Global Policy Forum

By Carlotta Gall and David Rohde

President Hamid Karzai said Sunday that Afghanistan's private militias had become the country's greatest danger — greater than the Taliban insurgency — and that new action was required to disarm them.

"We tried to do it by persuasion," Mr. Karzai said in an interview with The New York Times two days after he had postponed parliamentary elections by six months because of the threat of disruption. But now, he said, "The stick has to be used, definitely."

Mr. Karzai did not specify what action he would undertake. But his assessment represented a new ranking of Afghanistan's problems, with attacks by Taliban supporters and slow voter registration suddenly receding, to be replaced by worries about election intimidation by warlords and militias. Mr. Karzai, who has largely governed through consensus, met with Afghan and international officials later Sunday to lay out a new strategy.

The United Nations, NATO and the United States-led coalition are involved in Afghanistan, training the police, augmenting the army and providing security for the elections. Mr. Karzai is counting on that process to continue to improve his government's standing. His leadership over two and a half years, with heavy American backing, has rested largely on accommodation with various forces, an approach he defended Sunday. But his frustration, and that of his top ministers, seemed acute. Asked to rate his government on how well it had achieved its goals, Mr. Karzai offered the barely passing grade of D. He said that corruption remained rampant and that the failure of the disarmament program was a source of keen anxiety among the people.

Out of the 60,000 armed militiamen, only 10,000 have been disarmed and demobilized, and the program has stalled rather than accelerated in recent months. The hope now is to disarm 60 percent to 70 percent of the militias before the new parliamentary elections in April 2005, the leader of the joint election commission, Zakim Shah, said Saturday. Mr. Karzai said the struggle with the warlords would be decisive, suggesting that his government and society were at a turning point.

Asked what lessons he could offer for Iraq, he said Washington should not let private militias flourish.

Postponing the parliamentary elections had not been his preference, he said, but he acknowledged that Afghans wanted to see militias disarmed and sent away first. "The frustration that we have in this country is that progress has sometimes been stopped by private militias, life has been threatened by private militias, so it should not be tolerated," he said. Without disarmament, "the Afghan state will have really serious difficulties," he said.

Mr. Karzai and important foreign officials in Afghanistan said that despite the delay in elections, the country should take pride in the independence of the new joint election commission, which delayed the parliamentary elections in the face of the cabinet's opposition. The plan had been for parliamentary and presidential elections to be held simultaneously. Presidential elections, which are considered simpler to carry out, are now scheduled for Oct. 9, already a delay of four months from the original timetable.

Mr. Karzai is widely expected to win in a field of a dozen minor challengers. An alliance of powerful northern political leaders and warlords has thrown its support behind Mr. Karzai, making it unlikely that he will face a serious challenge. Critics have accused Mr. Karzai of striking a deal with the northern leaders. On Sunday, he denied that an agreement had been reached.

In recent months, the big concern had been to register voters at the time of an insurgency by Taliban supporters. Yet registration is progressing, especially in rural areas, and militias are now looming as the primary threat to free and fair elections, Mr. Karzai said. "We hear of intimidations even now," he said. Yet the likelihood of disarmament in the next six months remains uncertain. Mr. Karzai has always tried to bring the warlords on board rather than confront them, and the tension between his deal making and his new declaration of toughness has not been resolved. Despite vows to toughen his tactics, Mr. Karzai spent much of the interview explaining the need for accommodation. He would be tough on the process of disarmament, not on individuals, he said.

Jean Arnault, the leader of the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan, which is helping in the disarmament and elections, said the United Nations favored disarmament through cooperation rather than sanctions. "Sanctions push people to find new ways to skirt the issue," he said Saturday in an interview.

Mr. Karzai spoke of his most recent trip to the United States, when he visited the room in Philadelphia where the Declaration of Independence was signed, and reflected on the task of building a functioning democracy. "In Afghanistan we will have many more messy years to come, before we can claim that we have succeeded," he said. "This is a country in the making, and I am very realistic about that." "We have succeeded in bringing new money to Afghanistan in a very strong manner. We have succeeded in stabilizing the economy," he said. "But we have failed to curb corruption" and to disarm the militias, he said.

Nevertheless, compared with two years ago, when internal government rivalries and the assassination of his vice president forced him to accept American bodyguards who still protect him today, he said he now had a government that worked. "It has changed," he said. "We are a government. Two years ago we were not. Today I can decide things. Two years ago we could not."

Afghan security officials said that another serious concern for Afghanistan was foreign interference, notably but not only by Pakistan. Foreign states may be behind some of the violence that plagues Afghanistan, one security official warned this week. A bomb exploded Sunday morning in Herat in western Afghanistan, killing five civilians, including a 12-year-old boy, and wounding 21 others, said the police chief of Herat, Ziauddin Mahmoudi. In a statement later on Sunday, Mr. Karzai condemned the attack, saying it was "the work of Afghanistan's enemies who are desperately trying to derail Afghanistan from the path of reconstruction, peace and democracy." Senior officials in southern Afghanistan have warned that leaders of the former Taliban government are increasing their insurgency there and in the southeast, and that they are gaining popular support.

Mr. Karzai, who will visit Pakistan this month, said he was concerned about the training in Pakistan of militants, who then cross over and carry out attacks in Afghanistan. Afghan troops recently captured a militant who said he had been trained in Pakistan, Mr. Karzai said. The government raises the issue with Pakistan "on a daily basis," he said, adding that he would like for Pakistan to do more. But he dismissed the Taliban threat as "exaggerated." He differentiated those attacks from bombings and other acts of "terrorism" and "warlordism," which he said were the bigger problems.

He described relations with Afghanistan's principal neighbors, Iran and Pakistan, as cooperative, and said both had benefited from Afghanistan's recovery. "We are thinking from a businessman's point of view. It is very businesslike. We want to make money — and how do you make money? — by trading with our neighbors," he said.

He said if he won a new five-year term in October, he would do things "very differently" and not trap himself in a coalition with people who did not support change. "I will try to have as much of a professional, technocratic cabinet as possible, especially in the departments where there is the need for them," he said. But he acknowledged that he would still have to balance that with a policy of bringing factional leaders or warlords into the government. "The success will come when the balance is right," he said.

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