Ali Ahmed Jalali logged off his Hotmail account on a recent Tuesday morning and turned to the five haggard Afghans seated in his office.
For the last 20 years, the five men had endured the calamities that beset Afghanistan -- a superpower invasion, civil war, an epic drought and harsh Islamic rule. During those same 20 years, Jalali lived cozily in suburban Washington, watching his son's soccer games and car-pooling to a job as a reporter and editor for the State Department's Voice of America radio network.
PHOTO: AP
Yet today, thanks in large part to the US, Jalali is Afghanistan's interior minister and one of the country's most powerful men. The Afghans who stayed behind are his aides.
"Are you all right?" Jalali said, as the men snapped to their feet and saluted him before the Interior Ministry's morning staff meeting. "Are you good?"
"Yes, yes," the men answered.
Jalali, a balding, 62-year-old former Afghan army colonel, reporter and military scholar, embodies a new American strategy that relies heavily on convincing Afghan emigres to return to their homeland and play a leading role in revitalizing the country's weak central government.
Amid rising Taliban attacks, the US recently increased its total military and reconstruction spending in Afghanistan to US$13 billion a year. Millions of those dollars are expected to go to augmenting government salaries and lure skilled Afghans like Jalali home.
Jalali also stands at the center of a crucial American effort to increase security in the country before presidential elections next spring. After a US$500 million dollar, two-year effort to create a new Afghan National Army produce a force of only 6,000 soldiers, the US is spending US$250 million to train up to 40,000 police officers under Jalali's command.
"He's the real force behind a lot of this," said an American adviser to Jalali, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "If something happened to him, I don't know who would step in."
Soon after Jalali was named interior minister in January, a cartoon published in a Kabul newspaper showed Uncle Sam firing him out of cannon. Seated at a desk, Jalali is hurtling over the Atlantic Ocean toward the country he left 21 years earlier.
Western diplomats say the reliance on Afghan emigres is a careful attempt to avoid fueling the fierce Afghan nationalism that brought invading British and Soviet troops to their knees here. It is also an attempt to avoid the perception of American occupation that plagues the American effort in Iraq.
But Afghans who stayed in the country have already developed a nickname for Jalali and his Westernized ilk, a sign of how Afghans who stayed and suffered despise the ones who left. They are called "dog washers," a reference to the lowly jobs they were said to have in America and Europe. In Islamic culture, dogs are considered one of nature's filthiest animals, second only to pigs.
Jalali, who was born in Kabul and grew up here, grins broadly when asked if he ever cared for dogs in the US. A colonel in the Afghan army when Soviet troops invaded in 1979, he fled to Pakistan served as a top military planner for the Afghan resistance for one year. In 1982, he took a job with the Voice of America.
He thrived in the US, co-writing an analysis of the mujahidin war with the Soviets, The Other Side of the Mountain, considered a military classic. He said that when his longtime friend, Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, asked him to leave a job that paid him nearly US$100,000 a year and join his Cabinet in Kabul, he thought about it for several months. His salary as a government minister is not augmented by the US. It is US$110 a month.
"I came here because I thought I could make a difference," he said in flawless, American-accented English. According to his Afghan staff, as well as American and German advisers, he has.
Since taking office in January, Jalali has emerged as the government's bold and effective "bad cop" to Karzai's "good cop." Karzai has been praised for not using violence to resolve political conflicts in the country, but has also been criticized for being indecisive.
By contrast, in Jalali's 11 months in office, he has fired a dozen governors and a dozen police chiefs. His boldest moves included removing powerful governors and warlords in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif and southern city of Kandahar.
He suffers no fools. During that morning staff meeting, aimed at finalizing security for a constitutional assembly beginning this weekend, he grew visibly annoyed when two staff members arrived late, peppered his aides with questions and jabbed his finger in the air.
The following day during a meeting with one of his foreign advisers, he referred to a proposal as a "whiner paper." Yet he can be generous with praise, appearing to inspire fierce loyalty from those who work with him.
"I think Jalali is a man with remarkable courage," said Gerd Kunzel, a German adviser.
Critics maintain that some of his actions and appointments have not played out well. When several hundred Kabul policemen arrived in Mazar-e-Sharif this fall, they had nowhere to sleep. The new police chief he named in Kandahar last served as a chief under the country's Soviet-installed government in the 1980s and has failed to win the support of local tribes.
His most daunting task may be getting the glacial Soviet-style bureaucracy that he heads to simply function. The power went out during his staff meeting. The ministry is believed to field 70,000 police officers, but no one is sure of the exact number. Across the country, officers complain that they have not been paid for months.
At times, Jalali speaks fondly of his years in the suburbs of Washington. He retains both American and Afghan citizenship, a compromise Americans may understand but Afghans may deem suspicious. His family still lives outside Washington and his wife is a preschool teacher in Maryland.
Jalali says he knows history is against him. He knows, too, that Taliban leaders, as well as warlords, are believed to want him dead. He drives around Kabul in a German-provided, bulletproof Mercedes SUV escorted by a dozen of policemen.
But he insists his homeland is with him.
"I face many risks, but at the same time I get a lot of encouragement, support and words of appreciation from the silent majority in Afghanistan," he wrote in one e-mail message. "This, in fact, keeps me going."
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