Hamid Karzai is lonely. He is huddled, as always, deep inside his presidential palace in Kabul, protected by towering stone walls, growling dogs and U.S. bodyguards. Visitors to the palace must undergo three separate body searches before passing through the arched gates, all under the gaze of trained marksmen standing sentry in a watchtower. On this day in February, a driving blizzard has made Karzai’s lair seem even more forbidding. Only one person gets through unchallenged: Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Inside Karzai’s office, the two men converse in English and Dari, one of Afghanistan’s two official languages. Karzai, who out of fear of assassination rarely leaves the palace, asks Khalilzad how things look in the country he governs but almost never sees. Khalilzad unfurls a large map and points out various reconstruction projects marked in red and green ink–a network of roads and schools and irrigation canals that will be built, he says, as soon as the U.S. and NATO bring order to Afghanistan. Karzai nods impatiently but brightens when he locates the one major rebuilding achievement of his tenure: a 300-mile road linking Kabul to Kandahar. “Do you know how long it took to reach Kandahar before?” he asks. “Twelve hours, sometimes 18. Now I had a delegation that made it there in 3 hours and 45 minutes.” He laughs. “Of course,” he says, “we have no speed limits.” For Karzai and for the Bush Administration, there is no time to waste. Two years have passed since several hundred U.S. ground troops and 15,000 Northern Alliance fighters ousted the Taliban in retaliation for the Sept. 11 attacks, ending the mullahs’ oppressive rule and destroying the sanctuary from which Osama bin Laden directed his murderous minions. Having scored a blockbuster opening victory in its war on terrorism, the Bush Administration committed itself to winning the peace–pledging billions of dollars in aid, deploying 11,000 troops to hunt for remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and pinning its credibility on Karzai, the regal President who the U.S. hoped could manage the country’s combustible ethnic mix and rein in its notorious warlords. Making Afghanistan a stable democracy friendly to the West would not just deal a blow to bin Laden and the brutes who once ruled the country but also help win over hearts and minds across the Islamic world. Says Khalilzad, the Afghan-American who took charge of the U.S. embassy in Kabul last November: “The reputation of the Bush Administration is associated with Afghanistan.”
