Interview: Talking to Afghan Pres. Karzai

With Afghanistan reeling from fresh attacks on Western forces, TIME correspondent Aryn Baker spoke to the country's president Hamid Karzai about a range of subjects, including relations with Pakistan now that his testy neighbor Pervez Musharraf is resigning; and charges of corruption against members of his government and against his younger brother Wali Karzai.

TIME: Last time we met, in September 2006, Kabul's first major suicide attack went off during the middle of our interview. Since then we have had several devastating attacks and an attempted assassination...
Karzai: And the casualties will only get worse, I fear. And then did you see what was happening in Pakistan, why would someone go and blow himself up in a hospital [in Peshawar]? Who are they, what are they? It cannot be justified. The justification is far away. You can fight people anywhere, any place, but you don't kill people in a hospital. So why? It's going crazy. Why?
If they die in suicide attacks, how will their movement survive? What is behind this? It is criminality on the part of those who use them. Criminality is perhaps a light word. Diabolical, worse than that. Someone needs to coin a new term, a new phrase.

What would your phrase be?
Inhuman. It's to no end. It's not a war you can win. They blow people up, and disappear. Without a political cause, without a political objective. With nothing that can bring success, or any symbols of success?

So how do you combat a movement that has only annihilation as its goal?
The way to fix Afghanistan is to fix things with Pakistan. In order to fix terrorism at large, we need to remedy the wrongs of the past 30 years. Remedy means to undo. Did you see what happened in Algeria today? I will call the president of Algeria.
The world pushed us to fight the Soviets. And those who did it walked away. And left all the mess spread around. September 11 is a consequence of this. The bombing in Peshawar today is a consequence. Algeria is a consequence of that.
Afghanistan was a once great place. In perfect harmony with the rest of the world. Families sent their girls to university, wearing whatever style they wanted. And that family lived in perfect harmony with another family who was conservative and traditional. Both lived together and socialized. But in the years of fighting against the Soviets, radicalism was the main thing. Someone like me would be called half a Muslim. And we were actually called half Muslims. Because we were not radical. The more radical you became, the more money you were given. So radicalism became not only an ideological tool against the Soviets, but a way forward economically. The more radical you presented yourself, the more money the West gave you.

It wasn't just the West, it was Saudi Arabia, Pakistan...
Everybody together I call them the West, because they were led by the West. The moderates were undermined, not allowed. Patriotism, Afghan history and nationalism was called atheism. It was undermined. The more you betrayed Afghanistan, the more you spoke of radicalism, the more you went away from Afghan history, the better you were treated. And that's what we are paying for now.

So how do you repair the damage?
By paying proper attention to the hundreds of thousands of disparate lives... these people who have nowhere to go to, who are not being raised in a parent's home, who don't have sisters and brothers to live with. Who don't have dinner with their families every night. Who are taken [in] by these... enemies of Islam, who work in the name of Islam. These places are called madrassahs, but they are not [real] madrassahs. They train and raise these young souls to be ammunition in a political game. That is what happened today in [the hospital in] Dera Ismail Khan [in Pakistan], that is what happens in Afghanistan on a daily basis.
And also, let's focus on Pakistan. The ISI [The Inter-Service Intelligence spy agency of Pakistan]. The organization must stop using radicalism and extremism as an instrument of policy. Once that stops, unless the use of these young men as tools of radicalization, and as weapons to promote whatever agenda they have stops, we will have continued attacks like this.