Word: karzai
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...These questions matter, which is why the President's strategy review is so important. Afghanistan, Petraeus has noted, is different from Iraq. It is much poorer, vastly illiterate, governmentally incoherent and spectacularly corrupt - and its President, Hamid Karzai, shows no signs of the growth in office that Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki achieved (another mystery). In addition, the U.S. military has made some serious strategic mistakes in Afghanistan this year. "Why are the Marines in Helmand?" General McChrystal asked at one of his first strategy briefings, I'm told. Helmand province is where the opium crop...
...more important question: How long will he send them for? The military planners assume a five-to-10-year commitment. A more reasonable strategy would be to focus on the next year and see if there's any progress. Can the Afghan troops be trained? Will the Karzai government buckrake, or cooperate? Who are the Taliban, anyway? I'd send more trainers, and more troops to Kandahar, immediately, to give the effort its best chance to succeed. But the President should be as rigorous in evaluating the progress of counterinsurgency as the military was in formulating...
...Afghan faith in the future offered by Karzai's government is the key to the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. That faith will be more important than the strength of his electoral mandate in determining the fate of Karzai's presidency - and quite possibly that of Obama...
...election limbo allows Karzai and his Western partners to move forward. In three weeks, he will announce his cabinet choices and begin work on important security, economic and governance issues that had been put on hold during the election. And that will also provide an opportunity for the Obama Administration to use the leverage offered by Afghanistan's security and economic dependency to press Karzai to do better. "If we can start pressuring him to start cracking down on high-profile criminals and drug traffickers to show that he actually cares about rule of law, then he starts gaining legitimacy...
...factor holding Karzai's feet to the fire, though, may be the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan and his dependence on foreign troops for his physical survival. "I think [President] Karzai understands that he has to make changes to maintain an international commitment," says Hekmat Karzai. "He is also concerned about his legacy. If his presidency is going to be one that Afghans remember fondly, then clearly there has to be some issues he has to deal with...