TIME: Kabul: Tense Moments
on the Palace Grounds
Monday, October 07, 2002
By MICHAEL WARE
The Special Forces soldiers assigned to protect
president Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan have learned to
trust no one. That lesson was made abundantly clear
when a gunman dressed as a soldier in the newly
formed Afghan army attempted to assassinate their
charge in early September. It's not hard to imagine
how a recent altercation between Special Forces and
Afghan government troops nearly erupted into a bloody
melee inside the Presidential Palace grounds — a
confrontation that says a lot about the future of the
American presence in Afghanistan.
On September 30 just after 8:00 am, one of Kabul's
top generals, Bismillah Khan, commander of the city's
garrison and a deputy to the defense minister,
arrived at the Presidential Palace to meet one of the
former king's advisers. The general and his bodyguard
glided past an Afghan army checkpoint at the
visitors' gate only to be stopped forty yards later
by U.S. soldiers assigned to protect Karzai. The
Americans wanted to search the car and the general,
but Khan refused. When the U.S. soldiers attempted to
physically remove him from the car, fifteen Kandahari
mujahedin (bodyguards for the former king) cocked
their weapons and took aim at the Special Forces. The
other Afghan government troops followed. "It was one
of those times when you realize a minute is actually
sixty seconds, and that can be an awfully long time,"
Hayatullah Diani, a royalist official, told TIME. "I
thought they were going to start killing each other."
Before the scene turned bloody, members of Karzai's
office appeared and negotiations began. Khan was
released and the Afghan troops lowered their weapons.
What had flared in just seconds was over in minutes.
Had violence erupted the consequences would have been
catastrophic, ripping open divisions within the new
government and unsettling allegiances with factions
already feeling sidelined in the new order. The near
miss also demonstrates just how delicate a balance
the U.S. faces in Afghanistan between appearing as a
force of safety for some and source of agitation to
so many others.
The incident comes at a precarious time as Washington
seeks a deeper engagement in the country, stepping up
from combat missions to take on the complexities of
nation building. That has meant supporting a
relatively isolated president while pacifying, or at
least deterring, his rivals. Building up Karzai is
seen to have come at the expense of America's allies
against the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, which
dominates much of the government.
One of the biggest sources of friction comes from the
creation of the Afghan National Army, a U.S.- and
French-trained force to be commanded by the
president, not the defense minister. Weapons,
munitions and gear are being flown into a U.S.
airbase north of Kabul, unloaded onto Special Forces
convoys and distributed directly to the ANA. Already
feeling threatened by Washington's support for
Karzai, last week's incident has cemented the
Northern Alliance's view of itself as a forgotten
partner. But the U.S. military is making no
apologies. "President Karzai's personal security team
will continue to exercise the level of control
necessary to ensure the physical security of the
President," Central Command spokesman Col. Ray
Shepherd told TIME from Tampa, Fl.
In the days since the showdown key Northern Alliance
leaders have become vitriolic. "We're asking
ourselves is this an Afghan palace or an American
palace?" a senior general says. Western diplomats in
Kabul are waiting to assess the fallout. "I can't
gauge yet whether this is a very very serious thing
or whether it will pass as just something that
happened," says one. General Sharif's reaction is not
heartening. "The U.S. has turned its back on us," he
says, "So let me tell you something: the Russians
helped the Vietnamese defeat America, then the
Americans helped the Afghans beat Russia, and now is
the time again for the Russians. America should not
try to step forward here in Afghanistan."
Trouble is, that is precisely what Washington intends
to do.