Afghan President Hamid Karzai was full of fire and thunder before he set off for his recent visit to Washington. He said he would ask the American president for more control over the actions and behavior of US forces in his country and urge him to release more than 500 Afghan prisoners currently being held at Guantanamo.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me considering Afghanistan, like Iraq, is supposed to be a sovereign nation benefiting from a new and vibrant democratic spirit...or so go the press releases and the White House spin.
The abuse allegation contained in a recent New York Times report based on a confidential file containing notes on a US military investigation, greatly concerned President Karzai as long as he remained in Kabul. “It has shocked me totally,” he said, adding, “We condemn it. We want the US government to take very, very strong action to take away people like that working with their forces in Afghanistan.”
But when push came to shove Karzai appears to have flown home after his cozy tête-à-tête with nothing other than a ‘strategic partnership’ agreement permitting the Americans to continue using their Afghan bases as part of their ‘war on terror’, and allow them to raid Afghan homes at will. He also took back a flea in his ear over his failure to eradicate poppy cultivation, which will no doubt leave his people wondering whether something was slipped into his tea while he wasn’t looking.
No one can know for sure what was discussed behind closed doors and for all we know Karzai could have been thumping the Oval Office desk to back up his demands. But judging from the joint press conference held by the two leaders in the White House and the pat on the back the Afghan president subsequently received from the most powerful man in the world, the only thumping going on was Karzai’s enfeebled heart.
Unlike British politician George Galloway, who recently turned the tables on a Senate committee over its unsubstantiated accusations that he benefited from Iraqi oil allocations under the ‘Oil for Food Program’ and became an icon of the American left for doing so, Hamid Karzai couldn’t have been more fawning.
During a joint press conference held by the two leaders in the White House last Monday, he denied that the mass demonstrations that took place in his country were anything to do with the Newsweek Qur’an story. They were against Afghan elections, he said. Against progress and against his country’s “strategic partnership with the US”.
Instead, he shot the messenger, saying we Muslims are “very much unhappy with Newsweek for bringing a matter so serious into the gossip column” before praising the US for having “over a thousand mosques”.
I live in Egypt and I haven’t come across a Muslim yet who’s unhappy with Newsweek, other than its eagerness to flagellate itself on the say-so of the powers-that-be.
As for the alleged abuses by the US of detainees, which Karzai had earlier promised to tackle during his meetings with the Bush administration, at the press conference he said: “The prisoner abuse thing is not at all a thing we attribute to anybody else but those individuals. The Afghan people are grateful, very, very much to the American people and recognize that individual acts do not reflect on governments or on societies. These things happen everywhere.”
Well, first of all they don’t happen everywhere for if they did the cells at The Hague would be chock-a-block. Few first world countries have locked up foreigners at whim, denied them their judicial rights, and subjected them to flashing lights, stress positions, salivating dogs, beatings, torture, as well as sexual and emotional abuse, as documented by almost all human rights agencies, including the Red Cross, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
And secondly, those acts do reflect on governments as evidenced by the Nuremberg trials and the Geneva Conventions, drawn up expressly to prevent such acts.
In short, the military status quo in the so-called ‘democracy’ of Afghanistan will prevail and there is little its president can do about it. If anything, Karzai’s trip to Washington was further evidence that his hands are tied and the country is still under virtual occupation.
There is no doubt Karzai’s heart is in the right place, but he simply doesn’t possess the necessary clout, which would enable him to take control of his country in the way that a leader should.
This was never more clear than on Dec. 7, 2001 when the Taleban surrendered Kabul to US forces conditional upon a Karzai-brokered deal offering amnesty to top Taleban figures including Mullah Omar, last seen riding off into the sunset on a motorbike.
In the event, the deal was rejected by the hawkish US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who said any deal that would allow Mullah Omar to “live in dignity” would be unacceptable, and warned if the deal went ahead US relations with Afghanistan’s new interim government would “turn south” and Washington would switch off the money supply.
And so, from the point of view of oil company executive turned politician Karzai, his best bet is to go along with the administration ‘few bad eggs’ theory as most others seem to be doing, or at least pretend to be doing.
As veteran investigate journalist Seymour Hersh points out with regard to the abuses at Abu Ghraib: “It’s been over a year since I published a series of articles in the New Yorker outlining the abuses at Abu Ghraib. There have been at least 10 military investigations since then — none of which has challenged the official Bush administration line that there was no high-level policy condoning or overlooking such abuse.”
So that’s it then. Including the opium crop, everything in Afghanistan’s garden is rosy and that should include its president’s cheeks. Although to be fair, in our world, which is ever sycophantic towards the superpower, Hamid Karzai merely conforms to an unwritten truth: The US rules and if you don’t like it, that’s just too bad.
Unlike Galloway, who can grandstand and show off his oratorical genius as much as he likes without too many negative repercussions, Karzai is responsible for feeding his people, improving their education, rebuilding infrastructure and ensuring their security. To do those things, he needs US cash and cooperation. So if a few ‘thank you’ and ‘pleases’ in the right direction achieve those crucial ends so be it...at least for now.
