Despite Perils, Tribal Chief Is Driven to Oust Taliban

In a remote valley high in the mountains of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai is calling on tribal elders, religious leaders and warriors to join his effort to bring peace and a new regime to their nation.

His mission, in the Taliban stronghold of southern Afghanistan, is fraught with peril. A supporter of the nation’s exiled monarch, Mohammad Zaher Shah, Karzai is calling for a loya jirga, the traditional Afghan convocation of elders used to choose a new leader. It is implicitly a call for the overthrow of the Taliban.

The fundamentalist Islamic regime has announced a death sentence for anyone who supports Zaher Shah, and Karzai is surviving day to day. He and his bodyguards fended off Taliban soldiers Nov. 1, and he was pulled out of Afghanistan by U.S. helicopters last Sunday. He returned to his homeland within days, and there is little doubt that Taliban troops are still hunting for him.

But he seems prepared to take the risk in part because it is a role he long has expected to fill.

“Of course he is in a lot of danger now, but we have been preparing for this for 20 years, not just since Sept. 11,” said younger brother Ahmad Wali Karzai, who lives in the western Pakistani city of Quetta. “The place where he is now is mountains and high valleys and he has his people around him.”

His family is prominent in the Popolzai clan, part of the Durrani tribe that has been linked to Afghan’s royal dynasty since the 1700s. They are also Pushtuns, the dominant ethnic group of the country and the Taliban. In the southern provinces of Afghanistan where Karzai is now working, most people are Pushtuns.

Within that ethnic group his name is well known because his father served in the Afghan parliament for many years, at one time as its speaker. The father was assassinated two years ago in Quetta. Hamid, the fourth of seven sons and the one most steeped in politics, took his place in the struggle to dislodge the Taliban.

Karzai, 44, is one of the few Afghan leaders that U.S. officials have named publicly as an ally, and they are counting on him to rally what is believed to be latent opposition to the Taliban that exists even in the movement’s southern Afghanistan stronghold. At the moment, at least, the Bush administration appears to have no other strategy--short of deploying U.S. ground troops--to counter the Taliban in the south.

With his fluency in English and his urbane manner, Karzai puts Western officials at ease. But ultimately the test of his mettle will be in the wilds of Afghanistan, where loyalties are divided among local warlords, tribal allegiances and the Taliban, and people are often swayed by hard calculations about which side is most likely to survive.

“The tribes are still powerful but not as powerful as they were historically in Afghanistan,” said Anders Fange, civil affairs coordinator for a U.N. mission in Afghanistan and a 20-year veteran of working with the country.

“With the emergence of a more modern centralized state and the rise of moujahedeen, who fought the Soviets and were supplied with weapons and money from Pakistan, allegiances came to be based less on tribal power,” Fange added. “And then the Taliban came, and they are not tribal.”

Karzai is Media Savvy

Karzai is aware that it is dangerous to rely too much on tribal ties and has emphasized his willingness to work with all groups in Afghanistan--including the Taliban and the opposition Northern Alliance--as long as they accept the importance of convening a loya jirga. In the past few weeks, he has employed his considerable gift for communication and knowledge of how to use the media.

He has given interviews by satellite phone from his mountain hideaway to CNN, CBS, BBC and, most important, to the Pushtu-language radio service carried by the BBC. The latter is heard across the country by ordinary Afghans, whose support Karzai will need most if his movement is to succeed.

“He’s very street smart,” said Rifaat Hussain, chairman of the Department of Defense and Strategic Studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. “He has the ability to adapt. You like him when you talk to him in an intellectual conversation, but he can also talk to his own people in Afghanistan.”

Karzai used an interview with the Pushtu-language service to reassure the Afghan people that despite the Taliban attack he was alive and at work in his home country. In later broadcasts, he said he had talked to Taliban commanders as well as Northern Alliance figures and would even work with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the regime’s leader.

“Afghans must be empowered to take control of their country. If you do that, you will have an end to terrorism. If you don’t, the trouble will continue and there will be no end to it,” Karzai told The Times before he slipped into Afghanistan in early October. “In my opinion, the majority of the people want a loya jirga.”

Karzai’s political philosophy is the sum of his life experience, a pastiche of tribal connections, a British-style university education and extensive travel overseas.

He was born in the city of Kandahar and grew up in Kabul, the Afghan capital. Unlike his brothers--he also has a sister--Karzai never liked sports. “He was quiet, he would read a lot, drink tea and sit and talk with a close friend,” said Ahmad Wali Karzai, his brother.

Hamid Karzai received his master’s degree in political science in Simla, India, where he gained a mastery of English and an interest in the works of Mahatma Gandhi, said Abdul Malik, a close associate in Quetta. Karzai also speaks Urdu and Pushtu, as well as some French.

4 Brothers Live in U.S.

During the 1979-89 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, he moved to Quetta while the rest of the family went to the United States. Four brothers live in Laurel, Md., where three run a chain of restaurants in Baltimore, San Francisco and Boston.

Karzai has traveled to the U.S. frequently, as well as to Germany, Britain, France and Italy, where he has met in Rome with Zaher Shah. He also has testified before Congress and, unlike many of his countrymen, seems to view the U.S. as a useful ally rather than as an alien, non-Muslim military power bombing their land. He tries to make people see the distinction between the U.S. airstrikes and its policies toward Muslim countries.

“It is not a struggle between America and Afghanistan, it is a struggle between Afghanistan and the terrorists,” he told The Times. “These terrorists in Afghanistan have first killed Afghans. They destroyed our homes, they destroyed our villages, they killed our men and women and children. They have taken over our country, and we want it back.”

During the 1980s, Karzai was a frequent go-between for the moujahedeen forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“He would go into Afghanistan and travel to different areas to bring weapons and supplies,” said Ahmad Wali Karzai. “He was never into watching movies or sports; he spent all his time meeting and talking to people. He always had lunch or dinner with people; only once or twice would he eat with his family.”

He was so busy with politics that he married only two years ago, to an Afghan doctor living in Pakistan. She remains in Quetta but no longer works because of potential threats to Karzai’s family members, said Malik, the associate.

Karzai was not a front-line fighter in the past, a factor that some people worry could hamper his efforts.

“He’s appealing and he’s a modern man, but how much power and how much influence does he have in Afghanistan?” asked Hussain of Quaid-i-Azam University.

Karzai served as a deputy foreign minister from 1992 to 1994 but left the country when the post-Soviet civil war among competing factions became increasingly violent. However, he remained close to militia commanders, including some who became Taliban leaders. But Karzai distanced himself from the movement as it became more radical and refused an offer to become the Taliban representative to the United Nations, his brother said.

However, his ties to leaders across the Afghan spectrum convinced him that almost all of them should have a place in the next government.

“Some of the Taliban, the ones who have really sided with terrorism--those ones, of course, cannot be considered for any arrangements,” Karzai told The Times. “But the majority of Taliban, the common Taliban, the Talib with the gun--that’s an Afghan man, and he will go and live his life like other Afghans live their lives. So there should be no problem there.”

If there is a future broad-based government in Afghanistan and if Karzai survives, there is little doubt that he will play a significant role. As a tribal chief and a prominent Pushtun, as well as an appealing political figure, he probably can expect significant support. Already, he is on a list of candidates for a national unity council that would take over from the Taliban, according to Zaher Shah’s staff, which has been putting the group together. The 120-member council has yet to be finalized because of disputes about its makeup.

But the question is when and whether Afghanistan will emerge from the Taliban era.

“We will support Karzai because the three provinces--Helmand, Oruzgan and Kandahar--belong to his same tribe,” said Abdul Wahab Durrani, an Afghan exile in Pakistan who is the leader of a large refugee community near Quetta.

“But Afghanistan has 28 provinces, and Karzai has started to fight only in one or two,” he said. “We need Karzais in every province or the Taliban will not come under enough pressure to be defeated.”

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Times staff writers John Daniszewski in Moscow and Richard Boudreaux in Rome contributed to this report.