And his moment
came in 2001, or after 2001, when we, you know,
successfully toppled the Taliban regime, and
Khalilzad was really only the Afghan or sort of
pretty much the only Muslim any of these people
knew, and so they appointed him the overseer of the
post-Taliban Afghanistan, from which position he
selected one Hamid Karzai—again, much to the
subsequent grief of U.S. administrations—really with
the view of—a lot of Afghans I talked to at the time
thought, well, Karzai was a fairly weak figure, and
Khalilzad’s idea was that he, Khalilzad, would be
the real ruler of Afghanistan and behave like that,
really. He was bossing all them, and he restored—he
fostered all these ghastly warlords and strongmen,
with himself really as the biggest warlord of all.
He’d threaten them with airstrikes and so forth.
So, after he
had pretty much ensured that no stable settlement
would emerge in Afghanistan, and really his actions
had led to the revival of the Taliban, he failed
upwards and was moved to Iraq, where the U.S. was
trying to sort of put in place some kind of
government that they could entrust Iraq to. And as I
said, they didn’t like the man they had, a prime
minister called Jaafari. And Khalilzad looked around
and selected this character, al-Maliki, who was a
fairly comparatively obscure figure in the—had been
in the exiled opposition. He had lived in Damascus
for most of his adult life, running a butcher shop.
And suddenly, as I say, he called in al-Maliki.
