Hamid Karzai's tangled legacy: inept failure or anti-Taliban hero? --- A look at the extraordinary career of the Afghan president, the leader first hailed by the west who is now widely attacked for his perceived weaknesses, as he prepares to give up power --- Amid the dust and traffic of today's Kabul, three things remain almost as they were a decade or so ago. In winter, and when the wind clears the smog that is a side-effect of years of economic boom, the blue sky above the snowcapped peaks that ring the city is as impressive as ever. Then there is the Arg, the sprawling palace at the city's centre and the apparently calm eye of a turbulent storm of a country. The complex is home to the third element that has remained constant since the end of the Taliban's grim regime in 2001: Hamid Karzai, now in his 13th year of power. -- However, Karzai, 56, will soon be gone. He is constitutionally barred from contesting next weekend's elections and soon this theatrical, mercurial, complex man will have to find a new occupation. Many, particularly in Washington, will be relieved. -- Once, the prospect of Karzai losing power would have provoked a different reaction. Back in the chaotic days of late 2001, as the Taliban regime crumbled under the US assault launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Karzai was seen as a the man of the hour. He was the head of a major tribe, of Pashtun ethnicity like the apparently defeated Taliban and around 40% of his compatriots, but moderate, educated and pro-western. Officials in Washington, Kabul and London enthused about their new-found Afghan hero. Few are as gushing now. If, as three western ambassadors to Afghanistan told me during their respective terms in the Afghan capital, the relationship between US policymakers and Karzai was "like a marriage, with its ups and downs" this union has ended in definitive, and acrimonious, divorce. -- Once, the prospect of Karzai losing power would have provoked a different reaction. Back in the chaotic days of late 2001, as the Taliban regime crumbled under the US assault launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Karzai was seen as a the man of the hour. He was the head of a major tribe, of Pashtun ethnicity like the apparently defeated Taliban and around 40% of his compatriots, but moderate, educated and pro-western. Officials in Washington, Kabul and London enthused about their new-found Afghan hero. Few are as gushing now. If, as three western ambassadors to Afghanistan told me during their respective terms in the Afghan capital, the relationship between US policymakers and Karzai was "like a marriage, with its ups and downs" this union has ended in definitive, and acrimonious, divorce. -- When Moscow sent troops to bolster a faltering hardline Marxist regime in Kabul, Karzai fled. In 1992 he was with the first group of mujahideen leaders to enter a liberated Kabul and then watched the west ignore his country as it descended into anarchy and civil war. When the Taliban emerged in his native Kandahar, Karzai, like many Afghans, saw them as capable of bringing peace, or at least calm. He soon changed his mind and began lobbying for western aid for an effort to overthrow the hardline movement. This was a futile exercise until the 9/11 attacks, when everything changed. -- Just under two months after the attack, Karzai, armed with little more than a satellite phone, some CIA contact numbers and the hoped-for loyalty of his tribe, drove into Afghanistan. Foolhardy perhaps, but undeniably brave. By December 2001 the Taliban had been displaced, if not defeated, and the old mujahideen leaders were dead or discredited. Karzai was the right man in the right place. After consultations with representatives of key communities, he was installed, with some quiet celebration in Washington, as the leader of Afghanistan. -- "The mood at this time was pretty positive. He was seen as a good guy – thoughtful, knowledgeable, good internationally, good credentials, known quantity. It wasn't as if people said, 'Hey, he's all we've got'. It was much more positive than that," said one former US official closely involved at the time. -- There followed something of a honeymoon, for Afghanistan and for the newly joined couple of Karzai and the US. Draped in a distinctive Afghan chapan coat over well-cut suits and a Karakul hat, Karzai was fêted around the world. Heads of state were charmed by his oddly plummy English vowels – a legacy from his studies at a university in a former hill station beloved of British Raj administrators in India – and his conversation too. "He's well read, funny and can talk about everything from 19th-century politics to poetry to pots," said Rory Stewart, a British MP who dealt closely with Karzai at the time. Elections held in 2004 ratified Karzai's rule. In Washington and elsewhere, it appeared that the Afghan leader could do little wrong. For those who had seen Afghanistan under the bleak rule of the Taliban, the transformation was astonishing. -- Yet the next round of elections – in 2009 – saw everything change. According to Robert Gates, the former US defence secretary, Washington was so keen to oust the Afghan president that officials connived in delaying an Afghan presidential election in 2009 and then tried to manipulate the outcome in a "clumsy and failed putsch". How could so much go so wrong so quickly? The answer lies as much in the broader failings of the international effort in Afghanistan as in the specific relationship between its elected leader and officials on the other side of the world. --- Karzai blamed the west and Pakistan. The west, in part, blamed Karzai. Like Afghanistan generally, he might once have been seen as exotic, romantic and broadly friendly, but now had apparently become fractious, prickly and increasingly independent-minded. The system of government he had built was defiantly non-western, relying not on institutions but on individuals, key power-brokers prized for their loyalty and forgiven for faults that horrified overseas observers. None of this had been in the game plan. - More, Jason Burke - Guardian, at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/30/hamid-karzai-afghanistan-tangled-legacy-taliban