Hamid Karzai
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Hamid Karzai was the president of Afghanistan through most of the American occupation, and in John Kiriakou's usage he functions as a measurement rather than a biography.

Asked why plans that look straightforward on paper collapse in practice, Kiriakou answered with Afghanistan: "look at Afghanistan. After years and years, Hamid Karzai was really little more than the mayor of Kabul, and even then, he didn't control all of Kabul."

The accounting that follows is the point of the example: "20 years of American occupation, more than a trillion dollars spent, and still we're facing enemies as soon as we leave the city limits. It's not a way to run a war."

He raises it as a caution against the assumption that seizing a capital settles a country, the assumption underlying the four requirements of a coup as applied to Venezuela.

Where the phrase comes from

The formulation is older than the podcast circuit. It was a joke among Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff while Kiriakou worked there, already ten years into the war, aimed at the false belief that the central government in Kabul controlled the countryside, it controlled very little.

He used it directly on Senator John Kerry. Ten years after the start of the war, coming out of a briefing, Kerry said "we may actually win this thing." Kiriakou's reply was that they would not: it was the same briefing the committee had been given for a decade. "Hamid Karzai is the mayor of Kabul. That's it. The Taliban's got the rest of the country ... That's just happy talk from the generals because they know that you have the ability to hold up their budget."

An installed government

Kiriakou's account of how Karzai came to office is that the United States dispensed with the Afghan system rather than working through it: told that Afghans had chosen leaders their own way for thousands of years, Washington's answer was that it did not like that, there would be an election instead, and it had a man for it, Karzai, whose brother ran a popular Afghan restaurant in Baltimore. When the Afghans said they did not want that kind of system, the reply was "we're not asking you, we're telling you." Kiriakou sets that against the absence of any comparable democratic demand on Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain or Egypt.

The relationship with the agency was direct and transactional. Where a foreign leader is on the books, Kiriakou says, the CIA station chief walks straight into the office for the meeting, suitcases full of money and all that goes with it, and Karzai is now known to have been such a case. Asked how such a person is kept from getting out of control, his answer is Manuel Noriega: the United States overthrew him, kidnapped him, occupied his country and jailed him for life. "It's like you're fired."

Loyalty on both sides at once

The limits of the government Karzai headed show up in Kiriakou's smaller stories. In 2010 he met a man in Afghanistan who saw no conflict at all between working by day for Karzai's Northern Alliance government as an irrigation expert and going out at night with the Taliban to blow up irrigation canals, the great cycle of life for these people, in his telling, with no contradiction felt on either side.

See also

- The four requirements of a coup
- The Taliban
- Renting Afghan warlords
- Afghan heroin policy
