President Hamid Karzai’ has rebuffed General Petraeus’ face to face personal apology for the misidentification of nine boys for wanted insurgents, and the subsequent slaughter that followed.
President Karzai declared that “the people of Afghanistan are tired of these incidents and excuses, and condemnations cannot relieve their pain….I am asking you on behalf of the people of Afghanistan that there be no repetition of this incident.”
Mr. Karzai is seldom so forthright, so much in the right, as he has been on this occasion; his populism has had the far too costly fortune of coinciding with the deep and righteous anger and indignation felt by people throughout the Kunar Province, the area of Pakistan where those nine biys were killed by helicopter fire.
It remains to see though whether Mr. Karzai will be outflanked by the people’s anger. No doubt he will come around to toeing the NATO line when conditions and opportunities permit. But until then, it is possible that in speaking to Afghan anger on this tragedy he might go too far, incautious as he is, and stoke the public’s ire beyond the the level convenient for the local politics of the day . He will then have inflamed the cause of his own downfall in the eyes of the western diplomatic communities that have long help keep Afghanistan from slipping into outright chaos.