Abdullah Abdullah was the first Afghan to suggest Hamid Karzai should become president of Afghanistan. It was one day in mid-November 2001, and we were in the cockpit of a CIA transport plane heading from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to Afghanistan's Bagram airfield—just liberated by Northern Alliance fighters—where Abdullah and I were to meet with the rest of the Northern Alliance leadership.

Although Abdullah cautioned that his view was not shared by all his comrades in the alliance, it did have the support of the three most powerful: Muhammad Qasim Fahim, the minister of defense, Younis Qanooni, the minister of the interior, and Abdullah himself, then the alliance's foreign minister. All three were protégés of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the revered...