Karzai Is Said to Doubt West Can Defeat Taliban KABUL, Afghanistan -- Two senior Afghan officials were showing President Hamid Karzai the evidence of the spectacular rocket attack on a nationwide peace conference earlier this month when Mr. Karzai told them that he believed the Taliban were not responsible.
"The president did not show any interest in the evidence -- none -- he treated it like a piece of dirt," said Amrullah Saleh, then the director of the Afghan intelligence service.
Mr. Saleh declined to discuss Mr. Karzai's reasoning in more detail. But a prominent Afghan with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Karzai suggested in the meeting that it might have been the Americans who carried it out.
Minutes after the exchange, Mr. Saleh and the interior minister, Hanif Atmar, resigned -- the most dramatic defection from Mr. Karzai's government since he came to power nine years ago. Mr. Saleh and Mr. Atmar said they quit because Mr. Karzai made clear that he no longer considered them loyal.
But underlying the tensions, according to Mr. Saleh and Afghan and Western officials, was something more profound: That Mr. Karzai had lost faith in the Americans and NATO to prevail in Afghanistan.
For that reason, Mr. Saleh and other officials said, Mr. Karzai has been pressing to strike his own deal with the Taliban and the country's archrival, Pakistan, the Taliban's longtime supporter. According to a former senior Afghan official, Mr. Karzai's maneuverings involve secret negotiations with the Taliban outside the purview of American and NATO officials.
"The president has lost his confidence in the capability of either the coalition or his own government to protect this country," Mr. Saleh said in an interview at his home. "President Karzai has never announced that NATO will lose, but the way that he does not proudly own the campaign shows that he doesn't trust it is working."
People close to the president say he began to lose confidence in the Americans last summer, after national elections in which independent monitors determined that nearly one million ballots had been stolen on Mr. Karzai's behalf. The rift worsened in December, when President Obama announced that he intended to begin reducing the number of American troops by the summer of 2011.
"Karzai told me that he can't trust the Americans to fix the situation here," said a Western diplomat in Kabul, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He believes they stole his legitimacy during the elections last year. And then they said publicly that they were going to leave."
The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long conflict and will soon revert to its traditional policy of "running away," leaving Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed the whole of the Middle East
The Western powers, especially the United States, still wield immense military and economic power that looks formidable on paper. But they are unable to use that power because their populations have become risk-averse. The Western man today has no stomach for a fight. This phenomenon is not new: All empires produce this type of man, the self-centered, materialist, and risk-averse man. - The Iranian strategic analyst, Hassan Abassi, Director of the Center for Security Doctrines Research of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)
2 comments:
The sooner the UK pulls it's troops out the better. Their efforts are not appreciated by Obama and it's not worth the high casualty rate.
They are not there to turn that 13th century shithole into a modern democracy - an impossible task - and with Pakistan openly supporting the Taliban beating them is also an impossible task.
Hate to have to agree with Hassan Abassi over anything, but he's hit that one square on the nose.
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