Afghanistan: Washington Committed to Karzai

The London conference on Afghanistan highlighted tactical differences between President Hamid Karzai's administration and his country's US and European allies. Even so, it appears that Washington is committed to working with Karzai.

Friction between Karzai and his foreign benefactors has been evident for over a year, reaching a peak amid the highly contentious presidential election. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

In London, Karzai and Western leaders again appeared to be on different pages. The Afghan leader's announcement that he was ready to sit down for talks with top Taliban leaders seemed to move beyond the US position. In Washington, Obama administration officials have yet to decide whether it's worth trying to talk to high-level Taliban commanders.

During a January 21 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in Washington, the US policy troubleshooter for Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, suggested that the Afghan president was on board with American strategy.

Describing Karzai as "Afghanistan's legitimately reelected president," Holbrooke told skeptical senators that the Afghan president was ready to help implement the new American stabilization vision. "When I got to Kabul a few days ago and saw President Karzai,' Holbrooke said, "of all the meetings I've had with him going back over the last six years, I felt that this was the one in which he was most focused on the future, looking at the issues, and ready to move forward."

Holbrooke cited Afghanistan's disputed presidential elections as the main reason why the country had made limited progress on democratization and economic development during the first year of the Obama administration. "In that 12-month period, ten months were dominated by one issue, and that was the election," Holbrooke said. "And that election created so much tension, and it so overshadowed everything else we were trying to do. It prevented certain programs from getting off the ground at all. It inhibited others."

He went on to note that, in the southern Afghanistan, many newly arriving US civilian experts still "don't have office space, they don't have telephones, they don't have resources."

Holbrooke was more guarded about the prospects for securing stronger strategic cooperation from Pakistan. He described the challenge as "far more complicated than Afghanistan," adding that "our influence there [in Islamabad] is necessarily much less."