Interview: Talking to Afghan President Karzai

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Some of your closest aides are suspected of stealing land, drug smuggling and having illegal militias, Your military advisor, General Dostom, has been accused of kidnapping and resisting arrest. Yet you balked at arresting him. Why do you still protect these people?
Ah, Dostom. [Laughs]

He still has a militia, even if he denies it. So do several other former commanders. They just call them security companies.
If you call militias a security company, then we don't have them. it's all the internationals. For the past few years, one of our biggest sources of contention with the international community has been their use of security companies. Private security companies. That still is one of our very serious differences with the international community. We consider them as one of the reasons for insecurity on our highways. So this is something, that not do we not support, but we publicly and officially are very much against. It is something with which I have called on all members of the international community, I have called on all of the ambassadors.

But these security companies are militias run by former commanders.
And funded by the international community.

The commanders are still in your government.
They are not funded by us. They are funded by the international community because there is nothing we can do. We are against it , we are against it, we have been public, we have been officially clear about this, this is something that we must put an end to in Afghanistan. The Ministry of Interior closed down many of them.

But there are still many operating.
This is not our problem. This is unfortunately a consequence of this partnership [between the international community and commanders with militias].

But you do have Dostom as an advisor. He has broken the law. There are witnesses. And yet you have been unable to bring him to justice.
Warlords and their relationship with the international community is nothing I can do anything about. And their contracts, and the security firms.

Why will the international community not listen to you? What is the gain? I just came back from the north where the level of crime has skyrocketed due to the actions of some of these commanders. Rape, kidnapping. And nothing is happening.
I have taken action on some of these cases. I have removed a governor, some police chiefs and I will do more. And yesterday I investigated a matter of very serious importance in another province. Maybe Khunduz. I am very serious about that. there is something that I hope very much that our international backers will see the Afghan point of view, which they have not seen so far.

Which is?
The Afghan point of view is cut relations, stop backing them [the warlords]. Stop giving them contracts, stop arming them, and stop using them as political tools. Absolutely they are using them as political tools.

Why can you not say stop then?
What does stop mean? Stop. Will you stop writing? Stop is not the solution. I have to run this country. I have to take it forward with all the problems that it has. If someone in the international community is backing the warlords, and I say stop, and they don't stop, what is the next option? I tell them to leave this country? Pack up and leave Afghanistan? Take their money away, take their troops away? Then what? Will we be better off? Or will Afghanistan be worse off?
Here it comes a point where as the leader of the country I must judge my distance in action. Will I go the full way? Or will I stop short of doing that? In other words, in order to have a warlord arrested, an offender, not just a warlord, arrested and put for trial, should I go to the extent of causing so much annoyance in an ally, for them to leave, or should I stop short and continue to make the best of the situation?

Are you speaking here about Dostom? Are you saying that he has international support? Do you extend that to mean that he also has local support, in terms of the Uzbek population of Afghanistan of which he is the leader? And can you afford to lose that following?
I am always very considerate. No Afghan people will go with offenders. Law has to be applied, and I have to think of the circumstances to which I can apply the law to the best interests of the Afghan people. that is something that I have to consider, and I have considered, and I have been criticized for, by my fellow Afghans, for being too considerate in these circumstances. And I have been too considerate. I think I was right. I have to judge.
See I came to power in this country when there was no government. No institutions, no laws were applied. There was a time when someone had taken two daughters of a man away — this was in 2002 — and the then chief justice [Fazl Hadi] Shinwari came to me, and said we have no police, we cannot take him [the kidnapper] by the force of the law. So I decided to persuade him. By persuasion we were able to take one of the girls back, and then the other daughter and deliver them back to their house.
There was a time in those years where we didn't even have law to deal with situations like that. Now six years down the line, we come to know of all that happens in Afghanistan. And in a lot of cases, we have the ability to act, for which we are grateful to the international community because of their presence, their backing and their resources, and the help we have been given. Otherwise we could not, unfortunately still, have been able to function the way we should. It will take some more time, and we will have to wait, and work towards that day.

in 2002, U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said "we will not sacrifice security in the name of justice," talking about this very issue of warlords, who had been allied with western forces in defeating the Taliban. But six years on, we still have neither security nor justice.
At that point, that was the right thing.

And now?
Six years on, it is not like that. We have examples of justice sacrificed in the name of security, but the overall situation is not like that. The overall situation is where we act and we defend and we bring offenders to law, and we put them in jail. Even government offenders.

And then they pay a bribe and are freed.
Well, that is a different problem.

That is a big problem.
That is not the problem of the application of law, that is the problem of the system not being ready to handle the situation. That happens in many countries that have been here for a long time.