karzai

As you’ve read, yesterday the U.N. mission in Afghanistan abruptly fired its deputy director for political affairs, Peter Galbraith, the longtime American human-rights gadfly diplomat. Galbraith got sacked for the absurdity of speaking out against fraud in an election the U.N. mission helped sponsor. And now the United States is in a tight spot: the [...]

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty got an exclusive interview with Hamid Karzai after yesterday’s presidential debate. The whole thing’s fairly predictable — Karzai lists his accomplishments in office and dismisses his critics — until Karzai slips this in:
“I repeat that the war on terrorism is not inside Afghanistan, as was the case in the past. This [...]

More from Gen. McChrystal’s interview with The Los Angeles Times’ Julian Barnes. Barnes asks McChrystal if there’s an opportunity to get members of the Taliban’s coalition to lay down arms:
There absolutely is and I don’t think it is necessarily not possible with the Taliban. Most of the fighters we see in Afghanistan are Afghans, some [...]

Here’s what Afghan President Hamid Karzai told Fareed Zakaria about the disgusting Afghan marital rape law:
“Now I have instructed, in consultation with clergy of the country, that the law be revised and any article that is not in keeping with the Afghan constitution and Islamic Sharia must be removed from this law,” Karzai said.
Juan Cole:
The [...]

An independent commission in Afghanistan decides when elections are to be held. In January, it ruled that security concerns made August the optimal time for voting. But the term of President Hamid Karzai expires in May, meaning there would probably have to be a caretaker government in between May and August. So now Karzai has [...]

A couple weeks ago, a dispatch from The Associated Press reported that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had delivered an “11-point plan” to U.S. and NATO officials for “greater Afghan involvement in operations, Afghan approval of where U.S. and NATO troops can be deployed, and an end to arrests and house searches by foreign troops.” Laura [...]

It wasn’t long ago that Afghan president Hamid Karzai stunned observers by telling U.N. officials that it was nearing time to set a timeline for withdrawing U.S. forces. Now he’s expressing skepticism on the wisdom of increasing that presence by the planned 20,000 to 30,000 new troops.

Peter Bergen asks a great question: Since we’re seeing movement toward Karzai-Taliban negotiations, what kind of negotiations should there be?
Should everything be on the table? Who should be brought in and who should be left out?

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, feeling the pressure from his diminishing popularity, has been hinting he wants to negotiate a deal to draw at least some factions of the Taliban into the national government.
The whole thing has been sub rosa, occurring under the auspices of the Saudis for plausible deniability, and not really believed to [...]

A recent two-week trip through Afghanistan revealed a populace deeply unhappy with corruption in their government.