Barack and Hamid's excellent adventure

Samuels Jul 10 2010 Barack and Hamids excellent adventure Afghanistans president visits the White House

 

Barack and Hamid's excellent adventure:

Afghanistan's president visits the White House

By David Samuels

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/08/0083065 - not full text at this siite

David Samuels is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine.

The best month to visit Washington is May, after the April rains have ended but before the mindless election noise begins. The White House grass is a super-high-definition green that really pops when the network correspondents do their stand-ups. Breathing in the perfumed air, the members of the pack can feel just a hint of summer humidity coming on as they wait on the sunken asphalt driveway to ascend to the Palm Room for a joint statement from the elected leaders of America and Afghanistan. Something about the balmy weather and creamy paint job causes a wavering distortion in my normally solid sense of place, and I imagine for a moment that I am standing outside the service entrance of a mansion in Bel Air belonging to one of the legendary old studio heads, whose houses looked exactly like this but with bigger swimming pools. All that's missing is a sun-bleached dumpster piled high with black bags of trash.

It is funny to watch the reporters pretend not to hear the sound that I am very clearly hearing. It stops and then it starts again, a keening, wailing sound, familiar from Kabul to Gaza City. The adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, fills the air in front of the White House like the opening credits to some kind of Islamophobic fantasy movie, a Muslim Red Dawn. I scan the faces of the other reporters until two or three of them meet my gaze. I tilt my head, and they tilt their heads, as we try to locate the source of the sound and determine whether or not it is official. "It's coming from Lafayette Park," a reporter from a foreign wire service says, but some of the other reporters look doubtful. The alternative being that Hamid Karzai and his ministers are rolling out prayer rugs and touching their heads to the floor as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bob Gates sit on couches wondering, How did we get suckered so badly? This time it is the liberal elites who have lost themselves in the ragged provinces where delusions of omnipotence collide with the cold realities of a war we are bound to lose. The Afghan war cost America $55.2 billion last year and will cost $72.3 billion this year. With every billion spent the logic behind the American war effort gets weirder and more phantasmagoric, which is why no one here talks about the war.

"I saw Roger Ailes," says an older woman in a blue turtleneck sweater. "He said I should send him an email." She turns to her friend. "We're all independents now." Half the reporters look carb-faced and swollen from eating too much junk food while meeting late-night deadlines. Maybe a quarter are gym-toned fanatics like the president and his wife. No one smokes on the White House grounds. A minder in a navy-blue suit walks by. "Another ten minutes, folks. Ten minutes."

The reporters practice their questions, as if this were still the old days and raising their hands meant that there was even a slight chance they might be called upon. In fact, Obama hasn't had a real press conference in almost a year, which is the longest period of such abstinence since anyone began keeping track. The reporters who get to ask questions are selected weeks in advance by the White House. Still, pretending is helpful for morale.

"How about negotiating with the Taliban? You still good with that?"

"Is your brother a CIA agent?"

The question refers to Hamid Karzai's half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is regularly portrayed in the American press as a corrupt drug lord who charges huge fees for allowing trucks full of opium to cross the bridges over the Helmand River to Kandahar. Last fall, President Obama duly warned that he expected Karzai to establish tough new anti-corruption laws and remove his brother from the government of a country into which the United States would soon be sending 30,000 additional troops. Never mind that Afghanistan produces an estimated 90 percent of the world's supply of opium; and that the Taliban pays Wali Karzai to ship opium through the territories he governs; and that the U.S. Army, under the ill-fated General Stanley McChrystal, relies on Wali Karzai for logistical support and subcontracts special tasks, which include killing people, to gunmen under his direct control; and that as a courtesy we no longer destroy the poppy crop; and that Wali Karzai happens to be the CIA's landlord in Kandahar, renting them Taliban leader Mullah Omar's old villa. After a few months of back-and-forth, the message got through, and on March 30 the New York Times reported that "Afghan and American officials have decided that the president's brother will be allowed to stay in place," quoting a senior NATO official as saying that Wali Karzai could be a big help to the ongoing American reconstruction effort. "One thing, he is a successful businessman," the official said. "He can create jobs."

A clutch of shooters emerges, looking post-orgasmic after the photo spray at the top of the morning meeting. A few minutes later, the reporters ascend the staircase and enter through the front door of the White House, and hang a left to the East Room, which is decorated in an upscale-French-whorehouse palette of peach and gold, with three glass chandeliers glittering from the ceiling. Behind each empty podium stands an American flag and an Afghan flag. A large block of seats on the left side of the room has been reserved with little slips of paper that read afghan press corps, which sounds plausible as a name for a D.C. hardcore band. The Afghans in attendance, none of whom are actually reporters, have cheap digi-cams and are filming one another as the American TV reporters declaim.

"Bad blood at one point with the administration."

"Recognize Karzai is the power in Afghanistan."

As if an invisible hand has been waved over the ill-dressed throng, everyone falls silent except for Savannah Guthrie of NBC, a hard-bitten women with an auburn dye job and full war paint. "You have American soldiers over there fighting and dying," she intones, before moving on to the common wisdom of the moment. "The better part of valor is to work with the president in office." Guthrie is arguably responsible for this visit, by virtue of having conducted an interview with former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith, an arrogant creep who was forced out of his job as deputy U.N. envoy to Afghanistan and chose to express his unvarnished opinion of Karzai. "He can be very emotional, act impulsively," said Galbraith, who repeated the word "emotional" three times in the course of the interview. In case viewers didn't get the gossip-page code, Galbraith explained that "some of the palace insiders say that he has a certain fondness for some of Afghanistan's most profitable exports," leading a reporter to ask State Department spokesman Philip Crowley the next morning whether the United States had any reason to believe that Karzai was "like, hiding out in the basement of the palace doing bong hits, or something worse." Guthrie falls silent, and a woman in a pretty light-pink suit and a short black bob stands up and starts talking in Pashto.

General Stanley McChrystal enters the room in uniform, along with the rest of Obama's national security team—Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Michael Mullen, and U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry—and take seats in the first row on the right. The shutters click.

Click.

Click click click.

Cl-cl-click.

Hillary enters, apple-cheeked—you can imagine her in one of those nineteenth-century portraits of white-wigged secretaries of state like John Quincy Adams or John Hay. As a feminist, she is a true believer in the cause of Afghan freedom, which puts her here in a minority of one. Eikenberry, a tall man in a good suit who used to be a lieutenant general, was opposed to the surge, because the Afghan government—whose ministers he knows better than any other American in the room does—was corrupt and unable to run the country effectively. Having spent more than twenty hours on a plane with Karzai and his ministers circumnavigating clouds of volcanic ash, Eikenberry is now even better equipped to evaluate the men in whose pockets much of America's $276-billion investment in Afghanistan now resides. Appearing at a news conference in the White House briefing room on Monday, Eikenberry was asked whether his opinion of Karzai had changed. "President Karzai is the—he's the elected president of Afghanistan," Eikenberry said, falling back on the military man's necessary obeisance to the idiocy of legal authority.

McChrystal is our supposed ace in the hole. The master of America's hunter-killer teams in Iraq, he is new to Afghanistan and will shoot his mouth off and be fired just weeks from now. Our efforts there, he told the reporters in the briefing room on Monday, are "ultimately about changing the perceptions of people." He then predicted that, "increasingly, the momentum will shift to the Afghan forces," a theory for which there is, as yet, no evidence. "The government, corrupt and ineffective, lacks almost any popular support," wrote Carlotta Gall of the New York Times recently. Gall's despairing, factual tone is typical of the work she and her colleagues have produced over the past nine months, after someone at the paper finally decided that Afghanistan was a story worth covering. "Anyone connected to the government lives in fear of assassination. Its few officials sit barricaded behind high blast walls."

The woman in the pink suit is still speaking Pashto into her microphone. Suddenly, like a great beast, the photographers turn on her and start flashing away. "Down, down, down!" they shout, as the announcer's voice booms out over the heads of the ersatz press corps.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States!"

They enter the room together, looking like the realization of the internationalist ideal circa 1961: the stateless meritocrat in suit and tie, with a Kenyan father and a white American mother, raised partly in Indonesia and partly on an island in the middle of the Pacific, and the Afghan tribal leader, resplendent in ethnic finery layered over an impeccably tailored Western jacket.

"I am very pleased to welcome President Karzai back to the White House," Obama says, standing tall and straight behind the podium, with no teleprompter in sight. Obama's voice has a nice texture to it, deeper and a bit rougher than you tend to notice—a reminder, perhaps, of his secret smoking habit.

Each of these men, separated by maybe five feet of open space in the gilt-edged room, combines the righteousness of the Third World narrative with the trappings of First World power, signifying rather too slickly in both directions at once. Karzai was named one of the best-dressed men in the world by Esquire; in the Third World, his name quickly became a synonym for crook, traitor, ass-licker. Go to any country in the Middle East and you can hear politicians described by their enemies with the epithet "Karzai." Obama began his presidency as a symbol of Hope. He is a strange combination of magic and reason, who believes that solutions can be arrived at by consulting experts and then applying his winning personality to the sales job. The combination of his solid blue tie against an immaculate shirtfront, his collar perhaps a half inch too big for his skinny neck, suggests one of those heavily starched shirt-and-tie combos you see in the display window of a men's store. His liquid brown eyes convey a look of determination, which he emphasizes by turning his head to the side and tilting his chin toward the ceiling to show that he believes in the future.

Karzai turns to his left, looking directly at Obama, showing the rest of us his impassive hawk-nosed profile, which is topped by a gorgeous hat made out of the soft skin of fetal lambs. He wobbles a little bit, then nods when Obama mentions the lights of Kabul. "After all, it's the Afghan people we are working to protect from the Taliban," Obama says, digging himself deeper into the fairy tale about the good war he announced after months of ambivalence. At West Point, five months earlier, he had said, "We expect those who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable."

Karzai nods and adjusts his profile for the cameras. His role here is quite simple: he is a guest standing before his host, who is the emperor of the world. Every moment he stands here, side by side with the American president, his prestige grows, while the American's room to maneuver shrinks. The ever-increasing price tag on the war is a measure of Karzai's personal value to the Americans. He gives a big nod when Obama says "strengthening anti- corruption efforts," and a lesser nod at the phrase "rule of law." His throat is dry and he swallows, though without reaching for the glass of water on the low table by his podium. Instead he maintains a steady gaze at a fixed point about three feet in front of him, as if he is tracking the movements of a fly that sooner or later will come close enough to swat. Every tribe has its own rituals. These are the rituals of the suit-people of Washington, who will leave Afghanistan in a year and a half, or five years, or whenever they get tired of the dying.

As always, you have been gracious and kind and very hospitable," Karzai responds, in his pukka accent. He is a one-man cultural crossroads. The red shirt buttoned at the neck is a nod to Nehru. His shawl and hat are Afghan. His tailoring is British. His anecdote about going to Walter Reed and seeing a soldier who'd lost his arms and legs is pure American corn pone. "It was heart-rendering," he enunciates, before adding, "just like I have seen in Afghanistan." For every American who loses his arms and legs in the war against the Taliban, there are probably a hundred Afghans in the same condition, so you can't expect Karzai to be too broken up about such injuries. What interests him much more is that anyone would care about Afghanistan enough to piss away hundreds of billions of dollars there.

"I also thanked President Obama for adding considerable resources," he says, promising to "work with dedication and extreme care to have those resources spent well." The international press corps at his feet in the East Room of the White House is clearly a pleasure to be savored. His eyes sparkle. Obama is staring at him. What the hell have I gotten myself into here? "I am grateful to you for your support and very kind advice," Karzai is saying, a phrase that in English and Pashto and pretty much every other language on earth means, "Why don't you go jump in a lake?" As Karzai intones the requisite phrases, "frank and productive manner," "a major point of progress in our conversations," Obama leans against the podium, looking fatigued. The experts told me we didn't have any other choice. Gates, Clinton, everyone agreed this was the right move. We have read the books about Vietnam. Karzai takes in the American president's slouch with a hint of mannered disapproval. It is hard to imagine the leader of any other tribe comporting himself in such an undisciplined way. Karzai thanks him again for putting Afghanistan back on the map. "Our flag is flying all around the world," he announces. "We are present in all the important occasions." Obama smiles and sticks out his hand, in a way that is meant to show his limited embrace of a necessary partnership with a man he doesn't much like. It's question time.

Mark Knoller of CBS Radio. Where's Mark?" the president of the United States calls out. "Right here, sir," answers a quavering voice from the fourth row of seats. A shambling, bearded man who looks like a water buffalo in prescription glasses rises to his hind legs and asks the first question, which is some nonsense about whether the president has yet spoken to new British prime minister David Cameron (he has), and whether the British will withdraw their troops from Afghanistan (not yet). Obama explains that "our job is to be a good friend and to be frank with President Karzai," who is an untrustworthy fucker, to be sure, but the only ally we have in the entire country, bought and paid for an endless number of times.

"Sir, the relationship between Afghanistan and the United States is now into its tenth year," Karzai instructs. "It's not an imaginary relationship; it's a real relationship. It's based on some very hard and difficult realities." Americans being a childlike people with notoriously short memories, the Afghan president has decided that a refresher course on his corner of the world is in order. What does stealing an election mean in a country like Afghanistan? If you pay the tribal chiefs too little, then you will definitely lose the election. What is wrong, exactly, with being in the drug business, which is more or less the same as any other business? "The bottom line is that we are much more strongly related to each other today than we ever were before," he instructs. Let the secretary of state dream of liberating Muslim women to become astronauts, his chipper bearing suggests. I am the only friend you've got. Karzai calls on Nazira Azim Karimi, the woman in the pink suit with the black bob. "Pakistan government is not really really honest regarding Afghanistan," Karimi explains, before launching into a screed against the perfidy and double dealings of the Pakistanis that sounds distinctly like it was written by Karzai. The fact that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate has been supplying the Taliban and even helping to plan attacks on Afghan and American forces is another inconvenient fact of the war that the leader of the free world would prefer not to deal with.

Obama smiles at the Afghan woman in a truly warm way, which appears meant to encourage her in her career as a reporter. Good for you, his expression says. You're doing great. As he answers her question, he gives his audience the impression that they are watching him think in real time. It is the most compelling thing about his delivery, the sense that each word he chooses has a specific meaning and function that he would be happy to explain at length if you both had the time. He speaks about "the extremist organizations that have been allowed to congregate" in Pakistan, an elliptical formulation that neatly elides the question of who allowed them to congregate there. Instead of focusing on such bothersome questions, Obama implies, highly evolved people such as ourselves must move beyond "the old suspicions and the old bad habits." Karzai nods. "Bad habits" is certainly one way to put it. The tribal areas, Obama says, are "fairly loosely governed from Islamabad," but the Pakistanis' sincerity can be seen in the fact that "they have been taking enormous casualties." The word "enormous" would appear to be the weak point in his sales pitch, which Karzai isn't buying anyway. It is important for the Pakistanis and the militias they back to respect "the Afghan constitution" Obama says with a big hand gesture to underline the importance of this document, a copy of which is no doubt sealed in a chamber filled with inert gas in the government library in Kabul so that a thousand years from now small Afghan children can wonder at the immensity of their national accomplishment under the tutelage of the Americans.

Karzai answers in turn, while pink-faced Defense Secretary Robert Gates stares at him with little piggy eyes. Obama listens, his head tilted all the way back in boy-emperor mode, which generations of adolescent males have practiced since the Napoleonic Wars. Bored with the pose, he looks down at the ground for a moment, then looks up and out at the crowd, as if to renew his sense of what we want from him. Finally he settles on a reflective head tilt, a stylized representation of the idea that he who listens best has the most power. He holds this look until it is time for the next question, which has been assigned by the White House to Suzanne Malveaux, who asks about the July 2011 deadline by which the majority of American troops are supposed to leave Afghanistan. The answer, of course, is that July 2011 might just as well be November 2011, or April 2012, or July 2015, or however long it takes before America gets sick of the war.

"We are not suddenly, as of July 2011, finished with Afghanistan," Obama says carefully. His weird syntax is meant to imply that something will happen in July 2011 but it would be wrong, at this point, to say exactly what that will be. Changes will happen on the ground, to be sure, but also in the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. "Their," Obama says—he pauses, searching for the right word—"fear," he finally says, "of the Taliban weakens." Watching Obama find the right word is like watching a boy in short pants pluck the reddest, ripest cherry from the bowl. Yes, he seems to congratulate himself, that's exactly the right one. He delights as well in his ability to modulate his voice, which he uses to lower the blood pressure of his listeners, to put them on the verge of sleep—or to turn hard and deliberately reject any connection. He's a romantic with no father, and so he inflects the sinewy male role in a more sinuous way. "You look at a place like Marja," he continues. "The Taliban controlled that area. They're going to fight back." His short, functional sentences are clearly not his own. He is channeling the frank talk of his military advisers.

In the front row, Clinton, Gates, Mullen, Eikenberry, and McChrystal look up at their elected leader to see what new wrinkle might appear in the governing formula. When it comes to the possibility of Afghans being killed, he speaks with real emotion. "We have an interest in ending civilian casualties . . . because I don't want civilians killed," he says, repeating the point twice before carefully switching gears to empathize with the American soldiers, who as a result of their concern for civilian life are "holding fire, hesitating," thereby placing their own lives in danger. McChrystal, with his drawn face and a clenched jaw, can't be happy sitting here and listening to this crap. "We have shot an amazing number of people," he said recently, in a videoconference with American soldiers in Afghanistan, "but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat." Obama is clearly not down with the killing of dozens of innocent people by American troops at checkpoints. "I take no pleasure in hearing a report that a civilian has been killed. That's not why I ran for president," he says, merging civilian deaths and his electoral prospects in a way that reveals his personal stake in the war. "We are going to work together as"—he pauses again, searching for the perfect word that will win him the most possible points in his private game of Scrabble—"assiduously as we can." Hillary keeps nodding as he talks, signifying that the speaker is somehow dependent on her approval. It's a form of maternal power, the Yes that can very easily turn to No.

Compared with Obama's long pauses and word-by-word progress through his not-especially-enlightening sentences, Karzai's language seems almost loopy, his exuberant colonial vowels contrasting with mellow Afghan consonants. I have noticed also that he is something of a mimic, picking up the most obvious mannerisms of his interlocutor and playing them back, whether out of courtesy or insecurity or sheer boredom it is impossible to tell. "On the question of Ear-ahn and, ehm . . . his visit to Kabul," he says, referring to a recent visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a neat little maneuver that appeared to clinch Karzai's invitation to the White House. "The United States is our greatest contributor to, ehm," he pauses, searching for the right word—now it is his turn to play mental Scrabble—"stability and reconstruction." And yet, "Ear-ahn is our neighbor," he explains. "We wish that Afghanistan remains friendly to both." Robert Gates looks at him with incredulity. Friendly to both? On the one hand, you have America, with its $276-billion investment in Afghanistan, and tens of thousands of missing arms and legs, and then you have Ear-ahn, which is trying to build a nuclear bomb and push America out of the Persian Gulf. Then again, America talks about leaving Afghanistan by July 2011, whereas Ear-ahn, according to a quick look at the map, is likely to sit right next to Afghanistan forever. "We wish both countries the best," Karzai continues, "and if there is anything we can do, call us."

No one shows up for breakfast at the State Department with the Afghan cabinet except for me and a guy from Mother Jones. Sitting in a windowless room in Foggy Bottom and eating bagels and cream cheese with a dozen Afghan government officials at 8 a.m. is no one's idea of breakfast at the Ritz, to be sure, but still the turnout is a bit hard to fathom, especially for the Afghans, who can't believe that they've been dragged out of bed to be asked unpleasant questions by two beardless plebs. They respond to what appears to be a deliberate insult from their American hosts by talking animatedly in Pashto. Only a few English phrases can be understood, such as "change in tone" and "cluster bombs," a phrase that causes all the ministers to laugh uproariously. "I will have a bagel," decides the Afghan minister of defense, Abdul Rahim Wardak, a fleshy, dark-skinned man in his sixties who navigates slowly among the metal folding chairs before taking a seat at the head of the table.

A descendant of tribal chiefs from the Afghan province that bears his name, Wardak is a career military officer who served as a field commander with the mujahideen during the great jihad against the Soviets. I take the seat next to him, and he allows that his meetings with his counterparts at the Pentagon have involved many frank discussions. "Even within a family you can expect disagreements," he says when I ask him about the particulars of these quarrels. Every Afghan minister I meet uses the same line about disagreements within a family at least once and shows no surprise when I tell him I have heard it before. Wardak explains that the meetings centered on the particulars of what will be an "expanded operation" in Kandahar that nevertheless will be "modified" from what "people have been expecting," a description that seems to suggest American troops will not be fighting much over the summer. The July 2011 deadline, he explains helpfully, "does not mean the American troops will leave on that day." Rather, "responsibility for security will be transferred to the ANA in some parts of the country," which only implies that the Afghan National Army is not currently responsible for security anywhere in Afghanistan.

Having survived major battles in the field against the Red Army, a Scud-missile attack, and a 2005 attempt to assassinate him in his car, Wardak is well aware of the realities of life in his country, and he lies to me about the state of his forces with a beguiling combination of fluidity and resignation. "We led the operations and provided most of the troops," he says, when I ask him about a series of articles in the New York Times by C. J. Chivers, a former Marine, describing the recent campaign in Marja. Chivers's accounts of the performance of ANA troops in battle makes for grim reading in light of the Obama Administration's emphasis on training the Afghans to defend their own country within the next eighteen months. "After several days, no Marine officer had seen an Afghan use a map or plan a complicated patrol," Chivers wrote. "Moreover, in multiple firefights in which Times journalists were present, many Afghan soldiers did not aim—they pointed their American-issued M-16 rifles in the rough direction of the incoming small-arms fire and pulled their triggers without putting rifle sights to their eyes." He also noted that Afghan officers had little regard for their troops, who often went without food or water.

Wardak nods, spreading his fleshy hands in a gesture of acquiescence. "There are some capabilities, yes, that are required to be filled before we can take charge of security in some sections of the country," he says. When I ask him what those capabilities are, he responds, "Firepower, maneuvering, integrated firepower, air transportation, technical assistance, and the ability to secure our own airspace," which is more or less a complete definition of the capacities generally associated with the term "national defense." When I press him on the frequent reports of corrupt and abusive behavior by the leaders of some army units, he shrugs and raises his hands. "There is some heritage of Soviet-trained officers who behave in this way." Under General McChrystal, he says, the U.S. Army is finally fighting the Afghan war the right way, with the right focus and the proper understanding of how the insurgency is supported. Yet there can be little doubt that a major source of money for the insurgency comes from payments made by elected Afghan officials and Wardak's army, meaning that America is funding both sides in what is very clearly an Afghan civil war.

A case in point is a recent scandal involving the defense minister's own son, Hamed Wardak, a Rhodes scholar and class valedictorian at Georgetown University; his transportation company, NCL Holdings, won a $360-million Pentagon contract despite the fact that it wasn't registered with the Afghan government and didn't own any trucks. "Those accusations are without merit," the defense minister responds, adding, correctly, that his son's company has received the highest possible marks from the Pentagon.

I ask the minister about whether, in general terms, the logistics systems shared by the U.S. Army and the ANA might be susceptible to some form of graft. I note that Watan Risk Management and Compass Security, the two major companies that escort supply convoys across the country, are known to pay large bribes to the Taliban and even to stage attacks on convoys in order to raise their rates. Although the fee varies according to the number of trucks and what they are carrying, the average bribe required not to get shot at is reportedly somewhere around $800 per truck. Both companies are owned by relatives of President Karzai. A report published last year by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University estimated that the United States and its allies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on payments to private security and trucking companies.

"We have a very good logistics system," Wardak answers. "It works exceptionally well. There is proper institutional control. Accusations to the contrary are without any merit."

Sitting to my left, Dr. Ghulam Farooq Wardak, the Afghan minister of education, looks disconsolate, because neither of the two American reporters has asked him a single question. As Karzai's chief of staff, Wardak was famously influential in Kabul, credited with the ability to hire and fire senior officials, and to have his critics arrested by the police. He is used to feeling important. To make him feel better, I ask whether girls' schools are still being burned down in Afghanistan. "That does happen very regularly," he assures me. Over the past year, he says, there have been approximately 600 attacks on schools that have resulted in the partial or complete destruction of their facilities.

The interior minister, Haneef Atmar, a tall, ascetic-looking man who walks with a cane and is known as one of the few competent ministers in Karzai's cabinet, tells me that although corruption is indeed a problem, he has instituted a "zero-tolerance" policy for payments from contractors to the Taliban. He gives me his email address so we can talk further and then introduces me to a no-nonsense-looking military type named Kevin. "Kevin is my adviser," he says. It turns out that every member of the Afghan cabinet has a minder who "controls" that minister, a locution that the minders not only do not avoid but in fact seem eager to stress, as in, "I control the minister of mines." I ask Atmar when this meeting was planned, and he tells me, "About three weeks ago," confirming my impression that this visit was more or less arranged on the fly, after someone in the administration determined that Karzai had outfoxed them. As it turns out, Atmar's announcement of a zero-tolerance policy on payments to the Taliban is premature: he will be unceremoniously fired by President Karzai shortly after the cabinet returns to Kabul.

The State Department desk man for Afghanistan informs me that if I want a meeting with the minister of mines, Wahidullah Shahrani, he will be appearing later at the Chamber of Commerce. Huge deposits of minerals including iron, copper, and lithium have been found in Afghanistan over the past few years. Last year, a contract for the Aynak copper deposit, thought to be worth some $88 billion, was awarded to a Chinese company in exchange for what American intelligence officials told the Washington Post was a $30-million bribe paid to Shahrani's predecessor, Mohammed Ibrahim Adel, who was reported to be a close friend of Mohammed Karzai, one of the president's brothers.

At the Chamber of Commerce, a Greek temple to American corporate power, D.C. contractors and their Afghan partners are discussing U.S. government contracts for reconstruction work.

"What kind of fuel are you using in that power plant?" a fit-looking man in his fifties asks a tall, white-haired man in a navy suit and tortoiseshell glasses.

"Diesel," he replies. "These are IC engines, medium. The plant is one hundred megawatts."

The problem with building anything in Afghanistan, the men tell me, is ensuring a consistent supply of fuel. There's an eleven-inch pipeline that the Red Army built, and everything else needs to be trucked in, which means payoffs to the security companies and the local police, who are worse than the Taliban. I talk to a young American-born Afghan who grew up in Virginia and is now working in Afghanistan for an organization called SEIF, which was set up by CARE with funding from USAID. His job is to help small and mid-level entrepreneurs build packing plants in the countryside for dried fruit and nuts. I ask him how he thinks the war is going. "People in the rural areas are not happy with the last five or six years," he explains. "They see billions of dollars being pledged for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. They don't understand why they don't see any of that money, why they don't have roads, they don't have schools, why they are still living in a mud hut."

The meeting is called to order, and the moderator introduces U.S. diplomat Earl Anthony "Tony" Wayne, who oversees all non-military aid to Afghanistan. "Progress is being made," he says. "It is really pressure—uh, a pleasure—for me to be here." Wayne smirks and arches his eyebrows: an unfortunate roll of the genetic dice has given him the look of a hypocrite. He nods to Leslie Schweitzer of the Chamber of Commerce, who has amazing old-fashioned government hair, layered in that perfectly artificial Georgetown way, with a Beverly Hills lift. She's wearing a leather jacket that suggests a leopard print without being too vulgar about it and a heavy gold-link bracelet that would make Jay-Z blush.

Shahrani has the soft, slightly effeminate, overweight, precise look of the spoiled elder child who stays inside and eats sweets with his mother while the rough kids play soccer in the street. Before becoming a minister he was Karzai's adviser on finance, and before that he taught college economics in London. There is something off in his English, as if he learned it from tapes that were played at the wrong speed. "A koofar country. The fill of the Taliban government," he explains. "The achievements have been tremendoughahhah." I ask Ambassador Wayne how it is possible for the Chinese to pick up an $88-billion copper mine in the middle of a country in which America has spent more than $200 billion to no apparent purpose. "First is that the package that was put together was very massive," he says, arching his eyebrows again. "Speaking frankly, there are all sorts of rumors about what else was happening."

After the meeting, I ride with Minister Shahrani to the Willard Hotel, where we sit on pale yellow chintz-covered armchairs in a far corner of the lobby. In addition to the copper mine, he says, Afghanistan has the largest undeveloped iron-ore deposit in the world, for which bidding will soon ensue. "Everything will be done in the most transparent way possible," he assures me. "We're not Nigeria or the Democratic Republic of the Congo."

I try to imagine how that conversation goes. "So, you have already stolen billions of dollars, and you've deposited it in Geneva," I say out loud, playing the role of Shahrani. "Be content with what you've stolen already. Please don't steal more or the international community will be mad at us." Shahrani smiles. The State Department minder—who has been sitting three feet away while pretending not to listen to us—looks up, but the minister waves him off. "No, let him ask questions," he says. "All contracts will be made perfectly transparent," he repeats, before launching into a long disquisition on the procedures and the road show for the iron-ore contracts, which will happen sometime this fall. The total worth of the additional unexploited mineral resources in Afghanistan may be between $1 trillion and $5 trillion. Whatever the real number is, it will provide plenty of incentive to keep fighting.

I see Hamid Karzai for the last time at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Hillary Clinton, in a bright blue jacket and moon-faced smile, enters the room with the Afghan president and introduces him to former senator John Warner before they take their seats onstage.

"It's clear that it's been a very successful visit," the moderator says. "Congratulations." Tomorrow, Karzai will visit with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, before beginning the twenty-hour flight back home. "The trip indeed was very good, rather, from my perspective," Karzai says, savoring the memory of his informal dinner with Secretary Clinton and Secretary Gates before hauling out the anecdote about the limbless soldier at Walter Reed one last time. "In short, the trip was meaningful, substantive, and had all the right tones and objectives." Clinton beams. Unlike Obama, whose posture proclaims his moral superiority to his guest, these two hit the ball cleanly back and forth across the net. Yes, it's a hard problem to solve, her smile suggests, but if you read the briefing books and memorize the names of all the provinces and the cabinet ministers and their key aides, why, there's no reason that we shouldn't be able to help the Afghan people build a better tomorrow. "This is a meeting that has produced a lot of work," she says. Karzai offers a rueful smile.

"Well, we've been at this for over eight years. Why do we think this is going to be different?" the moderator asks. Karzai starts to answer, but then drops his microphone into his lap. "Mr. President," Clinton whispers. He is clearly bored out of his mind, or needs a fix, but Clinton is indefatigable. As she talks about defeating a ruthless and determined enemy, you can see her women's-temperance-movement side thrilling to the prospect of a climactic battle with the forces of gynophobia. Karzai speaks about the depraved nature of his enemies. "We are also morally higher, and better," he explains, with a nod in Clinton's direction. "On a personal note, they must respect women's rights. . . . Nothing can be permitted to interfere with that." He praises "the zeal" of his countrymen for democratic practices. "Is that the right word? All right!" he says gladly.

A tall, spectral figure rises from the row of seats in the middle of the room and begins to speak. It is Marvin Kalb, the ancient CBS newsman familiar to TV viewers as the voice of America's long-ago defeat in Southeast Asia. "I'm a writer in residence here at the United States Institute of Peace, and I'm here to finish a five-year study of the effect of the Vietnam War on presidential decisions," he says. A few people in the audience laugh out loud. Kalb then asks one of those crisp, professional questions you no longer hear from reporters obsessed with the minutiae of process—Have you spoken with David Cameron yet? "My question, Mr. President, has to do with numbers. Could you tell us how many Afghan troops and police do you have now properly trained? How many do you think you will need to conduct a successful counterinsurgency, and how long do you think that's going to take?"

Karzai ignores the question, and talks instead about seeing recent graduates of a training course, who "looked quite professional and were uniformed in the right way." Then he argues with one of his ministers about whether the country's economy will grow by an additional $1 billion or $1 trillion next year.

Ann Gearan of the AP, who has covered the State Department for years in the old-fashioned way, stands up to ask the Afghan president a final question. Is it really appropriate for the United States to be launching a major operation in Kandahar when the president is unable to remove his brother from office? Karzai nods politely. "Fortunately, officials who are elected by the people cannot be removed by the president," he explains. The issues raised by the American press have now been understood better, he concludes, before stating firmly, "the issue is resolved." Hillary Clinton turns her face toward the bright, shining lights. "I have nothing to add," she says. The vision is real and ineluctable. America will win the hearts of the Afghan people by defeating the Taliban and educating women to go to the moon, and our president will be reelected at a cost of $6 billion per month and tens of thousands more lives, Afghan and American.