The joke in Kabul used to be that Hamid was the only one of the Karzai brothers who wasn’t smart enough to run a restaurant, so he was chosen to run the country. But it turns out–to almost everyone’s surprise–that Karzai is a pretty cagey political player: he has almost completely neutralized his potential opposition in the upcoming presidential elections.
He somehow convinced his most powerful potential Pashtun rival Gul Agha Sherzai, the governor of Nangahar province, not to run. He added a mujaheddin warlord, Muhammad Qasim Fadim, to his ticket as a vice president. But he still needed to address the good-government challenge posed by Ashraf Ghani–a former Minister of Finance who quit the Karzai government because of the rampant corruption and incompetence–who is also running for President. Karzai needed to demonstrate some interest in cleaning up his government and making it more effective, which is why today’s news that he is negotiating with Zalmay Khalilzad to become an informal prime minister is so important.
The obvious downside to these negotiations is that hiring the former US Ambassador to Afghanistan as a member of the government could make it easier for the Taliban to portray Karzai as a U.S. puppet. On the other hand, Khalilzad is an Afghan (from Mazar-e-Sharif, in the north) who managed to forge an effective relationship with Karzai when he was Ambassador…and who may actually have the skills to reform a government that badly needs a house-cleaning.
If this arrangement comes to pass–in addition, to the excellent new U.S. military and diplomatic teams in Kabul–it won’t exactly be cause for optimism…but a marginal reduction of the prevailing pessimism may be in order. One thing that is immediately useful is this: With Karzai putting together his grand coalition and becoming the prohibitive favorite to be reelected in August, less U.S. and Aghan attention can be diverted to the elections and more spent on fighting the enemy and building a more effective Afghan government from the ground up.