KEY POINTS:
The routine lack of routine that is life in Kabul has been restored. No United States presidential hopefuls are in town, with their hordes of advisers and staff, the TV anchors have gone, moving on with the razzmatazz of an American election campaign.
President Hamid Karzai is able to ponder the past few days when Democratic contender Barack Obama blew through, travelling by [American] helicopter to the east of Afghanistan to offer his condolences to families of dozens of civilians killed in an [American] air strike two weeks ago.
He swept into Kabul at the weekend, and then was gone. The complexities of the presidential diary are revealing. For the bittersweet story of Karzai is also the bittersweet story of the Western involvement with Afghanistan.
In the heady aftermath of the 2001 war, everything seemed possible and Karzai, with his hawk nose, multicoloured Uzbek cape and astrakhan hat, was, like his country, handsome, brave, rugged, exotic and romantically wreathed in gunsmoke. Convincing both at home and abroad, effective enough to be useful, malleable enough not to be a threat, he was the perfect friend in a far-flung land.
Seven years on, Karzai, like his country, has become a problem. Tricky, conservative, proud, prickly, his views, like those of his countrymen, are not always those of his Western interlocutors. He does not do what he is told. In short, he is a bit too Afghan. But then so, as we are discovering, is Afghanistan.
Karzai was born in 1957 in the village of Karz, in the province of Kandahar, one of eight children of the chief of the 500,000-strong Popalzai and thus a scion of one of the most powerful tribes of Afghanistan.
Educated in Kabul and in India, he was 22 when the Soviets invaded his homeland.
For the next decade, based in Pakistan, Karzai was involved in liaison for a mujahideen faction. In 1992, he was with the first group of mujahideen leaders into a liberated Kabul and then watched the West walk away and his country dissolve into anarchy and civil war.
So when a religious militia known as the Taleban established rule of law in the mid-90s from bases in his native Kandahar, Karzai, like many Afghans, supported them. Despite his apparent Westernisation, the President is, though far from an intolerant fundamentalist, a devout man.
He never touches alcohol - abroad or in private - and prays five times a day. His piety is allied to a social conservatism that sees his wife, a medical doctor, kept out of sight. Mrs Karzai was not much in evidence during the Obama visit.
The excesses of the Taleban, as well as their probable murder of his father and the support they received from Pakistani intelligence services, turned Karzai against them. But with nobody very interested in Afghanistan, lobbying in Western capitals went nowhere. Until 9/11 changed everything.
Just under two months after the attack, Karzai, armed with little more than a satellite phone, some CIA contact numbers, his old mujahideen networks and the loyalty owed to him as chief of the Popalzai, headed into Afghanistan. It was an very brave gamble and it paid off. By December 2001, with the Taleban temporarily destroyed, and the old mujahideen leaders dead or discredited, he was the obvious man to take power.
Impressive in Western capitals, Karzai is at his best in Kabul where the painfully blue sky, the snowy mountains on the horizon, the danger, the wood smoke, the hawkers, the poverty and the simple fact of being there combine with the altitude to half stun many visiting statesmen.
"He's well-read, funny and can talk about everything from 19th-century politics to poetry to pots," says one Westerner who has dealt closely with him.
Karzai is also charismatic and, for a head of state, unpretentious. In interviews, he often sits on the edge of his chair, listening intently, barely able to contain his desire to act.
With Karzai head of an interim government backed by billions in international aid, endorsed by a traditional loya jirga assembly of tribal leaders, embraced by half the statesman of the planet, elected President for a five-year term in an astonishing and moving poll, 2002 saw the climax of the sudden love affair between the new Afghan leader and his country and the West. And then things started going downhill.
This was not inevitable. Part of the bitterness that Karzai will have sought to hide from Obama is a consequence of the unforced nature of the failures in Afghanistan. Errors in Iraq made a very tough job virtually impossible. Errors in Afghanistan have made a delicate task much harder.
One early error was the decision to opt for "nation building lite". The West did the easy bits of Afghanistan first. So Kabul, the relatively stable north, the prosperous western city of Herat all saw funds, troops and development while the tough and dangerous southeast was left to rot.
So in came the consultants, the private contractors but far fewer soldiers with far less expertise in post-conflict or counter-insurgency training than were needed. Instead of a massive military presence that could be downscaled to tighter, focused, special forces operations, the opposite happened. Early military expeditions in search of al Qaeda/Taleban were laughably clumsy. Development progress was painfully slow. And then everyone got distracted by Iraq.
It was 2006 before anyone woke up, despite Karzai's increasingly shrill alarm calls. In Kabul and the stable areas, the change in five years had been enormous. Anyone who had seen Taleban Afghanistan could not but be impressed by the new telephone networks, reconstruction and commercial activity. But while everyone looked away, the Taleban had regrouped, al Qaeda had found a new safe haven in Pakistan, drugs production had exploded and in Kandahar's hospitals small children were still dying of malnutrition.
The militants, with the complicity of opium and heroin smugglers, had filled the vacuum the West and the pitifully weak Afghan Government had left.
When the British went into southern Helmand as part of a massive new Western deployment, they got a much nastier reception than anticipated and rows broke out between London and Kabul over political and military strategy. Relations between Karzai and British policy-makers became venomous. The Westerners were depicted as arrogant, blundering neo-imperialists.
Karzai was dismissed as "the mayor of Kabul", an insult based partly in frustration at the President's seeming inability to impose his will in the provinces. Certainly, his air of decisiveness and energy hides a failure to energise or control even his close associates.
"It's bewildering," said a former diplomat. "You'd expect him to be charging around firing off memos, harassing subordinates ... but that isn't his style. The exercise of power itself doesn't seem to interest him - or perhaps he is just not very good at it."
Yet Karzai's defenders point out that no central government in Afghanistan has ever done anything other than rule through co-opted local power-brokers.
"This is not Sweden," said one aide. Relations have not recovered.
Karzai is infuriated by foreigners' blithe assumption that they "understand the Afghan" better than he and by misspent aid money. He is genuinely outraged and wounded by the continued civilian casualties caused by hamfisted military strikes.
Angry and bellicose sallies against Pakistan, which he blames for much of the violence in his country, are symptomatic of a deep frustration with the failure of the international community to grasp the regional nature of the conflict as much as traditional Afghan anti-Pakistani sentiment.
Among the international community, there is frustration about a lack of progress on justice, accountability and women's rights, principles which do not necessarily always agree with Karzai's conservative views.
With security deteriorating, contact between the "internationals" and the Afghans, whether President or pauper, is now minimal. Westerners increasingly move in heavily armed convoys, live behind blast walls and ship in their supplies from abroad. Once welcomed, they are becoming just the latest in the series of powers over the centuries that have hoped to shape Afghanistan, if not in their image, then as they would like.
As the gulf widens, the unpleasant realisation is growing, perhaps none too soon, that Afghanistan is not just exotic and quaint but is very, very different and that Westerners here, American presidential hopefuls included, are a very, very long way from home.
* The Karzai lowdown
Born in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, on December 24, 1957, the hereditary chief of the Popalzai. His father was an MP and supported King Zahir Shah.
Gained an MA in political science at Shimla in India. In 1999 he married Dr Zeenat Quraishi. They have a son, Mirwais.
Best of times
Already President of the Afghan Transitional Administration, Karzai won 55.4 per cent of the vote in the 2004 Afghan presidential election. He was officially sworn in as the first elected President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan on December 7, 2004.
Worst of times
Karzai's father Abdul Ahad Karzai was assassinated by, it's thought, the Taleban while organising resistance from his base in Quetta, Pakistan, in August 1999. Karzai himself survived an assassination attempt in December 2001.
What he says
"It was terrorism that brutalised the whole of Afghanistan. They tried to give it names and justifications, and those names and justifications were ethnic or political, but it was clearly a terrorist movement, backed by outsiders, to take Afghanistan."
What others say
"He is a strong and courageous advocate for the freedom and independence of his country and people." George Rupp, president of the International Rescue Committee.
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