Hamid Karzai takes author to heart, and his home William Dalrymple, in Sydney yesterday for the city's writers festival, found a devoted fan in Hamid Karzai. Picture: Sam Mooy Source: The Australian WHEN Hamid Karzai was preparing to meet his US counterpart Barack Obama in Washington in January, the Afghan President eschewed the detailed briefing notes drawn up by his advisers and stayed up late into the night to finish William Dalrymple's latest book, The Return of a King. If Mr Karzai's recent bellicose rhetoric towards the West is any indication, then reading about the treatment of his forebear, Shah Shuja, by the East India Company in the 1840s has strengthened his resolve not to be remembered as a puppet ruler. He was so taken by Dalrymple's narrative that he invited the Delhi-based author for a private audience in Kabul a few weeks after his White House summit. Our so-called current allies behave to us just as the British did to Shah Shuja. They have squandered the opportunity given to them by the Afghan people," Mr Karzai told him. Dalrymple, who is in Australia as a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival, said he sympathised with the Afghan President, who he believes has been vastly underrated by the West. Karzai has been very clever at manipulating vote banks and tribal alliances to remain in power for 12 years. He is no fool," Dalrymple said. Mr Karzai must stand down before elections scheduled for next April, leaving an untried successor to oversee the withdrawal of foreign troops and fend off a resurgent Taliban. "The Taliban still control 70 per cent of the rural south," Dalrymple said. They are not going to go away. They will only get more powerful -- the question is: how powerful? As the US prepares to pull its troops out of Afghanistan next year, the last thing anyone wants is for history to repeat itself. The First Afghan War, the subject of Dalrymple's book, ended disastrously. Of the 18,500 troops forced to march out of Kabul after a local uprising in the winter of 1842, only one man, an army doctor, survived. Shah Shuja -- who had been installed on the throne in Kabul by the British three years earlier, based on shoddy intelligence about a Russian threat -- was killed. The ruler he deposed, Dost Mohammed, was eventually returned to power. The parallels are eerily familiar. Shah Shuja came from the same sub-tribe as Mr Karzai while his opponents, the Ghilzai tribe, make up the bulk of the Taliban's foot soldiers. Bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table will be crucial to ending more than three decades of civil war in Afghanistan, Dalrymple insisted. They represent the most conservative strand of rural opinion in the south, they cannot be ignored. But he was cautiously optimistic about Afghanistan's future. There has been a huge migration to the cities. The young Afghans there are better educated, more literate, internet savvy. They do not want the Taliban back.