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(CBS News) – Afghan President Hamid Karzai caused a major uproar by turning a speech into an anti-western rant. The White House called his speech “genuinely troubling”, and Karzai later called Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to explain his position.
On Thursday, his position seemed to be crystal clear as the Afghan president delivered a scathing tirade against the west, foreign diplomats, the press and the U.N., all of whom he accused of trying to influence the results of last summer’s elections.
“They wanted to have a puppet regime,” Karzai said. “They wanted to have a servant government.”
The outburst came less than a week after President Obama’s surprise visit to Kabul. In public, the talk was of a brighter future for Afghanistan with Mr. Obama highlighting “good governance, rule of law, anti corruption efforts.”
In private, the president demanded a crackdown on corruption, a promise Karzai has repeatedly failed to deliver on.
Ahmed Wali Karzai is accused of doing business with both drug lords and insurgents, running Kandahar as his own corrupt fiefdom and delivering thousands of fraudulent votes for his brother, which may be why he’s still in office despite pressure from Washington.
Now the president is trying to turn the tables on his accusers. “There was fraud in the presidential and provincial election, and it was committed by the foreigners,” Karzai said.
In attacking the west, Karzai is trying to win support at home. He even went as far as to say that foreign troops were on the verge of becoming “invaders,” a term the Taliban often uses to describe U.S. forces here.
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(TPM) – TPMmuckraker has obtained a fuller transcript of the comments, which were first reported by the New York Times last week. The Times‘ Richard Oppel noted that since last summer U.S. and NATO troops killed 30 and wounded 80 Afghans in convoy and checkpoint shootings.
In response to a question about reducing such incidents, McChrystal told troops listening to the town hall:
“We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there’s danger, they’re asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it.”
German troops kill six Afghan soldiers in friendly fire incident
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."“Foreign Troops Are ‘Invaders’“
Well duuUUUUuuuuhhhh.
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KANDAHAR — Afghan President Hamid Karzai sought to rally public support for an upcoming military operation in the Taliban’s birthplace, promising that U.S. and NATO troops will push into insurgent areas there only after consultations with community leaders.
His remarks to about 2,000 officials and tribal leaders in Kandahar reflect a NATO strategy that makes bolstering the stature and capabilities of the Afghan government in the city, the largest in southern Afghanistan, as important as clearing neighborhoods of insurgents.
“There will be no military operation without your cooperation and consultation,” Karzai told the leaders as the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and NATO’s top civilian representative, Mark Sedwill, looked on.
Both U.S. and Afghan commanders have emphasized the need for support among Kandahar’s half million people, most of whom are members of the same Pashtun ethnic group as the Taliban. The Taliban was organized in Kandahar in the early 1990s and made the city their headquarters before they were ousted from power in the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Securing Kandahar is considered the key to turning back the Taliban in the south, which is the main battlefront of the war.
During his speech, Karzai, who was born in a village near Kandahar, appealed to tribal leaders to send their sons to the Afghan army and police to show support for the government and to participate in a nationwide peace conference expected in Kabul next month. He noted that of 270 recent graduates of the Afghan officers’ academy, only two came from Kandahar.
Karzai also announced he would increase monthly salaries of district chiefs from about $75 to more than $400 to attract talented people and discourage bribery and kickbacks.
VIDEO: Karzai meets Kandahar elders in “shura” or council meeting
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
(Reuters) – Under the former Bush administration, Washington and Delhi built closer ties, whose centrepiece was a deal effectively recognising India as a nuclear power. India also expanded its presence in Afghanistan after the fall of the Pakistan-backed Taliban following 9/11, unnerving Pakistan. Many analysts are sceptical that Pakistan will be willing to target Afghan Taliban militants based in its border areas as long as it thinks it might have to use them to counter India’s presence in Afghanistan.
At the same time, India has long cast a wary eye on Pakistan‘s close relationship with China. After defeating India in a border war in 1962, China became Pakistan’s most reliable ally, providing financial, diplomatic and military support, including to its nuclear weapons programme. Tensions have also been rising again along the undemarcated border between India and China which runs along the fringes of disputed Kashmir in the west to Arunachal Pradesh in the east. So the three countries, even without tensions over Afghanistan, are already delicately balanced.
Pakistan undercuts Karzai’s peace talks with the Taliban by arresting Mullah Baradar
And we haven’t even talked about the Northern Alliance warlords, human rights and Karzai support of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum …
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan (AP) – An opposition politician has seized the headquarters of a branch of Kyrgyzstan’s security forces — the first concrete sign that a violent uprising is now in charge of the Central Asian nation.
An Associated Press reporter saw opposition leader Keneshbek Duishebayev sitting in the office of the chief of Kyrgyzstan’s succesor agency to the Soviet KGB, issuing orders on the phone to people Duishebayev said were security agents. He also saw Duishebayev giving orders to a uniformed special forces commando.
Duishebayev told the AP that “we have created units to restore order” on the streets. This mountainous former Soviet republic houses a U.S. military base that is a key supply center in the fight against the Taliban in nearby Afghanistan.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."