As U.S. assesses Afghan war, Karzai a question mark

[unhappycamper]

As U.S. assesses Afghan war, Karzai a question mark
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 13, 2010; 12:00 AM

KABUL - Afghan President Hamid Karzai had heard enough.

For more than an hour, Gen. David H. Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry and other top Western officials in Kabul urged Karzai to delay implementing a ban on private security firms. Reconstruction projects worth billions of dollars would have to be shuttered, they maintained, if foreign guards were evicted.

Sitting at the head of a glass-topped, U-shaped table in his conference room, Karzai refused to budge, according to two people with direct knowledge of the late October meeting. He insisted that Afghan police and soldiers could protect the reconstruction workers, and he dismissed pleas for a delay.

As he spoke, he grew agitated, then enraged. He told them that he now has three "main enemies" - the Taliban, the United States and the international community.

"If I had to choose sides today, I'd choose the Taliban," he fumed.

[Goldstein1984]

1. One could say that it's our fault for endorsing a bogus election...

but after Bush v. Gore we have no room to talk.

[Democracyinkind]

2. What are we even doing there?

"If I had to choose sides today, I'd choose the Taliban,"

Good thing that we will never make him choose. He would never have taken the job if he knew that someone was going to force him to choose.

The longer this is going on the more I am starting to believe that we have achieved exactly what we wanted in Afghanistan.