Democracy Fights for its Life: Profile of Hamid Karzai

Elizabeth Rubin of the New York Times magazine has an engrossing story on Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai that is worth reading.  Here’s the intro paragraph:

On a sunny June morning in Kabul, I sat among hundreds of turbaned men from Afghanistan’s Helmand and Kandahar provinces in a chandeliered wedding hall where they had gathered for a campaign rally to re-elect President Hamid Karzai. War was raging in Helmand and Kandahar. And yet there was an atmosphere of burlesque about the place. Waiters hammed up their service, skidding across the floor balancing mounds of rice, bananas and chicken, whirling shopping carts of Coke and Fanta. The organizer of the event and master of ceremonies was none other than Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, the five-foot-tall ex-governor of Helmand and probably the country’s most infamous drug trafficker. From a velvet couch he barked out to the speakers: “Not so many poems! Keep your speeches short!” — but no one was listening.

Here’s the whole thing. It would be worth looking over–many of us have forgotten to think about and pray for events and developments in Afghanistan, a country in which the war against terror rages and democracy fights for its life.

(Photo: Lyndsey Addario for the VII Network/New York Times)