Word: karzai
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Moving east to Afghanistan, we bemoaned the withdrawal of presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah, the chief opponent of President Hamid Karzai, from a hotly contested race plagued by allegations of fraud, terming the decision premature. Abdullah’s concession to Karzai dispossessed the Afghan government of any democratic legitimacy, thus depriving the country of much-needed stability. The implication of this politically expedient maneuver, we concluded, was that the United States could not afford to factor in the chimerical prospect of a stable democracy in Afghanistan as it considers its policy toward the region...
...warning shots according to the McChrystal protocol. But the bus didn't stop and the Americans opened fire; five civilians were killed and 18 wounded. Outraged Afghans poured into the streets in Kandahar to protest. Their support for the upcoming battle was becoming more tenuous, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai had said he wouldn't approve the U.S.-led campaign in Kandahar unless the people wanted it. The fate of Barack Obama's new Afghan strategy hung in the balance. (See pictures of the 2009 presidential election in Afghanistan...
...common mistake for great powers to assume that those whom they engage as proxies to fight their battles or run their satrapies share the same agenda as their patrons just because their interests coincide at a given moment. But not all of Karzai's enemies in the region are America's enemies, and not all of America's allies are Karzai's allies. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Pakistan, the original patron of the Taliban, which has also been going through the motions of indulging American concerns while continuing to enable the Afghan Taliban insurgency...
Like Pakistan over the past eight years, Karzai has been biding his time, positioning himself for the battles and power shifts that will come when the Americans leave, his goal - like Islamabad's - being to protect his power. And the arrival in Washington of the Obama Administration signaled the onset of the endgame. Driven by a desire to conclude America's fiscally burdensome wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and alarmed by the downward security spiral in Afghanistan, the Obama Administration put Karzai on notice that failure to tackle the corruption that was deemed to be fueling the insurgency would jeopardize...
...should come as no surprise, then, that in the endgame, Karzai has revealed an agenda quite distinct from that of Washington - just as Pakistan has done. The premise of the U.S. policy, after all - just like that of the Pakistanis, Karzai, the Taliban and every other player in the game - is that sooner or later, the Americans will leave. And it's that reality, now more than ever, that is shaping everyone's game...