The mind implodingly bad news on Afghanistan has taken another downward tailspin. So much so that even pop-culture savvy New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has gotten in on the blame game.
And here’s why: Because there is now a somewhat more clear deadline on NATO withdrawal in Afghanistan (electoral politics requires that President Obama harp on about 2011 as a somewhat important deadline, even though the rest of the world thinks otherwise) President Hamid Karzai has taken it upon himself to ensure his political survival through political demagoguery. Karzai’s populist, insurrectionist line seems to have dovetailed well with a altogether ruinous turn in the nearly decade long U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.
The U.S. seems to have lost its leverage on politics in Afghanistan, even as it has engineered commitments from its NATO allies to stay on and nation build in Afghanistan past 2014. Take for instance, that General Petraeus and ISAF got fooled by an impostor as a high level Taliban leader. Take for instance the foreboding news that Karzai has challenged the United Nations backed electoral results in the recent parliamentary elections in Afghanistan even though the result was deemed fair enough; even though Karzai’s power in parliament will not be diminished. The U.N.and other elections observers succeeded in throwing out as many as 25 percent of ballot returns due to charges of corruption and voter malfeasance. Whatever the real structure of post-election political power, Karzai wants to take the reigns of the political narrative in Afghanistan, on his own terms. He seems to not mind that doing so risks running roughshod over his international military backers.
This bears some explication. NATO leaders confirmed that they were looking to 2014 as a fairly hard and fast deadline to move away from the intervention in Afghanistan. William Hague, the British Foreign Minister committed to withdrawing troops by 2015. The world’s askance glance is moving away from Afghanistan and Karzai knows it. He does not want to be another President left hanging after another foreign military withdrawal. He wants to have a longer political and more felicitous career than the one that his predecessor President Mohammad Najibullah enjoyed: Najibullah was shot and then hanged along with his brother in 1996 under Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s orders.
Karzai is doing anything he can to save himself, including of course, running away from his American and NATO paymasters. Whether he likes it or not, the Taliban will be a part of a contested power sharing agreement. Indeed, he will have to work with the Taliban leadership if he wants to govern Afghanistan (or even Kabul) after his international guests–perhaps lodgers?–have left Afghan soil. Karzai wants to do anything he can to promote a view that he is the man in charge, that he is the one warlord who can protect Afghan sovereignty. Don’t forget that the Taliban insurgency was a remains a nationalist endeavor.
Karzai’s turn away from NATO and the UN shouldn’t come as a surprise. But his moves to stay in power still seem surprising and, indeed, offensive.
