Two of Hamid Karzai's brothers planned to ask for asylum in the US, while other family members stayed away and kept their money out of Afghanistan – so anxious were they that the Afghan president would lose last year's election.
In the end, following a campaign marked by massive fraud, Karzai was re-elected after being forced into a second round.
The panic during the long counting process in August 2009 is revealed in secret US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. "Karzai's side is in some disarray," says a dispatch from Francis Ricciardone, the US deputy ambassador in Kabul. It quotes three Karzai advisers as admitting they knew fraud had been committed by their side.
The Karzai family feared major violence could break out amid intelligence reports that Mohammed Atta, a northern warlord opposed to Karzai, and other powerbrokers were arming their followers.
The cable says the US ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, and other senior officials warned Karzai's opponents to refrain from violence and ensure peace and stability – while also telling Karzai not to interfere in the counting process or undermine the authority of the country's Independent Election Commission.
Other cables reveal the Obama administration had serious doubts about Karzai's volatile mood. For his part the Afghan leader harboured worries over US intentions. "We must disabuse Karzai of the notion that we are just another imperialist force," Eikenberry confides in one email to Washington. Another says Karzai believed the US was secretly funding Abdullah Abdullah, his main electoral opponent.
"Can you manage without the United States?" Karzai is said to have asked his defence minister – the apparent idea being to tell the US to leave and see if Afghan security forces could run the counter-insurgency campaign against the Taliban on their own. The minister said he could not..
On other occasions Karzai was ready to offer the US huge concessions. Shortly before the fraudulent election last year that Karzai expected to win handily, Eikenberry found the Afghan president "more coherent" and "less paranoid than in the past". The president offered the US permanent bases at Bagram and Kandahar airfields, the biggest US installations in Afghanistan.
Barack Obama's controversial decision to announce the beginning of a US troop drawdown in July 2011 appears frequently in the cables. Obama has emphasised the political nature of the decision as a sign to the US public as well as Afghan leaders that the US does not want a long-term commitment of troops in the country.
But the cables reveal that Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told Abdul Rahim Wardak, the Afghan defence minister, that the drawdown was not a political decision but a US military recommendation. The distinction is important because it suggests the recommendation can easily be changed and that Obama has no choice but to do what the military recommends.
The delicate nature of the drawdown, which US republicans have attacked as premature and destabilising, is revealed in a cable from the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Sent to several dozen US embassies around the world, it asks US officials to tell their foreign counterparts "at the highest level" that the US strategy of letting Afghan forces take the lead in different provinces is not the beginning of an imminent US withdrawal.
Under the heading "Clarifying the transition to Afghan lead", it says the US-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) is in the "stabilisation" phase – the third in a five-phase operational plan.The next phase is "transition" and the last is "redeployment", culminating in withdrawal.
Transferring lead responsibility to Afghan forces is not the same as "transition", says Clinton's spin advice. Transition is a complex issue of measuring progress in the country's overall security, stability and governance. Transition is not an exit strategy, she adds. "It is important that our allies and partners counter erroneous misunderstanding that international support for the government of Afghanistan is wavering and any false expectation of an imminent withdrawal of Isaf forces."
She instructs her officials to report back quickly that they have passed the message on.
The cables touch on the contentious issue of sovereignty and whether the Afghan government can really be seen as an independent agency rather than a US puppet. In one message late last year Eikenberry recommends that Afghanistan hold a meeting of foreign ministers from major countries to support the government's goals. (The meeting did indeed take place).
"The Kabul setting is an essential backdrop to our efforts to emphasise Afghan ownership of their destiny; the venue will capture their people's pride, imagination, and sense of national ownership", Eikenberry argued. Without irony, he goes on to say that US attendance should be "conditioned on the new Karzai government enacting several key steps". These include the appointment of a clean and competent cabinet, action against high-ranking officials accused of corruption, and avoiding previous mis-steps, such as pardoning drug traffickers.
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