Hamid Karzai: "Eating Food and Wearing Clothes Paid for with American Dollars"

Alissa Rubin is a special reporter. She worked in the Baghdad bureau for the New York Times during the surge beginning in 2007. She has been reporting from Kabul for what seems forever. This morning Rubin has a frontpage story, "Karzai Bets on Vilifying U.S. to Shed His Image as a Lackey," analyzing Hamid Karzai's recent binge of hand-biting. She begins and ends her story with last communist president to lead Afghanistan, Mohammad Najibullah; he was hanged by the Taliban shortly after they took control of Kabul.

Afghanistan (along with the Islamic Republic of Iran) is a foreign policy entanglement of the last three decades that has marked the ascendance of Neoconservatism within the larger neoliberal paradigm. That the United States is ready to beat a retreat from Afghanistan is therefore significant; thirty-plus years of practice is looking at a potentially significant alteration. Karzai is trying his best, no doubt with U.S. collusion, to position himself once the retreat begins:

American and other Western officials in Afghanistan have bent over backward to reassure the Afghan public — and Mr. Karzai — that they will not abandon them as the Russians did. That retreat, in the early 1990s, led to the collapse of the government and the army and, ultimately, to civil war. 

Indicators from the White House, though, have not been as sure. President Obama has yet to decide how many troops might stay on after combat units leave at the end of 2014. Many numbers have been floated, but nothing has been determined.

I haven't religiously followed the coverage coming out of Afghanistan, but I've kept up. And the sense that I get is that there's no way that Karzai survives without a huge U.S. military footprint in the country. My impression is that having gone with the McChrystal counterinsurgency troop increase when he first took office, Obama is going to leave as few troops as possible (enough to operate small installations where drones can be launched and Special Forces can bivouac).

Rubin quotes a tribal elder to illustrate the sophistication of the Afghan people:

For Afghans at a more grass-roots level, there is little faith in either the Afghan government or the Americans. 

“Now Karzai is trying to deceive people that he sympathizes with the Afghan people, and also he is trying to show the Taliban that ‘now I am independent from the Americans,’ ” said Hajji-Abdul Majeed Khan, a tribal elder from Arghistan, a district in Kandahar Province where Mr. Karzai has had support. 

“I don’t think that Karzai and Americans have disputes at all — they both are playing a double game to throw dust in people’s eyes and bring another stooge government to Afghanistan,” he added.

Rubin then closes the story with the statement the Taliban released in reaction to Karzai's allegation that Taliban and U.S. forces were working in concert:

They issued a searing response late Monday in which they dismissed Mr. Karzai as an abject hypocrite, eating food and wearing clothes paid for with American dollars.

Nationalism “neither rescued Najibullah nor will it rescue Karzai; the Afghan nation is one of the nations of the world that knows its puppets and its heroes,” said the Taliban statement, which was written by a man identified as Qari Habib.