SANA

KABUL (SANA): Once seen as the only person for the job, President Hamid Karzai has exasperated the US and many Afghans with his inability to tackle corruption and insecurity.

Four years ago Hamid Karzai, the softly spoken, well-dressed president of Afghanistan, was untouchable. In the wake of the US-engineered toppling of the Taliban regime, Karzai was seen by the west as the only man who could make something out of a country wrecked by decades of war.

A Pashtun and a member of the same tribe as the old royal family, Karzai was thought to be cut from the right cloth to lead a famously fissiparous country. He was a man the west could do business with: although he initially backed the Taliban, he had shunned the extreme mujahideen groups that fought the Soviets in the 1980s and which gave rise to some of the militant groups causing havoc today.

Today, the Karzai backlash is in full swing, from the US and European leaders threatening to undermine his position to senior Afghan figures in Kabul. “He was never the right choice,” Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister, said. “I worked with him and never thought he should have been more than a junior minister.”

Opinion is divided on when things started to go so wrong for the 51-year-old leader. Hedayat Amin Arsala, a former vice-president who is still a senior minister, said Karzai’s original sin was to co-operate with the reviled warlords when he became leader of Afghanistan’s interim government in early 2002. These regional militia leaders were revered as heroes of the jihad against the Soviet Union, but after the Russians left they became hate figures for lawlessness and corruption.

Arsala, a former close ally of Karzai, is one of about a dozen Afghan politicians planning to stand against him in the presidential election in August. Sitting in the magnificent surroundings of his office, where the Afghan cabinet used to meet in the nineteenth century, he said he was standing more in sorrow than anger.

Rumours have abounded for years about some of Karzai’s brothers, most notably Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of the provincial council in Kandahar. Last year the New York Times quoted White House officials saying Ahmed Wali was involved in drug trafficking - an allegation he denies.

More recently, public attention has focused on Mahmoud Karzai, a man who spent most of his life in political exile in the US running restaurants. Despite his relatively limited business experience, in the last seven years he has become one of Afghanistan’s leading tycoons, with shares in the country’s biggest bank, property developments, and control of one of the country’s biggest industrial assets, a cement plant north of Kabul.

In the view of one western diplomat: “He’s a poet for Christ’s sake - what do you expect?” Karzai was once found by a western diplomat poring over a collection of Philip Larkin poems. Some credit his poetry as the source of ability to hold an audience, whether in English, Dari or Pashtu. But many technocrats who plan to stand against him in August say his pre-2001 career as a junior official in a moderate anti-Soviet resistance group did not give him the management skills necessary to run a modern state.

“Unlike his brothers he couldn’t even run a two-room restaurant,” said Ashraf Ghani, who once served as Karzai’s finance minister and is running against him.

Anwar ul-Haq Ahadi, another former finance minister and presidential candidate, said Karzai had “absolutely no capacity for critical thinking”.

“He does not prepare for meetings. He does not do background reading, he does not prepare questions. Cabinet meetings are very unproductive. He just takes a position and then expects it to be followed.”

One of Karzai’s aides, speaking privately, said the presidential office was chaotic, with minutes of meetings rarely kept and copies of presidential speeches lost. Decisions are made “on the hoof” with an inner circle of “yes men”.

Mohammad Amin Farhang, who until late last year was commerce minister, said the president often appoints unsuitable provincial governors and government officials to retain the support of warlords.

“Without asking me he appointed a department head in my ministry who was totally incompetent. It was a political deal between [Karzai] and a jihadi leader and it created lots of problems.”

Karzai says he has lost popularity in Washington because of his willingness to talk out on the issue. “I was a lovely man when I was keeping quiet. I’m a nasty man, a no-good leader when I began to speak,” he complained recently.