Obama ready to cut Karzai adrift
As support for Afghan leader wanes, rivals go to Washington for meeting with new President
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Reuters
Afghan leader Hamid Karzai may find himself on the receiving end of President Obama's axe-wielding
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Barack Obama's arrival in the White House and the wind of change sweeping through Washington could lead to the ousting from power of Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, The Independent has learnt.
International support for Mr Karzai, who was once the darling of the West, has waned spectacularly, amid worsening violence, endemic corruption and weak leadership. But until very recently, diplomats insisted there were no viable alternatives even as fighting has intensified and the Taliban insurgency in the south has grown. But four key figures believed to be challenging Mr Karzai have arrived in Washington for meetings with Obama administration officials this week. There is now talk of a "dream ticket" that would see the main challengers run together to unite the country's various ethnic groups and wrest control away from Mr Karzai.
"The Americans aren't going to determine the outcome of the election, but they could suggest to people they put their differences aside and form a dream ticket," said a senior US analyst in Kabul.
Mr Obama has already started getting to grips with the challenge of Afghanistan; he received a briefing on the coming American troop "surge" from General David Petraeus on Wednesday, his first full day in the Oval Office. Last night, Mr Obama appointed the veteran US diplomat, Richard Holbrooke, as his new special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The unofficial delegation to Washington was made up of three ex-ministers and a serving governor. Dr Abdullah Abdullah was the foreign minister, Dr Ashraf Ghani served as finance minister, Ali Ahmad Jalali was interior minister and Gul Agha Sherzai is the governor of the eastern province of Nangahar, where US troops are based. When Mr Obama visited Afghanistan in July he met Governor Sherzai in Jalalabad, even before he saw President Karzai in Kabul. "They are not going to blindly back President Karzai like the Bush administration did for so long," said John Dempsey, head of the United States Institute of Peace in Kabul. On the ground in Afghanistan, Camp Bastion in Helmand province is already becoming the symbol of the Americanisation of the war in the south. US forces have started arriving and will be joined by many more. Airfields are to be built to bring in transport and warplanes in preparation for a coming offensive with the dispatch of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.
Karzai officials had hoped Hillary Clinton, now the US Secretary of State, would prove their ally in White House. But those hopes were dashed last week when she branded Afghanistan a "narco-state" with a government "plagued by limited capacity and widespread corruption" during her confirmation hearing.
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president's brother, was named last October in leaked US intelligence reports as a major narco-trafficker. The allegations, vigorously denied by both men, are widespread in Afghanistan but, until then, Western officials had refused to corroborate them. But the leak was seen as a shot across Mr Karzai's bows from the Bush administration, to make him clean up his act and rein in his brother. The flurry of criticism suggests the international community is less than happy with his response. Mrs Clinton's remarks coincided with stinging criticism from Nato's secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who said corrupt and inefficient government was as much to blame for instability as the insurgents. Writing in The Washington Post, he said: "The basic problem in Afghanistan is not too much Taliban; it's too little good governance."
Individually, Mr Karzai's rivals risk splitting their support base. Together, diplomats are optimistic they could win the election, expected next summer, and reinvigorate a jaded population. "We need to create a new momentum, like in 2001," said Haroun Mir, co-founder of the Afghanistan Centre for Research and Policy Studies. "Change will bring hope, because right now the momentum is with the Taliban."
The planning for new policies on Afghanistan has been going on for months by Pentagon and State Department staff in anticipation of Mr Obama's inauguration. One official said: "We have to come up with fresh innovative ideas on counter-insurgency, counter-narcotics, governance, development. Now they are drafting in people from other departments. There is no doubt we neglected Afghanistan after the Taliban fell but there is a worry that we may be trying to do too much, too fast now."
A slew of initiatives are on the way. They include the arming of local groups to fight the Taliban, in the way Sunni militias were used against insurgents by General Petraeus in Iraq.
US, British and Nato forces will also play a much more direct role in counter-narcotics operations in an effort to tackle Afghanistan's heroin trade which provides 93 per cent of the world's supply of the drug.
Some policy analysts insist it is impossible to blame the Afghan president for all his country's ills. They say the international community has been ineffective, often divided and international military effort was focused on catching terrorists, not quelling an insurgency for far too long.
British anger at Taliban patients
British soldiers complain that they are being forced to share hospital facilities in Afghanistan with Taliban fighters. Enemy combatants are treated at the Camp Bastion Field Hospital in line with the Geneva Convention. But personnel are objecting to the traditional war-time practice. "My friends... were waking up in the hospital to find Taliban in the bed next to them," one soldier said. "The last thing they want to see when they come round is the Taliban on the same ward. It's just not right."
The Ministry of Defence said it had not received any complaints.
The challengers: Who might replace Karzai?
Gul Agha Sherzai
A veteran of the wars against the Soviets, Mr Sherzai (whose name means "son of a lion") is a former governor of Kandahar criticised for human rights abuses. He escaped assassination in 2006.
Dr Abdullah Abdullah
Although half Pashtun, he is considered a leader of Afghanistan's Tajik population. He was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2001 and served until 2006.
Ali Ahmad Jalali
An ethnic Pashtun and former colonel, Jalali joined the anti-Soviet resistance after the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979. He took US citizenship and spent 20 years broadcasting for Voice of America.
Dr Ashraf Ghani
An ethnic Pashtun, he studied in America, at Colombia University. He worked at the World Bank from 1991 to 2001, when he returned to Afghanistan for the first time in 24 years. From 2002-04 he was Finance Minister and oversaw the successful transition to Afghanistan's new currency.
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Comments
Obama should bring the warlord to justice
Until this idea of the Afghan state - this tribal Pashtun centric - foriegn sponsored - highly centralised - psudo monarchiical predeidential system - exists there will be many problems in that land - the end result of which will be a general uprising of the people to once again smash the despotic Afghan state.
Salah ( Kabul, Afghanistan)
But this strategy will fail...and the US will fail along with it.
Obama is doing what Bush and reagan before him did in Afghanistan.Bringing warlords who control DRUG TRADE.The drug trade is controlled by Karzai brother but Pakistan wants to control it as its ISI survives on this fund and when Regan looked the other way about human rights abuses by Hekatmayer and others of ISI agents.
Karzai is espousing the view of Afghanistan street as he wants to win the election.If Obama is imposing his dream team on Afghans then he will be digging his own grave with SAUDI ARABIAN CALIPHATE playing its game through Zilmay Khalizad.
I love it when we give people "freedom, democracy and liberty". How to turn Afghanistan into another Iran, only ten times worse.
Just watch as the coalition troops leave and the Taliban takes over again.
How disappointing! In just two days Mr. Obama is following the disasterous Bush line and is showing signs that the only change we are going to see is a new face ........ making the same mistakes!
If it is corruption Mr. Obama is worried about I suggest he looks to Kenya, the land of his father and witness the rampant blatant corruption that is bringing that lovely country to its knees!
During the past 30 years of war this faulty idea of a state naturally fell apart into respective regions....but with the Bonn process and the highly questionalble constitution writing process - the old order of the unworkable Afghan state was re-established....once again forieng sponsorship came in... survivors of the old system whom has been mostly living in comfort in the west popped up again looking to restore their lost positions in Afghan State. Karzai was par excellence a represenative of that previous Afghan state - and we have seen the results he created. Ashraf Ghani, Ahmad Jallali and Sherzai were also part of that group which included Karzai...and no different in their vision that the old order ought to be restablished and strengthened.
Ashraf Ghani was ever frustrated at how slow the process of re-establishing the dictatorial Pashtun state was taking place - as was Jallali - and wanted their own tribal grouping to beneift more than the Karzai clique of Durrani Pashtuns. Both of whom want to be the next puppet and drive home the Afghanization of that multi-ethnic multi nation - and in the majority non-Pashtun population.
They will not succeed - that land may be fooled into keeping quiet for a brief period but before not too long they will all arise and once smash the unrepresentative - foriegn serving - Afghan state.
To succeed - a whole new look is needed. A look that takes into account the fact that the old world order of the West being against the forces of USSR all over - and Afghanistan serving as a buffer in that process - is no longer relevant. The very idea of Afghanistan is no longer needed. A foreign sponsored Pashtun centric state need not be created again... the 'Southern Strategy' need no longer apply...for the most important element in that territory are not the Pashtuns or Uzbeks or other - but the Tajiks...they will determine how long the forigners will be allowed to stay and how long they will tollerate the new incarnation of the Afghan state.
A look at that list does not give me hope of things getting better - but most defenitely worse. Dr Abdulah is not really the leader of the Tajiks.... he is a power hungry individual whom will serve anyone whom gives him a position. The other three are Pashtun nationalist to the point of racism... all of it are bad signs for the future.
Ppl the world over tend to react similarly to any aggressive invader.
We've recently experienced a new President of 'Murka, eulogising the rebels who won the 'Murkan war of independence against attempted imposition by force of a British engineered "civil society".
Wars in the 21st century are tax-financed corporate welfare operations.
More tp the point, "what the hell" are British forces doing there - apart from polishing indigenous population suppression techniques and propping up narcotics barons who supply the drugs that arrive "at our our school gates" (Wonderone) [via another of his dirty allies based in the Balkans]
The insolence of the British is astonishing. They're the thugs committing war crimes in the country of the Talibs.
As I suggested in response to Patrick Cockburn's piece, it might be a novel option, eliciting a new kind of shock and awe, to refrain from proposing or engineering anything at all. Leave it alone . . . completely . . . and suddenly. It may then take no more than a few (metaphorical) moments of utter silence for Afghanistan to start beating its own swords into ploughshares.
The whole system needs a reboot, not more layers of code to patch its inherent inadequacies. Perhaps we have been overworking this problem.
so this is how western democracy works ... and freedom is killing innocents without any fear of justice ..
America chooses its allies very carefully. It is usually difficult to find useful people who will follow directions and betray their country and people's vital interests for the all mighty dollar. Since the end of the cold war we have seen a number of American allied leaders fall as all sociopaths eventually do. Where do you find psychopaths ready to murder on command? Naturally among the criminal element of any target country. The sin of the Karsai administration is not of being corrupt-rather of having the nerve to complain of repeated civilian deaths from NATO and American bombings. The Northern Alliance in Afghanistan is corrupt. The president of Pakistan only requires 10 per cent to remain silent about American missiles bombing tribesman on the border. If innocent civilians are killed then let Allah sort them out. The US doesn't discriminate against the corrupt rather against the disobedient. Perhaps a disastrous, world wide depression will serve as the Almighty's way to punish the evil in the world. What could be a worse punishment for a world that worships the 'Golden Calf'. Obama, America's new age imperialist.
If we analyse the history of Afghanistan, whenever it has been in any turmoil, it has been only and only been controlled and taken out of that sitiuation by a pashtoon leader, not because pashtoons are capable of governing and other ethnic minorities are not, but because pashtoons are the majority and whenever pashtoons have seen the qualities of leadership in any of their leaders, they have united behind him and have given him their full support, thus making him lead effectively and successfully. If any one disagrees, he can look at the history of Afghanistan. I hope the minorities of my beloved Afghanistan are not offended by what I have taken out from the history of Afghanistan. Now having said that one can rightfully ask a question then how comes karzai failed and realy failed badly and he is pashtoon. Unfortunately, Mr karzai has never been seen by the pashtoons as their leader rather he has been seen as pupet of the US, a close freind of the Northern Alliance, a disgrace for the Afghans. He just speaks good and fluent pashto and thats all, nothing more.
The sitiuation in Afghanistan will never improve as long as too much power is given to the divided minorities led by yet a minority from just one district(only recently upgraded to provence).
The status quo of the power consolidation into the hands of just one minority out of minorities should not be an option at all, otherwise we will be back in square one.
I agree to the header. It is a beauty but is the Senate agreeable to the Afghanistan wars still on and Obama meet Karzai in the new few days? I wonder if this is possible. The Afghans still want to sell the dope and need the, money in the hidden sources for the wars of the war lords.
I than you
Firozali A.Mulla
Two combat "comedians" pulled their chairs up to the sides of an Argentine casualty's bed and laid their knives and forks on the bedspread.
Humour usually overcomes sensibilities when it comes to our Armed Services.
Ghani for President!