AMERICA:The president's upbeat account of the Afghan war during Karzai's visit to the US was jarring
US RELATIONS with Afghan president Hamid Karzai nearly broke down this spring after national security adviser Jim Jones told reporters that US president Barack Obama went to Kabul to read Karzai the riot act.
Karzai accused the US of plotting against him, and threatened to join the Taliban. In extremis, both sides realised how much they needed each other, and Karzai came to Washington this week to push the reset button.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and US vice-president Joe Biden threw dinners for Karzai, and Obama spent three hours with him, including a stroll through the White House’s rose garden. It was, as David Ignatius of the Washington Post put it, “a touching piece of theatre”. But it left one feeling uneasy.
The Afghan leader said it was “extremely painful” and “heart-rending” to stand beside the bed of a US soldier who had lost all four limbs in Afghanistan, during a visit to Washington’s Walter Reed Army Medical Centre.
A total of 1,053 US soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan.
I couldn’t help wondering how the mutilated soldier felt, being visited by a man so criticised by his own leaders.
"President Obama can't stand him," Maureen Dowd of the New York Timeswrote on the very day of the Karzai-Obama duo.
Karzai was appointed president of Afghanistan by a UN-backed meeting of exiles in Bonn at the end of 2001. He won the presidential election that was finally held in October 2004, and was re-elected after widespread reports of massive vote-rigging last November.
For the past two years, US officials have leaked stories about corruption, drug-running, election-rigging and, most recently, attempts to stock the Afghan electoral commission with Karzai supporters ahead of this year’s parliamentary elections.
“The US administration destroyed Karzai, and that was totally suicidal,” says Gilles Dorronsoro, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
The most charitable view of Karzai is that the US emasculated him by refusing to grant him real power.
Karzai was extremely close to Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan- born American who was the Bush administration’s ambassador to Kabul, Baghdad and the UN.
"It was like Zal had to hold Karzai's hand even when he went to the bathroom," a US official in Kabul told the New Yorkermagazine in 2005. "He consulted him on everything."
Khalilzad wrote understandingly of Karzai this week in the Washington Post, explaining Karzai’s suspicions of the US administration, noting his “humiliation”, and relaying his demands that coalition forces stop entering Afghan homes and arresting Afghans.
It was hard to stomach the hypocrisy of the red-carpet treatment accorded to Karzai this week. But Obama’s upbeat presentation of the Afghan war at their joint press conference was even more jarring. “We [have] succeeded in driving the Taliban out of Marja,” he said.
But the Taliban are still active in Marja. The attempt by Gen Stanley McChrystal, commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, to impose a “government in a box” in the capital of Helmand province has failed. Some experts predict a similar pattern – that locals will be too scared of the Taliban or too sceptical of the government and the Americans – in a new offensive scheduled for the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar this summer.
Obama’s claim that the sacrifices of the young men whom Karzai visited “result over time in more and more of Afghanistan being under the control of the Afghan government . . . and less and less under the control of the Taliban” does not stand up to scrutiny.
A Pentagon report last month stated that of 120 districts deemed crucial to US success in Afghanistan, fewer than six are under full government control.
Obama and Karzai spoke of reducing the number of Afghan civilians killed by US and Nato forces. The New York Times reported that “90 Afghan civilians were killed by American and Nato troops during the first four months of the year – almost 2½ times the number during the same period last year”.
Obama’s assertion that Karzai has made progress in fighting corruption was knocked down by a report from the US special inspector general for Afghanistan which says Karzai’s office has not allowed the control and authority office, set up at US insistence, to publish its audits or send them to parliament. The truth, says Dorronsoro, a political scientist who has visited Afghanistan many times since 1988, is that “the coalition is losing the war – and rapidly”.
“The situation has deteriorated so badly that to avoid losing, we’re forced to send more troops. That’s called Vietnam,” he says.
By the end of this year, Obama will have tripled the number of US troops in Afghanistan to more than 100,000. The Afghan war is now costing more than the war in Iraq – $6.7 billion (€5.4 billion) in February alone – and the cumulative cost of both wars is more than $1 trillion.
