And part of which was a reality. We also dealt very closely on the issues of detentions. This goes again to this issue of president karzai seeking to establish and to reinforce the sense that afghanistan was a sovereign country and to wrest from the United States and other countries the kinds of respect due to that country and due to its people, and as we negotiated a contentious mou for my turning over of several thousand afghan detainees to afghanistan, that process and that sense of sovereignty came home in a very real way for me. And then, unfortunately, when president karzai abrogated parts of the mou, i had to cease the turnover of detainees until such time i was sure that they werent going to be released ultimately to target us or afghan citizens of the afghans again. We also had a period of time where we worked very closely on night operations and special operations, and that resulted in a memorandum of understanding as well where we sought to move from being unilaterally engaged in night ops, spec ops, to one where we partnered with the afghans to one where i committed to him and to the Afghan Security leadership the development of special operations capabilities where afghanistan could eventually operate unilaterally without specific u. S. Or nato help. And then very clearly it was a time of transition, as scott properly said. We were moving the Afghan Forces from being in trail to being in the lead. We were moving isaf forces from being in the lead to being advisory in nature, but very importantly for me i worked hard, and i know Stan Mcchrystal had before me, and ultimately Dave Petraeus in succession to him, on trying to understand Hamid Karzais sense of his ownership of the Afghan NationalSecurity Forces as the commander in chief, but more importantly the ownership of the Afghan Security forces in the context of the conflict that was being waged. It was never fully clear to me what his attitude was. And then, of course, we dealt very carefully and often on the issue of corruption, me trying to get him to work towards dealing with institutional krug kruges and him trying to get me to get our contracting and spending processes under control, and there were a number of other areas like the Afghan Local Police and the elimination of private Security Companies and transitioning prts where we worked together very closely. But we also faced some world class crises which were very important in defining how we worked during times of real stress and crisis, and i think that was an area that defined our friendship, and we leveraged that friendship on a number of occasions to get to the solution, or at least to keep the crisis from spinning us off into space. The first was the downing of myc h47 with an entire s. E. A. L. Strike force on boort within a month of my taking command. That was a moment of great concern for him because he believed that we were beginning to witness that moment on the battlefield which had been witnessed in afghanistan when the first stingers arrived during the soviet war, and it was a moment of real concern for him, and we worked that very closely together. Then shortly after that the u. S. Embassy and my headquarters was attacked by suicide bombers, and that was an area where we worked very closely in the solution of that and understanding how that came about followed almost immediately a week later by the assassination of president rabbani, the head of the High Peace Council, the chair of the High Peace Council and all of the associated 2ki d difficultih that. And then the event on the pakistan border with 24 pakistani troops were killed resulting in pakistan closing my principal ground line of communications over which 80 of my supplies flowed into the country. That was followed by the urination video where u. S. Marines were found to be urinating on dead taliban. That created a sequence of events in conjunction with the inadvertent and sad burning of the holy koran at bagram which began the process of the insider attacks, which really stressed the relationship between the west in general, nato, and the Afghan Government and president karzai, but also stressed the relationship within the coalition itself as increasingly these insider attacks were eroding the consensus of the coalition to remain committed to afghanistan. And then that was followed by the mass killing, youll recall, of the 16 afghans in kandahar, and each of these, whether it was a challenge or a crisis, permitted me to take the measure of the man, and i found president karzai to be a worthy partner in most of these. We didnt agree necessarily on many of them and often the outcome wasnt what either of us desired, but it was these were moments where we had the opportunity to work very closely. So against the backdrop of these many factors, i think its important to take stock of president karzais legacy under these many strains. He has very strong opinions, for example, on the sources of corruption in afghanistan. He blames foreign influences significantly and the United States in particular but was unable or unwilling to take credible and Decisive Action to curb the corruption within the country. He remembers the u. S. Role in the shaping of the 2009 election which caused a lot of animosity and antipathy towards the United States, i believe, while avoiding at the same time the matter of substantial ballot box stuffing. He was enormously critical of the u. S. Policy toward pakistan but did not exert every effort to reach out to pakistan to improve that relationship, and he would accuse the u. S. Of arrogance and malfeasance demonstrating in the process his mastery of Something Else called brinksmanship, but at the same time he was confronting this, we also had to keep in mind as americans, and i heard this first from Dave Petraeus and i tested it myself when i was there, that many of these crises that we had with president karzai could easily have been solved if we had listened closely to him one or two or three years before when hed raised the issue early along in the process and we were either deaf to the issue that he was raising or we under resourced the solution and ultimately didnt really solve the problem. So issues about, for example, the private Security Companies. That was a real issue to him, and it was a real issue to afghans, and we didnt solve it properly. He ultimately brought us to the brink and the creation of the Afghan Public Protection force was the result. Not the perfect solution, but it was a solution. And the elimination ultimately of provincial reconstruction teams in terms of rendering them as Capacity Building mechanisms rather than Service Provider mechanisms which compromised the ability of local governance to develop. And then ultimately civilian contracting, civilian casualties, and corruption. These were all issue where is if we listened to him earlier and wed taken the kinds of actions that he believed we should have he often provided us excellent advice in that regard, this could have reduced, i think, friction in many respects on many issues. Legacies take many shapes and invariably are formed in the eyes of the beholders. Im going to take a crack at some of this and i want to be careful because its difficult even before hes out of office to talk about his historic legacy, and thats why a panel like this is valuable i think in terms of how we look at the future and for policy processes, but i think its fraught with dangers in terms of the potential for criticizing a sitting president. Ill leave to the afghans, and i suspect ill hear a bit in a moment from a very prominent afghan journalist, how they view their president , but from the many, many afghans with whom ive dealt, and i have never asked an afghan his or her opinion of their president because i believed out of respect to the president and respect to the afghans, i didnt want to put them in that place. It doesnt mean they didnt offer their opinions. And i always had a sense of their open but sometimes grudging respect for him. They respected hamid karzai, but there was also a sense of melancholy, i believe, on the absence of his presence and that of his governance in their lives, and im talking about Sub National Governance which we worked so hard to try to develop, but it defied my abilities when i was there as a commander. We can talk about that if you like. But they were very proud of him in many ways. They were proud that he stood up to the foreigners of which i was one, but recently i think as regards the bilateral Security Agreement, which would enshrine a permanent presence for the foreigners, many afghans were simply horrified that he seemed to be sacrificing their future in not signing an agreement and never fully explaining why or clearly understanding why, and i think in some respects in terms of a contemporary legacy, we see that much ground was lost by the president in that regard. Regionally i believe pakistan will not view the karzai era and the relationship between islamabad and kabul with much nostalgia. Karzais views of pakistan were seldom positive, unfortunately they were frequently openly expressed which made the relationship different to manage. Tehran will not miss the president either for many reasons, but i think this goes to kais points about president karzais journey and personal goals of making afghanistan a sovereign entity to be reckoned with, and i think the iranians ultimately were to determine even with a substantial presence in kabul they had much less influence over the president and over the parliament than they had hoped, and the bilateral Security Agreement left a foreign presence in the country which iran had consistently resisted. Nato i think will view him in the short term as an unappreciative partner who over time became increasingly difficult to deal with. While only the president , hamid karzai, can say for sure, it is likely that he always viewed the enormity of the 50 nation nato Led Coalition as too intrusive on the sovereignty of afghanistan and ultimately on his own authority. But i think we may have missed or he may have missed the larger point, that those 50 nations committed their blood and their treasure to afghanistan and thus tied irrevocably the International Community to the future of this poor and beleaguered country in ways we have probably never seen the parallel before in history. Afghanistan, this poor state, this nation emerging from conflict whose interests were the personal interests of 50 nations in the world, i think that was a True Advantage to afghanistan. And then theres the u. S. , and hes being judged harshly, frankly, in the u. S. , perhaps unfairly so and will be likely for some time. His inflammatory and provocative and sometimes disrespectful rhetoric aimed at this administration, but sadly also aimed at the sacrifices of u. S. Troops was compounded by a sense of his ungratefulness for the u. S. Investment. Again, perceptions, and this perception ultimately attracted the ire of much of the congress and the administration, and taken together, this tyme put the u. S. Relationship and commitment to afghanistan in danger. When i was the commander, i did not seriously consider that there was a possible likelihood of a zero option. In essence, the u. S. Pulling out completely of afghanistan and, frankly, taking with it nato and the International Community. But i have to tell you, over the last probably six to eight months and in particular with the rhetoric and the problems over the bilateral Security Agreement, we came perilously close ultimately to a zero option, and we still dont have a signed bilateral Security Agreement although i suspect that the soon to be inaugurated president will do so pretty quickly. And, unfortunately, this has tainted his shortterm legacy overall, and i believe it will taint it for a considerable period in the United States. But the truth is hamid karzai is a man with extraordinary abilities but with human frailties. He was placed in one of the most demanding, thankless positions on the planet and was forced to operate within a largely incapable government emerging after a generation of conflict where he found not only difficulty in managing a National Government from the palace but also in creating the kind of subNational Government necessary to extend the writ of kabul to the people. He had to coexist and operate with the largest Wartime Coalition in modern era inside his country while seeking to reconcile with the taliban and foreign fighters a rebellion and ultimately to bring peace to his people. Few men have, in my mind, ever faced larger challenges for so long with so few real measures and tools to deal with any one of them individually much less all of them simultaneously. So, yes, he was flawed, and, yes, he played fast and loose with relationships over time, and, yes, he was provocative, and, no, he was not demented, and, no, he was not on meds, none that i knew of. But in a few weeks time when the next president of the Islamic Republic of afghanistan will lead a nation plagued by insurgency but one profoundly changed for the better in the 12plus, nearly 13 years that hamid karzai assumed his office in this troubled nation, and that context while today hamid karzai finds himself often strongly criticized, as i said in the beginning a searching and Detailed Analysis of his administration and his presidency and of him as a man will return a balanced appraisal of his legacy and how it was that after all these years of confli conflict, afghanistan could have come so far under his leadership. Thank you. Thank you, general allen. I think it was a huge amount there we will be able to engage with a little bit later on. Now youve put me in the position of doing something that you wisely have never done, which is to ask an afghan what he thinks of president karzai and his legacy. So mujib, the floor is yours. Thank you, scott. Im humbled to be part of such a distinguished panel, and i wanted to read a few passages from the article i recently wrote for the atlantic. Its called after karzai and its in the current issue. I walked around for an hour this morning trying to find a copy. I couldnt. So it tells you how well i know d. C. Its in everybodys briefcases. Theyre all reading it at every break. So ill read a couple passages and then i will have a few remarks about the president s domestic policy, domestic legacy and his local governance and in providing the context for this passage, ill go back to one of the points the general emphasized and how difficult it is to predict a sitting president s legacy and how challenging it is. So here is the passage. The afghanistan that karzai leaves behind is certainly a more inclusive and cohesive country than the fractured mess he inherited. Among my own peers, educated young urbanites connected to the world and provided with free space for expression, theres a growing sense of nostalgia for him. Hes largely seen as a man of great personal dignity who, despite his shortcomings, tried to minimize the bloodshed that my generation was born into. Our afghanistan is shaped by principles karzai saw as essential and nonnegotiable but because of the president s style of leadership, these gains appear tenuous. Under karzai a relatively free press blossomed, but every time threats against it emerged, it has been plunted not by the institutions or law karzai put in place, but by the president s personal intervention. The same can be said of womens participation in society which has grown tremendously but with few institutional safeguards. Even the future role of the countrys warlords is uncertain. Karzai has kept most of these men off balance and he deserves credit for doing so yet these men are not gone from public life. They have continued to profit from contracts and investments largely tied to the presence of foreign militaries, vested economic interests is a major factor that keeps them loyal to a democratic system. In 12 1 2 years, many have sanitized their images. Shorter beards, fancier suits, more politically correct language. For better or worse, their sons and daughters who seem more attuned to democratic practices are now beginning to step into their fathers shoes. Sponta, his National Security adviser, he says he doubts anyone could have fared better than karzai in such a fragmented society, and yet the next president of afghanistan will inherit a broken chain of command, weak institutions, and a variety of local powers that may prove difficult to bring to heel. All the more so because he will lack the personal connections that karzai worked so hard to cultivate. The question whether the forces from the past will succeed again, this is spont a speaking, or whether modernizing forces will take the country forward, this has not been finalized. Almost none of the achievements made under karzai appear irreversible, sponta lamented. Instead, afghanistan remains a place stuck between modernity and its own splintered history. Which way it will move next is anyones gruess. So i saw the president about a week after the first round of elections to find a successor to him in april, and it was the feeling at that time was that he had done a good job staying neutral in the elections. There was a sense of jubilation, about 7 Million People had turned out to vote, and karzai had proved his critics wrong as ambassador eide said. There were a lot of conspiracy theories he would change the constitution, he would stay in power. So in april when i wrote this, all that seemed, you know, false, and the article wen