Why Hamid Karzai makes a bad partner for the U.S.
By Peter W. Galbraith
WashPost
Thursday, April 8, 2010
President Obama will soon have 100,000 troops fighting a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Their success depends on having a credible Afghan partner. Unfortunately, Obama's partner is Hamid Karzai.
In the eight years since the Bush administration helped install Karzai as president after the fall of the Taliban, he has run a government so ineffective that Afghans deride him as being no more than the mayor of Kabul and so corrupt that his country ranks 179th on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, just ahead of last-place Somalia, which has no government at all.
Afghanistan held a presidential election last August just as Obama was ramping up U.S. support for the war. Although funded by the United States and other Western countries and supported by the United Nations, the elections were massively fraudulent. Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC) -- which, despite its name, is appointed by and answers to Karzai -- oversaw massive vote-rigging in which at least one-third of Karzai's tally, more than 1 million votes, was fake. A separate, independently appointed Electoral Complaints Commission eventually tossed out enough Karzai votes to force a second round of balloting, but the IEC ensured that the voting procedures were even more prone to fraud than those applied to the first round. Karzai's main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, rightly chose not to participate in the second round.
Many Afghans understandably do not see Karzai as a democratically elected leader. So America's Afghan partner suffers from a legitimacy deficit in addition to his track record of ineffectiveness and corruption.
(More here.)
WashPost
Thursday, April 8, 2010
President Obama will soon have 100,000 troops fighting a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Their success depends on having a credible Afghan partner. Unfortunately, Obama's partner is Hamid Karzai.
In the eight years since the Bush administration helped install Karzai as president after the fall of the Taliban, he has run a government so ineffective that Afghans deride him as being no more than the mayor of Kabul and so corrupt that his country ranks 179th on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, just ahead of last-place Somalia, which has no government at all.
Afghanistan held a presidential election last August just as Obama was ramping up U.S. support for the war. Although funded by the United States and other Western countries and supported by the United Nations, the elections were massively fraudulent. Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC) -- which, despite its name, is appointed by and answers to Karzai -- oversaw massive vote-rigging in which at least one-third of Karzai's tally, more than 1 million votes, was fake. A separate, independently appointed Electoral Complaints Commission eventually tossed out enough Karzai votes to force a second round of balloting, but the IEC ensured that the voting procedures were even more prone to fraud than those applied to the first round. Karzai's main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, rightly chose not to participate in the second round.
Many Afghans understandably do not see Karzai as a democratically elected leader. So America's Afghan partner suffers from a legitimacy deficit in addition to his track record of ineffectiveness and corruption.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
Karzai is a bad partner because his conscience blames him for the miseries of his people due to American occupation of his country and he fails to follow the dictates of the US. Saddam Hussein was an excellent partner of the US when he was co-operating with the US when he was fighting the American proxy war with Iran for 8 long years in the 1980s
And the US gave him approval to occupy part of Kuwait. Poor saddam was trapped. Noriega was the best partner of the US as long as he allowed the Americans to control the Panama Canal and the drug trade, when he felt the injustice to his people he became the number one enemy of the US and was captured and imprisoned by the US international justice system. Only the world police (US) can do this. Warren Anderson was (the CEO of Union Carbide) the murderer of 15,000 innocent lives in Bhopal. But India could not even extradite him for questioning, because he is a superior Whiteman and so the world police follow a different set of rules
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