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Book reveals Karzai fled Pakistan on motorcycle By By Umar Cheema 5/9/2008

NEW YORK: Afghan President Hamid Karzai had left Pakistan in 2001 on the directives of the ISI that set deadline of September 30 for him, plainly telling him that his visa would not be renewed.

Two years after the assassination of his father in Quetta allegedly by Taliban in which Karzai also implicated the ISI, he went back to Afghanistan riding a motorbike, with an old satellite phone. He gave the number of this phone only to the American and British diplomats posted in Islamabad, a new book has revealed.

Shortly before his departure from Quetta, a plan that he kept secret, two ISI officers came to his residence to guess his intentions. He asked them to leave his residence. He held a flurry of meetings with different diplomats in Islamabad, before leaving Pakistan, strongly hinting that he was going back to his country. Karzai was offered a little help by one embassy but not more than a satellite phone that he refused to accept. The time he left, he was in severe shortage of money that his brother arranged for him.

Descent into Chaos — a new book with telling details about the ISI links with Taliban, al-Qaeda’s role in Afghanistan and the apathetic attitude of the world powers towards this war-torn country ó- reveals horrific details when it would hit bookstalls, next month.

Ahmad Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who earlier authored books including Jihad, Taliban, and The Resurgence of Central Asia, has written this volume to be made available on bookshops by June 2.

“A Man with a Mission” the first chapter of the book contains firsthand accounts of President Karzai that he shared with the author whom he met in Lahore in 2001 to consult on ISI directives, nine weeks before the expiry of ‘deadline’: September 30.

This chapter also unfolds Karzai’s chequered history of relations with Taliban whom he gave fifty thousand dollars plus a cache of weapons by the time they captured Kandahar and that Taliban later wanted to appoint him as their ambassador in the United Nations.

Pakistan’s Foreign Office that was interviewing Taliban’s diplomat corps, called Karzai for interview but he refused doing this, so he could not be appointed ambassador. And when his relations with Taliban deteriorated later, they wanted to assassinate him after killing his father in Quetta. Karzai defied Pakistani and Taliban authorities when he drove his father’s body for burial in Kandahar, his hometown, accompanying a three-hundred-vehicle convoy of family members, mourners and tribal chiefs-in-exile.

But Karzai told the author that Taliban turned against him well before killing his father, by the time when “they were taken over by ISI and became proxy”. Karzai had been living in Pakistan since 1983 (except for sometimes when he served with Mujaddedi) until his ‘deportation’ in 2001. By the time Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he went to Himachal Pradesh University in northern India to study political science.

Born in 1958 in Kandahar, he was the fourth of eight children of his father. Except for him and his brother Ahmad Wali, all have immigrated to the United States, a typically tragic Afghan diaspora of Soviet invasion.

After completing studies in India, Karzai, who has command over six languages, came to Pakistan and affiliated with the National Liberation Front of Afghan leader, Sibghatullah Mujaddedi. First he served as his foreign policy adviser and later as his deputy foreign minister when Mujaddedi became Afghan President, years before Taliban took over. Karzai’s family settled in Quetta in 1994 and he later started living with them. When he was directed to leave Pakistan, a couple of years after his father’s killing, he got worried, took the warning seriously and shared with journalist friend, Ahmad Rashid.

“The ISI told Karzai that he could no longer stay in Pakistan, his visa would not be renewed, and he must leave the country with his family by September 30,” the book disclosed. The author claimed himself to be Karzai’s close friend.

“We both (Hamid Karzai and Ahmad Rashid) knew that the expulsion order was as much a death threat as it was a warning and it could not be taken lightly,” the author writes. We both knew who had really ordered his expulsion: Mullah Muhammad Omer, the leader of the Taliban in Kandahar,” the author further narrates, recalling his conversation with Karzai when he spent a night at his residence in Lahore. “Karzai’s father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, had been murdered by the Taliban in 1999 ó- an assassination that Karzai believes also implicated the ISI”.

The author writes that a number of weeks after his meeting with Karzai, the incident of 9/11 took place. Karzai was in Islamabad walking on the Margalla Hills on the evening of September 11, when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Centre. His younger brother Ahmad Wali Karzai called him from Quetta and told him about this tragic incident.

Over the next few days Karzai met with diplomats from all major Western embassies, hinting strongly that he was preparing to go into Afghanistan. He was offered little immediate help, except from the British, in the form of a satellite phone which he declined to accept. When he returned to Quetta, his house was crowded with tribal elders wanting to know his plans. The ISI sent around two officers also to try to discover his intentions. The latter (ISI) were politely asked to leave without being offered a cup of tea ó- a sure insult.

Karzai told only a handful of people knew of his plans, his wife, his brother among them. A few days later he asked Ahmad Wali (brother) to get hold of some money because he had no funds. Then, packing an old satellite phone, whose number he gave to the Americans and British, he got onto a motorbike and, with a few friends, headed into Afghanistan.