Karzai, Bonn and the Long Resurgence of the Taliban
From Kandahar to Bonn
By the time Kandahar fell on 7 December 2001, foreign diplomats and Afghan factions were already gathered in a hotel above the Rhine in Bonn, Germany. The United Nations had brought four delegations together: the Northern Alliance, two exile groups based in Rome and Cyprus, and a Pashtun delegation from Peshawar. The Taliban were excluded. The Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, working for the UN, chaired the talks. Their job was to agree what came next: a transitional administration, a roadmap to a constitution and elections, and an international force to keep order in Kabul.
The December 2001 Bonn Conference brought four Afghan delegations together but excluded the Taliban. It chose Hamid Karzai as interim leader, set out a roadmap to a Loya Jirga and elections, and authorised the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to keep order in Kabul.
Hamid Karzai and the Bonn Agreement
The Bonn delegates needed a Pashtun figure to balance the Tajik and Uzbek dominance of the Northern Alliance. They chose Hamid Karzai, an English-speaking Popalzai tribal leader from Kandahar whose father had been assassinated by the Taliban in 1999. The Bonn Agreement, signed on 5 December 2001, made him chairman of an Afghan Interim Administration for six months. While the talks were ending, Karzai was on the ground in Uruzgan province nearly killed by an American air strike that hit the wrong target. He was inaugurated in Kabul on 22 December.
ISAF and the Light Western Footprint
UN Security Council Resolution 1386, passed on 20 December 2001, authorised the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to maintain security in Kabul and its surrounding area. The early ISAF was deliberately small: around 4,500 troops drawn from 18 countries, led at first by Britain and then by Turkey. Outside Kabul, security was left to regional warlords whom the United States and Britain had bought as allies during the campaign — Abdul Rashid Dostum in the north, Ismail Khan in Herat, Gul Agha Sherzai in Kandahar. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary, refused requests from Karzai and Brahimi to expand ISAF outside Kabul. The light footprint was a deliberate choice and it shaped everything that followed.
Bonn had promised an emergency Loya Jirga — a Pashto term meaning ‘grand assembly’ — to confirm a transitional government. It met in Kabul in June 2002 and elected Karzai head of state. A constitutional Loya Jirga in December 2003 produced a new constitution in January 2004: an Islamic republic with a strong elected president, a national assembly and equal rights for women on paper. In October 2004 Karzai was elected president with 55% of the vote in the country’s first direct presidential election. The procedural milestones of the Bonn process were largely met. The political reality on the ground was less reassuring.
The Problems Karzai Faced
Karzai inherited four overlapping problems. The first was warlordism: regional commanders ran their provinces as personal fiefdoms, kept their militias, taxed the population and, in some cases, ran the police. The second was the opium economy. Afghanistan had produced about 185 tonnes of opium in 2001 under Taliban suppression; by 2007 it was producing 8,200 tonnes — over 90% of the world’s heroin supply — and the trade funded both warlords and a returning insurgency. The third was corruption. Police salaries went unpaid for months at a time, ministers awarded contracts to relatives and the Kabul Bank scandal of 2010 would later expose nearly $1 billion missing. The fourth was Karzai’s own legitimacy: he was widely nicknamed ‘the Mayor of Kabul’, partly because of how little authority he had outside the capital and partly because his personal security depended on a US contractor team.
The Resurgence of the Taliban
The Taliban had fled in late 2001 rather than fight to the death. Many crossed into Pakistan’s tribal areas, where ISI sympathisers and a sympathetic Pashtun population sheltered them. From 2002 they began rebuilding. By 2005 a low-level insurgency was reaching across southern and eastern Afghanistan. NATO took over command of ISAF from August 2003, expanded it nationwide from 2006, and committed itself to the south — British forces deployed to Helmand Province from May 2006 expecting a peacekeeping role and finding themselves in some of the heaviest fighting British troops had seen since the Falklands.
Three factors fed the resurgence. First, the Taliban’s sanctuary in Pakistan’s tribal areas was never closed; ISI elements continued quiet support, and US drone strikes were politically constrained until 2008. Second, the Karzai government’s failure to deliver justice, jobs or honest policing in southern districts left openings the Taliban filled with shadow courts that paid villagers more reliably than the state. Third, opium money paid for fighters, weapons and motorcycles. Western forces fought campaign after campaign — Operation Mountain Thrust 2006, Operation Medusa, the years of bloody fighting in Sangin from 2006 — without ever shutting down the supply of recruits coming north out of Pakistan.
By 2006 the Taliban had recovered enough to launch a sustained insurgency in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Helmand opium funded fighters; Pakistan’s tribal areas housed their leadership; the Karzai government’s weakness gave them political openings. The 2001 victory had not held.