Word: rome
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...which makes Karzai's mission to Rome later this week especially important. He is going there to bring back the country's exiled King, Mohammed Zahir Shah, in an effort to reconstitute national unity. The King's 40-year reign, the country's last taste of peace and prosperity, was ended by a coup in 1973 while the monarch was in Italy for mud-bath treatments. At an interview with TIME, the King appeared in notably better health than he did five months ago, when world leaders began looking to him to help fill the vacuum left by the Taliban...
...called on to take the throne to spare his nation from potentially bloody turmoil. He would go on to rule Afghanistan for 40 years, bringing an era of relative peace and prosperity and unprecedented democratic reforms. Displayed prominently today in Zahir Shah's plush, carpeted living room in Rome is a 1949 photograph of himself in military uniform, his piercing dark eyes projecting a certain pride in his benevolent regime...
Zahir Shah, 87, is expected to touch down this week in Kabul for the first time since he was ousted in a bloodless coup by a cousin in 1973. Security will be extraordinary as the former King is accompanied from Rome by interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai. Both Karzai's presence and the tight security are signs that Afghanistan's good guys and bad guys alike believe the royal leader may possess a singular power to unify the fractured nation. A European official with extensive experience in the region said the ex-monarch's popular support is remarkably strong...
Though he plans to continue to shuttle between Kabul and Rome, where most of his family will remain, Zahir Shah says his return to Afghanistan is permanent. With the royal palace virtually destroyed, the ex-King and his small delegation will be staying in a cluster of hilltop residences that once housed the royal court and later top Taliban leaders...
Whatever the accommodations, Zahir Shah says he has no ambitions to retake the throne. "My principle is that I am subject to the free will of the people," he told Time during a rare interview at his house in Rome. Sitting cross-legged on a living room couch in his contemporary-style concrete villa in the northern part of the city, Zahir Shah described his mixed emotions on the eve of his return: "It has been a great desire to be back among the Afghan people. But there will also be great sadness and nostalgia for all that has happened...