Contemporary Authors

1. A kingdom of their own : the family Karzai and the Afghan disaster LCCN 2016007281 Type of material Book Personal name Partlow, Joshua, author. Main title A kingdom of their own : the family Karzai and the Afghan disaster / Joshua Partlow. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. Description 422 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm ISBN 9780307962645 (hardback) CALL NUMBER DS371.412 .P37 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ONLINE CATALOG Library of Congress 101 Independence Ave., SE Washington, DC 20540 Questions? Ask a Librarian: https://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-contactus.html

• Penguin Random House - http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/165850/joshua-partlow

  Joshua Partlow
  Photo of Joshua Partlow
  Photo: © Amandine Roche
  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JOSHUA PARTLOW is The Washington Post’s bureau chief in Mexico. Between 2009 and 2012, he was the Post’s Kabul bureau chief, and has also worked as a correspondent in South America and Iraq. In 2010, Partlow shared an Overseas Press Club award with Rajiv Chandrasekaran for the best newspaper or news service reporting from abroad, in recognition of their series on the war in Afghanistan.

  A Kingdom of Their Own
  THE FAMILY KARZAI AND THE AFGHAN DISASTER
  By JOSHUA PARTLOW

  Category: Middle Eastern World History | World Politics
  A Kingdom of Their Own by Joshua Partlow
  READ AN EXCERPT
  Paperback +
  Hardcover –
  HardcoverBUY
  Sep 20, 2016 | 432 Pages

  Ebook +
  Audio +
  ABOUT A KINGDOM OF THEIR OWN

  The key to understanding the calamitous Afghan war is the complex, ultimately failed relationship between the powerful, duplicitous Karzai family and the United States, brilliantly portrayed here by the former Kabul bureau chief for The Washington Post.

  The United States went to Afghanistan on a simple mission: avenge the September 11 attacks and drive the Taliban from power. This took less than two months. Over the course of the next decade, the ensuing fight for power and money—supplied to one of the poorest nations on earth, in ever-greater amounts—left the region even more dangerous than before the first troops arrived.

  At the center of this story is the Karzai family. President Hamid Karzai and his brothers began the war as symbols of a new Afghanistan: moderate, educated, fluent in the cultures of East and West, and the antithesis of the brutish and backward Taliban regime. The siblings, from a prominent political family close to Afghanistan’s former king, had been thrust into exile by the Soviet war. While Hamid Karzai lived in Pakistan and worked with the resistance, others moved to the United States, finding work as waiters and managers before opening their own restaurants. After September 11, the brothers returned home to help rebuild Afghanistan and reshape their homeland with ambitious plans.

  Today, with the country in shambles, they are in open conflict with one another and their Western allies. Joshua Partlow’s clear-eyed analysis reveals the mistakes, squandered hopes, and wasted chances behind the scenes of a would-be political dynasty. Nothing illustrates the arc of the war and America’s relationship with Afghanistan—from optimism to despair, friendship to enmity—as neatly as the story of the Karzai family itself, told here in its entirety for the first time.

  SEE LESS
  PRAISE

  A Washington Post Notable Book of 2016
  A Publisher’s Weekly Top 10 Book of 2016

  “Timely… A detailed portrait… Karzai’s legacy, as Partlow shows, will be intrinsically based on the American intervention, and on his own responsibility for what Partlow calls the Afghan Disaster.” —The New York Review of Books

  “[Partlow] does a splendid job of tracing the history of President Karzai and his sprawling family… There have been very few well-written, deeply reported, well-balanced and interesting accounts of what transpired during America’s longest war. Partlow’s is one of them.” —The Washington Post

  “Those who followed Partlow’s byline over his years in Afghanistan will find his typically gripping combination of fine narrative and telling detail replicated in this admirable book.” —Foreign Affairs

  “Finely reported.” —The Economist

  “No-nonsense… Partlow removes some of the doubt Americans may have about the long and costly effort in Afghanistan although the country’s long-term governance remains unknown… Partlow has changed the popular image of Hamid Karzai from inept, corrupt leader who accomplished nothing.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Nuanced… American military and political arrogance butts up against deep-rooted cultural customs and family networks throughout this excellent account of a vastly difficult topic.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Partlow provides an insightful, revealing dissection of the failures of the U.S. government in Afghanistan… Partlow’s character portraits are masterful… An excellent introduction to the Karzai family and to the disastrous consequences of the Americans’ inadequate understanding of Afghan culture.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Meticulously documented… Readers are left with a better understanding of the complexities faced by leaders and diplomats through first-hand reportage that takes us as close to the action as we’ve ever been, and expert analysis.” —Booklist

  “A strong assessment of Karzai’s government and an important contribution to any well-rounded collection on contemporary Middle Eastern politics and society.” —Library Journal

  “When the Americans chased the Taliban from Kabul after the 9/11 attacks, they put all their money on one man, a little-known leader named Hamid Karzai. Fifteen years later, the American mission is veering toward collapse, and Karzai looms larger than life. Joshua Partlow traces our catastrophe with peerless skill and style. A Kingdom of Their Own is the essential book for understanding how it all went so wrong.” —Dexter Filkins, author, The Forever War

  “Incisive, superbly written and meticulously reported, Joshua Partlow’s A Kingdom of Their Own illuminates the war in Afghanistan through the lives of the fascinating, quarrelsome, maddening Karzai family, once the West’s hope for change in the Middle East, now a living reminder of our mistakes in the region. A riveting read.” —Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author, Imperial Life in the Emerald City

  “Read this fine book and weep. I have followed Afghan events in the newspapers for 13 years, but found surprises throughout Partlow’s vivid account. He gives us unforgettable lessons in the folly–still apparently irresistible to many Americans–of nation- building in remote nations whose cultures we do not fathom. And he writes beautifully.” —Robert G. Kaiser, author, Act of Congress

  SEE LESS

• NPR - http://www.npr.org/2016/09/27/495632165/kingdom-examines-afghanistan-through-the-prism-of-the-karzai-family

  'Kingdom' Examines Afghanistan Through The Prism Of The Karzai Family

  Listen· 36:13
  36:13

  Queue
  Download
  Embed
  Transcript
  Facebook
  Twitter
  Google+
  Email
  September 27, 20161:18 PM ET
  Heard on Fresh Air
  Fresh Air
  A Kingdom of Their Own
  The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster
  by Joshua Partlow

  Hardcover, 422 pages purchase

  Journalist Joshua Partlow was in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2012, a time of corruption, government dysfunction and civilian hostility to U.S. military operations. His new book is A Kingdom of Their Own.

  DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

  This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. In 2009, the largest American diplomatic mission in the world was in Kabul, Afghanistan, where the U.S. embassy's budget of $4 billion was four times the country's domestic income. President Obama was sending more troops and civilian personnel to reverse alarming gains the Taliban had made. And so much cash was flowing into the country that President Hamid Karzai's chief of staff had a money counting machine in his office.

  Those are some details in a new book from our guest, Washington Post foreign correspondent Joshua Partlow. Partlow was in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2012, and his account of those years is a story of government dysfunction, rampant corruption and increasing civilian hostility to American military operations. Partlow looks at the Afghanistan experience through the prism of the Karzai family, the president and his brothers, many educated in America, who became important players in the political strife, corruption and violence in the country. Besides his tour in Afghanistan, Joshua Partlow has done reporting in Iraq and Latin America. He's now The Washington Post's Mexico bureau chief. His book is "A Kingdom Of Their Own: The Family Karzai And The Afghan Disaster."

  Well, Joshua Partlow, welcome to FRESH AIR. This is a big family, an influential family in Afghanistan. It includes Hamid Karzai, the president, but many others. You know, we have famous political families in this country. I mean, the Taft's going way back, the Kennedys, probably the most famous. Tell us about this family and why you wanted to focus on them.

  JOSHUA PARTLOW: This was the family who was in charge in Afghanistan and was involved in all aspects of Afghanistan when I arrived in the summer of 2009, just before President Hamid Karzai's election to his second term. And they had - they had come to define the decade-long war at that point. And they would be in power in the years that followed as well. And they had - they struck me just as a fascinating and frustrating and intriguing family, I mean, starting with the president himself.

  He was full of contradictions. He was the commander in chief at a time when the U.S. military had 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and yet he was - had these pacifistic tendencies. He was - he was extremely sensitive to violence. He would cry in public. He was - he had started the war in 2001 as a pro-American Muslim leader, and he had become the greatest critic of the U.S. military's presence in Afghanistan. And he was, you know, the leading figure in this family that had enriched itself during the course of the war, and yet he had these tendencies to live a very humble life. And he'd scorned material wealth, and he changed the way the palace was run in order to have things more plain and more simple. So I was intrigued by all these factors and wanted to explore this family more deeply.

  DAVIES: I want to talk about some of his brothers and half-brothers who played really important roles in Afghanistan. But speaking generally, it's - what's one of the fascinating things is that these brothers, when the Soviets invaded in 1979, many of them made their ways - their way to the United States and had careers then. You want to just give us a little bit of a picture of these brothers and where they were in America?

  PARTLOW: Yeah. The family was scattered by the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Some people, like Hamid Karzai, moved to Pakistan and got involved in the resistance to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, working with the mujahedeen groups. And others moved to the United States and had completely different careers.

  Qayum Karzai was the first to arrive here. He was an elder brother, and he came on an Afghan air force program and trained in U.S. military bases in Oklahoma and then got airsick and realized being a pilot wasn't for him. And he scraped money together and drove a car cross-country and ended up in Washington, D.C. And he was - he found work as a waiter in restaurants that no longer exist here in Washington. He worked at a golf course. He had all sorts of jobs and established a presence here and his brothers quickly followed. And several brothers lived in Maryland. They set up restaurants here in Baltimore, in Boston, in Chicago, in San Francisco and had a fairly vibrant business career by the time September 11 happened.

  DAVIES: It was striking to me that many of them really worked hard. I mean, they didn't have money. They worked as busboys and waiters to start. But then when their brother Hamid becomes president of Afghanistan, they go back and become big players.

  PARTLOW: Yeah, it was amazing. There's a - there's a hotel in the D.C. suburbs, the Bethesda Marriott hotel that has a restaurant there. And almost all of the president's brothers worked at that restaurant as busboys or waiters. Many of the Karzai's attended community college at Montgomery College in Montgomery County, Md. So they have these deep connections to the United States. And they also after September 11, when there was the miraculous turn of events that their brother was selected the leader of the country, they - several of them took advantage of that to realize some of their even larger business ambitions and set these projects in motion that, you know, a decade later became these enormous business projects, in some cases scandals.

  DAVIES: So let's kind of reset the scene here. In 2001, when the September 11 attacks had happened, the Taliban was in control in Afghanistan. They'd taken control after warlords fought one another following the Soviet's departure. You had the Taliban in power. The United States comes in after the 9/11 attacks, sweeps them from the capital and into the hills. And there's a need for a new government. The United States loves Hamid Karzai, makes sure he is the guy in charge. Why? What did he bring?

  PARTLOW: He checked a lot of boxes that the U.S. was interested in at that time. He was a Pashtun. He came from the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, which they thought was crucial to - for the leader of the country. He spoke English. He was educated. He was rather moderate compared to the other political leaders in Afghanistan at the time. He was - he didn't have a lot of blood on his hands. He wasn't a militia leader who had war crimes in his background. He was somebody who was considered the least threatening politician by a lot of the interested parties. So the other ethnic groups were OK with him because he wasn't necessarily a threat. The Tajik, the Northern Alliance at the time thought he was someone they could work with, maybe someone they could manipulate. He was the least threatening candidate to all involved. It also happened to be that two of the other prominent charismatic Afghan political leaders were killed right before or after September 11.

  DAVIES: So you have Hamid Karzai coming in, a guy who speaks English pretty fluently, as do his brothers, who is educated, seems to be open to, if not outright embrace, Western values. And then fast forward to 2009 when President Barack Obama has - you know, has won the election and been inaugurated. This is eight years later. While during the Bush administration there was all this focus on Iraq, things had changed drastically in Afghanistan. What were the American goals then when Obama came into power?

  PARTLOW: Yeah. The situation with - in terms of the American relationship and President Karzai had changed dramatically by that point. He was seen as the leader of a corrupt government. He was seen as ineffectual in terms of developing the other institutions of government. He was widely disliked on a personal level. There had been fight after fight after fight with the United States, mostly about civilian casualties or the collateral damage of the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan.

  So he was seen as the source of a lot of the problems and a lot of - the reason why the United States wasn't succeeding in Afghanistan. And so when President Obama's administration came into power, the message to President Karzai was clear. It was we're not going to have the type of close, brotherly relationship that President Bush and President Karzai had. It's going to be much more distant. We're not going to talk to you as much. We're not going to meet with you as much. And President Karzai was both offended by that, but he also saw it as a sign that the U.S. government was trying to push him from power. And so while that election in 2009 took place, he became convinced that the U.S. was intent on making him lose the election and drive him from power. And so that set the tone for the relationship in the years to come.

  DAVIES: That was the election for president of Afghanistan.

  PARTLOW: Yes, that was the election in 2009 for president.

  DAVIES: You know, the Americans seem to be saying to Karzai, well, we're not just going to keep spending money here. We want some change, and we want some results from you. What was Karzai's style as a leader? I mean, the Americans wanted somebody who would have an efficient administration, clear chains of command, make data-driven decisions. What was his style of leadership like?

  PARTLOW: Right. He was much more of a tribal leader. He performed his - he presided over his citizens. People would come and have an audience with him in the palace. He greeted dozens of people each day, peasant farmers from around the country would come into the palace to air their grievances. And he would spend hours, late into the night with political leaders from all levels of the country and regular citizens across Afghanistan. And he - he did not have the type of organized, efficient palace operation that the U.S. wanted.

  In the book, I discuss the National Security Council, which the U.S. government had spent a lot of time and money trying to set up and make it become an efficient organization to communicate with other branches of government and solve these national security crises that came up constantly in the war. And...

  DAVIES: That's a national security council in Kabul...

  PARTLOW: Yeah.

  DAVIES: ...An Afghan National Security Council.

  PARTLOW: Yeah, the National Security Council in Afghanistan, which was - which basically mimicked the White House version of the same office. And they printed up these elaborate committee sheets and who would brief who and who would meet with who. And that all got disregarded. And people would gather in President Karzai's office or in informal settings and hash these decisions out amongst themselves when there were no Americans present. And he basically rejected the Western style of governance that was being imposed on him.

  DAVIES: The other striking thing you write about in the National Security Council in Afghanistan was how many people were supposed to be employed and how many actually showed up for work.

  PARTLOW: Right, yeah. There were these huge - and that happened across the government ministries. There were - there were the official roles of employees and paychecks going out the door to these people who either didn't exist or didn't show up. And that was part of the broader problem of corruption that you saw across the Afghan government. And it became the real fixation of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan was how can we clean up this government? How can we make it less corrupt? And that really also set the scene for some of the greatest battles between the U.S. and Karzai's palace.

  DAVIES: And how much of the salaries and other costs of the Afghan government were being underwritten by American aid?

  PARTLOW: It was almost all of it. There was also other Western European countries that provided a lot of aid. But for the vast majority of the funding for the Afghan government, for their security forces, for their soldiers and police came from the U.S. government and U.S. taxpayer money. Just to give one example, the Afghan army and police force - it was more than $10 billion a year just to pay for their weapons, their trucks, their uniforms, their food. Everything they needed to operate came from the United States.

  DAVIES: Joshua Partlow's book is "A Kingdom Of Their Own: The Family Karzai And The Afghan Disaster." We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

  DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Washington Post foreign correspondent Joshua Partlow. He spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. His new book is "A Kingdom Of Their Own: The Family Karzai And The Afghan Disaster." Now, corruption was a huge issue. And let's talk about how the brothers of President Karzai figured into that picture. There are some interesting characters, one of them, Mahmoud, who you describe as the Afghan Donald Trump. Tell us about him.

  PARTLOW: Right. He has a very enormous personality. He's - he's a talker. He has no filter. He'll say whatever he wants. And he also has these extraordinarily ambitious business projects. So he had been - had run restaurants in the United States and then moved back to Afghanistan. And his first big idea was to build a gated city in Kandahar, which is a dirt - you know, dirt poor desert farming community, extremely harsh conditions, houses made of mud, pretty rudimentary in a lot of cases, most people live in poverty.

  And his idea was basically to replicate a subdivision from suburban Virginia or from suburban - in the Bay Area in California where he had lived and turn Afghanistan into this modern country that he hoped it could be. And he had received $3 million from the U.S. government to get this project off the ground, even though there were a lot of problems with his proposal and they had not raised enough money on their own to get it going, and plus the land was owned by the Afghan Ministry of Defense, which nobody was quite clear about at the beginning when it started. But so he put this grand project into motion, and he actually completed it and - until there was eventual struggles over the ownership of the project and the ownership of the land.

  DAVIES: And this development called Aino Mina, you say like an American subdivision. Do you mean like with swimming pools and landscaping and nice houses?

  PARTLOW: Yeah. It had a very Western, modern look. There were granite countertops in the kitchens. There were - there was regular trash pickup at the houses. There were swimming pools, manmade lakes, hotels, mosques, hospitals. It was a city in essence. Mahmoud had driven me around the subdivision at one point, and he was pointing out fountains that were in the median in one of the main highways. And he said he'd been in Rome, and he'd seen this fountain. And so he wanted to replicate it, and some of the apartment buildings he said had - were based on the ones in Concord, Calif., where he had lived before. So this was truly a product of his own imagination.

  DAVIES: Yeah, and we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, no ordinary developer gets something like this. He was connected. Was there a market? Did people - could people afford the houses? Did they move in?

  PARTLOW: People did move in. It was ultimately - he had built some of the houses to be low-income housing and he said that he wanted to cater to all the people of Kandahar and give them an opportunity to live inside here. But it ultimately turned out to be housing for the elite, the wealthy, the politically connected, including plenty of allegations of drug money being used to buy the houses or drug traffickers themselves.

  It also became a place as the Taliban became more violent and Kandahar became a place where people moved because it was safer. And so the demand for these houses went way up as the war got more violent in, you know, the period around 2010, 2011, 2012 because he had plenty of police and security guards, and it was a gated community. So it was walled off to some degree from the violence outside.

  DAVIES: So this is Mahmoud, a brother of the president. He was also involved in the scandal involving the Kabul Bank. This is a complicated story, but did he cheat? Did he make a fortune here?

  PARTLOW: Yeah. This is a complicated story, but the short answer is yes. He took millions of dollars in loans from this bank that - and there was no intention or expectation that these loans would be paid back. He had told me at one point Kabul Bank was his dream business, and you could see why. It was a piggy bank of money for the politically connected and the wealthy in Afghanistan. It was set up by another businessman who had lived in Dubai and moved to Afghanistan.

  And the idea was to take in - the way the bank actually worked was that it would take in depositors' money and loan that money out to the wealthy businessman in Afghanistan so they could jumpstart whatever other businesses or projects they had going. So Mahmoud used Kabul Bank to help finance a cement plant that he owned. He used the money for other business ventures in Afghanistan and that was common. The vice president's brother did the same thing, and several of the most prominent important Afghan businessmen used this bank in that way. And the bank ultimately came crashing down. And he was caught up in the repercussions of that.

  DAVIES: So Mahmoud Karzai, the president's brother comes, makes a fortune on a variety of deals some of them enveloped in scandal. Let's talk about one other brother Ahmed Wali Karzai. He is in some ways the most interesting. Tell us about him.

  PARTLOW: Yeah. He was an amazing figure. He was, in some ways, the most powerful of the Karzai brothers. He had been alongside the president early on. He had moved to Kandahar at the beginning of the war. He had worked closely with the U.S. Special Forces, with the CIA as they're setting up their bases in Kandahar to...

  DAVIES: And let's just explain. Kandahar is a southern province which is the kind of ancestral home of the Karzai family, right?

  PARTLOW: Right. Yeah. He had moved to Kandahar which was the ancestral home of the Taliban and was the - also the hometown of the Karzai family. And it was the place where both the Taliban and the U.S. military really fought for control over the course of the war. He had moved there with President Karzai in the first days after the Taliban were pushed from power. And he worked closely with the CIA and the U.S. Special Forces. He was the - a right-hand man for them to find fighters to join their militias that would work with the CIA to pursue Taliban targets. He was constantly providing intelligence. He was on the CIA payroll for the duration of his life more than a decade in the war.

  At the same time, Ahmed Wali was at the center of allegations about being in control of a drug empire in Kandahar. He was accused of being the kingpin figure who presided over a vast heroin-shipping operation in Afghanistan and using that money to bolster the president's political popularity or pay off friends and rivals.

  So when I was in Afghanistan that question about whether he was our friend or our enemy was central for the U.S. military and a lot of effort was spent investigating his personal life, his business life to try to find evidence that he was involved in the drug trade and that there would be justification for kicking him out of Afghanistan.

  DAVIES: Ahmed Wali Karzai had a lot of businesses that made a lot of money, but he also had a - an unofficial but very powerful political role in the province, right? He wasn't the governor, but he ran things, right?

  PARTLOW: Right. His official title was - he was the head of the Kandahar provincial council. But in reality, he was the most powerful man in Southern Afghanistan across several provinces.

  DAVIES: Joshua Partlow's book is "A Kingdom Of Their Own: The Family Karzai And The Afghan Disaster." After a break, he'll tell us about some bitter feuds and rivalries within the Karzai family and the murder of one of its most powerful members. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

  DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. We're speaking with Washington Post foreign correspondent Joshua Partlow. He was in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2012 when President Obama was sending more U.S. military forces and civilian aid to stem alarming gains the Taliban had made in the country. Partlow's new book looks at President Hamid Karzai and his huge family, including many brothers who were powerful figures in the country. some deeply involved in the corruption spawned by the infusion of American dollars. Partlow's book is "A Kingdom Of Their Own."

  The United States put a lot of effort into fighting corruption. They brought in investigators, a DEA agent named Kirk Meyer and some Army folks that were determined to investigate these figures, make arrests. And, of course, they made their case to President Karzai that this was terrible, it was undermining his authority, it was undermining the war. How did the president react?

  PARTLOW: The president was furious. He saw these corruption investigations ultimately as an attack on his palace, as a way to weaken him in Afghanistan, to ultimately drive him from the palace. It was a - you know, it was a paranoid reading of events, I think. But these corruption investigators really took this problem personally.

  Kirk Meyer, you mentioned, was a DEA agent who ran a group called the Afghan Threat Finance Cell inside the U.S. embassy. And initially it had been set up to cut off the funding for the Taliban. But quickly their investigations shifted to the Afghan government, to cabinet members, to Karzai's palace and family and inner circle. And he had all these tools and an Afghan police team working for him, and they had wiretapping. And they would - they started to understand more about where the U.S. taxpayer money was going and who was stealing it.

  And they became infuriated, I think, both with the scope of the problem - and Kirk Meyer, in particular - and others who worked for them - he took it very personally. He saw this as taxpayer money that was being stolen right in front of their eyes. And he was willing to do anything he needed to do to stop it. And he set up a series of raids and investigations which culminated in the arrest of a man you mentioned, Mohammed Zia Salehi, who who was an aide in Karzai's palace. And he had worked with the CIA and had been involved in payments to supporters of the government. And he kind of worked in a behind-the-scenes, shadowy role. And ultimately, the - he was arrested inside his home. And President Karzai was infuriated, and he threatened to send Afghan troops to free him. It was another one of the fights between him and the U.S. government that really undercut this relationship.

  DAVIES: And, of course, the U.S. investigators felt that, look, if we can arrest somebody, if we can charge them and make it stick, it will send a signal throughout the country that this kind - this stuff is over and that we're going to run things fair and square. What happened to this guy who was arrested, Salehi? Did it stick?

  PARTLOW: No, it didn't stick. So a few hours after he went to prison, President Karzai ordered him to be freed. And the Afghan attorney general sent the order, and he was taken out of the American-run prison where he was being held. Beyond that, then Karzai issued a series of orders that prevented these U.S.-run Afghan teams from investigating corruption cases. They made it much more difficult for them to do their work. He ultimately did - he hadn't been paying much attention, to be honest, to the work of these groups before this arrest. But afterwards, he made it much more difficult for the Americans to pursue these types of cases.

  And it was at the same time, incidentally, where the U.S. military really got involved in Afghan anti-corruption work. So at the same time as Karzai's decided he's going to shut this stuff down, whole other operations and teams get going to try to make him investigate the very same things that he's now opposed to accepting. So I think for the American anti-corruption investigators in Afghanistan, the whole experience was very - left them very embittered ultimately because they felt that the U.S. government and Washington didn't do enough to back up their warnings, basically. They felt that the U.S. government should have cut off some of the aid to Karzai's palace and that would be the only way that he would take this message seriously and that he would do anything about the corruption problem.

  But to preserve whatever was left of the already tattered relationship, no one in Washington was willing to take that step. This was after all our ally in Afghanistan, and this is the government we had helped set up to try to fight the Taliban. And so we - they were - nobody was willing to go that far to actually weaken the government that we were there to work with.

  DAVIES: When these investigators did their work, what did they learn about the scale of the corruption, how much U.S. aid might be siphoned off to corrupt activities, payoffs?

  PARTLOW: They were stunned. People who'd studied corruption professionally described it to me as the first live kleptocracy they'd ever seen. There were tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars leaving the country on commercial airplane flights and gold bars. I mean, there was money flying out the door faster than anyone could keep track of it. The Kabul Bank scandal, which we talked about, ended up costing hundreds of millions of dollars and required a bailout that was ultimately American money and donor money to pay for. So we were paying for billions of dollars that were ultimately being stolen.

  DAVIES: As much as 50 percent of the American aid was - what? - leaking into the corruption?

  PARTLOW: Yeah, estimates as high as 50 percent of American aid was being squandered or stolen.

  DAVIES: Ahmed Wali was murdered by somebody he knew. Do we know what it was about?

  PARTLOW: Ahmed Wali was murdered by his closest lieutenant, his right-hand man, a man named Sardar Mohammed, who had been a bodyguard for the Karzai family. He'd been - he'd guarded an elder brother's home and cars. He'd guarded the family cemetery. He had - he held one of those hybrid rolls which was part militiaman, part Afghan policeman. And he was - he commanded a couple of hundred men in Kandahar, and he was accused of assassinations on Ahmed Wali's behalf.

  And he ultimately walked into Ahmed Wali's home one afternoon in July of 2011 while Ahmed Wali was greeting his guests on the couch and asked for a private word in a back room and then shot Ahmed Wali pointblank. And there were a lot of explanations for why that was. I think the most likely explanation to me is that he had - Ahmed Wali had taken away a lot of his influence as a militia commander. He had lost control of certain checkpoints.

  But there were also allegations that the CIA had killed Ahmed Wali. That was something that the - Pakistan's intelligence chief had told President Karzai directly that the CIA was responsible for the death. That was something I never really believed because Ahmed Wali had worked so closely with the CIA and was such an asset to them. There were other allegations that it - the dispute had to do with a rivalry over a woman or because he was molesting young boys. There were plenty of stories about him. But ultimately, Ahmed Wali was betrayed by one of his closest allies.

  DAVIES: Before we leave the story of Ahmed Wali, I mean, one of the fascinating points that you make about the Karzai family, I mean, these were - there were brothers who made a fortune from their connections to the president. But in the larger family, there were rivalries that led to violence at times - you know, murders and retaliation.

  PARTLOW: That's right. You know some of the worst most critical comments I heard about the Karzai's came from other members of the family, and this was a family that was divided. And what I concluded after doing this research was the course of the war, the infusion of so much money into Afghanistan and their rivalry for money and power really tore this family apart in a similar way that it tore Afghanistan apart.

  It was a personal tragedy for many members of the Karzai family as they were pitted against each other for control of that country. There's one story that we used down through the generations of the Karzai's starting decades back when an uncle of the president was murdered by another member of the Karzai family, and his son devotes his life to avenging that murder. And that creates a series of killings over the years that sucks in the U.S. military and becomes on a minute level an illustration of how the U.S. military often got involved in these personal feuds and tribal disputes.

  DAVIES: Joshua Partlow's book is "A Kingdom Of Their Own." Its about the Karzai family in Afghanistan. We'll talk some more in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

  DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Washington Post foreign correspondent Joshua Partlow. He has a new book called "A Kingdom Of Their Own" about his time in Afghanistan with the Karzai family. You also note that in some respects, the Americans were having to relearn the country again and again because commanders and diplomats would rotate in and out so often.

  PARTLOW: That's right. It was - there's a joke that it wasn't a 10-year war. It was 10 one-year wars. And that - there was - there were grains of truth to that. Every summer the - many of the diplomats in the U.S. Embassy would rotate out. The soldiers would be on one-year rotation. So all this institutional memory that would get built up over the course of someone's tour would then - it would then go back to zero and people would start learning the name of the provinces again, and they would start, you know, learning the basic facts about Afghanistan. And that was something that I saw a repetition of - of Americans investigating and thinking about the same questions that they'd spent months earlier debating and trying to find an answer to, and they would start back at the beginning again.

  DAVIES: You know, it's fascinating because when I read this, you see the Americans coming in, you know, in good faith thinking they're there to defeat the Taliban and build relationships with the Afghan population. But these ethnic conflicts and tribal relations are so complicated, and they don't always get them. And it leads them to - blundering into mistakes or being manipulated into settling a personal grudge with U.S. military force. And it made me wonder that as you spent time there and spent time with these players and got to know them, do you feel - did you feel at times you knew more than the American military commanders about the country and what they needed to know?

  PARTLOW: That's an interesting question. I feel like I had access to certain information that most diplomats, for example, or maybe commanders wouldn't know just because I was spending so much time with Afghans as a lot of the journalists there were. And the Karzai's are great for that. Also they speak English. You can - they can explain things to you in a way that, you know, if you're learning through translation, it's - a lot gets lost. And so yeah, I became very familiar with their political rivals, how things worked on the ground that I don't think you got that nuance if you were sitting in an air-conditioned office in Kandahar Airfield.

  DAVIES: You talked to American military personnel a lot. Did you ever feel like telling them, look, you don't get this?

  PARTLOW: There's a story that I thought was funny that I heard. There was an American general who - there was a killing that was this horrible atrocity that took place where an American sergeant went out and killed maybe 16 Afghans in a village, and he was later convicted - Sergeant Bales. And the general in Kandahar at the time was distraught over this, the American general. And he had asked the Qayum Karzai, one of the elder brothers, you know, how should I deal with this? How would an Afghan deal with this situation? Should I give the families - the victims' families money? Should I buy them livestock? And those were all practices that were common when the U.S. military would inflict some collateral damage.

  And what Qayum Karzai said is you can't do it the way we would do it because we would give them a daughter. You know, we would trade a daughter to another tribe or family, and then, you know - and those types of customs were so foreign and so sometimes you talked to the Karzai's and you'd think I'm just like you. We both have this experience in the United States. But then there were the other aspects of Afghan culture that were so different, and were lost on a lot of Americans.

  DAVIES: You're no longer in Afghanistan. You're in Mexico City now, right?

  PARTLOW: Yeah. That's right.

  DAVIES: What's your sense of where Afghanistan's headed and where American policy is headed?

  PARTLOW: I'm really worried about what's going on now. I think the situation is a lot worse than it was even a couple of years ago. The Taliban's much stronger. They control more of the country. They're surrounding the major cities. It seems like the Afghan government basically only rules the cities now and the rural areas are the domain of the Taliban.

  At the same time, the government's a lot weaker than it used to be. There's been a fragile ethnic coalition for the last couple of years that have tried to rule the country with a Pashtun president and a Tajik chief executive. And there are lots of strains on that relationship and threats that that government will fall apart. So I think the situation is much more precarious than it was even a couple of years ago.

  DAVIES: You know, when you look at the story of Hamid Karzai in power, you see, you know, a leader who didn't have an interest in the military campaigns that the Americans were trying to run, tended to oppose and complain about American activities, tolerated enormous corruption within his government. And yet you write that a lot of people who found him so frustrating still regard him very fondly. What's your sense of him as a man and as a leader, his place in Afghan history?

  PARTLOW: I developed more respect for him than I initially had when I got to Afghanistan. And he impressed me in several ways. I thought he was a real patriot, a nationalist leader and a man who ultimately cared about the suffering of Afghans and their well-being. And that was driving to a large degree his opposition to the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.

  I think he became paranoid about the U.S. role, particularly in the latter years. He started believing lots of conspiracy theories about what the U.S. government was up to. And I think he - what started out as opposition turned into something far darker and farther away from reality.

  But I think his ultimate goal, the way I saw it, was to keep the ethnic groups of Afghanistan from reverting to civil war. I think what he considered the worst and most dangerous period of Afghan history was the civil war years of the early '90s, after the Soviets had withdrawn, when there were rockets in the streets of Kabul and widespread damage and refugees flooding out of the country. And I think he was willing to overlook a lot of other crimes if he could keep the warlords and the regional strongmen from fighting against each other. So he would let his friend or let some militia commander be in charge of an Afghan ministry. And if they stole half the budget, well, that was better than that person using their artillery to fight their rival. So I think he had different goals than the United States, and that was - and different interests - and that was the source of a lot of the problems.

  DAVIES: Well, Joshua Partlow, thanks so much for speaking with us.

  PARTLOW: Thank you. It's been great to be here.

  DAVIES: Joshua Partlow is a foreign correspondent who's now the Mexico City bureau chief for The Washington Post. His book about Afghanistan is "A Kingdom Of Their Own." Coming up, Ed Ward tells the story of the earliest Beach Boys recordings. This is FRESH AIR.

• Wilson Center - https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/joshua-partlow

  ASIA PROGRAM
  Joshua Partlow
  EXPERTISE
  Security and Defense Asia Afghanistan Middle East and North Africa
  AFFILIATION
  former Kabul bureau chief, Washington Post; former public policy scholar, Wilson Center
  WILSON CENTER PROJECTS
  "The Karzai Family and the War in Afghanistan"
  TERM
  Mar 04, 2013 — Jun 28, 2013
  Bio

  Joshua Partlow is a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. Between 2009 and 2012, he was the paper’s Kabul bureau chief. Before going to Afghanistan, he worked as the Post’s correspondent in South America, based in Rio de Janeiro, and as a correspondent in Iraq. Partlow joined The Washington Post in 2003. He was on the financial desk and later worked for the metro section covering the Maryland suburbs as a general assignment and police reporter. In 2010, Partlow and his Post colleague Rajiv Chandrasekaran won an Overseas Press Club award for the best newspaper or news service reporting from abroad for their series on the war in Afghanistan. He has masters degrees in international affairs and in journalism from Columbia University, and earned his undergraduate degree in environmental sciences and policy from Duke University. He has served as a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University.

  Project Summary

  This project is a study of the political and personal history of President Hamid Karzai and his family, with a focus on the recent years of the war in Afghanistan. The research looks at the personalities and the power dynamics within President Karzai’s palace and family and how their relations with U.S. soldiers and diplomats have evolved over the course of the war. The project will describe the changing perceptions of Karzai’s performance as president during the war and the different foreign policy approaches of the Bush and Obama administrations towards the Afghan leader.

  Major Publications

  "Why Karzai is fed up with the U.S. Mission in Afganistan." The Washington Post. 16 Mar. 2012.
  "War pulls apart Afghan familes." The Washington Post. 10 Apr. 2011.
  - See more at: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/joshua-partlow#sthash.hNOBQqZE.dpuf

• Shorenstein Center - https://shorensteincenter.org/fellowships/former-fellows-by-semester/fall-2012/

  Joshua Partlow is a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. Between 2009 and 2012, he was the paper’s Kabul bureau chief. Before going to Afghanistan, he worked as the Post’s correspondent in South America, based in Rio de Janeiro, and as a correspondent in Iraq. Partlow joined The Washington Post in 2003. He was on the financial desk and later worked for the metro section covering the Maryland suburbs as a general assignment and police reporter. In 2010, Partlow and his Post colleague Rajiv Chandrasekaran won an Overseas Press Club award for the best newspaper or news service reporting from abroad for their series on the war in Afghanistan. He has masters degrees in international affairs and in journalism from Columbia University, and earned his undergraduate degree in environmental sciences and policy from Duke University. While a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center, he will write a paper about the U.S. media strategy in Afghanistan.
  Discussion Paper: Podium Wars: President Hamid Karzai, the Foreign Press, and the Afghan War

• Curtis Brown - https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/client/joshua-partlow

  BIOGRAPHY

  Joshua Partlow is a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. Between 2009 and 2012, he was the paper’s Kabul bureau chief. Before going to Afghanistan, he worked as the Post’s correspondent in South America, based in Rio de Janeiro, and as a correspondent in Iraq.

  Joshua joined the Washington Post in 2003. In 2010, he and his Post colleague Rajiv Chandrasekaran won an Overseas Press Club award for the best newspaper or news service reporting from abroad for their series on the war in Afghanistan. He has masters degrees in international affairs and in journalism from Columbia University, and earned his undergraduate degree in environmental sciences and policy from Duke University. He has served as a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University.

• YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiYR0anjPg

  Published on Nov 3, 2016
  The key to understanding the calamitous Afghan war is the complex, ultimately failed relationship between the powerful, duplicitous Karzai family and the United States--brilliantly portrayed here in its entirety for the first time by the former Washington Post Kabul bureau chief.

  The United States came to Afghanistan on a simple mission: to avenge the September 11 attacks and to drive the Taliban from power. This took less than two months. But over the next decade, the ensuing fight for power and money left the region even more dangerous than before the first troops arrived.

  At the center of this story are President Hamid Karzai and his brothers who began the war as symbols of a new, moderate, forward-looking Afghanistan--the antithesis of the brutish and backward Taliban regime. Now, with the war in shambles, they are in open conflict with one other and with their Western allies. Joshua Partlow's clear-eyed analysis reveals the mistakes, squandered hopes, and wasted chances behind the scenes of a would-be political dynasty that, in turn, newly illustrate the arc of the war and America's relationship to Afghanistan--from optimism to despair, and from friendship to enmity.

  JOSHUA PARTLOW is The Washington Post's bureau chief in Mexico. Between 2009 and 2012, he was the Post's Kabul bureau chief and has also worked as a correspondent in South America and Iraq. In 2010, Partlow shared an Overseas Press Club award with Rajiv Chandrasekaran for the best newspaper or news service reporting from abroad, in recognition of their series on the war in Afghanistan.

4/12/17, 10)03 AM
Print Marked Items
Karzai Inc; Afghanistan
The Economist.
421.9011 (Oct. 15, 2016): p80(US). From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
Keep looking over your shoulder
At war with Afghanistan's first family
A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster. By Joshua Partlow. Knopf; 422 pages. Simon & Schuster.
MIGHT things have turned out better in Afghanistan without Hamid Karzai? The many critics of the former Afghan president blame him for tolerating corruption and for undermining the West's war against the Taliban. As Robert Gates, once America's defence secretary, said: Mr Karzai was the most "troublesome ally in war since Charles de Gaulle".
America initially regarded the dashing Pushtun tribal leader as just the man to run post-Taliban Afghanistan, Joshua Partlow, a journalist with the Washington Post, writes in "A Kingdom of Their Own". Western diplomats made sure he was appointed interim leader in 2001 and elected president in 2004. But America came to have grave doubts about him. "I hate that guy," Richard Holbrooke, then a senior American diplomat in the region, let slip to Afghan officials in the run-up to the fraud-ridden presidential election of 2009. Mr Karzai's naive pacifism and his disdain for military affairs maddened American generals. When one commander reported that a remote town had fallen to the Taliban, Mr Karzai snapped back: "So it was liberated."
Things went from bad to worse as America became increasingly frustrated at its inability to crush a ragtag Islamist militia. In 2010 it seized on the notion that public anger with government corruption was behind the growing support for the Taliban. But an anti-corruption campaign provoked a confrontation with members of Mr Karzai's family, which included some thoroughly Americanised Afghans who had returned from exile after making their careers in the restaurant trade.
Mr Partlow describes how American officials, tapping telephones, uncovered the brazen malfeasance of the Afghan elite. Much of this focused on Kabul Bank, an institution that turned out to be little more than a Ponzi scheme which provided multi-million-dollar, interest-free loans to its shareholders. Among them was Mahmood Karzai, Hamid's elder brother, a dealmaker and businessman who dreamed of creating American-style suburbia in the deserts of Kandahar.
Mr Karzai personally abhorred corruption and angered his relatives by frustrating their attempts to obtain government contracts and jobs. But he also blocked foreign would-be corruption-busters. Any arrests would undermine Mr Karzai's own political base of tribal leaders and the businessmen who had made millions out of the wartime economy and vast amounts of civil aid after 2001.
about:blank Page 1 of 5
4/12/17, 10)03 AM
America also bears much of the blame for its failures in Afghanistan, as this finely reported book shows. Policy changed with each new rotation of diplomats and generals. Early on, the Bush administration was not interested in nation-building and was happy with a conciliatory president who would co-opt corrupt warlords, not imprison them. Later, when it decided to throw money and troops into a massive counter-insurgency campaign to boost the war effort, it wanted a no-nonsense technocrat in charge. That was not the style of Mr Karzai, who loved to rule in the manner of a king, meeting tribal delegations and micromanaging the country by mobile phone from his presidential palace. The historic compound, with its gardens and its decorative giant employed to "walk around the palace and be tall", looms large in this book.
One of America's biggest U-turns was over Ahmed Wali Karzai, another sibling who became the president's man in Kandahar, the historic heartland of the Pushtuns. Over the years many Americans, from Vice-President Joe Biden down, argued that Ahmed Wali was like a mafia godfather, his behaviour fuelling support for the Taliban. But when President Obama decided to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan in 2010, Ahmed Wali became essential to the war effort after all.
Mr Partlow overstates the extent to which the Afghan people shared their president's disillusionment with his tormentors. But he is right that Mr Karzai identified many of the mistakes America made, only to be ignored. He railed against the killing of civilians and harassment of villagers during NATO raids long before General Stanley McChrystal tried to confront the problem. And he was right to blame the Taliban's resilience on Pakistan's harbouring of Afghanistan's enemies.
Some American officials who were sent to Afghanistan came to wish they had listened more. Of all the many brothers and lesser Karzai cousins Mr Partlow encountered in his reporting, Hamid was, he believes, the "most misjudged of all".
A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster. By Joshua Partlow.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Karzai Inc; Afghanistan." The Economist, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 80(US). PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466463510&it=r&asid=a4bc76a96e0611e2fe70faebf835d477. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466463510
about:blank Page 2 of 5
4/12/17, 10)03 AM
Partlow, Joshua. A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster
Ed Goedeken
Library Journal.
141.13 (Aug. 1, 2016): p108. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Partlow, Joshua. A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster. Knopf. Sept. 2016.432p. photos, notes, index. ISBN 9780307962645. $30; ebk. ISBN 9780307962652. HIST
Beset with wars and invasions for much of the past century, Afghanistan entered the 21st century with more of the same. Numerous accounts detail the American experience, which began its latest phase after the September 11 attacks. But that period only set the stage for more conflict as the government of Hamid Karzai, who served as present of Afghanistan from 2004 to 2014, struggled to maintain control over the sprawling and forbidding countryside. This valuable account by Partlow, who began serving as foreign correspondent for the Washington Post in 2006, helps readers clearly understand the complex and everchanging challenges that Karzai's government faced. Partlow knows his subject well, providing a thorough accounting of Karzai, his family, and the slow erosion of American support throughout the years that Karzai held office. The author is sympathetic to the Afghan leader's incredibly complex political and social mileau, but he is also honest when he believes Karzai could have been more forthright in his actions.
VERDICT A strong assessment of Karzai's government and an important contribution to any well-rounded collection on contemporary Middle Eastern politics and society.--Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Goedeken, Ed
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Goedeken, Ed. "Partlow, Joshua. A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster." Library
Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 108. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459805089&it=r&asid=e130b3d4a28d3b5180cb3af655e8d288. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459805089
about:blank Page 3 of 5
4/12/17, 10)03 AM
A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster
Publishers Weekly.
263.29 (July 18, 2016): p201. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster Joshua Partlow. Knopf, $28.95 (432p) ISBN 9780-307-96264-5 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
A veteran foreign correspondent explores America's entanglement with Afghanistan, our country's longest war, through the lens of the Karzai family, which wielded power from the 2001 ousting of the Taliban until 2014. That time span encompasses a period of hope, a tempering of expectations, and a near-total breakdown in President Hamid Karzai's relations with the United States. Partlow, an astute and thoughtful reporter, shows how the U.S. eventually came to view Karzai as hapless--or tacitly complicit--in the face of widespread corruption. The book, however, offers a more nuanced perspective on what went wrong. It focuses mostly on Hamid Karzai, but also profiles his brothers, notably Ahmed Wali Karzai, assassinated in 2011 after years of speculation that he was a narcotics kingpin. Partlow also devotes much space to U.S. failures in battling corruption in Afghanistan, showing how the policy of rotating military personnel through on short tours made it difficult for American service members to familiarize themselves with the country. American military and political arrogance butts up against deep-rooted cultural customs and family networks throughout this excellent account of a vastly difficult topic. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn, Sagalyn Literary Agency. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster." Publishers Weekly, 18 July 2016, p. 201.
PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459287567&it=r&asid=3f00ca9a2a0dc381a72035e8c3ac9aa8. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A459287567
about:blank Page 4 of 5
4/12/17, 10)03 AM
Afghanistan: Obama's sad legacy
Carlotta Gall
The New York Review of Books.
64.1 (Jan. 19, 2017): p31. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gall, Carlotta. "Afghanistan: Obama's sad legacy." The New York Review of Books, 19 Jan. 2017, p. 31+.
PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478020162&it=r&asid=9da68d3fde93e660df770d8da4e60a7f. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A478020162
about:blank Page 5 of 5

"Karzai Inc; Afghanistan." The Economist, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 80(US). PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466463510&it=r. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017. Goedeken, Ed. "Partlow, Joshua. A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 108. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459805089&it=r. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017. "A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster." Publishers Weekly, 18 July 2016, p. 201. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA459287567&it=r. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017. Gall, Carlotta. "Afghanistan: Obama's sad legacy." The New York Review of Books, 19 Jan. 2017, p. 31+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478020162&it=r. Accessed 12 Apr. 201

• Kirkus Review
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joshua-partlow/a-kingdom-of-their-own/
  Word count: 375

  A KINGDOM OF THEIR OWN
  The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster
  by Joshua Partlow
  BUY NOW FROM
  AMAZON
  BARNES & NOBLE
  LOCAL BOOKSELLER
  GET WEEKLY BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:
  Email Address Subscribe
  Email this review
  KIRKUS REVIEW

  A summary and analysis of the United States’ troubled relationship with former Afghan president Hamid Karzai and his sprawling, influential family.

  Washington Post Mexico bureau chief (previously Kabul chief) Partlow provides an insightful, revealing dissection of the failures of the U.S government in Afghanistan by focusing on the multifarious, endlessly fascinating Karzai family. Naturally, Hamid Karzai’s American-aided rise to the head of Afghanistan’s post-Taliban government and his subsequent disillusionment with the American mission take center stage in the narrative. From the American perspective, Hamid went from “a compromise candidate known for compromising, the favorite of no Afghan group—even his own—but the least objectionable, and least threatening, to all” to, in the words of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, “not an adequate strategic partner.” Partlow takes pains to illustrate how civilian deaths and unfulfilled promises led to Hamid’s increasing skepticism toward the war effort. The author also spends a great deal of time on Hamid’s extended family, especially the business-minded dreamer Mahmood Karzai and Ahmed Wali, either a scheming Popalzai—the Karzais’ tribe—warlord or staunch American ally, depending on whom you ask. Partlow’s character portraits are masterful, often based on firsthand observations and relying on small but crucial personal details to convincingly render these complex, multifaceted men. The author’s reporting often leads to revealing tangents, including a deep dive into a decades-old blood feud between two branches of the Karzai family that gives Western readers a window into the role that honor and revenge still play in Afghan society. According to Partlow, the Karzais “stood at the center” of the hubristic U.S. effort to “remake an ancient tribal society into a modern democratic country.” The “Afghan disaster” is as much the result of cultural misunderstandings as it is misallocated funds and poor strategic planning.

  An excellent introduction to the Karzai family and to the disastrous consequences of the Americans’ inadequate understanding of Afghan culture.

• Publisher's Weekly
  http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-307-96264-5
  Word count: 220

  A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster

  Joshua Partlow. Knopf, $28.95 (432p) ISBN 978-0-307-96264-5

  A veteran foreign correspondent explores America’s entanglement with Afghanistan, our country’s longest war, through the lens of the Karzai family, which wielded power from the 2001 ousting of the Taliban until 2014. That time span encompasses a period of hope, a tempering of expectations, and a near-total breakdown in President Hamid Karzai’s relations with the United States. Partlow, an astute and thoughtful reporter, shows how the U.S. eventually came to view Karzai as hapless—or tacitly complicit—in the face of widespread corruption. The book, however, offers a more nuanced perspective on what went wrong. It focuses mostly on Hamid Karzai, but also profiles his brothers, notably Ahmed Wali Karzai, assassinated in 2011 after years of speculation that he was a narcotics kingpin. Partlow also devotes much space to U.S. failures in battling corruption in Afghanistan, showing how the policy of rotating military personnel through on short tours made it difficult for American service members to familiarize themselves with the country. American military and political arrogance butts up against deep-rooted cultural customs and family networks throughout this excellent account of a vastly difficult topic. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn, Sagalyn Literary Agency. (Sept.)

• Rand
  http://www.rand.org/blog/2016/10/book-review-a-kingdom-of-their-own-the-family-karzai.html
  Word count: 2197

  Book Review: 'A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster'
  Supporters of Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah take down a large portrait of Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul July 8, 2014Photo by Omar Sobhani/Reuters
  by Jonah Blank

  The Corleones of Kabul

  Foreign observers of Afghanistan tend to think of former President Hamid Karzai's government as a clan of corrupt thugs, led by a feckless, petulant whiner. In this narrative, Karzai was a man in over his head: an aesthete playing the part of a warlord, just barely aware of his unsuitability for the role. His 13 years in office, this thinking goes, deprived Afghanistan of competent leadership and condemned the country to instability and poverty. By 2009, five years before Karzai stepped down, the governments in Kabul and Washington were headed for an ugly separation, thanks in part to Karzai's poor record.

  How accurate is this picture, and to what extent were the Karzais responsible for the deterioration in U.S.-Afghan ties? That question is at the heart of Joshua Partlow's excellent A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster. As in any divorce, there are two sides to the story.

  From the American perspective, Karzai began as a heroic figure. Rugged and handsome, he seemed to many Westerners exotic enough to represent the authentic voice of his people, yet spoke English with a reassuring fluency and an appealing British inflection.

  In the fall of 2001, when the U.S.-led invasion commenced, there were few other viable contenders for Afghanistan's top job. The country's most capable anti-Taliban commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud, had been assassinated by al Qaeda two days before September 11; Osama bin Laden knew that the terrorist attacks might provoke an American invasion and eliminated the man most likely to serve as Washington's partner. Even if he had lived, Massoud might have had a hard time governing: he was Tajik, and Afghanistan's Pashtun plurality had maintained a monopoly on political leadership since the eighteenth century. The most plausible Pashtun leader, meanwhile, was a one-legged mujahid named Abdul Haq, known to American officials as “Hollywood Haq” for his fondness for the limelight—yet he was killed (by the Taliban) only a few weeks after Massoud.

  Unlike Haq, Massoud, and most of Afghanistan's other potential leaders, Karzai had lived through twenty years of war without seeing combat. His baptism by fire came only a few weeks before the 2001 invasion began, when U.S. Green Berets infiltrated southern Afghanistan and helped him consolidate control there. On the other hand, Karzai's lack of battlefield experience meant that he had acquired few enemies. From an Afghan perspective, he also had the right ethnic background: he was a Pashtun, from the traditionally royalist Popalzai tribe of the Durrani lineage, which was largely free of ties to the Taliban. To Americans, he looked and sounded like a leader. “Karzai,” as Partlow notes, “was a compromise candidate known for compromising.”

  Many who had encountered Karzai in the 1990s were amazed at his rapid elevation from bit-player to world-charmer. (I was among them: in 2000, I had arranged for Karzai to testify before the U.S. Senate, identifying him only as a “tribal leader” at a little-noticed committee hearing; his transformation was so abrupt that I forgot about the episode until cleaning out a file cabinet years later.) Suddenly, he was feted in world capitals, splashed on television stations, and even, in 2002, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

  By 2009, however, the love affair between Karzai and U.S. officials had gone wrong. In Washington's view, Karzai couldn't deliver on his promises and had little interest in trying. He turned a blind eye to the industrial-scale corruption that permeated his government, especially when it was perpetrated by his relatives. The Americans saw Hamid as a wartime leader with little interest in warfare, a fickle pushover too eager to follow the counsel of toadies, an ingrate who constantly insulted the American troops who kept him in power. In 2010, when Karzai threatened to give up his post and join the Taliban himself, many Americans half hoped it wasn't a bluff.

  From Karzai's perspective, the United States was an enemy masquerading as a friend.
  From Karzai's perspective, however, the United States was an enemy masquerading as a friend. This was an old role for superpowers in Afghanistan: the British pioneered the model in the nineteenth century and the Soviet Union epitomized it in the 1980s. Karzai and many other Afghans believed that the United States was unwittingly mimicking many of its predecessors' mistakes. The U.S.-led army of liberation soon came to be seen as an army of occupation.

  Like the Soviets before them, the new occupiers dished out insults to local culture and custom, often without knowing they had given offense. Most damaging was their trampling on Afghans' religious sensibilities: foreign soldiers let dogs loose in peasants' houses on night raids, violated religious propriety to search women for weapons, and even (unintentionally, as part of a routine prison housecleaning) burned pages from the Koran. When Karzai expressed his outrage at such actions, he was indeed speaking on behalf of his people. What Americans described as corruption and nepotism, on the other hand, were in Karzai's eyes merely the cold realities of Afghan politics, in which loyalty to family was among the highest imperatives.

  Among the Karzais, it was Hamid's half-brother, Ahmad Wali, who played the role of family disciplinarian. AWK, as he was commonly known, is the Godfather of Partlow's story: a generous, calculating, charismatic, and brutal power broker who had once worked in exile in an Afghan restaurant in Chicago before rising to power in Kandahar Province. Different segments of the U.S. government loved and despised him in equal measure. Diplomats and military brass in Kabul saw him as the archetype of the venal warlord the United States was trying desperately to uproot. Spies and military leaders in Kandahar—where AWK controlled everything from the Provincial Council to the local economy—saw him as a vital partner who, unlike his peers in the central government, could be counted on. Was he guilty of mafia-style graft, extortion, and violence? As Partlow rightly notes, most U.S. and international observers believed that he was—but none could produce evidence.

  Karzai relied heavily on his half-brother. Most of the president's cabinet members and potential rivals commanded personal militias and had pockets deep enough to buy or terrify others into compliance. Karzai didn't have any of those things; although his powers on paper were extensive, in practice, they were almost worthless. He was mockingly referred to as the “Mayor of Kabul,” reliant on American bodyguards for his physical security. It was AWK who provided him with a power base independent of his theoretical subordinates. When the Americans pressured Karzai to force his brother into exile, it should have been no surprised that he refused.

  Karzai's brother Mahmood, by contrast, was more careless in his crimes. When Kabul Bank collapsed in 2010, he owed it more than $22 million; to date, more than one-third of that sum remains unpaid. The evidence of corruption at Kabul Bank, which had made a number of risky investments and loans to its own shareholders, was indisputable: the bank's CEO turned incriminating documents over to investigators. But if Mahmood was guilty (as Hamid correctly concluded he was), so too was most of the Afghan elite. The gaudy mansions springing up throughout Kabul weren't being built on any civil servants' salaries. Former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann highlighted the hypocrisy that followed: “To Afghan ears, it was ‘I won't fire my crooks, but I want you to fire your crooks.'”

  Karzai saw corruption as an American phenomenon, and he wasn't entirely wrong. The United States and other foreign donors had poured massive amounts of money into a society unequipped to handle it, creating few safeguards against graft. As for the U.S. Treasury officials hounding Mahmood for his financial transgressions, their entreaties seemed hypocritical to many Afghans. In 2010, Kabul Bank required a bailout of just under $1 billion; in 2008, the U.S. Treasury Department spent $700 billion on behalf of U.S. taxpayers to prop up failing Wall Street banks. (Once concessional loans by the Federal Reserve were added to that sum, the U.S. bailout's pricetag may have been trillions more.)

  “Accountability” was the United States' watchword in demanding harsh punishments for the culprits in the corruption at Kabul Bank. The bank's founder and its CEO, the latter responsible for $810 billion of the bank's $935 billion in losses, received jail sentences of five years each, and over a dozen others were sentenced to shorter terms. But what accountability had the United States meted out to its own financial miscreants? No top Wall Street banker spent time in jail for his or her role in the 2008 financial crash. And the figures involved in the risky practices that helped cause the crisis represented a class of bankers who cycled easily between jobs at lucrative financial companies and positions in the government bodies tasked with overseeing them.

  Karzai was acutely aware of the disparity between how the U.S. government treated its own financial titans and how it expected him to treat those of Afghanistan. In 2007, when U.S. General Dan McNeill brought Karzai a message from President George Bush noting that Congressional support for Afghanistan would hinge on anticorruption measures, Karzai reminded him of Boston's notoriously corrupt “Big Dig” infrastructure project and suggested that similar problems could be found in every congressional district. When confronted about Kabul Bank's malfeasance, Karzai asked whether President Barack Obama had gotten personally involved in the prosecution of Wall Street conman Bernie Madoff. One of the most infuriating things about Karzai was that he was not always wrong. “So many of the problems we experienced,” said U.S. General John Allen, “were things he had raised three or four years before.”

  Karzai's greatest crime was not incompetence, nor fecklessness, nor the enablement of corruption, nor the brutality and misrule of his family and allies. Those were all valid charges, but the United States forgave such offenses and more in its other Afghan partners: Gul Agha Shirzai, Abdul Raziq, Ismail Khan, Atta Muhammad—the tally such of warlords could fill pages, and a similar roster could easily be assembled for Iraq and other countries with which Washington has had a close relationship.

  Karzai's unforgiveable crime was ingratitude.
  Karzai's unforgiveable crime was ingratitude. As American troops were dying to protect his life, he called them names and dishonored their sacrifices. In a typical statement in February 2013, he accused U.S. Special Forces of "harassing, annoying, torturing, and even murdering innocent people." In the spring of 2012, following the accidental Koran burning, he labeled American soldiers “demons” who were committing “Satanic acts that will never be forgiven by apologies.”

  Any war brings a succession of human tragedies, and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was no exception. Yet it would be hard to argue that the American outrages were worse than those brought about by the Soviets, the Taliban, or the chaos of the civil war in the 1990s. By Karzai's second term, which began in 2009, he nevertheless tended to portray U.S. errors in the harshest words possible and display little appreciation for the fact that his survival rested on the troops he so freely disparaged. This explains a great part of the “disaster” of Partlow's title. So, perhaps, does the familial infighting that provides for much of the book's drama. AWK was assassinated by a longtime family retainer in July 2011. Various minor relatives have been unceremoniously offed by other members of the clan. As Partlow notes, “the worst things I ever heard about the Karzais came from other Karzais.”

  Those who followed Partlow's byline over his years in Afghanistan will find his typically gripping combination of fine narrative and telling detail replicated in this admirable book. Many readers, however, may hunger for a more complete portrait of the Karzai family rather than a set of loosely linked sketches centered on its most famous member. Hamid's elder brother Qayyum comes across as little more than a cipher. Mahmood appears briefly and in fascinating form—he “was blustery, brash, buffoonish, full of outlandish plots and plans, a man who spoke without filter or seeming regard for the facts—Afghanistan's version of Donald Trump,” according to Partlow—but anecdotes on his exploits are in short order. And how did AWK evolve, in the realm of Afghan politics and within himself, from an American restaurant worker to the capo of Kandahar? These stories remain to be written; in the meantime, Partlow has contributed a first-rate initial volume.

  Jonah Blank is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. He is the author of Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity Among the Daudi Bohras.

  This commentary originally appeared on Foreign Affairs on October 12, 2016.

• Christian Science Monitor
  http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2016/0927/A-Kingdom-of-their-Own-tries-to-make-sense-of-Afghanistan-and-the-Karzais
  Word count: 950

  A Kingdom of their Own' tries to make sense of Afghanistan and the Karzais
  csmonitor icon Latest News
  Save for later
  Subscribe
  Washington Post journalist Joshua Partlow takes a deeper look at Afghanistan, the Karzai clan, and their complex relationship to the United States.
  By David Holahan SEPTEMBER 27, 2016
  Save for later
  View CaptionAbout video adsView Caption
  If you want to know why the United States is still in Afghanistan nearly 15 years on, and why its forces, together with Afghan allies, could not defeat a dirt bike-riding cadre of 35,000 or so rebels, Joshua Partlow has some insights to share. From 2009 to 2012, Partlow reported from Afghanistan as the Washington Post’s Kabul bureau chief.

  From an American point of view, Afghanistan – a place so unfathomable to most Westerners that it gives Alice’s Wonderland a run for its money – is a mess. Reconstructing that war-torn country has cost US taxpayers more, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than the Marshall Plan lavished on 16 European nations after World War II. At the same time, 2,356 US servicemen and women have been killed there and 20,904 wounded. The total tab for the US is more than $1 trillion and rising. For all of that, the future of Afghanistan remains very much in doubt.

  Partlow’s valuable new book, A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster, enables its readers to understand Afghanistan better – or, at least as well as the author does. It also offers a compelling portrait of former Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his ambitious and oft-mystifying family – a number of whom had thrived in America and elsewhere only to return home after 9/11 to do exponentially better in an Afghanistan awash in American dollars. Partlow may not succeed in answering all the questions surrounding the Karzai family, but he at least offers a nuanced understanding of this very intriguing clan and their deeds.

  Recommended: How well do you know Afghanistan? Take our quiz.
  When the Bush administration needed someone to rule Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, Hamid Karzai seemed like a good choice. He was educated, moderate, and an ethnic Pashtun. It was mostly Tajik fighters from the Northern Alliance who, along with American bombs and Special Forces, had routed the Taliban, but Pashtun support was key to governance.

  TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE How well do you know Afghanistan? Take our quiz.

  PHOTOS OF THE DAY Photos of the day 04/11
  What are you reading?
  WHAT ARE YOU READING?Tell us about the book that's currenly on your bedside table.
  It was all kumbaya at first, but by the end of his two terms as president in 2014, Karzai’s relations with the Americans had deteriorated badly. He questioned their motives and actually came to believe, according to Partlow, that they were in “cahoots with the enemy,” one of the many popular Afghan conspiracy theories for why the war was going so badly.

  After a particularly grim week in 2012, during which Americans soldiers had inadvertently burned copies of the Quran, Karzai expressed his anger to US General John Allen and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in startling terms, “I wouldn’t blame a lot of Afghan soldiers for wanting to kill American soldiers.” In fact, they had been doing just that: Incidents of Afghan forces turning their weapons on American and NATO troops were rising at an alarming rate.
  Clearly, Americans were battling more than simply the Taliban. A key obstacle, the author points out, was their own ignorance of a country that is perhaps as far from the American experience as a place can get.

  Afghanistan has never had a central government to speak of, as a favorite folk proverb reveals so succinctly: “Behind every hillock, there sits an emperor.” Nor are Afghans wild about rules – tribes and relationships being far more important. The Americans tried to get Karzai to govern “rationally” by helping his government fight corruption and function more like their own.

  It didn’t take. While considered honest by most observers, Karzai was more concerned with political stability, tribal relationships, and showing that he wasn’t an American stooge than in stamping out corruption. He governed to a different drum. His palace was a place, after all, that had a poet in residence and five food tasters, not to mention a 7-foot-tall man whose job was to walk around and be tall.

  Several of the president’s siblings clearly pushed the envelope of their privileged position. But if many Afghans were stunningly corrupt, they were also remarkably adept at concealing it. In the end, the Americans largely gave up trying to nail people like Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half-brother, who was thought to be raking in $250 million a year as the warlord of Kandahar. Nothing stuck to him. Besides, a friendly Ahmed Wali, it turned out, was very helpful to the Americans – before a trusted aide murdered him in 2011.

  In the end, Partlow determines that many unfairly judged Hamid Karzai, whom he calls “the puppet who wouldn’t dance.” He writes: “He could take credit for balancing Afghan ethnic factions and perhaps preventing them from reverting to civil war. Millions of Afghans returned home during his government; millions of children, girls among them, enrolled in schools. His great political skill was compromise, and he used it to hold an improbable government together. He stood up to America and for his own people. He put the brakes on something that could have spiraled much further out of control.”
  David Holahan regularly reviews books for The Christian Science Monitor.

• The Economist
  http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21708643-war-afghanistans-first-family-karzai-inc
  Word count: 861

  Afghanistan
  Karzai Inc

  At war with Afghanistan’s first family

  Print edition | Books and arts
  Oct 13th 2016

  A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster. By Joshua Partlow. Knopf; 422 pages; $28.95. Simon & Schuster; £20.

  MIGHT things have turned out better in Afghanistan without Hamid Karzai? The many critics of the former Afghan president blame him for tolerating corruption and for undermining the West’s war against the Taliban. As Robert Gates, once America’s defence secretary, said: Mr Karzai was the most “troublesome ally in war since Charles de Gaulle”.

  Latest updates
  Secular power balances the harshness of Israel’s religious courts
  ERASMUS
  AN HOUR AGO
  The hype about China’s newest city
  THE ECONOMIST EXPLAINS
  4 HOURS AGO
  A passenger is dragged from a United Airlines plane
  BUSINESS AND FINANCE
  13 HOURS AGO
  East Germany is running out of people
  EUROPE
  16 HOURS AGO
  The number of executions worldwide fell in 2016
  GRAPHIC DETAIL
  16 HOURS AGO
  Explaining Britain’s immigration paradox
  BRITAIN
  17 HOURS AGO
  See all updates
  America initially regarded the dashing Pushtun tribal leader as just the man to run post-Taliban Afghanistan, Joshua Partlow, a journalist with the Washington Post, writes in “A Kingdom of Their Own”. Western diplomats made sure he was appointed interim leader in 2001 and elected president in 2004. But America came to have grave doubts about him. “I hate that guy,” Richard Holbrooke, then a senior American diplomat in the region, let slip to Afghan officials in the run-up to the fraud-ridden presidential election of 2009. Mr Karzai’s naive pacifism and his disdain for military affairs maddened American generals. When one commander reported that a remote town had fallen to the Taliban, Mr Karzai snapped back: “So it was liberated.”
  Things went from bad to worse as America became increasingly frustrated at its inability to crush a ragtag Islamist militia. In 2010 it seized on the notion that public anger with government corruption was behind the growing support for the Taliban. But an anti-corruption campaign provoked a confrontation with members of Mr Karzai’s family, which included some thoroughly Americanised Afghans who had returned from exile after making their careers in the restaurant trade.

  Mr Partlow describes how American officials, tapping telephones, uncovered the brazen malfeasance of the Afghan elite. Much of this focused on Kabul Bank, an institution that turned out to be little more than a Ponzi scheme which provided multi-million-dollar, interest-free loans to its shareholders. Among them was Mahmood Karzai, Hamid’s elder brother, a dealmaker and businessman who dreamed of creating American-style suburbia in the deserts of Kandahar.

  Advertisement

  Mr Karzai personally abhorred corruption and angered his relatives by frustrating their attempts to obtain government contracts and jobs. But he also blocked foreign would-be corruption-busters. Any arrests would undermine Mr Karzai’s own political base of tribal leaders and the businessmen who had made millions out of the wartime economy and vast amounts of civil aid after 2001.

  America also bears much of the blame for its failures in Afghanistan, as this finely reported book shows. Policy changed with each new rotation of diplomats and generals. Early on, the Bush administration was not interested in nation-building and was happy with a conciliatory president who would co-opt corrupt warlords, not imprison them. Later, when it decided to throw money and troops into a massive counter-insurgency campaign to boost the war effort, it wanted a no-nonsense technocrat in charge. That was not the style of Mr Karzai, who loved to rule in the manner of a king, meeting tribal delegations and micromanaging the country by mobile phone from his presidential palace. The historic compound, with its gardens and its decorative giant employed to “walk around the palace and be tall”, looms large in this book.

  One of America’s biggest U-turns was over Ahmed Wali Karzai, another sibling who became the president’s man in Kandahar, the historic heartland of the Pushtuns. Over the years many Americans, from Vice-President Joe Biden down, argued that Ahmed Wali was like a mafia godfather, his behaviour fuelling support for the Taliban. But when President Obama decided to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan in 2010, Ahmed Wali became essential to the war effort after all.

  Mr Partlow overstates the extent to which the Afghan people shared their president’s disillusionment with his tormentors. But he is right that Mr Karzai identified many of the mistakes America made, only to be ignored. He railed against the killing of civilians and harassment of villagers during NATO raids long before General Stanley McChrystal tried to confront the problem. And he was right to blame the Taliban’s resilience on Pakistan’s harbouring of Afghanistan’s enemies.

  Some American officials who were sent to Afghanistan came to wish they had listened more. Of all the many brothers and lesser Karzai cousins Mr Partlow encountered in his reporting, Hamid was, he believes, the “most misjudged of all”.

• Florida Times
  http://jacksonville.com/entertainment/2016-11-27/book-review-kingdom-their-own-explores-karzai-s-role-afghanistan
  Word count: 613

  Home
  Posted November 27, 2016 03:01 am
  By Lee Scott
  Book review: ‘A Kingdom of Their Own’ explores Karzai’s role in Afghanistan

  Comments
  0 Share
  A KINGDOM OF THEIR OWN: THE FAMILY KARZAI AND THE AFGHAN DISASTER

  Author: Joshua Partlow

  See Also

  Florida State releases 2016 football schedule
  Baptist Health plans to open Baptist MD Anderson Cancer Center in Jacksonville in fall
  Data: Knopf, 424 pages, $30

  By Lee Scott

  For the Times-Union

  Within a few weeks a third different administration will begin dealing with the longest war — and by some counts the most expensive — in which the United States has ever been involved. Trillions (that’s with a “T”) have been spent trying to force a U.S.-style republican form of government on an arid land forever ruled by tribes and religion.

  For 15 years, U.S. presidents, ambassadors, special envoys, generals, and soldiers have come and gone but the only constant in Afghanistan, besides death, has been Hamid Karzai.

  President Karzai, who became the country’s leader three months after September 11, served until 2014, when he was forced to retire because of term limits.

  In “A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster,” Washington Post reporter Joshua Partlow, writing with exceptional, and often exquisite, detail, explores Karzai, his family and his country.

  A popular pick in the beginning (“The U.S. government paid him, armed him, protected him.”), the relationship between Karzai and the Americans soon began to chill as investigators exposed corruption at all levels of government. When an aide was arrested, Karzai “felt the Americans had crossed a dangerous line, opening a new front in their campaign to unseat him and aiming further into his inner circle.” The president outraged the American even more by advocating reconciliation talks with the Taliban. “Some of them believed that Karzai had not just lost faith in the U.S. military’s chances at winning the war but had actively begun to undermine American goals in an attempt to hasten the superpower’s withdrawal,” Partlow writes.

  As American troop withdrawals commenced and Karzai’s term ended in 2014 he burnt the bridge even more. “The man who began the war as arguably the most pro-American Muslim leader in the world ended it with this message to the United States: thanks for nothing. ‘Americans did not want peace in Afghanistan,” Karzai said, ‘because it had its own agendas and goals here.’”

  Despite what seems as a disaster in retrospect, Partlow sees many positives from the Karzai reign.

  “He could take credit for balancing Afghan ethnic factions and perhaps preventing them from reverting to civil war. Millions of Afghans returned home during his government; millions of children, girls among them, enrolled in schools. His great political skill was compromise, and he used it to hold an improbable government together. He stood up to America and for his own people. He put the brakes on something that could have spiraled much further out of control.”

  We may have not seen the last of Hamid Karzai. The race for his successor was fraught with problems – it ended with a new division of power brokered by American Secretary of State John Kerry, and a Taliban resurgence has forced an increase in American troops. Through all this, Karzai remains on the sidelines, quietly pulling strings, awaiting the next election, his critics say.

  So we may see a return of “the puppet who wouldn’t dance.”

  Lee Scott lives in Avondale.

• The Washington Free Beacon
  Home Posted November 27, 2016 03:01 am By Lee Scott Book review: ‘A Kingdom of Their Own’ explores Karzai’s role in Afghanistan Comments 0 Share A KINGDOM OF THEIR OWN: THE FAMILY KARZAI AND THE AFGHAN DISASTER Author: Joshua Partlow See Also Florida State releases 2016 football schedule Baptist Health plans to open Baptist MD Anderson Cancer Center in Jacksonville in fall Data: Knopf, 424 pages, $30 By Lee Scott For the Times-Union Within a few weeks a third different administration will begin dealing with the longest war — and by some counts the most expensive — in which the United States has ever been involved. Trillions (that’s with a “T”) have been spent trying to force a U.S.-style republican form of government on an arid land forever ruled by tribes and religion. For 15 years, U.S. presidents, ambassadors, special envoys, generals, and soldiers have come and gone but the only constant in Afghanistan, besides death, has been Hamid Karzai. President Karzai, who became the country’s leader three months after September 11, served until 2014, when he was forced to retire because of term limits. In “A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster,” Washington Post reporter Joshua Partlow, writing with exceptional, and often exquisite, detail, explores Karzai, his family and his country. A popular pick in the beginning (“The U.S. government paid him, armed him, protected him.”), the relationship between Karzai and the Americans soon began to chill as investigators exposed corruption at all levels of government. When an aide was arrested, Karzai “felt the Americans had crossed a dangerous line, opening a new front in their campaign to unseat him and aiming further into his inner circle.” The president outraged the American even more by advocating reconciliation talks with the Taliban. “Some of them believed that Karzai had not just lost faith in the U.S. military’s chances at winning the war but had actively begun to undermine American goals in an attempt to hasten the superpower’s withdrawal,” Partlow writes. As American troop withdrawals commenced and Karzai’s term ended in 2014 he burnt the bridge even more. “The man who began the war as arguably the most pro-American Muslim leader in the world ended it with this message to the United States: thanks for nothing. ‘Americans did not want peace in Afghanistan,” Karzai said, ‘because it had its own agendas and goals here.’” Despite what seems as a disaster in retrospect, Partlow sees many positives from the Karzai reign. “He could take credit for balancing Afghan ethnic factions and perhaps preventing them from reverting to civil war. Millions of Afghans returned home during his government; millions of children, girls among them, enrolled in schools. His great political skill was compromise, and he used it to hold an improbable government together. He stood up to America and for his own people. He put the brakes on something that could have spiraled much further out of control.” We may have not seen the last of Hamid Karzai. The race for his successor was fraught with problems – it ended with a new division of power brokered by American Secretary of State John Kerry, and a Taliban resurgence has forced an increase in American troops. Through all this, Karzai remains on the sidelines, quietly pulling strings, awaiting the next election, his critics say. So we may see a return of “the puppet who wouldn’t dance.” Lee Scott lives in Avondale.
  Word count: 869

  The Rise and Fall of the Karzai Dynasty
  Review: Joshua Partlow, 'A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster'

  SHARE
  TWEET
  EMAIL
  Hamid Karzai, right, meets with tribal leaders in late 2001 / AP

  BY: Frank Freeman
  October 2, 2016 4:59 am

  A recent New York Times headline says it all: "15 Years Into Afghan War, Americans Would Rather Not Talk About It." A Kingdom of Their Own by Joshua Partlow, who was the Washington Post’s bureau chief in Kabul from 2009-2012, explains in agonizing detail why. He has told the story of America’s involvement in Afghanistan since 9/11 by telling the story of the Karzai family, many of whom were working in their own restaurants and living in America when 9/11 happened.

  Hamid Karzai was not, though; he was living in Pakistan in modest circumstances. At first, U. S. officials did not want him to be president of Afghanistan—he was not a significant player in the region—but he knew the different tribes and spoke the languages, including a British-accented English. He was a Pashtun, a member of the most powerful tribe in the country’s south. He was suave, smooth, a low-level diplomat who liked to meet with people and compromise. He would not embarrass American officials as a fragrant, bearded Afghan warlord might. With American help, he became president of Afghanistan on December 12, 2001. As one diplomat told Partlow, "What you have to remember about Hamid is, he was just a nice guy."

  Despite a bad start—at the Bonn conference where Karzai was chosen, it was obvious the Americans and international community had already picked him—Partlow describes how the Bush administration got along better with Karzai than President Obama. Bush would often have video conferences with Karzai, whereas Obama delegated that task to Joe Biden and an ambassador. The general message of Obama’s administration, via Richard Holbrooke and later David Petraeus, was that the Afghans needed to get out of the way of the power pouring money and men into Afghanistan’s reconstruction.

  A story about Biden illustrates this attitude. "Biden came with a message that Karzai needed to clean up his government and deliver services to the people and that he wouldn’t have the type of chummy relationship or easy access to Obama that he had enjoyed with Bush." As the discussion escalated into argument, "Biden chucked down his napkin." Partlow writes:

  This type of pressure tended to backfire. The Afghans present, even those with little sympathy for Karzai, found it offensive. They saw Biden as not just impolite but condescending. "He was talking as if he were negotiating with some wild mountain people who knew nothing. He was showing a lot of disrespect," Amrullah Saleh, Karzai’s intelligence chief at the time, told me. "Biden’s way of conducting that talk was not diplomatic. It shattered the image of American grandness. Slamming a cup. It’s over. This is not Hollywood. These are negotiations. … Karzai’s reaction was very decent. Very brave. Very courageous. He kept his composure. He was much higher than Biden."

  But military failures also abounded. Besides the infuriating replication of mistakes we made in Vietnam, such as one-year rotations of personnel, many bombings and night raids were disasters (some because of Afghan treachery). For instance, in 2012 a raid of a pharmacist suspected of being a "‘subcommander’ of the Haqqani insurgent network" ended with the suspect’s mother killed, his father wounded, and his aunt shot in the eye. When asked how they defined "subcommander," those in charge of the raid said the suspect had "an informal relationship with just one other suspected insurgent." Karzai asked, "Why didn’t you just arrest him on his fifteen-mile commute to the pharmacy?"

  Aside from their deadly mistakes, the Afghan political class in this book comes off as one of the most corrupt I’ve ever read about. Powerful men, two of them Karzai’s brothers, enriched themselves shamelessly. The Kabul Bank was a huge Ponzi scheme; most of the money ended up in foreign banks, and Hamid Karzai did little to bring the guilty to justice or recover money for the poor who had invested in a bank they trusted.

  Power and money tore the Karzai family apart. At the center stood Hamid, the quiet intellectual who became president. Partlow often praises him, and admits his basic achievements in a troubled country. "He wasn’t a despot, or vengeful, or cruel. He didn’t win the war or make peace with the Taliban. But when he left, there was still a democracy." Yet Partlow also displays the leader’s quirks, failures, obtuseness, and, gallingly, ingratitude to the American slain. Karzai had no words of gratitude for the United States during his last speech as president of Afghanistan. Partlow says this is because Karzai thought America had prolonged the war to serve its own ends. And so, "The man who began the war as arguably the most pro-American Muslim leader in the world ended it with this message to the United States: thanks for nothing."

• Fredricksburg.com
  http://www.fredericksburg.com/entertainment/arts/book-review-a-kingdom-of-their-own-delivers-comprehensive-engaging/article_2598e473-1dc4-558e-916e-f13ec0716fe8.html
  Word count: 366

  EDITOR'S PICK
  Book review: 'A Kingdom of their Own' delivers comprehensive, engaging insight to Afghan politics, US involvement
  By EMILY HOLLINGSWORTH THE FREE LANCE–STAR Jan 14, 2017 (0)
  A Kingdom of their Own
  A Kingdom of their Own
  With more than 8,000 United States soldiers stationed in Afghanistan since July and a new U.S. president taking office, the relationship between Afghanistan and the U.S. continues to change.

  “A Kingdom of Their Own,” by Washington Post reporter Joshua Partlow, follows the tenure of Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s first democratically elected president. Voted in only a few years after 9/11, Partlow covers Karzai’s impact in Afghanistan and the diplomatic shifts that took place between President Bush and President Obama.

  But it does not only cover the political aspect of the president’s life. Karzai’s past, his personality and beliefs, his siblings’ involvement in the U.S., and Afghanistan and America’s responses to his presidency is told in striking and engaging narration.

  The details that Partlow uses to tell the story even describe the logging company Mahmood, Hamid’s older brother, had worked for in Maryland and the various businesses he and his siblings had owned and operated in D.C. and Virginia.

  What makes this book so engaging is every detail it contains, which adds to the sensation that you are becoming directly involved with and understand Karzai, his family and the turbulent transitions Afghanistan was experiencing.

  The book also follows members of the U.S. government and their investigations of corruption concerns and attempts to lessen civilian deaths from the Afghanistan war.

  Equally engaging is Partlow’s direct experience in Afghanistan. He describes the political and domestic atmosphere and shares the voices of high-profile leaders and working-class people in small towns, who were impacted by the presidency in different ways.

  Contemporary history buffs and readers interested in the changing relations between Afghanistan and the U.S. will find a richly detailed timeline of Karzai’s life within and outside of the office.

  Emily Hollingsworth
  is a news assistant at the Free Lance-Star.

• Manhattan Book Review
  http://manhattanbookreview.com/product/a-kingdom-of-their-own-the-family-karzai-and-the-afghan-disaster/
  Word count: 274

  A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster
  We rated this book:
  $30.00

  Hamid Karzai would be the chosen one to lead Afghanistan, post 9/11, post Taliban overthrow. Karzai had previously extolled the rule of the Taliban but quickly grew wary of their fundamentalism and potential for tyranny. Karzai would collaborate with the CIA in battling the Taliban, and he would emerge as the predominant leader after the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud. The alliance with the US would last over a tumultuous decade, with initial success in the War on Terror. As the years went on, Karzai would be challenged by charges of corruption and drug running involving his brother Ahmed Wali. His reign would also be highlighted by factional challenges and assassination attempts. His military expertise would be questioned as the Taliban gained ground, and the Obama administration would take office and begin to shirk from outright support of Karzai. Hamid Karzai would need to navigate rough waters in his time as leader.

  A Kingdom of Their Own explores the leadership of one of the US’s tentative allies in the Global War on Terror. The Karzais are viewed from many angles: as diplomatic envoys, military leaders, politicians. Some hold positive views, others lean negative. Karzai’s reign can be more described as a stalemate. The man himself is an enigma but fascinating nonetheless.

  Reviewed By: Philip Zozzaro
  Author: Joshua Partlow
  Star Count: 5/5
  Format: Hard
  Page Count: 432 pages
  Publisher: Knopf
  Publish Date: 9/20/2016
  ISBN: 9780307962645
  Amazon: Buy this Book
  Issue: 12/1/2016
  Category: History

• NY Review of Books
  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/afghanistan-obamas-sad-legacy/
  Word count: 522

  Afghanistan: Obama’s Sad Legacy
  Carlotta Gall JANUARY 19, 2017 ISSUE
  A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster
  by Joshua Partlow
  Knopf, 422 pp., $30.00
  Hamid Karzai leaving the Interior Ministry after being sworn in as prime minister of Afghanistan’s interim government, Kabul, December 2001; photograph by Paula Bronstein from her book Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear, just published by University of Texas Press
  Paula Bronstein
  Hamid Karzai leaving the Interior Ministry after being sworn in as prime minister of Afghanistan’s interim government, Kabul, December 2001; photograph by Paula Bronstein from her book Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear, just published by University of Texas Press
  It is only two years since Hamid Karzai, leader of Afghanistan since the beginning of the American intervention, stepped down from the presidency, but amazingly many Afghans are regretting the day he left. Afghanistan is in a precarious state. The economy has taken a dive since 2014, when most American troops withdrew. Assistance programs and lucrative contracts have dried up and thousands have been put out of work. Insecurity has increased as the Taliban has sharply escalated its offensive to seize territory and unseat the Afghan government.

  Political divisions within the Afghan leadership compound the unease. President Ashraf Ghani, who took office in September 2014, appears isolated in the Arg, the former royal palace, at odds with his chief executive Abdullah Abdullah and most of the political leadership, while in a house just outside the palace walls, Karzai hosts a growing crowd of former ministers and wealthy supporters in a manner that hints at a political comeback. The mood among ordinary Afghans is one of disillusionment and nervousness. Taliban advances have won them control of more districts than any time in the last fifteen years and new groups swearing allegiance to the Islamic State have unleashed appalling violence.

  Afghan security forces and police are hemorrhaging men amid accusations of corruption and poor leadership—the army has been losing five thousand to six thousand men a month in casualties and desertions, while enlistment has fallen to two thousand a month. In Kabul government offices and embassies have disappeared further behind high concrete blast walls. Helicopters clatter constantly overhead as American and Afghan officials travel by air across the city rather than risk suicide attacks.

  While the country is in a state of national emergency, political leaders are locked in a power struggle. Ghani and Abdullah agreed to share power for two years in a government of national unity—brokered by John Kerry after widespread fraud rendered the 2014 election result inconclusive. But the two men have barely been able to agree on ministerial appointments, and the planned reforms to the electoral law and to the constitution have yet to take place. The two-year deadline passed in September amid fierce political maneuvering only after the Obama administration insisted that the unity government continue for the full five-year presidential term. Yet many worry that the arrangement is not functional.

  President Obama’s legacy in Afghanistan is disappointing. He made broad promises to focus on…

• South Asia Monitor
  http://southasiamonitor.org/news/afghanistan-the-band-of-brothers-book-review-/lite/21652
  Word count: 759

  Afghanistan: The band of brothers (Book Review)
  Posted:Jan 18, 2017

  Print Email Share increase Font size decrease Font size

  By Vikas Datta
  Title: A Kingdom of their Own - The Family Karzai and The Afghan Disaster; Author: Joshua Partlow; Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Pages: 432; Price: Rs 799

  What went wrong for the West in Afghanistan? Why couldn't a global coalition led by the world's preeminent military and economic power defeat "a bunch of farmers in plastic sandals on dirt bikes" in a conflict that outlasted both the World Wars combined? Was it the nature of the country, the flaw in the outcome they wanted, or their unreliable local allies?

  All of these may be contributing reasons but perhaps holding the key is the last reason, in particular the Karzai family, whose roller-coaster but ultimately downhill relations with the US mirrored in a way, that between the superpower and their war-torn country.

  But how did a relationship that began with such promise between the Karzais, several of whom had lived and flourished in the US before returning to their homes when the Taliban was chased out, turn so toxic, that President Hamid Karzai, who owed his accession and power to the US, went to the extent of calling his allies "demons"?

  Joshua Partlow, now The Washington Post’s bureau chief in Mexico, but its Kabul bureau chief 2009-12, seeks to tell how.

  Having travelled extensively across Afghanistan, from the Karzais' ancestral village to the Presidential Palace in Kabul, he has talked to a wide cross section of people, both Americans and Afghans, from President Karzai down to his far cousin - whose old vendetta with the more prominent section cost his family dear, and from politicians to diplomats, security men to businessmen, bankers to mullahs, to examine what went wrong and when.

  Partlow, who shared an Overseas Press Club award in 2010 for the best newspaper or news service reporting from abroad for their series on the war in Afghanistan with Rajiv Chandrasekaran (also known for chronicling US misadventures in Iraq in "Imperial Life in the Emerald City"), is no less scathing on US confusion, its divided responsibilities and efforts, its vicious turf fights, its misplaced priorities and above all, its penchant for "overkill". Several grim instances of the last are present in the book.

  It also unrolls a staggering tale of corruption and abuse of power in an impoverished country, hoping for peace and prosperity after decades of strife, but seeing excesses flourish unchecked despite the best efforts of a small band of earnest and dedicated Afghans and Americans who never received any support or were stopped before they could take their investigations to a logical end.

  But Partlow's main focus is on the Karzais - especially President Hamid, his half-brother Ahmed Wali, who was the top power in Kandahar, and businessmen Mahmood, though the story goes back in time to the 1980s. It also draws in the older generation - their father Abdul Ahad, and his half-brother Khalil Karzai, who could have become a prominent leader had he not fallen victim to a typical trait of the Pashtuns, in whose language the word for "cousin" and "rival" are the same.

  All the same, the author does not seek to pin blame on either side, but just chronicles the gulf separating a superpower, confident of its military and technological prowess solving any problem, and a still nearly-feudal state characterised by a bewildering mosaic of entrenched tribal loyalties, patronage networks and informal administrative systems and a penchant for conspiracy theories.

  And in the course of his account, Partlow is brilliantly incisive and vivid, inserting some unforgettable sights and sounds, or apt Pushto or Dari proverbs.

  But Partlow is kind on both the principal Karzai brothers. He makes a balanced assessment of the President, who is shown as personally honest, and notes the contrary American policy imperatives he was presented across his tenure. He is as fair as possible to Ahmed Wali, who inspired contrary feelings among his American interlocutors, some wary of him and wanting him out - despite finding no hard evidence, and many other who could not praise him enough for all his assistance.

  Ultimately, he indicates that Afghanistan was possibly a "Graveyard of Empires", not because of its men's fighting prowess, but because no outsider understood or appreciated its intricate, baffling dynamics to run it successfully.

  IANS

Word Count