Word: karzai
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...President Karzai Can Be an Effective Partner Aside from the serious allegations of ballot fraud in the recent vote, the bigger legitimacy problem in Hamid Karzai's re-election was that only 1 in 4 registered voters actually turned out on election day. In the absence of any credible alternative, Washington will use Karzai's dependence on the West for funding and security to pressure him to deliver the sort of governance that can win popular support. But Karzai's government is widely seen as corrupt, ineffective and a tool in the hands of a foreign invader, and Afghans...
...Departure Date Creates Leverage Some critics suggest that by announcing July 2011 as the target date to begin a troop drawdown, President Obama has encouraged the Taliban to simply wait out the Americans. Supporters counter that by declaring that the U.S. commitment is finite, the President is forcing Karzai and the Pakistanis to take more responsibility for fighting the Taliban. That debate may be missing the point: everyone in the region is already acting on the assumption that the U.S. presence is temporary, knowing that America can't sustain a permanent occupation. One reason Karzai has made common cause...
...view of the conflict in Afghanistan. Months of cajoling and exhortation by U.S. officials have failed to shake the Pakistani view that the country's prime security challenge is its lifelong conflict with India rather than the threat of Taliban extremism, and the Pakistani military sees the Karzai government as being under Indian sway. As a result, Pakistan's large-scale military offensives against the Taliban have been confined to those who challenge the authority of the Pakistani state; those who use Pakistan as a base from which to launch attacks in Afghanistan have been largely unmolested. (See pictures...
...Despite its discord with Washington, Tehran has built progressively stronger economic and political ties with Afghanistan, not only with its historical allies among the country's ethnic minorities - the fellow-Shi'ite Hazaras and the Uzbeks and Tajiks - but also with the government of President Hamid Karzai. Still, some U.S. officials charge that the Iranians are hedging their bets and also building bridges to some elements of the Taliban despite their longtime enmity toward the movement. (Iran came close to war with the Taliban in 1998, when the movement murdered nine Iranian diplomats after capturing the northern city of Mazar...
...Iran can also use political levers against U.S. interests in Kabul. Dobbins points out that the Northern Alliance constituencies with which Tehran has strong connections - the Hazaras, Tajiks and Uzbeks - are also key support bases of Abdullah Abdullah, whom Karzai beat in this year's fraud-ridden election. "The most damaging thing that Iran could do would be to encourage these elements ... to cease supporting the [Karzai] government and essentially open a third front in the current civil war," he says...