By Sikander Hayat
There has increasingly been talk of a new establishment in Afghanistan as many insiders and outsiders have started to believe that current president Hamid Karzai is part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Failures of Hamid Karzai
1. Taliban surge back with every year of fighting—this week insurgents killed at least 20 people in attacks on three government buildings in Kabul
2. The perception of Afghanistan as an opium-fuelled officially sanctioned corruption”
3. Change of Afghanistan from a drug free country under Taliban to an Afghanistan as a “narco-state” under the current establishment
4. Fighting has intensified and spread—insurgent attacks were up by a third and civilian casualties increased by 40% last year over 2007
5. Mr Karzai is seen as indecisive and a poor administrator, using his “pocketful of mobile telephones” to deal with endless petitioners rather than running a proper government
6. A sense of injustice among general populace, the exclusion of some tribes from power
7. Instead of seeking “to serve and to protect”, the Afghan police works “to exploit and to extort”
8. Mr Karzai’s greatest shortcoming is his failure to assert his authority over his younger half-brother, Ahmed Wali, whose grip on the tribal politics of Kandahar has antagonised many
9. Two opinion polls, one published in October by the Asia Foundation, an American NGO, and one this month by three broadcasters, including the BBC have found that the number of people who thought Afghanistan was going in the “right direction” had dropped over recent years while those who thought the opposite had grown
10. Due to all this mismanagement, the standing of Western forces was also in decline (just 33% thought they were doing a good or excellent job) although the Taliban and foreign jihadists were highly unpopular
Who should replace Mr Karzai? A few possible scenarios:
1. Few prominent rivals have yet announced their intention to run
2. Mr Qanuni, who came second in the last presidential ballot, and the former foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, are regarded as able. But the former is a Tajik and the latter, although claiming some Pushtun roots, is closely associated with the Tajiks
3. Other names that are often mentioned include Ashraf Ghani and Ali Jalali, both Pushtuns living in America who once served under Mr Karzai, as finance and interior ministers respectively. But many believe that Afghan exiles, no matter how able as technocrats, lack credibility; Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, calls them “dog-washers”.
4. Zalmay Khalilzad, a former American ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations has said to have put out feelers about running
5. One possible candidate is Gul Agha Sherzai, a former warlord and governor of Kandahar, a successful governor of Nangarhar, now largely free of opium poppy. When Mr Obama visited Afghanistan last year, Mr Sherzai was the first Afghan leader he met.
6. One idea that is gaining ground is to change the constitutional balance by, say, creating a prime minister who would share authority with the president. This might offer an elegant way of stripping Mr Karzai of power while honouring him as a “father of the nation”, and reassuring him about his family’s safety and the interests of the Popolzai.
7. Afghanistan needs to be led by a Pushtun with credibility among the southern tribes and, ideally, acceptable to Pakistan
There has increasingly been talk of a new establishment in Afghanistan as many insiders and outsiders have started to believe that current president Hamid Karzai is part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Failures of Hamid Karzai
1. Taliban surge back with every year of fighting—this week insurgents killed at least 20 people in attacks on three government buildings in Kabul
2. The perception of Afghanistan as an opium-fuelled officially sanctioned corruption”
3. Change of Afghanistan from a drug free country under Taliban to an Afghanistan as a “narco-state” under the current establishment
4. Fighting has intensified and spread—insurgent attacks were up by a third and civilian casualties increased by 40% last year over 2007
5. Mr Karzai is seen as indecisive and a poor administrator, using his “pocketful of mobile telephones” to deal with endless petitioners rather than running a proper government
6. A sense of injustice among general populace, the exclusion of some tribes from power
7. Instead of seeking “to serve and to protect”, the Afghan police works “to exploit and to extort”
8. Mr Karzai’s greatest shortcoming is his failure to assert his authority over his younger half-brother, Ahmed Wali, whose grip on the tribal politics of Kandahar has antagonised many
9. Two opinion polls, one published in October by the Asia Foundation, an American NGO, and one this month by three broadcasters, including the BBC have found that the number of people who thought Afghanistan was going in the “right direction” had dropped over recent years while those who thought the opposite had grown
10. Due to all this mismanagement, the standing of Western forces was also in decline (just 33% thought they were doing a good or excellent job) although the Taliban and foreign jihadists were highly unpopular
Who should replace Mr Karzai? A few possible scenarios:
1. Few prominent rivals have yet announced their intention to run
2. Mr Qanuni, who came second in the last presidential ballot, and the former foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, are regarded as able. But the former is a Tajik and the latter, although claiming some Pushtun roots, is closely associated with the Tajiks
3. Other names that are often mentioned include Ashraf Ghani and Ali Jalali, both Pushtuns living in America who once served under Mr Karzai, as finance and interior ministers respectively. But many believe that Afghan exiles, no matter how able as technocrats, lack credibility; Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, calls them “dog-washers”.
4. Zalmay Khalilzad, a former American ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations has said to have put out feelers about running
5. One possible candidate is Gul Agha Sherzai, a former warlord and governor of Kandahar, a successful governor of Nangarhar, now largely free of opium poppy. When Mr Obama visited Afghanistan last year, Mr Sherzai was the first Afghan leader he met.
6. One idea that is gaining ground is to change the constitutional balance by, say, creating a prime minister who would share authority with the president. This might offer an elegant way of stripping Mr Karzai of power while honouring him as a “father of the nation”, and reassuring him about his family’s safety and the interests of the Popolzai.
7. Afghanistan needs to be led by a Pushtun with credibility among the southern tribes and, ideally, acceptable to Pakistan
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