Karzai is back, friends. You may read his adventures here http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1543198807/84

From the mystical land of Afghanistan to Mar-a-Lago, Amerika. When will it ever end?

pickle me grandmother!

He is our man in Kandahar, isn't it.

Karnal interview with EB Singh, published in Pakistani Literary Journal (December, 2018).

EB: You started the Karzai series in response to a post on a political discussion board.
K: Yes. It was a thread called “Karzai threatens to join Taliban”. It was one of those predictable rants on how shifty Muslims are. You know, you try to help them out, and this is the thanks you get.
EB: How did the other posters respond to fiction?
K: They didn’t. Karzai usually gets ignored. Do you think it’s fiction?
EB: I’m not sure you can put it into an existing genre.
K: I mean, of course it’s fiction, but it’s based on real events. The great thing about Karzai is that he’s always in the news. You’re fictionalizing his words, sure, but you’re describing actual events. You’ve got the news to go on.
EB: Perhaps it’s magical realism.
K: Maybe. There’s definitely magic in there.
EB: Or an element of the surreal.
K: And that’s not my invention. It was initially an attempt to show Karzai cracking up, or at least stoned. These things are true too. Karzai has had mental health problems, and it’s been rumoured that he has used drugs to cope. With his family history of trauma, who wouldn’t?
EB: He’s lived an amazing life. He’s been everywhere, including all over the news.
K: He’s got an epic story. He took over a kind of political dynasty from his father, who got assassinated. It was a family business. Recently, his brother was assassinated. These were huge blows to Karzai.
EB: What’s amazing is that he’s still standing himself.
K: True. The fact that he hasn’t taken a bullet is a mystery itself. Pakistan, Afghanistan, every leader seems to get assassinated over there. Karzai’s a survivor – so far.
EB: You talk a lot in your stories about global politics.
K: Or Globalism. Karzai has always stood as a bridge between east and west. He lived in America for a time. I think he was an oil or gas broker – probably a mediator for a US mining or drilling company. The region’s full of oil and gas. I guess that’s what the Chinese find so promising about it.
EB: You haven’t explored the Chinese much. Or the Russians. Or what about Iran? They’re in Afghanistan.
K: Yeah, I’ve just done America, and I think that reflects the media we’re given.
EB: You seem to have become more forgiving of Karzai over time. He’s becoming a bit of a hero.
K: You can only play the bungling, Inspector Clousau character for so long, but yeah. He is becoming more successful in the stories. This is ironic, as he’s no longer president.
EB: You’ve got two phases of Karzai’s life in leadership, and they both reflect the foreign policy difference in US administrations.
K: Yes. Early Karzai was about Bush and Cheney’s American evangelical outlook, their neo-conservatism. This doctrine became rather passé during the Obama years. Or did it? Actually, I’m not so sure it did.
EB: Neoconservatism became rather passé after the US failures in Iraq. Bush’s Mission Accomplished speech can be seen to be its epilogue. That image of Bush in his flight jacket on that aircraft carrier is all about the hubris of the neocon outlook. 
K: Yes, and it didn’t end when Obama got in. Actually, for Afghanistan, it got worse. Remember? The Democrats saw Afghanistan as the “good war” and Iraq as the “bad war’. They bought into the whole educating girls thing. It’s true that Bush was sloppy. He forgot all about Afghanistan when he decided to go into Iraq. ADHD. When Obama got in, he went back into Afghanistan again, and as we saw, the troops kept escalating. Afghanistan seemed to just suck those American soldiers in. The generals kept asking for more and more troops. Just let us take this province, just let us defend this stretch of road.
EB: They learned from Iraq. The troop surges there turned things around.
K: Sure. Until they pulled out troops and saw ISIL sneak in.
EB: That’s the problem. If you’re in you’re in for good.
K: But you can never win. That was the lesson of Vietnam America forgot. Imagine, a whole generation was shaped by that one. 30 years later, they went through it all over again.
EB: Leaders don’t learn from history, obviously. The point of the Karzai stories seems to be that these things are predestined. America has no choice but to go in, and Afghanistan has no choice but to do what they do.
K: Right. It’s a sort of WWI take, I guess, “the war to end all wars” – which in just a few years became a statement of irony, like “Mission Accomplished”. The point is that a network of alliances is like a chain of dominoes. As soon as one mobilizes, the rest are sucked into war. You only need one small state – in this case Afghanistan – to bring the world to the brink of annihilation.
EB: A little drastic, maybe...
K: Is it? Russia and America nearly nuked each other a few times during the Cold War. It’s only a miracle that saved us from that. During the 80s, there was nearly a hot war between Russia and America over Afghanistan. Luckily, America outsourced.
EB: Which led to the rise of militant Islam.
K: Exactly. There are times, I guess, when they send in the CIA and times when they send in the US forces. Until 2001, it was all CIA.

Continued...

EB: Hosts like Hannity have a huge say too.
K: I’ve heard they talk on the phone most nights. Those Fox hosts have a huge amount of say over public opinion. They have a very compliant audience – the over-55s. But that’s only one segment of the population.
EB: And then there’s the “fake news”.
K: Exactly. The irony is that Trump is the most fake politician we’ve seen yet. He doesn’t give a sht about policy, it’s all about ratings, image. I remember when people thought Reagan would never get in, he was just a B-grade movie star. Now we’ve got a reality TV boss. Reagan’s legacy has endured. I don’t think Trump’s will – how can it?
EB: Reagan won the Cold War.
K: And Trump’s losing the peace. He seems to like it this way. He likes conflict, he likes agro.
EB: It’s good for the ratings, right?
R: Excellent point. Trump has the political conviction of reality TV: create a hero, create a villain and watch the story go viral. Keep it simple, but listen to your audience. You’re right. This is exactly what Trump does.
EB: And Karzai?
K: I’ve never thought about this. I think we’ll see him enter the world of social media. Right now, he’s very traditional media – he reads Time, he goes on BBC, CNN, al Jazeera. Actually, apparently he grew up reading it – probably how he learned English. He would have learned all about the West from Time magazine.
EB: Which relates to what you said earlier. Karzai is really a projection of the Western media. And Afghanistan is our image of a sick, but ambitious, developing world.
K: I’m taking this stuff down, this is good. Yes, I think the Karzai stories are about just that – the fracture between the developing and developed world. Afghanistan is our symbol of all that is backward and underdeveloped. Uncivilized.  But it has that mystery too, that enigma. It has a kind of magic or mysticism. I hear Karzai himself is quite mystical, or poetic, anyway. He likes poetry. He likes dreams. He has a sense of irony and absurdism.
EB: Do you think he’s read the Karzai series?
K: I’d love it!
EB: Why the ads?
K: Well, it goes back to genre. What I have in mind is a sort of pulp magazine for political magical realism – you know, like an old 1950s sci-fi or crime fiction magazine with lots of stories and pictures and ads for things like body building. This is an Afghani magazine, obviously. It has ads for things like massage parlours and gun shops.
EB: And they all seem to be on Karl Marx Avenue.
K: Right! That doesn’t actually exist.
EB: I know, I Googled it.
K: I imagined the previous communist government renaming the main street. It’s a nice Cold War reference, I think. It sounds completely antiquated, like Christmas decorations left up in May or something.
EB: You recently wrote a piece on the Hamid Karzai Airport.
K: Yes. They’ve named Kabul Airport after him. I only discovered that by Googling. I couldn’t find one picture of the airport that didn’t have Kabul International Airport on the sign, so that’s like another thing they botched up – something that can drive Karzai into action.
EB: It sounds like you have endless stories.
K: There’s so much to write and think about. There’s so much I’ve missed. I’d love to write about Karzai’s brother’s assassination. Apparently he was the corrupt business side of the family. I’d love to write about Karzai’s father and his old home town, Karz. They grow grapes there - they make raisins. Mythical, right?
EB: Sure is. Thanks a lot for your time. As they say in your stories, “stay reading, friends.”
K: No worries, I will.

REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION