The White House has issued its strongest warning yet that President Karzai cannot count on continued US support if he fails to accept that Afghanistan’s fraudulent election has critically undermined his authority.
President Obama is more concerned at “whether there’s an Afghan partner” worth defending, than with the politically fraught question of how many more troops to send, said Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama’s chief of staff and a central figure in White House deliberations on Afghanistan.
His rare public remarks today were echoed by comments from Senator John Kerry, who has flown to Kabul to join efforts to persuade Mr Karzai to accept a second round of voting or enter a power-sharing deal with his opponent, Dr Abdullah Abdullah.
If the only reason we are in Afganistan is because of Karzai, we should get out. In the meantime, all of these mixed signals can do not good.
I blame George Bush.
If for nothing else, we need additional troops to assist those already there who face danger. This response by the President appears to ignore the needs of the troops on the ground.
To treat Afghanistan’s central gov’t as necessary to our goal is to purposefully misunderstand our mission there. We cannot be there to nation build. This country is too spread out, too uneducated, too povertry stricken and to sparsely populated for the US to try to use a centralized gov’t from Kabul to control the hinterland provinces, where Al Quaida and the Taliban who protects it exist. We simply have to ignore the central gov’t and control the hinterland provinces, by allying with Pakistan in those areas. To the extent the central gov’t is helpful, fine. To the extent is it corrupt, so what? It is largely irrelevant to the reason we are there. Our President is stalling to appease the left of his party, who want to withdraw from this “war of necessity” (his own words) altogether. He continues delay unfortunately not only at his own political risk but at the risk of the lives of our young men and women on the ground over there. And the latter is not acceptable. Gens McKristal and Petreaus need to set a deadline for themselves and resign if Obama does not make a decision by that time. That may be the only way ultimately to protect these soldiers and to stop the political maneuvering that is going on in Washington at the expense of these young men and women.