By ALISSA J. RUBIN
On July 22, a few days before Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, retired from his post, The New York Times interviewed him in his residence in Kabul.
Mr. Crocker had been a Foreign Service officer in the State Department since 1971, and served extensively in the Arab world, including stints as ambassador to Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait and Iraq. He has also been ambassador to Pakistan. He retired on Friday as ambassador to Afghanistan, where he had previously served as deputy chief of mission and in 2002, he reopened the American Embassy in Kabul after the Taliban regime fell.
The following is a transcript of his answers to some of the questions posed by The Times. Brief explanations have been provided in brackets where necessary.
On the likelihood of a peace deal with the Taliban:
I am increasingly persuaded there is no “the Taliban.†I think it is an increasingly factionalized movem ent, some of whose members stand totally against any form of reconciliation and others who want to pursue it.
If a reconciliation comes, it's not going to be a grand bargain, I don't think. It's going to be piecemeal: individuals here, individuals there. I consider that a realistic possibility.
I don't think you'll ever get the Haqqanis or Mullah Omar and those closest to him. [The Haqqanis are a family-run insurgent and criminal network based in Miran Shah, Pakistan, in the largely ungoverned tribal areas. They are believed to be responsible for some of the more complex terrorist attacks in Kabul and elsewhere in the country. Mullah Mohammed Omar is the leader of the Taliban and is believed to be in hiding in Pakistan.]
On whether, in retrospect, it was a mistake to include warlords in the government at the beginning after the Taliban were ousted:
There's no question it's a problem. It's limits of influence. There were so few forces here, allied force s, back in '02 that we weren't really in a position to control or influence very much of anything.
That said, we saw the problem early on. And you know, this was back in the day when we had an authorized channel with the Iranians. It started right after 9/11 and I ran it for our side and at that time, this was something my Iranian counterpart and I talked about.
When were the talks? The talks went from September '01. I was on a flight to Geneva because [the talks] were under the auspices of the U.N., and they ran until the beginning of May '03 off and on. We broke them off after the Riyadh bombings in that month. We had warned the Iranians [the bombings] were being planned by Al Qaeda figures in Tehran under Iranian protection. They didn't do anything about it and we lost Americans.
But in the early months, we had a fair meeting of the minds. They were very, very anxious to get on with the war: â€Will you guys please hurry up?†And then subsequently we t alked about the problem with the warlords and one of the discussions was, “Well, maybe we Iranians could do something about Ismail Khan and you Americans could do something about Dostum.â€
[Ismail Khan, an ethnic Tajik, was the power broker who ran Herat and a broad swath of western Afghanistan on the Iranian border. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek, dominated a broad swath of the north, but especially the areas around Mazar-i-Sharif, Jowzjan and Sar-i-Pul.]
And for a while that worked. Dostum was given some kind of position here in Kabul; that kind of removed him from his base in the north, and Ismail Khan went through a period of significantly reduced influence.
The problem persists. The actuarial tables will, I think, affect this over time; these guys are getting older. Some of them have decided, like Marshal Fahim, that he'd rather be part of the establishment than operating away from it. Some have taken themselves out of the game, like Sayyaf.
[Marshal Muhammad Fahim, an ethnic Tajik, is the first vice president of Afghanistan and was a powerful commander from Panshir Province before joining the government. Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a former leader of a mujahedeen faction during Afghanistan's civil war, is now a member of Parliament and a confidante of President Hamid Karzai.]
On whether warlords are operating from within the government:
That's also part of the problem of the compromises that need to be made to produce a relatively stable, or at least relatively unified, nation. Fahim was, I think, critical in the aftermath of the Rabbani assassination in keeping the northerners on our side. He stuck right by Karzai; he made some very positive statements for national unity.
[Burhanuddin Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik, was the president of Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996, when the mujahedeen dominated the country. He was appointed head of the High Peace Council by President Karzai. Mr. Rabbani was assassin ated by a suicide bomber with a bomb in his turban on Sept. 20, 2011, which deeply angered members of the former Northern Alliance, who formed the main opposition to Mr. Karzai.]
You know this better than almost anybody: Afghanistan is enormously complicated, more so than Iraq, and it rivals Lebanon and it's a lot bigger and has a lot more actors. Karzai has had to play a very difficult balancing game.
On the likelihood of a soft partition after the NATO withdrawal in 2014, with the Taliban influential in the south, warlords dominating the north and west, criminal families influencing the east, and government control primarily in and around Kabul Province:
The key determinant here is the [2014] election, and of course everything that runs up to it. Look, anything is possible here; you know my hackneyed line that an extreme long-range prediction is a week from Thursday. But what I see going on talking to the president, talking to other officials, talking to political leaders of all stripes, persuasions and ethnicities suggests several things.
First, the northerners want to play significantly in Kabul. A soft partition or otherwise could happen, but I think for the major northern political figures, that's not where their minds are. It's figuring out how they are best postured for the post-2014 administration and how to be part of it, and some have said so explicitly in conversations with us.
Another scenario is the election of a Pashtun president from the Hizb-e-Islami party, which is linked to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, another of the warlords who was a leader during the civil war that tore the country apart in the 1990s. The military wing of Hizb-e-Islami has continued to be active in the armed opposition to the Afghan government and especially to its American and European allies.
In terms of a Hizb-e-Islami victory, you would have solid northern opposition, and not just northern non-Pashtun opposition. You would d ivide the Pashtuns. A serious Hizb-i- Islami effort probably more likely than anything is going to guarantee that somebody else wins this.
On President Karzai:
He certainly has his critics and he certainly has a number of challenges to deal with, but one quality I noticed in him when I first got here in January '02 that still I think is very prominent in his thinking: He's an Afghan nationalist. He's not blind to ethnic differences and tensions, but he is constantly thinking: “How do I keep people basically linked up together in a unified state?†And he's told me that among other things, it's absolutely critically important for 2014 to produce a president that all Afghans and all the communities can accept, so that equilibrium is maintained and national unity is maintained. And I do believe him when he says that.
On what role the United States should play in the Arab Spring uprisings:
I worry. It's not that I think that we're making bad policy jud gments, I think we are running into resource constraints. Development budgets get cut and cut and cut and more and more countries arise that need the support. And there's a growing delta between need and resources that is troubling.
