THE US and Afghan presidents seemed to have emerged from a marriage councillor’s office to face the press in the East Room of the White House yesterday.
“The relationship between the US and Afghanistan is now in its 10th year,” President Hamid Karzai began his remarks. “It is a real relationship based on hard and difficult realities.”
Karzai was wearing his trademark purple-and-green striped chapan robe and karakul fur hat. More than eight years have passed since high-fashion designer Tom Ford called the Afghan leader “the most chic man in the world”.
In the past year, US officials have been more likely to label the Afghan leader as corrupt, election-rigging and ineffectual.
Karzai has given as good as he got, accusing the West of fiddling last year’s Afghan elections and, only last month, threatening to join the Taliban himself.
To save the deteriorating relationship, the Obama administration piled Karzai and 15 cabinet ministers into a US military aircraft and flew them to Washington for a four-day visit, intended to relaunch what Obama repeatedly called their “strategic partnership”.
Most of their grievances were aired, albeit diplomatically, in yesterday’s press conference. For the US, corruption and Karzai’s dalliance with the Taliban. For Afghanistan, civilian casualties and the insecurity associated with the target date of July 2011 for US troop reductions.
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, $2.5 billion (€1.98 billion) – nearly one-quarter of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) – was paid out in bribes last year.
“I want to acknowledge the progress that has been made in strengthening anti-corruption measures,” Obama said, as Karzai gazed intently at him. “Of course, President Karzai and I both acknowledge that more needs to be done.”
Last year, the US talked about “flip-flopping the foot soldiers” of the Taliban, essentially by buying them off in the way the US lured Sunnis away from the Iraqi insurgency. Now, Karzai is conducting discreet negotiations with Taliban leaders in the Persian Gulf, and the US doesn’t like it.
Obama yesterday reiterated US conditions for making peace with the Taliban: they must renounce violence and all ties with al-Qaeda, and promise respect for the Afghan constitution, including women’s rights.
“There are thousands of Taliban who are not ideologically engaged, who are not part of al-Qaeda,” Karzai asserted. “Thousands of them are country boys caught in circumstances beyond our control. It is this group we are addressing in the peace jirga ”.
Karzai talked of peace with the Taliban, but Obama spoke of war. “The incentive for the Taliban to lay down their arms in part depends on our effectiveness in breaking them militarily,” he said.
Karzai thanked the US president for expressing “very fundamentally, in human terms, his concern about civilian casualties”.
“I am ultimately accountable for someone who was not on the battlefield and got killed,” Obama said. “I don’t want civilians killed, and we are going to do everything we can to prevent that. Our troops often put themselves at risk to decrease civilian casualties . . . holding fire, even though it would be safer for them to just take these locations out.” Though he intends to start bringing troops home in July 2011, Obama promised: “We are not suddenly finishing with Afghanistan. This is a long-term presence not simply defined by military presence . . . We are still going to be putting in resources.”
Obama called new British prime minister David Cameron, whom he telephoned on Tuesday, “a smart, dedicated and effective leader”. Cameron, he said, “reaffirmed, without me bringing it up, his commitment to our strategy in Afghanistan”.