Nick Carter, walking without helmet or body armor, told a nearby reporter that “the point at which you have enough security to do something symbolic like this is the point at which the hard work of delivering governance starts.” His counterpart, General Zazai, addressed the obvious concerns of the people who had come out for the ceremony. “We promise we won’t abandon you,” he said.
* * *
Even before my arrival in June 2009, I believed an important component of President Karzai’s role as head of state and commander-in-chief of Afghan military forces would be his willingness and his ability to travel around the country providing visible leadership, particularly to troubled areas. Since the increase in violence, he’d left the Kabul palace less and less, except for rumored late-night rides in the passenger seat of a beat-up sedan to see the city that was changing outside his view. I felt he needed to break free of the often-cloistered environment of the palace, where he developed his perspectives based on secondhand, often biased, information, and the routine pummeling he took from the media often inflamed his frustrations. Inside the palace walls, he was also susceptible to the manipulation of members of his inner circle, who stoked his emotions to their benefit through whispers and innuendo. While retaining a balanced perspective was a common challenge for many national leaders, the situation in Afghanistan multiplied both the difficulty and importance of such balance. Further, the population needed to see and hear Karzai. Too often they were informed by rumors and propaganda, rather than direct communication with their leaders. I judged that he needed regularly to visit locations ranging from the battlefields of Helmand to northern provinces like Kunduz.
Such trips were easier proposed than done. Afghanistan’s insecurity made adequate protection an extensive effort. Additionally, each trip’s location and timing had domestic political ramifications that required Karzai’s input. My staff dedicated a large amount of its time to scheduling, coordinating, and executing these trips. We planned them to align with prominent events over upcoming months—central military operations as well as international conferences and decisions. We also sought to visit lower-profile areas and to continue to strengthen his connections beyond the Pashtun south, where his family and tribe were prominent.
The logistics mattered, not least because the Taliban were anxious to kill him. A poorly executed trip risked undermining President Karzai’s stature, and could reduce his willingness for future travel. To reach most locations in Afghanistan required a series of vehicle, airplane, helicopter, and ultimately foot movements, each phase of which had to be resourced and integrated into what we hoped would feel like a seamless string of coordinated actions. Each stage involved more than moving just the president. An entourage of selected ministers, aides, and presidential security people always accompanied him.
Although Afghanistan was in the process of fielding a small air force, to include presidential aircraft, the yet-nascent fleet meant that we normally had to use ISAF planes. We had nothing equivalent to Air Force One to fly the president in, so initially he buckled in shoulder-to-shoulder with fifty or sixty Afghan government and ISAF personnel in the noisy cargo bay of a U.S. Air Force C-130. The roar of the aircraft’s engines made conversation impossible, and Karzai would maintain as much dignity as possible as we droned toward our destination.
One of the passengers on many of these flights was then-Major Khoshal Sadat, or Kosh, who had joined our team that January. Since taking command, I had been anxious to bring a young Afghan officer onto my staff as an aide-de-camp. Too often, we discussed Afghanistan without a single Afghan in the room. After a few months, a British special forces officer recommended Kosh to us. He came from a military line, like so many of the Americans in his country: Kosh’s grandfather had been a senior non-commissioned officer in the king’s guards, and his father had been a pilot in the Afghan Air Force. But when his father died in an accident in 1988, Kosh’s mother had to raise him and his siblings during the long decade of war that followed. It was a childhood few of us could imagine, one hitched to the weathervane fate of Kabul. As a boy during the civil war anarchy, he caught a ricochet in his arm. As a teenager, he went to get bread but soon wandered over to a crowd, and saw what they saw: the bloodied body of Najibullah, hanging from a candy-cane striped traffic beam. As a young man under the Taliban’s dystopian regime, he evaded an unknown fate by escaping out of the back of a pickup after the Taliban had arrested him for carrying cassette tapes. Through it all, his mother insisted that he get an education and learn English. He did well in both, and after joining the military in 2003, he soon won a spot at Britain’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He now came to us after several years of combat as a squadron commander of an elite all-Afghan commando unit trained and mentored by the British SAS.