hamid karzai

If this came in any other context except the aftermath of a dispiriting, fraud-filled election, this statement from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton would be a mundane discussion of how U.S. interests in a given country have to go beyond a dialogue with that country’s leaders. But since we’re talking about Afghanistan and the [...]

Michael Cohen, with something between bewilderment and respect, calls Hamid Karzai a gangster. He means it in the slang sense of someone who doesn’t care what you think of him; will do dirt right in front of your eyes; and dare you to do something about it. And reading this New York Times piece about [...]

More from today’s funtime White House presser. Jake Tapper of ABC asked Robert Gibbs about the Afghanistan election:
TAPPER:  President Obama last month in Pittsburgh said, of the Afghan elections and the aftermath, “What’s most important is that there’s a sense of legitimacy in Afghanistan among the Afghan people for their government.”  Is there a sense [...]

History just has a way of kicking Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in the teeth. There the 2004 Democratic nominee was, in Kabul, two weeks ago, securing President Hamid Karzai’s acquiescence to a runoff election, a very big diplomatic feat. Now challenger Abdullah Abdullah has withdrawn; the runoff is off; Karzai has been declared the winner [...]

If you saw me on al-Jazeera fifteen minutes ago making this point, sorry for repeating myself. But if not: Robert Gibbs said in his White House press conference today that the Obama strategy review for Afghanistan will go on — a troop decision is apparently still weeks away — and will continue to look at [...]

Ah, the Friedman unit, that beloved Internet tradition denoting the six-month increment many pundits believe will prove decisive in any war, only to be subject to an endless addition of … Friedman units. In the course of this very good New York Times piece outlining the stakes for President Obama now that Afghan President Hamid [...]

I asked Peter Galbraith, the deputy head of the United Nations’ mission to Afghanistan who was deposed for supporting a more rigorous U.N. role in opposing vote fraud in the August 20 elections, what he thought about Abdullah Abdullah’s withdrawal from the runoff. “Abdullah did the right thing,” he told me in an email from [...]

Saying it was in the “best interest” of his supporters, Abdullah Abdullah, the main challenger to President Hamid Karzai, announced Sunday that he was pulling out of a runoff election scheduled for this week. It is unknown right now if the election will occur, but Abdullah said that he was “absolutely not” calling on his [...]

CNN is reporting that a “Western source close to the Afghan leadership” is saying talks for next week’s runoff election between Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah have broken down and over the weekend Abdullah will drop out. Christiane Amanpour’s only other source in the piece is Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and [...]

I had some concerns that a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed from Richard Fontaine and John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security treated the fraudulent Afghan presidential election too blithely, proposing to simply work around Kabul and deal directly with the provinces. But if this Washington Post story is correct, the Obama [...]