By Steve Hynd
Hamid Karzai has survived his inauguration for a second term as Afghanitan's president, and has spoken like a King: he has promised to end graft, appoint a clean cabinet, kick private security companies out of his nation within two years and a drawdown of foreign troops within five. He's also promised a "loyal jirga" to help reconcile the various factions within his fractured country.
It would be an ambitious agenda for any national ruler. The big question is: can he actually deliver any of it? Western leaders, desperate for any measure of legitimacy they can confer on the man who blatantly stole an election he would have won anyway, are making as many encouraging noises as they can.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said it showed Karzai understood the demands being made on him.
"When you've been re-elected, it's delivery time and I think that's what came through in President Karzai's speech," Miliband said. "It's a very challenging country to govern but you've got a very strong, substantial statement today."
European Union special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Ettore Sequi called the speech "a very good statement which reflected the right priorities the right way."
"Let's encourage and support the president and we shall have opportunities to see how that program will be translated into reality," he told Reuters.
But the reality is that Karzai isn't a King able to rule by fiat - he's a Western mostly-puppet juggling a whole bunch of intenselly rich and violent warlord supporters while looking over his shoulder at the Taliban-led insurgency.
Stopping corruption and electing a clean cabinet will require Karzai to subdue bloody warlords like his own brother quoted above, designated vice-president Mohammad Qasim Fahim or power-broker General Dostum. None are going to take marginalisation and exclusion easily. There's a good chance some will just try to have Karzai killed and figure they can do a deal with his successor.
Halting the operations of both domestic and international security companies within two years will mean seriously upsetting the likes of Hamed Wardak, son of the Afghan defense minister, and Karzai's own cousins Ahmad Rateb Popal and Rashid Popal. They and other operators of security companies have been accused of making out like literal bandits from protection kickbacks on their already lucrative trucking contracts. It will also mean stepping up the Afghan security forces to the point where they can take over from those security companies - presumably without copying their tactics of bribing local brigands to let convoys past. Such a rapid increase in both numbers and capability seems like a pipe dream to many.
And finally, to get foreign troops out of Afghanistan within five years, or even just getting Afghan forces in the lead, will mean not just doing all of the above on steroids but doing it without upsetting his Western leash-holders enough that they simply decide to replace him. Too, there are major factions within those Western nations that don't want to leave in anything even marginally close to five years. For them, "staying the course" has become a reason in and off itself: witness the shenannigans over the last year from the U.S. neocon lobby and from General Odierno over the prospect of pulling out to an agreed timetable in Iraq. Karzai's five year timeline overlaps the nest U.S. presidential election and from here it looks like Obama is by no means certain to win a second term. A new hardline Republican administration in D.C. would be inclined to tear up any timetable for withdrawal if it could justify staying longer.
Before any of Karzai's edicts can come to pass, he'll have to deal with his own robber barons, his Western liege-lords and a troublesome rebellion - all while under constant threat of being unseated and of assassination from disaffected factions. I personally would love there to be a clear and unambiguous timetable for withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan and so I wish Karzai the very best of luck if he's serious. But it's unclear, on the past evidence, either that he means what he says or if he does that he has the lion heart needed for the task.
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