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BY AMY DAVIDSON
There was a stray, sad moment in the joint press conference that President Obama held with President Hamid Karzai, of Afghanistan, that made one think of valor and loss. It came when Obama said that the Medal of Honor was being given to Staff Sergeant Clinton Romesha—for his actions in an ambush in which he was wounded and kept fighting, and exposed himself to more fire to get to stranded soldiers—just after reminding the audience that “two thousand of America’s sons and daughters” have died in a war that began more than a decade ago. And, after all that time, he still struggled to explain why.
Obama is the second President to stand in press conferences like that next to Karzai, who wore, as he does, a cape and karakul cap. It is strange to remember that, when we first met him, after the September 11th attacks, Tom Ford described him as “the chic-est man on the planet.” During his visit to New York in early 2002, eleven Januaries ago, the Times ran a piece explaining to readers that “the garments he had chosen, Afghan observers in America said, were a carefully assembled collection of regional political symbols, combined in a way that might look swashbuckling to the West, but could be read as something else by anyone back home.” The cape, worn “with such élan,” was “typical of clothes worn by northern tribesmen,” while the hat “is of an Uzbek style,” the pants of a type common among “village people.” Stranger still is that the deliberate way he chose his clothes once seemed so interesting—romantic, even.
They don’t anymore. The Karzai who was in Washington would strike no one as swashbuckling, unless the word is meant only to invoke pirates and looting. He had the half-weary, half-stubborn look of a man whose main concern is how to preserve the position and wealth his relatives and associates have accrued through corruption and graft. Because of term limits, he is scheduled to leave office after elections in April, 2014, so it may be tricky; then again, he more or less openly stole the last election. After Obama talked about how the withdrawal of American combat troops, scheduled for next year, might be achieved even more quickly, a reporter asked Karzai, “Do you have any sense of how many troops you would be willing to have?”
“Numbers are not going to make a difference to the situation in Afghanistan,” Karzai replied. “It’s the broader relationship that will make a difference to Afghanistan and beyond in the region.” Cynicism about Karzi has reached the point that one wondered, when Karzai said “the broader relationship,” if what he meant was money. (The other question that came to mind was who had the more mendacious negotiating partner: Obama, talking with Karzai; or Biden, sitting down with the N.R.A.)
Obama, for his part, looked like a man who might be sorry that he had, early in his Presidency, tripled the number of troops in Afghanistan. His nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense certainly supports that view. “Let me say it as plainly as I can: starting this spring, our troops will have a different mission,” he said. “That is a very limited mission, and it is not one that would require the same kind of footprint, obviously, that we’ve had over the last ten years in Afghanistan.” When a reporter asked about how America’s departure would affect Afghan women, Obama, with some feeling, spoke about how “Afghanistan cannot succeed unless it gives opportunity to its women,” and Karzai appended a distracted “Indeed, indeed.”
“I want us to remember why we went to Afghanistan,” Obama said. “We went into Afghanistan because three thousand Americans were viciously murdered by a terrorist organization that was operating openly and at the invitation of those who were then ruling Afghanistan.” He then spent a couple of minutes explaining why that was “absolutely the right thing to do”—and why we were done: “Have we achieved everything that some might have imagined us achieving in the best of scenarios? Probably not. This is a human enterprise and you fall short of the ideal.” Indeed.
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