hamid karzai

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 Now challenger Abdullah Abdullah has withdrawn; the runoff is off; Karzai has been declared the winner [...]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 [...]

Tell me if this makes sense to you. During the Aug. 20 Afghan presidential election, thousands of polling stations either didn’t open to the public or didn’t host election monitors, which allowed election fraud to become so widespread that a full one-third of the votes for incumbent president Hamid Karzai were ultimately invalidated. Conflict over [...]

I had no luck getting members of Congress to talk yesterday about the relationship between Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of the Afghan president, and the CIA. But Jeff Stein, I belatedly see, got Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) to talk about the connection last week. Here’s how Rogers, the ranking Republican on a terrorism subcommittee, describes [...]