<i>60II</i>: The Toughest Job In The World

Afghanistan’s new leader, Hamid Karzai has what may be one of the world’s toughest jobs. He wants Americans to know two things: He wants U.S. money and he wants Osama bin Laden and his terrorist lieutenants captured as badly as we do.

“We are very serious about that, ” Karzai tells Dan Rather on 60 Minutes II. “This is not America’s war on terrorism. This is our war against terrorism.”

Karzai says he does not know the whereabouts of either suspected terrorist leader bin Laden or Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar, but he wants them caught and punished.

“ I want them to be tried, “ he says. “I want them to be seen by the cameras so the Afghans can see that these people are being tried, they feel that they’re getting justice. So that your own people in America, those families that lost so many of their men and woman can see that they’re being given justice… that we will deliver.”

Delivering bin Laden to justice isn’t just politics for Karzai. It is deeply personal.

Not only did the Taliban and the terrorists keep Karzai and his family out of the country for years, but they also, he believes, killed his father, a longtime Afghan politician, in a fatal shooting on a Pakistan street.

“He was a man so scared of guns,” Karzai says of his father. “He hated it, absolutely hated it. The one thing that I remember from my life is … his hatred of guns. And he was shot with a gun.”

Karzai is certain his father was assassinated by the Taliban. “We knew it even then,” he says. “But a lot of Afghans have died. A lot of Afghans have been killed by terrorism. He was one of them.”

Karzai says he is grateful for America’s role in routing the Taliban from his country and helping him to win his position as the nation’s interim leader.

During the interview, he gave Rather a tour of the presidential palace, where he lives alone. Once home to the country’s kings, presidents and power brokers, it is now in ruins – devastation he claims was caused by the Taliban, who treated the palace the same way they treated the people of Afghanistan.

“Look at what they’ve done,” he exclaims. “Look at this! Why would the Taliban wreck this? It was mostly done by their foreign friends.”

When the Taliban took over the property, filling it with foreign al Qaida fighters, they stripped the buildings of paintings and valuables and let rooms and staircases fall into disrepair.

Karzai knows “the vision many Americans have of Afghanistan is simply rubble.” But he says it once was “a magnficent place” and his number one job is obtain funds from the rest of the world to restore some the splendor.

With Afghanis struggling to do even the simplest things, Karzai went to incredible effort to prepare a lamb and rice state dinner for U.S. Sen. Joseph iden. Biden’s support is crucial to Karzai because American money will make a huge difference in a country where basic necessities are luxuries.

Seventy percent of the homes are without drinking water. Nearly all of the roads have been damaged or destroyed amd Kabul’s mass transit sits in a tangled pile. Less than 10 percent of the population has electricity and even that comes and goes with the wind.

Karzai, who speak six languages, takes it all in stride. His arrival in Kabul has prompted the return of many Afghans who fled during the decades of fighting here.
Some have come back to join his cabinet.

His older brother, a Baltimore restaurant owner who hadn’t been here since 1973, was among them. The two brothers went back to the old neighborhood a few weeks ago to see the house they grew up in. It was such a battered shell of loose bricks that they didn’t recognize it.

For hours every day, Karzai meets in the presidential palace with leaders of Afghanistan’s countless tribes.

“I have heard people from all over Afghanistan,” he says. “Other than asking for security and disarmament and a national defense ministry, they also ask for international security forces.”

No one he’s spoken to has called for a removal of foreign forces. “They ask for more, “ he says, “ as a surety, as a guarantee of commitment of the international community, to stay and help Afghanistan. Through it all, no one is sure how safe Karzai himself is.

“I’ve faced bullets so many times during the Soviet invasion,” he says. ”I was fired at from very close range. God saved me. I was almost killed three and a half months ago when the Taliban tried to attack my base. And I had that incident of a friendly bomb very close to my headquarters. I believe in God. He will keep us.”

Karzai survived that friendly bomb in part because an American soldier threw his body over Karzai’s.

And now Kaezai, an incurable optimist, is counting on the world to open its wallet and save Afghanistan.

“This is for our survival,” he says. “And we want to survive. We want to live and live well.”