Word: kabul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...insurgency has intensified, so has carping about Karzai's failings--not just his physical remoteness but also his willingness to placate the country's warlords, his failure to take on government corruption, even his inability to get the traffic lights working in Kabul. The very qualities that catapulted Karzai to power and burnished his celebrity abroad--his flair, openness and old-world gentility--now seem to be exactly the wrong traits for a leader of a developing country at war with itself. "He brought a new face to Afghanistan by being nice to everybody," says Ahmad Nader Nadery, head...
Karzai says, "What the world should see is the desire of the Afghan people, not the problems we have along the way." A first-time visitor to Kabul is struck by the relative normality of the place, the absence of the barbed wire, blast walls and paranoia that have become familiar in Baghdad. The roads bustle with traffic--the number of cars in Kabul has tripled since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Garish new building projects loom over some of Kabul's oldest, poorest slums, dramatizing the extent to which the country is beginning to emerge from decades...
...much for the good news. Venture outside Kabul, and the reality of the country's blight becomes overwhelming. Sixty percent of the country is still without electricity, 80% without potable water. Unemployment hovers around 40%. The absence of credible police and consistent government services in rural areas has created vacuums that are being filled by an array of antigovernment forces: Islamists in the south, '80s-era warlords in the west and drug runners in the north. Meanwhile, the fighting between coalition troops and the Taliban has halted new reconstruction projects and undermined the impact of finished ones. Only half...
...rise of the insurgency. They're more likely to share his view that culpability for the Taliban's resurgence lies with Pakistan, for harboring the movement's leaders (a charge Pakistan denies), and with the U.S., for not committing sufficient troops to fight them. In a visit to Kabul last week, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf vowed to do more to curb the support the insurgents receive from their brethren, but Karzai has yet to be convinced. "That is what I want the international community to focus on," he says...
...demands he faces: working 14-hour days, he hasn't taken a vacation in five years. Karzai's burdens are compounded by his isolation. He rarely leaves his compound, although he says he recently slipped out of the palace in an unmarked car to press the flesh in Kabul. For all his ebullience, he can't help sounding weary from having to shoulder so much of the responsibility, and the blame, for Afghanistan's turbulent rebirth. "Our expectations were too high. My own expectations were too high," he says. "We came, we thought the neighbors were going to be good...