Karzai wagers on Obama's audacity
By M K Bhadrakumar
Public corruption in Afghanistan is taking curiouser and curiouser turns. A
vexatious choice arises: Betraying your country to a foreign intelligence
agency - is it an act of corruption? By moral and ethical standards, it appears
so. By legal standards, no doubt, it is the highest form of corruption and
deserves the maximum punishment.
Those accused usually perish in long, interminable solitary confinement - or
fade into oblivion after a spy exchange. In the latter category, they often go
on to become alcoholics as they walk into the sunset of life and the guilt of
corruption begins to eat into the vitals of their conscience, which can be
regarded as the highest form of God's wrath.
However, in Afghanistan, where the bizarre can become the order of the day, the
United States holds the supreme power to both
spawn corruption and, then, well, go through the motions of punishing it.
Arguably, this must be one of the highest forms of self-flagellation known to
mankind - outside of Shi'ism, that is.
Karzai spurns tough love
Take the burnt-out case of Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for
the National Security Council in the government headed by President Hamid
Karzai.
The New York Times has made the sensational revelation that Salehi was almost
nabbed by the Afghan agency tasked with an anti-corruption drive a month ago,
but had to be summarily allowed to go scot-free at the personal intervention of
the president. Salehi, quite expectedly, had been trained by the Americans with
the noble objective of what has come to be known as "capacity-building" of
Afghan state organs.
Salehi has apparently been working as a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
agent for donkey's years, either betraying the functioning of the presidential
office or corrupting Karzai's policies by injecting careful doses of American
thinking into them from time to time, thus rendering invaluable service to the
US-led war and Washington's regional strategies. Not only that - the CIA used
him also as a sort of cashier to disburse its payments to its other agents in
Afghanistan.
Salehi's case file has now become a celebrated instance of the battle of wits
between Karzai and the Barack Obama administration as it approaches a
qualitatively new level of ferocity. To such an extent that at one point Karzai
threatened to disband the entire US-trained anti-corruption task force and the
standoff threatened to knock the bottom out of the Obama administration's AfPak
strategy. It even prompted Washington to post-haste dispatch to Kabul one of
the key figures in the highest echelons of the US foreign and security policy
establishment, John Kerry, chairman of the foreign relations committee of the
senate.
Washington let it be known through media leaks that Kerry's mission to Kabul
was to do some "tough-talking" to Karzai, which indeed has been happening with
an alarming frequency in recent years as part of the US's "tough-love" approach
to the indomitable Afghan leader who has begun holding his political ground
with an increasing tenacity that threatens to dilute American overlordship of
the war itself.
But tough love is a highly complicated act to perform. We do not know what
transpired between Karzai and Kerry in the presidential palace last week. There
could be more than one version of the rendezvous as the two also, according to
American media reports, are great friends and get along splendidly.
At any rate, no sooner had Kerry left Kabul at the conclusion of his mission,
Karzai took to the media and virtually tore into the American case file on
Salehi and the entire sordid business of what constitutes corruption in
Afghanistan.
Karzai made three points. First, Salehi was treated shabbily by the US-trained
task force, that its acts were completely out of proportion to the charge
against him, namely, that he allegedly accepted a gift of a US$10,000 car for
his son for some services rendered. Surely, it was a modest gift as it could
only have been a basic model of a very small car, which the status-conscious
Afghan elites do not usually use. A reconditioned Nissan Micra imported from
Dubai, perhaps?
It's a proxy war
But that was not the point. Karzai was finger-pointing that when there are
probably much bigger sharks in the Afghan pond, the US-led drive chose to make
a horrible example of Salehi because the idea was not so much as to crack down
on corruption as to discredit the presidential palace itself.
It seems anti-corruption officials last month charged into Salehi's house in
the wee hours of the morning, handcuffed him and tried to take him away. The
worst part was that he was treated like a petty criminal in front of his family
members and neighbors, which is an abominable thing of humiliation to happen to
any Afghan with high social standing.
Two, Karzai challenged the US-led anti-corruption agency and ordered that it
must work within Afghan laws and that it should be a "sovereign" Afghan body.
In short, Karzai showed the Americans the door and said he intended to exercise
his presidential prerogatives as the elected leader of a sovereign country and
the US cannot behave as if Afghanistan were a vassal state.
Karzai has meanwhile issued a decree that the Afghan private militias that
masquerade as "security agencies" and which are funded and engaged by the US
and other Western countries by way of outsourcing aspects of the war are to be
disbanded and merged with the Afghan security forces under the Interior
Ministry within this year. These agencies provide guards or escort duties,
gather field intelligence or even undertake controversial errands that are
beyond the pale of the law.
Karzai in effect hit the Americans below the belt. The fact remains that the
Americans have been engaging in a quaint form of warring in the Hindu Kush by
increasingly subcontracting the war to American contractors. No one speaks
about it, but this has inevitably led to massive corruption as the Pentagon
patronizes its favorite American contractors, and evidently, it is all pork.
Like in the case of the Iraq war, the Afghan war also stinks and the US
Congress is finally examining how billions of dollars have been spent by the US
in the Hindu Kush since the invasion in late 2001.
Karzai understands perfectly well that the current "anti-corruption" drive by
the US's AfPak officials is a clever move to pass the buck to the Afghan side
and blame the latter for all the colossal wastage of financial resources for
the war provided by American taxpayers when congress comes up with its report
and the fur starts to fly.
Unsurprisingly, Karzai is not willing to be made the fall guy. A third point he
made, therefore, is that he is not even in charge of the gravy train running
through the Hindu Kush. Afghan officials have pointed out that only a small
portion - less than 20% - of the international aid flow into Afghanistan is
routed through the Kabul government, whereas the remaining 80% is handled
directly by the donor countries.
This acrimony as to who holds the aid strings is actually as ancient as the
hills. The Americans have never questioned the veracity of Karzai's claim,
which is backed by UN officials, too. But why has it erupted with such
ferocity?
The heart of the matter is that Karzai seems to suspect that an invidious US
attempt is on to replace him. He would have certainly noted that the New York
Times devoted a full-page article on the Afghan war recently, a key portion of
which virtually demanded the Obama administration to have a rethink over
Karzai's continuance in office.
Karzai is a sophisticated politician and knows what the US did in Vietnam when
if faced defeat in the war. The US simply kept replacing its South Vietnamese
ally in Saigon's presidential palace. Karzai has indeed become a political
hurdle for the US. He is far too assertive to be a faithful ally and there is
no certainty that he would mature into a Nuri al-Maliki, the premier in Iraq.
Most important, he insists on piloting the search for a political settlement
and is increasingly showing a propensity to build a regional consensus
involving Iran, Russia, India, and others. He threatens the US's monopoly of
the war and the peace process.
In essence, Karzai has concluded that the US and Pakistan have worked together
to throttle his initiative to open a line to the moderate Taliban who are open
to reconciliation.
The recent disclosures by the New York Times regarding the "capture" of Mullah
Baradar in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi in January testify to the
fact that it was a joint CIA-Inter-Service Intelligence operation. And the best
claim the Americans can put forth on their performance is a preposterous
explanation that they are dumb creatures and the smart Pakistanis used them as
a doormat and that they were really not quite clued in on what was afoot when
they swooped down on the No 2 in the Quetta shura and nabbed him in his
hideout.
Karzai doesn't think the CIA comprises such imbeciles as not to know who they
are dealing with when they collaborate with Pakistan's formidable ISI in a
major field operation.
What is more ominous than all this is the secret meeting held by US officials
in Bonn last month with some of Karzai's allies from the erstwhile Northern
Alliance, with the duplicitous intent of prising them away from their political
tie-ups with the Afghan leader. In short, to tear apart the spider-like web of
political deals that Karzai has been astutely making to broaden and deepen his
support base in anticipation of the time when he will sit down face-to-face
with the Taliban.
The supreme irony is that the US has been instigating Karzai's Northern
Alliance allies belonging to non-Pashtun ethnic groups by portraying the Afghan
leader as an appeaser of the Taliban and tapping into their visceral fears of a
Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.
Karzai has reason to suspect that the game played by the US's AfPak officials
is extremely devious as it happens just before the Afghan parliamentary
elections due on September 8. Karzai is pinning his hopes on getting a
parliament elected with which he can work in harmony, unlike the previous
legislative body that was under the influence of the American Embassy in Kabul.
Can Obama rein in the Pentagon?
Karzai estimates that he would have to carry the parliament along as
representing the collective opinion of the Afghan people in any political
settlement. If Karzai's plan for the parliamentary elections succeeds, thanks
to his broad-ranging alliance with non-Pashtun groups, and he gets a parliament
with which he can work so as to evolve a national consensus, it would lethally
damage the US's entire strategy to control and prescribe the contours of any
Afghan settlement.
The core issue is, as reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post
last week pointed out, that all indications are that the US has no intention of
vacating its military presence in Afghanistan and Central Asia in the
foreseeable future. And it is only through a pliant regime in Kabul that the
Pentagon can hope to negotiate a favorable status of forces agreement. The
issue is of fundamental importance to the US's regional strategy of
"containment" of China, Iran and Russia and doesn't allow any scope for
compromise.
Writing in Foreign Policy, Selig Harrison, a renowned scholar and author of Out
of Afghanistan, touched on the huge political dilemma facing Obama -
how to leave Afghanistan without "losing". He pointed out that it was only by
the US agreeing to a "neutral" Afghanistan that the war could be brought to a
conclusive end.
But Harrison foresees that Obama will have a tough fight on his hands within
his own camp in Washington as he inches toward a political settlement in
Afghanistan. He wrote:
The biggest obstacle to the accord is not likely
to come from Pakistan, but from a Pentagon mindset in which the projection of
US power is viewed as a desirable end in of itself. Some of the 74 US bases in
Afghanistan, including the airfields, are designed solely for
counter-insurgency operations and might be expendable in a neutralization
accord.
But the mammoth airfields at Bagram and Kandahar are projected to grow in the
years ahead - ambitious new construction projects continue at both bases,
despite Obama's pledge to begin withdrawing troops from the country in the
summer of 2011. Furthermore, congress is considering funding requests, totaling
$300 million, to establish new bases at Camp Dwyer and Shindand, close to the
Iranian border, and Mazar-i-Sharif, near Central Asia and Russia. Aware of
Afghan opposition to "permanent bases", Pentagon and White House officials now
speak of "permanent access", which would guarantee the use of these bases for
intelligence surveillance operations.
Conceivably, the benefit
of the doubt could be given to Obama that he is either not in the loop about
Pentagon thinking or that he is "yet to address" the future of US bases in
Afghanistan and Central Asia. Harrison is inclined to feel that the latter is
the case.
In either case, it is Obama who will finally call the shots and decide whether
the Pentagon will still use Afghanistan to "further its global power projection
goals long after the Taliban and al-Qaeda are a distant memory", Harrison
estimates with a profound sense of the history of the 30-year Afghan conflict.
In sum, Karzai has an epic fight on his hands. He either pulls back his Afghan
instincts of pride, self-respect and fierce independence and strikes a Faustian
deal, or he treads on the Pentagon's global strategy. It could be a fatal
choice either way for him.
Ironically, Karzai's best hope is that Obama refuses to be an "establishment
president" and lives up to the promise he held out at the time of his election
campaign. But the rhetoric of 2008 is now history. What matters in the hurly
burly of politics is the "here" and the "now".
The outcome of the US Congressional elections in November could prove to be a
watershed event in Karzai's tumultuous political career as much as it could be
for Obama's meteoric appearance on the world stage as a man of peace.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign
Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka,
Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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