzbek) control over the critical security sector. Tajiks held most leadership positions in the military and police forces, with Pashtuns lling in the ranks. e administration also included some of the most fundamentalist mujahedeen, such as Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who exercised a pernicious in uence in the justice sector. The Dostum Dossier Reliance by the Karzai administration, and the U.S. mili- tary, on Abdul Rashid Dostum—who is now Ashraf Ghani’s vice president—created a signi cant problem that endures to this day. Dostum is credibly believed to have carried out one of the greatest war crimes in Afghanistan’s bloody history: the torture and execution of some 2,000 Taliban members who had surrendered to his forces at a place called Dasht-i-Leili in November 2001. (Documentary evidence exists that also implicates U.S. military personnel in the massacre.) When I was in Kabul in March 2002, on a personal mis- sion intended to assess human rights concerns, Afghans with whom I was in contact there, as well as nongovernmental organizations, journalists and Mary Robinson, who chaired the United Nations Human Rights Commission and was visiting Afghanistan, all independently told me the charges of a massacre at Dasht-i-Leili were very likely true. Criti- cally, Pashtuns, even those who supported or were part of the Karzai administration, reacted viscerally to accounts of the massacre. Dostum was deeply feared and hated among the Pashtuns I met. ough his positions in the Karzai administration were largely ceremonial, he wielded considerable power behind the scenes, so his mere presence constituted a barrier to negotia- tions with the Taliban, who have not forgotten how many of their members he butchered. Now that he is vice president, President Ghani will nd it di cult to engage Pashtun support for his leadership or pur- sue negotiations with the Taliban. Ghani will also presumably have to deal with the growing international calls for justice and accountability in the matter of the Dasht-i-Leili massacre. Karzai 2.0? at is far from the only problem the Ghani/Abdullah administration has inherited from its predecessor, of course. For starters, it will be populated by many of the same ine ec- tual, divisive gures. Moreover, like Karzai, Ashraf Ghani brings an administra- tive/technocratic background to the position of president. ese non-combat credentials a ord him little personal credibility with the small-to-major mujahedeen warlords who retained their positions of in uence throughout the Karzai interregnum and who control much of the Afghan political world outside Kabul. Ghani will doubtless have to rely on the same system of patronage that Karzai employed to retain the loyalty of these gures. It should be underscored that the cre- ation of that system precluded development of any system of state institutions except in the area of health and education. e role of Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, e ectively as prime minister, is another critical challenge facing President Ghani. Transition to a more parliamentary system would o er When Moscow ended its military occupation of Afghanistan 25 years ago, the ensuing drawdown of Western engagement was abrupt and essentially total.