Читать книгу Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan To A More Dangerous World - Christina Lamb - Страница 12

The war that would never end started in a way that it never should. US special forces captain Jason Amerine and his team from the 5th Special Forces Group were eating ‘truly bad pizza’ in Fortuna Pizzeria in the town of Aktogay in Kazakhstan on the evening of 11 September 2001 when his mobile rang. It was Dan Pedigor, the Defence Attaché from the local US Embassy, with startling news. A plane, he said, had flown into the World Trade Center.

Amerine’s reaction was ‘Oh wow.’1 In primary school he’d read a book about air disasters, and had made a diorama of the B25 Mitchell bomber that hit the Empire State Building in thick fog in 1945. He imagined something like that.

They went back to their pizzas, talking animatedly. Many of the men were thinking about home. They were in Kazakhstan to train Kazakhs in small-unit tactics for counter-insurgency, and had just three days left. Amerine was feeling nostalgic. His divorce had come through in June, and at thirty he thought it was also time for a career change. He had dreamed of being in the special forces since he was a teenager in Hawaii and first met a Green Beret, and now he was an experienced captain, leading a team specialising in parachute insertions behind enemy lines. He knew that as an officer you only have so many opportunities to lead men in the field, then you’re on the staff – and he could not imagine doing an office job. With not much going on in the world, he assumed this would be his last deployment.

Then the phone rang again, and turned everything upside down. A second plane had hit the Twin Towers. Amerine knew then that his country was at war: ‘It was OK, it’s an attack, and had to be al Qaeda who were operating out of Afghanistan.’

Shocked by the news, the men went back to their quarters, and called home to check on their families. Amerine and his sergeant talked late into the night about what might happen. He knew the US would go to war in Afghanistan, and had no doubt that they would be part of it.

What had not occurred to him was that they would be stuck. Although they were probably the special forces team nearest to Afghanistan, military bureaucracy meant they had to go back to base in the US to be assigned orders. However, war had come from the skies, and air traffic closed down around the world for almost a week. The men were left waiting in Almaty, the old Kazakh capital, and he tried to distract them with some sightseeing. One day they went to the World War II museum which was full of displays of big battles fought by the Soviet Union that emphasised all the deaths. One of their guides was a former Soviet officer who had served in Afghanistan fighting the US-backed mujaheddin. ‘It is impossible to win in that country,’ he warned them. ‘Don’t trust the Afghans, and just make sure you come back alive.’

It was 20 September when Amerine and his men finally got back to their base of Fort Campbell in Kentucky. He found it ‘surreal’ to see how everything had already changed. The airport was guarded by men with guns, and there was an Apache helicopter gunship patrolling the highway outside the gate.

Several other special forces teams had already been deployed to bases in Central Asia. Amerine’s team practised live firing and basic soldiering skills while they anxiously waited to be assigned a mission. They presumed this would be to link up with Northern Alliance commanders in northern Afghanistan, and destroy al Qaeda safe havens. Finally, on 10 October, three days after the bombing of Afghanistan started, they were sent back to Central Asia. They had been chosen, along with another team, for the next deployment, and were flown to K2 airbase in Uzbekistan, where they waited.

Two teams were sent to northern Afghanistan, and eventually, after two weeks, Amerine was told that his team would be heading to south-eastern Afghanistan to link up with Abdul Haq and help him start an insurgency. Amerine knew little about him, other than that he was one of Afghanistan’s best commanders from the war against the Soviets. However, within a few hours the news came that Abdul Haq had been captured by the Taliban and executed, so they were to ‘stand down’. ‘That kind of put into perspective the kind of risk the teams were taking,’ said Amerine.

The next day they were told they were being sent to join Hamid Karzai. Nobody seemed to know anything about him, other than that he was a Pashtun, and was trying to raise some kind of Southern Alliance. The information they were given did not even include a photograph. Amerine envisaged ‘some grumpy warlord, missing an eye, with a scar on his cheek who spoke no English’. He sent one of his men to the bazaar to buy a ‘really big knife we could give to our warlord, and say, “We’re here to fight with you, here’s a knife.”’

Amerine along with eleven of his Green Berets was flown to the Pakistani airbase Jacobabad, in the southern province of Sindh, which the Americans were secretly using. Karzai and his men were waiting there. They had already been into Afghanistan, but had found themselves woefully ill-equipped. ‘We weren’t prepared at all,’ Karzai later told me. ‘I went in just in a shalwar and vest, and we ended up sleeping on mountains. It was so cold, even curled up. We finally got to Tarin Kowt [capital of Uruzgan], but people told us there were still lots of Taliban and we should go back.’2

Some of the people he met up with betrayed them, and the Taliban came in pursuit. But Karzai got a message out on his CIA phone, and was luckier than Haq – helicopter-borne US Navy Seals flew in to rescue them and take them to Jacobabad.

When Amerine met the less than athletic Karzai, he was astonished. Instead of a warlord, he found an educated and dignified man speaking impeccable English. ‘In some ways his total lack of military experience made it easier,’ said Amerine. ‘I knew immediately there would be no games, no swaggering or posturing – this was someone I’d be able to talk to.’ He left what had become known as ‘the BFK’ (Big F—ing Knife) in his backpack.

Karzai was accompanied by seven or eight tribal leaders who also did not look as if they would be much use on a battlefield. ‘Most were older, they seemed tired and a couple looked kind of frail,’ recalled Amerine. ‘We figured out he had no forces pretty quickly.’ Only one man stood out. ‘There was this guy Bari Gul with an angry scowl on his face the whole time, he looked a real fighter.’

Karzai seemed unfazed by the task ahead, despite what had happened to Abdul Haq and his own narrow escape. He told Amerine he didn’t think they would have to fight at all. ‘He believed we’d pretty well show up in Uruzgan, that the main town of Tarin Kowt would rise up and that would be it, the Taliban would surrender.’ Amerine was less convinced. ‘If it’s peaceful that’s great, but we’ll plan for it to be a lot more difficult,’ he told him.

While we in the media sat in our hotels in Quetta watching the bombing on TV, Amerine, Karzai and their men gathered around a large map of southern Afghanistan every day for a week, drinking endless cups of green tea, and formed a plan.

In Amerine’s eyes the aim was to ‘infiltrate, grow a force, lay siege to Tarin Kowt, then grow a bigger force and slowly make our way to Kandahar and compel the Taliban to surrender, which would be the end of them’.

Their maps were so poor that they didn’t even know there was only one road between Tarin Kowt and Kandahar. Also, Amerine had never actually raised an army anywhere. Nor was he pleased to discover that he was supposed to take Karzai’s CIA handler Casper and four other agents, which would mean he could take fewer of his special forces team than he wanted.

When Karzai asked Amerine about America’s long-term plans for Afghanistan, he had to admit he had no idea.

There was another problem. Amerine’s commander, Colonel John Mulholland, had given orders that they were not to go into Afghanistan unless Karzai had at least three hundred men on the ground. ‘He meant three hundred bright smiling faces greeting us,’ said Amerine. ‘Karzai said there are more than three hundred men, but they won’t gather unless I go in.’ As it was, on the night they chose to infiltrate because the moon would be at its lowest, Amerine couldn’t reach Mulholland on the phone. Mulholland’s deputy told them to go ahead.

They needed to get going. The bombing campaign was having a quicker impact than expected, and by the time they set off on 14 November, Kabul had already fallen. It was around midnight when Karzai and his seven tribal elders, Captain Amerine and his eleven-man team, and the CIA agent Casper and four more spooks, climbed into five heavily armed Black Hawk helicopters which would drop them deeper behind enemy lines than any other Americans. The soldiers were in camouflage, and most sported beards grown over the previous month to help them blend in with the locals, though close up their thickly muscled builds would give them away. Apart from their weapons and personal GPS, each carried a so-called ‘blood chit’ with a message in seven local languages. ‘I am an American and do not speak your language,’ it read. ‘I will not harm you. I bear no malice towards your people.’

The infiltration was a disaster. One of the helicopters was blown off course by all the dust and dropped four of Amerine’s men in the wrong place, which meant the rest had to wait half the night for them to show up. When the weapons and equipment were airdropped, hundreds of Afghans appeared from the mountains and stole everything, including laptops and the SOFLAM for calling in airstrikes. The Americans were taken to a village on a bend in the Helmand River that was not the place for which they had meticulously planned and studied. It was also clear that Karzai had few people.

Even so, Amerine believed the plan could work, because they would build the force bit by bit. He estimated they would need six months to take Tarin Kowt. He had reckoned without the Afghans. After just three days he got a note from Karzai to say that the people of Tarin Kowt had risen up and taken the town from the Taliban. Amerine was flabbergasted. It turned out that the townspeople had heard that Kabul had fallen to the Northern Alliance, so they stormed the palace of the Taliban Governor of Uruzgan, dragged him out and hanged him. They then drove out the remaining Taliban and declared the town free. To Amerine, this was a disaster. The powerbase of the Taliban was the south, and Uruzgan was Mullah Omar’s home province. Amerine was convinced the Taliban leader and his men would not give that up so easily.

Karzai commandeered some local pick-ups and a bus, and they moved into Tarin Kowt that evening and set up headquarters in a compound. Hours later, as they were about to eat dinner, a message came that an enormous Taliban convoy was on its way from Kandahar to retake Tarin Kowt. Eighty vehicles, they were told. Even allowing for Afghan exaggeration, Amerine was worried. ‘Doing the math in my head, that was a lot of guys.’

He asked Karzai to round up all able-bodied men from the town. After half the night Karzai had managed to find only thirty men. They borrowed some vehicles and drove off, having to stop for petrol on the way. Just south of Tarin Kowt they found an ideal vantage spot from which to protect the town, a bluff that overlooked a wide valley through which the Taliban would have to pass. The men positioned themselves along the ridge, some of the Afghans smoking hashish, and Amerine’s radio operator called in air cover. Soon three F18s were hovering high above at around 30,000 feet.

It was not long before one of Amerine’s men spotted something glinting between the hills. It was the Taliban convoy, so long that it looked like an endless snake. Amerine’s radio operator contacted the US pilots overhead and pronounced the vehicles ‘cleared hot’, meaning they could start bombing. The first bomb missed, but the second hit the lead vehicle, turning it to dust and flame. However, when Amerine turned around, his own Afghan fighters were all jumping in their trucks to flee. They had never witnessed American air power before. Without Karzai, who had stayed back in town, Amerine had no translator to explain to them that the airstrikes were theirs, and they should stay.

‘I got really frustrated and mad,’ said Amerine. ‘We had no trucks of our own, and I’d been warned by one of the CIA guys to make sure we took the car keys from the guerrillas, but I hadn’t done that.’ The Americans had no choice but to jump in the fleeing trucks. ‘It felt like we were stealing defeat from the jaws of victory,’ he recalled. ‘In that moment we lost Tarin Kowt. People would be slaughtered, and there wasn’t anything I could do. I even thought about shooting one of the drivers to take a truck, but if I shot one of our guerrillas they’d never trust us.’

Amerine thought they would just have to grab Karzai from the town and leave. However, when they got back and told him what had happened, Karzai managed to get them two trucks and they drove back. There was not enough time to return to the bluff, but they got to the edge of town and started calling in airstrikes, having figured out that the Taliban were advancing along three paths from the valley in a three-pronged attack.

Word went out at US Central Command that a lone team of Green Berets was under attack from hundreds of Taliban, and F14s and F18s were scrambled from all over the country. ‘Every available US aircraft with bombs was in Tarin Kowt to help us,’ said Amerine. ‘It was this incredible feeling that the might of the military was coming to assist. They knew that our lives were pretty much in their hands.’

One of the pilots looked down from overhead and radioed, ‘Where are the friendly forces?’

‘OK, so see the two trucks …’ replied Amerine.

‘That’s it?’ the pilot asked incredulously.

Despite the massive display of air power the bombs could not wipe out all the Taliban, and some made it into town. ‘What really pushed it over the edge was the people of the town came out with guns,’ said Amerine. ‘At first we were shooing them away, but then we realised they were actually there to fight with us. We killed hundreds of Taliban that day.’

With Tarin Kowt won, over the next three weeks Amerine’s team began moving south towards Kandahar, which was still firmly in Taliban hands. They set up a headquarters on the way at a place called Damana. From there, on 3 December they launched an attack to capture the town of Shawali Kowt and its hill, which overlooked a vital bridge over the Argandab River towards Kandahar. There was intense fighting, and the Taliban counterattacked. One of Amerine’s men, Wes, was shot in the neck though luckily the bullet missed an artery. Eventually the Americans fought them off, and by the next day had taken the hill, giving them control of the bridge.

Yet when Amerine radioed the news to his headquarters, he was ordered to give up the hill. ‘It was a complete foul-up,’ he said. ‘We’d had two days of fighting and no sleep at all. I was very angry.’ The Afghans with them were baffled as they retreated, and with no interpreter it was impossible for Amerine to explain.

‘What seems to have happened is that up till then in the war there were no American casualties in battle [just one from an accidental airstrike in the north],’ he said. ‘At that point fighting up front with the guerrillas wasn’t the norm. So when I radioed that one of my men was shot, there was this shock – “What are your men doing, putting themselves in harm’s way?” I think someone at some level thought there must be a safe area we could be operating from, but they didn’t understand – sorry, we are behind enemy lines, and the guerrillas won’t fight unless we are up front.’

The next day they were ordered to retake the hill, which they did, christening it the Alamo.

While Amerine and Karzai were battling it out with the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, 3,000 miles away in Bonn a group of twenty-five Afghans were huddled in a castle on a wooded hill overlooking the Rhine, trying to form a government. Chairing the meeting was Lakhdar Brahimi, the veteran diplomat and former Algerian Foreign Minister who was the United Nations’ Special Envoy for Afghanistan. He had thought the Taliban would hold on till spring, but then cities started falling like dominoes – Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul, Herat – so the Northern Alliance controlled more than half the country. This would not have been acceptable to Afghanistan’s Pashtun majority, or indeed its neighbour Pakistan, so there was a sudden rush to come up with a more representative interim administration before it was too late.

The White House wanted to do this at Bagram airbase, but Brahimi insisted it needed to be neutral territory. The Germans offered their official guesthouse, the Petersberg Hotel, a site laden with history. It was there in 1949 that the three occupying powers, Britain, France and the US, had signed the agreement paving the way to the birth of the German Federal Republic.

The aim of the Bonn Conference was to form an interim administration which would run the country for three to six months until a loya jirga, a traditional gathering of elders, could be held to decide Afghanistan’s future. There were four delegations – the main ones being the Northern Alliance (including representatives from General Dostum and Ismael Khan) and the Rome group (royalists loyal to the ex-king, Zahir Shah, to which Karzai belonged), then two smaller groups: the Cyprus group (intellectuals thought to have ties with Iran) and the Peshawar group (including the powerful Gilani family). No Taliban were invited, for this was a conference of victors – something that would be rued later. Most of the Afghans were dressed in suits, and aside from the Northern Alliance, many were émigrés, well-educated and Westernised. One of the few in a turban was Pacha Khan Zadran, a warlord. The meeting was opened on 27 November by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, and tasked with producing a government within a week. That was the deadline because the hotel was then booked for a conference of dentists.

Even without the Taliban, getting an agreement was no easy task. The Northern Alliance felt that they should run the country having taken Kabul, and they resented being outnumbered in Bonn. In fact back in Kabul, their leader, Professor Rabbani, had already moved into the presidential palace. The Pashtuns, as Afghanistan’s majority tribe, insisted they should run the government, and were highly suspicious of the Northern Alliance.

As usual in Afghanistan, the situation was complicated by outside interests. Also present in the hotel, though not inside the conference room, were a number of international observers from countries in the region or involved in the conflict, including the US, the UK, Iran, Russia, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The atmosphere was not helped by the fact the meeting was being held during Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, during which Muslims cannot eat in the hours of daylight.

The Americans had sent James Dobbins, a former US Ambassador who had been appointed envoy to the Afghan resistance. A veteran of international conferences that were fuelled by fine food and plentiful wine, Dobbins wondered how this one would work with everyone sober, hungry and tired. Before reaching Bonn he had travelled to Tampa, Florida, to meet General Franks, and had heard the name Hamid Karzai for the first time. ‘They said we’ve got him in a helicopter – he’d been overrun by Taliban and was being flown out to Pakistan. They didn’t want another Abdul Haq incident.’3

A few days later in Islamabad Dobbins met the head of ISI, General Ehsan ul Haq, who was the first to suggest Karzai to him as future leader. ‘He wasn’t an American candidate,’ said Dobbins. ‘But then I went to Kabul, and Abdullah Abdullah also suggested him. I thought, gee, if ISI and the Northern Alliance are agreed, he must be something.’ In Bonn he found the Russians, Indians and Iran all suggested Karzai. ‘There was a clear consensus among international observers that he was the most broadly acceptable.’

The Americans had their man. The only problem was convincing the Afghans. Francesc Vendrell, the Deputy Special UN Envoy, describes the astonishment of the delegates when they sat around the big round table for the opening session and saw a microphone hanging down. They were even more surprised when they were told, ‘Now we will hear from someone inside Afghanistan.’ It was Karzai, speaking from Uruzgan. He told me later, ‘I was in a mud hut of two rooms and had a cold. I don’t know what I said. I never figured I’d be President.’ The line from the satellite phone was not great, but in a way the crackling added to the atmospherics, as he made an impassioned plea for people to set aside their differences for the sake of the nation. ‘This meeting is the path towards salvation,’ he said.

Dobbins thought the most capable figures were from the Northern Alliance, such as the leader of its delegation, Yunus Qanuni, a small, elegantly dressed man with a slight limp. But the Pashtuns would never accept one of them. One Pashtun delegate, Abdul Haq’s brother Haji Qadir, had already walked out, claiming Pashtuns were under-represented.

It was agreed then that the Rome group would choose the new leader. Supported by the Italians and some of the other Europeans, they really wanted the former King as head of state, but were persuaded by the Americans that he would not be acceptable. So they proposed Professor Abdul Sattar Siarat, an Islamic scholar who had been Justice Minister in the King’s last government thirty years earlier. When it came to a vote, Siarat was the clear winner with eleven, compared to two for Karzai.

Siarat was not a Pashtun but an Uzbek, who made up less than 10 per cent of the population, and Dobbins worried that he would not get people to rally round him, nor be able to command respect from Northern Alliance warlords. But while he found none of the Afghan delegates very enthusiastic about Siarat, no one would speak out. Even Qanuni said he could not object to Siarat, as he was a respected figure and his cousin by marriage.

In the end Francesc Vendrell had to call the King in Rome and persuade him to convey to his delegation that ‘rather than an Afghan of their choosing he was asking them for a Pashtun of their choosing’.4 Siarat was so unhappy about the decision that he locked himself in his room, while another of their delegation, Hedayat Amin Arsala, walked out.

The chairman of the conference, Asadullah Wasifi, was furious, even though Karzai was his nephew and had studied with his son Izzatullah in Simla. ‘We elected Siarat but the Americans told me, “No, we want to bring a Pashtun.” I asked, “What kind of democracy is that, where we elect the man you want?” Then Khalilzad came to me and said, “What’s the problem? He’s your brother’s son!” I said, “Yes, he is, that’s why I know he won’t be able to run the country.”5

He refused to sign the document, pointing out that Karzai had never run anything. The only post he had ever held was as Deputy Foreign Minister in the ill-fated mujaheddin government which took power in 1992 after ousting the communists then quickly started fighting each other. Karzai only lasted eighteen months before having to flee to Pakistan, helped by Hekmatyar, putting him in the warlord’s debt.

When Karzai later asked Wasifi why he hadn’t accepted him, he replied, ‘Afghanistan is a big problem and you’re too small.’

The next challenge was persuading Rabbani to step aside. The Northern Alliance leader refused to allow his delegation to submit names of candidates for posts in the interim administration. Instead he called a press conference in Kabul, and announced that Afghanistan should hold direct elections for an interim council rather than abide by the decisions made at Bonn.

The Americans were terrified that the Northern Alliance would pull out of the discussions, and then it would be impossible to organise another meeting. Dobbins called Secretary of State Colin Powell to ask his advice. The answer was unequivocal. ‘Do not let them break up!’ he was told. ‘Keep them there; lock them up if you have to!’

Powell asked Russia, which had a close relationship with the Northern Alliance, to persuade Rabbani not to break up the conference. According to Dr Abdullah, the Russians ‘passed on a message that the world expects an agreement’, and warned that the Northern Alliance ‘shouldn’t expect that without an agreement [Russian] support … can continue’.6

The Iranians also played a key role. To his surprise, throughout the conference Dobbins found himself working closely with them, meeting the leader of their delegation, Jay Zarif, every morning for coffee and cakes to discuss developments.

Under such concerted pressure, the younger members of the Northern Alliance decided to mutiny and continue to participate in the Bonn Conference with or without the support of Rabbani. A strategic American rocket landing near Rabbani’s house may have helped.

Even so, Northern Alliance participation came at a price. They demanded three quarters of the cabinet, including the most powerful portfolios of defence, interior and foreign, as well as control of the intelligence. Finally, after a late-night session with the Americans, Indians, Russians and Iranians, the Northern Alliance agreed a deal, with the Iranians once again playing a critical role. There would be twenty-nine ministries, far more than Afghanistan needed, of which sixteen would go to the Northern Alliance. Two women were included. The King would get the meaningless title of ‘Father of the Nation’, and convene the loya jirga the following year.

The other main argument was over who would provide security for Kabul. The Northern Alliance wanted an all-Afghan force. Others feared that a Northern Alliance-led force would carry out the same kind of abuses that had occurred after the jihadis took power in 1992, which led to the emergence of the Taliban. A small multinational force under the auspices of the UN was agreed.

Thorny issues like disarming warlords were left unresolved – proceedings needed to wrap up by dawn on 6 December so the dentists could move in.

At the time the rapidly approved administration was hailed as a ‘diplomatic miracle’. The West had its military success, dismantling the Taliban regime in two months, and now it had a West-friendly interim government to replace it. Brahimi would later admit: ‘The deal was reached hastily, by people who did not adequately represent all key constituencies in Afghanistan, and it ignored some core political issues.’7

When Amerine and his men got the news that Karzai had been named interim leader of Afghanistan they were astonished. Up until then Amerine had no idea how important Karzai was – which was not surprising, as most Afghans had never heard of him. He was glad he hadn’t known. ‘If I’d been told he’s the future leader of the country, how do I put the guy in a convoy and try to make my way to Kandahar with three hundred guys?’

By then they were less than thirty miles from Kandahar. But they would never make it. The day after retaking the ‘Alamo’ hill a team of American reinforcements from headquarters flew in, this time equipped with their own trucks. They immediately started calling in airstrikes on a cave a couple of miles away which they thought might be a hiding place for Taliban.

They also brought welcome cargo – care packages from home, though not for the recently divorced Amerine. The men were on the ridge of the Alamo, reading their letters and enjoying Rice Krispies bars while Bari Gul and some of the Afghans watched the explosions, by then accustomed to the idea that these Americans could call down fire from the sky on their enemies. Amerine was sitting twenty yards away, discussing the battle plan for Kandahar with one of the staff officers who had flown in, when suddenly there was an almighty blinding flash. Amerine was tossed through the air. ‘I knew the only thing it could be,’ he said. ‘We’d been hit by our own bomb.’

They had been struck by a JDAM, one of the satellite-guided 2,000-pound bombs that the Americans had used to decimate the Taliban. ‘The person giving the coordinates to the cave accidentally gave our own coordinates,’ said Amerine.

There were bodies everywhere, and people groaning – it was clear that they had been hit badly. His own thigh was ripped open by shrapnel, and both his eardrums were perforated. Three of his men were dead, as were many of the Afghans. ‘Bari Gul and most of his men were killed in the explosion. My team was finished, everybody had to be medivaced.’

By sheer luck, Karzai was further along the ridge, and was only slightly wounded in the shoulder. ‘Hamid couldn’t believe what had happened,’ said Amerine, who years later would still find it hard to talk about that day. ‘We could easily have killed him too. I just didn’t have it in me to tell him that our own headquarters had done it.’

Amerine later found out that just that morning, the Taliban had sent a delegation to Karzai to surrender Kandahar. ‘The bomb that hit us was probably the last bomb that was dropped in that theatre … at least in that stage of the campaign.’

It was an ominous start.

Still in shock, Karzai was flown into Kabul on 13 December. One of the first people to see him was James Dobbins, anxious to meet the man he had helped get chosen in Bonn. He was relieved, finding Karzai ‘an attractive personality, warm, reasonably open. Many of the qualities we chose him for are what we would later criticise him for. A more forceful person wouldn’t have been acceptable.’

Though Dobbins was happy to have formed an administration so quickly, he worried that there had been no provision for peacekeeping forces, which he was convinced would be necessary if the fledgling government were to work. He told Rumsfeld they needed 25,000 troops, but was firmly rebuffed. ‘He refused even to discuss it.’

His concerns were shared by the British government, which organised a conference in London bringing together fifteen potential troop-contributing countries. But the Pentagon laid down strict conditions. First, what the Bonn agreement had termed an ‘international security force’ would be renamed the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), to eliminate any idea that internationals would provide security, which it saw as an Afghan responsibility, even though there was no Afghan army to do this. US troops would not participate, as they ‘did not consider peacekeeping a fit role for American troops’. Bush told a meeting of his National Security Council, ‘We don’t do police work.’8 The US would also limit the numbers. ‘We were very wary of repeating the experience of the Soviets and the Brits who ended up looking like occupiers,’ Bush wrote in his memoir.9

On 20 December the UN Security Council approved the deployment of a peacekeeping force numbering between 3,000 and 5,000 troops. It would be led by Britain, which would supply 1,500 troops, commanded by General John McColl.

Afghanistan, emerging from more than two decades of war with armed men everywhere and little effective government, would have just one peacekeeper for every 5,000 people. The last conflict in which the West had been involved was Kosovo, where it had left one peacekeeper for every forty-eight people.

It wasn’t only the numbers that was a problem. The US had insisted that the peacekeepers be restricted to Kabul, giving the US forces of Operation Enduring Freedom free rein to comb the rest of the country for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. It was the birth of two parallel forces.

Nobody in Kabul seemed to have heard of their new president-to-be. ‘Who is he?’ people would ask. ‘Do you have a picture?’

Few people were aware that Karzai was already in the city and had moved into the Arg, the presidential palace. Shortly after I arrived in the city I got a message from his assistant Malik, inviting me over.

It was not easy to get in. The guards on the gate were those of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the head of the Northern Alliance, who had moved into the palace as soon as Kabul had fallen, and thought he should be President, so was refusing to leave. They said they had never heard of any Hamid Karzai. Eventually Karzai’s uncle Asis came out to find me and took me inside.

The driveway to the palace was lined with stone lions which had all been decapitated. ‘Taliban,’ explained Asis. He had been Deputy Chief of Protocol for King Zahir Shah, and knew the palace inside out. He showed us into what he called ‘the Peacock Room’, in which the Taliban had laboriously daubed white paint over the heads of the peacocks on the wallpaper. There was a dark patch on one wall, where Asis recalled a beautiful Gobelin tapestry of an English garden scene used to hang – a gift from Queen Victoria to King Abdur Rahman when his son visited London. ‘Afghans were very confused, and asked why did the stupid king put a horrid carpet on the wall, Afghans have much more beautiful carpets on their floors,’ he laughed.

Asis reminisced wistfully about Kabul in the old days. ‘We had lots of clubs,’ he said. ‘Club 25, Club Moon, a bowling alley, dancing at night, and the wonderful Khyber restaurant by the fountain where there was better food than in Italy or France. It’s like we’ve gone back five hundred years.’

Karzai was sitting in an armchair in another room which had a Philips freezer standing incongruously in the middle. The room was as cold as the inside of the freezer – there was just an ineffectual one-bar heater – and he looked dwarfed by the large chair. I was surprised to see him wearing a long, shiny chapan coat in striped green-and-blue silk, and an astrakhan hat. As long I had known him he had always been in jeans and leather jacket, or occasionally beige shalwar kamiz. ‘I didn’t have clothes so someone lent me these,’ he explained. ‘Everything is still in Pakistan.’

I was still cross that he hadn’t taken me on his return to Afghanistan. ‘The conditions were very cold and hard,’ he said. ‘We had to sleep in a shepherd’s hut. It wasn’t like when you and I went in the old days and people fed us in villages.’ He looked thin. Even so he claimed that everything had gone well in Uruzgan, people all coming out to support him. He did not tell me that he had been accompanied by special forces, only that the Americans had flown him on a transport plane from there into Bagram, a military camp just north of Kabul. He had been met by Marshal Fahim, the new Defence Minister, who was astonished to see him alone. Like all warlords Fahim never went anywhere without pick-ups crammed with heavily armed men. ‘Where are your militia?’ he asked Karzai. ‘I have no men,’ Karzai replied. ‘You are now my men.’

That was all very well, but they weren’t his men. They were Tajiks and he was Pashtun. And how could he trust Fahim? It was Fahim who had ordered his arrest seven years earlier when Karzai was Deputy Foreign Minister, and had him interrogated for hours.

I could see his shoulder was bothering him. He told me he’d fallen over in Uruzgan, but wouldn’t go into any detail. Something didn’t add up. Only later did I hear the whole story.

22 December, the day of Karzai’s inauguration, dawned grey. The ceremony took place at the Interior Ministry building just along the road from the Mustafa. Security was tight, roadblocks manned by soldiers and police patrolling in old Russian peaked caps decorated with red and gold braid. They were clutching an assortment of arms, including handheld rocket launchers. Alarmingly I saw one policeman drop his just outside our hotel. Fortunately it didn’t go off.

A motley band in uniforms with braided gold epaulettes played a sort of monotone oompah on the only remaining brass instruments in Afghanistan as dignitaries walked along the specially flown-in red carpet. It was all quite grim, not at all like the installation of the last Western-backed ruler, Shah Shuja, in 1839, when one British soldier and artist present wrote that ‘the wild grandeur of the whole pageantry baffles description’.10

The foreigners seemed satisfied. General Franks was there, the man who had made this all possible. Next to him was British General McColl, as well as the Foreign Ministers of Belgium, Iran, India and Pakistan, and many diplomats.

More interesting for me was watching the assortment of sworn enemies take their seats next to each other as part of the new administration after years of trying to kill each other. General Dostum was there, glowering and bearish as if he’d like to go and kill a few people. He was to be Deputy Defence Minister. Ismael Khan made an entrance by arriving late, thus outdoing Dostum, whose deputy had betrayed Ismael to the Taliban.

A Pashtun might be heading the new administration but it was clear who was dominating it. In prominent places were the Panjshiri trio – Marshal Fahim, the new Defence Minister, who still had his own army on the Shomali plains just outside Kabul; Yunus Qanuni, who was to be Interior Minister; and Abdullah Abdullah, the Foreign Minister.

Overlooking proceedings was a huge portrait of the late Northern Alliance commander Ahmat Shah Massoud in his trademark pakoul. Massoud was rapidly becoming the Che Guevara of Afghanistan. His photograph was everywhere, hindering visibility on the windscreens of the ubiquitous Toyota jeeps, decorating traffic islands and shops. One of the seats in the front row was left empty in deference to him, with his picture on the back and a bunch of plastic flowers on it.

Just as when the British were impressed by Shah Shuja’s appearance, Karzai was winning plaudits for his lambswool hat and green-and-blue-striped chapan. The fashion designer Tom Ford even called him ‘the chicest man on the planet’.

What they thought was his dress sense wasn’t the only reason for satisfaction among Western diplomats. They believed they had found the perfect President – a charming man who spoke immaculate English, loved English poetry and was from the majority Pashtun tribe yet was also a nationalist. And in some ways the fact that no one knew him seemed a good thing, as he was not compromised by his role in the jihad, unlike the warlords who most Afghans blamed for getting the country into such a mess.

After being sworn into office he spoke in his native Pashtu, then read a poem in Dari, one of the seven languages he speaks. He embraced Rabbani and called on Afghans to ‘forget the painful past’. He was just two days away from his forty-fourth birthday, and made reference to his lack of experience. ‘Oh God I am a novice so please help me.’

There was already one black cloud. A group of elaborately turbaned elders from Gardez who had come for the ceremony told us that a convoy from Khost they were supposed to be coming with had been bombed by the Americans, and as many as sixty-five elders killed.

When we journalists clustered round General Franks after the ceremony, he defended the bombing. ‘Friendly forces don’t fire surface-to-air missiles at you,’ he said. ‘We believe it was a bad convoy. We have reason to believe it was a good target.’

No surface-to-air missile had been fired. It would be the first of many such mistakes.

We should have realised then that instead of the end this was just the start. While Karzai was being sworn in as new leader of Afghanistan, a British man called Richard Reid was boarding American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami. The heels of his shoes had been hollowed out and packed with explosives.

It was the Saturday before Christmas, and the plane was packed with 185 passengers. Over the Atlantic, two hours out of Paris, some of them complained of smelling smoke. Hermis Moutardier, one of the French air hostesses, spotted Reid trying to light a match, and warned him that smoking was forbidden on the plane. He promised to stop, but a few minutes later she smelled more smoke.

To her horror she found Reid hunched in his window seat holding a lit match to one of his shoes. As she went to grab him, he pushed her away so hard she fell. ‘Get him!’ Moutardier screamed. Her colleague Cristina Jones rushed to the scene and threw herself at Reid, who was six feet four and snarling like an animal. He bit her hand and she screamed. Reid was not easy to control, but a small army of flight attendants and male passengers managed to hold him down, doused him with bottled water and tied him up with seatbelts, plastic handcuffs and headphone cables. A doctor on board sedated him. His shoes were then carried into the cockpit for inspection by the pilots, and only then were the fuses spotted.

The ordeal wasn’t over. The crew had no idea if he had any accomplices onboard, so the remaining passengers were kept in their seats for the final nerve-racking two hours and fifty minutes until they could land at the nearest airport, which was Boston. Afterwards they found numerous spent matches. No one knew why they hadn’t caught light. If they had, the shoes had more than enough explosives to blow up the plane.

Less than a week later, on 28 December, General Franks went to visit President Bush on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Bush told reporters afterwards that they had discussed Afghanistan. In fact it was the first detailed briefing to discuss plans for a war in Iraq.