Karzai Like a Fox

Michael Hirsh

Hamid Karzai, who is on his umpteenth visit to Washington, is a royal pain who has made no secret of his growing anti-Americanism, to the point of threatening to join the Taliban. President Karzai may also be, for that reason, the most critical asset Barack Obama now has in Afghanistan—and the main ticket home for thousands of American troops there.

Despite attempts to smear him as crazy or unstable or drug-addled—by controversial ex-diplomat Peter Galbraith, among others—most senior U.S. and British officials who have worked closely with Karzai say he is acting as normally as anyone could expect from someone who is regularly accused of being an American stooge by the Islamist insurgents in his country. Not to mention someone who has heard his sanity and reliability regularly questioned in leaked U.S. memos and press accounts over the last year. Among his defenders: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (who told me in a late April interview that both she and Sen. John Kerry have "spent a lot of time talking to President Karzai about why elections oftentimes aren't fair," drawing "on our own personal experience.") Another champion of Karzai is NATO civilian envoy Mark Sedwill, who told me and other reporters recently that the Afghan leader is doing the best he can with the meager cards he's been dealt and who suggests, piquantly, that a better question might be whether Karzai sees the Western allies as reliable.

Read more