Hamid Karzai is the President of Afghanistan and he's a man between a rock and a hard place. He has led his country since the 2001 fall of the Taliban. He used to be a White House favourite during the Bush Administration but recently his popularity has waned and he's suspected of making deals with warlords, tolerating drug smugglers and ignoring corruption. In April this year, he threatened to join the Taliban if the West didn't stop pressuring him.
Now Mr Karzai has lost faith in the Americans and NATO to prevail in Afghanistan and is keen to strike his own deal with the Taliban and Pakistan, the Taliban's longtime supporter. If this is true, it will surely be a change of heart for the President because he's spent the past nine years in office accusing the Pakistanis of supporting the Taliban.
People close to him say he began to lose confidence in the Americans last summer after President Obama announced that he would begin reducing troops by the summer of 2011. The Americans and NATO are sending thousands of additional troops into the country to supposedly weaken hard-core Taliban and force them to the bargaining table but it's not happening and he knows the Americans can't afford to stay there forever. He believes that a lot of Taliban have been wrongly detained and should be released, they don't know who the enemy is and they wrongly detain people. He's trying to build bridges with the Taliban and his brother Ahmed Wali Karzai has recently held secret meetings with its deputy commander.
After all the deaths and suffering of innocent civilians and soldiers from around the world, it looks like we will all pack up and go home. And for what?
No comments:
Post a Comment