Karzai says no to US Permanent military bases

[faye]

look what happened when karzai refused their apology about the 9 assassinated children. if i remember correctly his uncle got accidentally assassinated shortly after.
i think he acted independently when he went to russia but he is the meat in the sandwich. personally i think he should be approaching mahathir mohamad of malaysia for advice to take afghanistan forward.

[randolph85]

karzai is a puppet?wow big news,please someone clap for this fool.
you are the fool who always thinks amerrica is some sort of god.

i dont think you even know what you are saying,all you do is try to downplay anything happening in afghanistan and try to portray Afghans as this totally irrelevant people who's opinions dont matter for your god america.

the irony is that it is you that is on karzai's balls with your view.

i am on karzais balls because i say that his word means nothing? lol what??

i am saying karzai has no power to order his masters around and now u are turning into some 9 yr old girl throwing a hissy fit. i am in fact repeating what the taliban says about karzai.

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakin...-puppet-Karzai

"The cancellation of the second round of the election showed that decisions on Afghanistan are made in Washington and London, while the announcements are made in Kabul," a Taliban statement said.

Source: Reuters

"Karzai is a puppet he cannot represent a nation or a government," said Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousuf, commenting on Karzai's call for the Taliban to work for peace and reconstruction.

Source: Tolo

In reaction to the remarks made by the top US commander, Gen. Petraeus, on Monday about Taliban contacts with the Afghan government, the Taliban statement says how can it be possible for the "Islamic Emirate" to hold back-door peace talks with "the powerless government" while the Taliban have rejected such calls for talks in the past.

[graveyardofempires]

i am on karzais balls because i say that his word means nothing? lol what??

i am saying karzai has no power to order his masters around and now u are turning into some 9 yr old girl throwing a hissy fit. i am in fact repeating what the taliban says about karzai.

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/world/view/20091103-233818/Taliban-ridicules-puppet-Karzai

"The cancellation of the second round of the election showed that decisions on Afghanistan are made in Washington and London, while the announcements are made in Kabul," a Taliban statement said.

Source: Reuters

"Karzai is a puppet he cannot represent a nation or a government," said Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yousuf, commenting on Karzai's call for the Taliban to work for peace and reconstruction.

Source: Tolo

In reaction to the remarks made by the top US commander, Gen. Petraeus, on Monday about Taliban contacts with the Afghan government, the Taliban statement says how can it be possible for the "Islamic Emirate" to hold back-door peace talks with "the powerless government" while the Taliban have rejected such calls for talks in the past.

many people in Afghanistan think karzai si their chosen leader through elections.so if he condemns something like killing of children or anouncing the pastor burning quran they form public opinion.

let me explain it to you in american way

lets say Glenn Beck says that American occupation of Afghanistan is illegal and explains it,dont you think that will have an effect on the view of those viewers?

[randolph85]

that was my point, karzai is a politician not a leader. he says things to make people happy, to all sides. one day he will say the taliban are his brothers, the next day he is thanking US troops for their "sacrifices". afghans may of voted for karzai but thats because he was the lesser of other evils, i seriously doubt any afghan loves karzai or thinks he is actually running an independent government. one of the poorest countries on earth does NOT have influence.

[graveyardofempires]

that was my point, karzai is a politician not a leader. he says things to make people happy, to all sides. one day he will say the taliban are his brothers, the next day he is thanking US troops for their "sacrifices". afghans may of voted for karzai but thats because he was the lesser of other evils, i seriously doubt any afghan loves karzai or thinks he is actually running an independent government. one of the poorest countries on earth does NOT have influence.

you just said karzai is a puppet and now you are saying he is a politician.
according to you Afghans have voted for karzai because america wanted the afghans to vote for karzai?

some things are above karzai or his politics,things such as durrand line,permanent bases etc.

[faye]

afghanistan can have influence now with all the wealth they have in the ground but they don't need the pentagon telling them who to give the mining leases to. they need someone with nouse who they can trust because they will now have lots of 'friends'.

[randolph85]

you just said karzai is a puppet and now you are saying he is a politician.
according to you Afghans have voted for karzai because america wanted the afghans to vote for karzai?

some things are above karzai or his politics,things such as durrand line,permanent bases etc.

of course hes a politician, u think politicians can't be puppets?

afghans voted for karzai because they saw him as a better alternative to the northern alliance and he is acceptable to all sides(minus the taliban) where was karzai before the US dropped him off into afghanistan? this is how karzai returned to afghanistan, on the wings of american special forces.



the things u mentioned are not just above karzai, they are above afghanistan. like i said, afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on earth, dirt poor nations dont dictate politics to other countries. this is probably why u will never see somalia on the UN security council any time soon. this isn't the 18th century anymore.

[ghundal]

foreigners are out whether you like it or not

Why West Lost Afghan War

by Michael Scheuer

The former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit says the US-led coalition has already lost the war in Afghanistan. A shake-up in military leadership won't change that.

Recent events surrounding Afghanistan shouldn’t confuse anyone, as the reality of the situation still lies in one simple statement: The US-NATO coalition has lost a war its political leaders never meant, or knew how, to win.

‘Winning’ in Afghanistan was never anything more than killing Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, as many of their fighters and civilian supporters as possible and then getting out immediately with the full knowledge that—as Mao said long ago—insurgencies always rebuild and the process might need to be repeated.

The best and most appropriate response to al-Qaeda’s September 11 raid, then, would have been a unilateral US punitive expedition that inflicted massive death and destruction on the enemy and delivered a clear warning to Islamists not to pick fights with the United States. Indeed, many Islamists expected this response, which is why they poured vitriol on bin Laden and expected the US military to set back their movement a decade, if it did not destroy it completely.

Faced with this criticism, bin Laden simply said ‘wait,’ adding (in paraphrase) that the Americans and their allies can’t stomach casualties, that they won’t use their full military power and will unite Afghans by trying to Westernize them via popular elections, installing women’s rights, dismantling tribalism, introducing secularism and establishing NGO-backed bars and *****houses in Kabul. Bin Laden was right; it seems he is, among other things, a keen student of the West’s past nation-building operations.

Since June 1, the parade of incompetents crossing the Afghan stage is stunning: Gen. Stanley McChrystal, US President Barack Obama, Gen. David Petraeus, Afghan President Hamid Karzai—the list is long. McChrystal, saddled with a dead-end strategy devised by David Kilcullen, John Nagl and other counterinsurgency ‘experts,’ gave access to himself and his staff to Rolling Stone, long among the most anti-military US journals.

For his trouble and indiscreet words, McChrystal was fired by Obama—who, with his senior advisers, merit all the negative things said about them—and replaced by that purveyor of military snake oil, Gen. Petraeus. Even as the transitory success of the Iraq ‘surge’ is unravelling, Petraeus takes the Afghan command saying everything is okay (within a week the Pentagon’s media machine was telling Congress and Western publics that the ‘Afghan war is on track.’)

While this has played out, Hamid Karzai reportedly met with Sirajuddin Haqqani—a major Afghan insurgent leader—and prepared to surrender under the guise of creating a coalition regime. For all his failures and fabulously corrupt relatives, Karzai can easily solve the dilemma the West can’t even frame accurately: Question: What does the Taliban and its allies want? Answer: Power. So Karzai is talking to Haqqani, and probably Taliban leaders, to see if there’s a governing arrangement that will give him a role in post-NATO Afghanistan and doesn’t lead to his execution after the last NATO trooper leaves. The chance of this is near nil, however, and so Karzai and his family will have to step up the pace of their alleged thievery and get ready for an early exit that leaves the West holding the bag.

And as these parties circle the Afghan drain, Lindsay Graham, a much but inexplicably respected Republican senator from South Carolina, said: ‘This is a chance to start over completely [in Afghanistan].’ At the start of the US Civil War it was said South Carolina’s fatal flaw was that it’s too small to be a nation and too big to be an insane asylum. Sen. Graham has reconfirmed this truism

After nine years, it is utterly impossible to restart Western policy in Afghanistan. Too many Afghans are dead; too many Afghans and non-Afghan Muslims have joined the Taliban-led insurgency; too much pro-Taliban money is pouring into Afghanistan from wealthy donors on the Arabian Peninsula and across the Muslim world; too much Western funding has been stolen and sent abroad by Karzai’s cronies; too much popular support for the war in the West has been squandered; too many U.S.-NATO troops are dead or maimed; too much has been done by the West to push Pakistan toward the abyss by demanding its military do Western dirty work; and too much time has been wasted on counterinsurgency theories and policies that avoid killing the enemy and his civilian supporters. The one thing the West ‘can start over completely’ is a revision of the plans for withdrawal that moves up the departure date.

The bottom line is that the United States and NATO stand defeated in Afghanistan. Under McChrystal, Petraeus, or Obama himself the counterinsurgency strategy now being flogged has been intellectually bankrupt from its inception. No better proof of this can be found than the fact that the part of the policy meant to address the Afghans’ ‘quality of life’ has been a substantial success.

There are 3 million-plus more Afghan children in school today than in 2001; more electricity and potable water are available; many roads and irrigation systems have been rebuilt; and more primary health care is being delivered. Kilcullen, Nagl and their colleagues argued that such success would prompt the Afghans to turn away from the Taliban’s religiosity and nationalism and isolate that purportedly small force from a population swelling with delight and loyalty to Karzai because of material improvements. In short, a social science-powered, mini-New Deal in Afghanistan would win with minimal use of US-NATO military power because Afghans would joyfully jettison God and country for better teeth and smoother roads.

Well, no such thing occurred. As the trend line for these accomplishments rose, the positive trend line for the Taliban-led insurgency rose faster. The once southern-Afghanistan-based insurgency spread across the nation; the Taliban and its allies struck in Kabul at their pleasure; and the large military/social-work operation to clear insurgents from Marjah District in Helmand Province—framed as the test case to validate US-NATO strategy—became, in McChrystal’s words, an endless, ‘bleeding ulcer’ as the Taliban has gradually reasserted control there.

The enraging and unifying impact on Afghans of the US-NATO occupation of the country; Western support for the unrepresentative and corrupt Kabul regime; and the secularizing campaign by Western governmental agencies and NGOs has not and will never be negated by purer water and more refrigeration. The Afghans will appreciate and pocket the material improvements even as more of them take up arms to drive out occupiers they perceive as the enemies of God and Afghanistan. Western leaders should have recalled they’re not fighting Westerners, for whom more ice cubes and tetanus shots might have been enough to give up their faith.

A year after Obama outlined this new strategy at West Point it lay in shreds and tatters: the Taliban, et. al are more powerful and geographically dispersed, and the Afghan people are no less Islamic or nationalistic. The ever-present avenging angel of history ignored is exacting its pound of flesh and is still hungry. And the bin Laden-inspired Islamists are nearing victory over the world’s last superpower, a win that will have a galvanizing anti-US impact in the Islamic world by showing Muslims the impossible is possible.

The tragedy of this reality is that it would have taken no highly classified intelligence data or deeply penetrating brain power to predict its occurrence. A week’s reading at the local library about the occupations of Afghanistan by Alexander the Great, the British Empire and the Soviet Union shows each empire was sooner or later defeated and evicted—Alexander lasted longest because he built Greek colonies—by the most basic Afghan trait which has been transparently and overwhelmingly dominant since the 4th century B.C.: Afghans refuse to tolerate foreign occupation and rule.

Reading history’s lessons also would have shown that the one foreigner who had the most successful strategy for Afghanistan was Genghis Khan. He killed all the Afghan fighters and their families he encountered, built mountains of their skulls to remind Afghans that Mongols are not to be trifled with and then got his army out of the country to India as quickly as possible. George W. Bush had the chance to play Genghis for about a year but didn’t. Instead, he and his clone Obama defied history to try to win the love of Afghans and international applause. In the end, both men earned and richly merited what we see today—abject Western defeat.

Michael Scheuer is the author of ‘Imperial Hubris’ and former chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden Issue Station

[ghundal]

http://the-diplomat.com/2010/11/01/g...ober-surprise/

General Petraeus’s October Surprise


The timing of Gen. Petraeus’s good news on Afghanistan is strangely convenient for Washington—and glosses over the reality of a likely civil war.

Last month saw a surprising flood of good tidings from Afghanistan. We learned that the US-NATO offensive in Kandahar is succeeding; that drone strikes are breaking al-Qaeda’s back; that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are at daggers drawn; and that the Taliban is ready to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the Afghan war.
What a change since September, when the outlook was so gloomy! So what prompted these changes? Good policy? Military heroism? The Taliban realizing that it was beaten? Or was it something to do with tomorrow’s US mid-term congressional election?

My guess is that last one. After all, if you recall, the same Gen. David Petraeus who now commands in Afghanistan also delivered a similar package of remarkable and unexpected good news about Iraq when he was in charge there—just before the 2008 US presidential election. The ‘surge’ and the ‘Sunni Awakening’ had ‘succeeded,’ claims that were enough to broadly keep the Iraq war off the political agenda during the late stages of the campaign (much to the relief of both Barack Obama and John McCain). Today, it’s clear that much of the so-called success in Iraq is unravelling, with al-Qaeda returning to Baghdad and Anbar Province, and Iraqi society headed toward sectarian civil war.

This time around, Petraeus’s batch of happy news comes at a time when neither party wants to talk about how far the Afghan war is off the tracks. And, looking at the US media, the ploy has worked again.
The first three items of Petraeus’s supposed good-tidings package can be dealt with quickly. The Kandahar offensive is progressing because Petraeus and his predecessor gave the Taliban and other mujahedin eight months advance warning. As a result, insurgent leaders—never eager to stand and fight conventional forces—long ago moved most of their men and materiel to safer venues. Essentially the US-NATO campaign is succeeding because there’s so little opposition, save for the IEDs, mines and booby-traps with which the Taliban has laced the region.
Next, while drone strikes hurt al-Qaeda (no group welcomes casualties) they have no strategic impact on Osama bin Laden or his organization. Leaders are replaced and fighting goes on not only in South Asia, but also in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and North and West Africa, in each of which al-Qaeda is far more potent than it was on 9/11.


Meanwhile, the day after bin Laden threatened France via audiotape, the French defence minister announced that Paris might well begin to withdraw its Afghan force in 2011. Such an appeasing response hardly suggests a broken-backed al-Qaeda. And as for the existence of a debilitating al-Qaeda-Taliban contretemps, there are many claims about this, but no openly available and credible data.

But the most important—and problematic—of Petraeus’s so-called good-news items is the claim that the United States, NATO and Hamid Karzai’s regime have started peace negotiations with the Taliban. If such talks are occurring, they would have been initiated by a US-NATO coalition that knows the war is lost and which is looking for a way out of Afghanistan that will entail the least number of casualties and humiliation. Taliban leaders, on the other hand, would know that if they are talking to NATO, they are doing so because victory is nearing and that the very occurrence of the talks will tear apart relations between the US-led coalition and its only Afghan ally, the remnant of the late-Ahmad Shah Massoud’s alliance of northern Afghanistan’s minority groups.

For Afghanistan’s Tajik, Shia, Uzbek and Turkmen minorities, the arrival of US-led forces in Afghanistan in October 2001 provided not only an opportunity to break the mainly Pashtun-dominated Taliban’s hold on power, but also to build a new Afghan society to replace the one that had kept the non-Pashtun minorities at the bottom of the pecking order for more than 300 years. On entering Kabul on the back of US and NATO military vehicles in late-2001, the minorities controlled the city, northern Afghanistan, and the new Afghan regime, even though Pashtun Karzai was at its head.

Since then, though, the road has been largely downhill for the leaders of the northern minorities. Their US and NATO military allies prematurely declared the war over after the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces withdrew to Pakistan, and they watched Karzai surround himself with Pashtun cronies while his brother and other family members established a power base in Kandahar Province rumoured to be based on diverted foreign aid and the heroin trade.

In addition, much of the Western and Indian financial aid that was funnelled into the country (and which was not immediately stolen) was used to build infrastructure projects—power plants, roads, irrigation systems, dams—in the country’s Pashtun regions in the southern, eastern and western provinces. Most dire for the northerners, who had helped infidels destroy the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate, the US-NATO coalition’s near military inertness for the five years after Kabul’s capture allowed time for the re-emergence of a better trained, armed, led and hungry-for-revenge Taliban funded by heroin profits and contributions from the donors in Arab Peninsula. Even as Gen. Petraeus delivered October’s good news, then, the Afghan minorities were watching the gradual return of the Taliban-driven nightmare they lived through from 1994 to 2001.


All this means that US-NATO-Karzai negotiations with the Taliban will be interpreted by the northern minorities as their erstwhile allies throwing in the towel and admitting defeat. Faced with this reality, the northerners will have to prepare for a renewed civil war against the Taliban after US-NATO forces are gone. And in this effort they’ll have no shortage of foreign help. Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, remain eager—as they were before 9/11—to use northern Afghanistan as a buffer zone between themselves and the Pakistan- and Arab-supported Islamist Taliban. Each country will be more than willing to fund, arm and train a re-formed northern military force. India and Iran also will help—the former to protect whatever it can of the large monetary and political investment it has made in Afghanistan since 9/11, and the latter in an effort to shield its Shia brethren from renewed persecution and murder at the Taliban’s hands.

Talking to the Taliban is also likely to earn US and NATO forces some pain inflicted by their former northern allies before withdrawal is complete. Revenge is a sentiment always bubbling away under the surface in Afghanistan, and the northern mujahedin will want to ensure that the US-led coalition pays a price for abandoning them. Indeed, the coalition may already be starting to incur that cost. Throughout 2010, for example, the pace of insurgent attacks on the Karzai regime and coalition targets in northern Afghanistan has steadily increased. While there are pockets of Pashtun populations in the northern provinces, they are neither numerous enough nor geographically dispersed enough to be responsible for all the attacks that have and are occurring. In the months ahead, there are certain to be escalating attacks on US-NATO supply routes into Afghanistan from Central Asia—the US-led coalition’s weakest link in the north—and it won’t always be clear if the attackers are Taliban Pashtuns or America’s jilted northern allies.
Petraeus’s October surprise may well have gotten Democratic and Republican candidates through tomorrow’s mid-term elections without a debate on the Afghan war; this is apparently now an ongoing (if demeaning) job for four-star US generals. But by late spring next year, the odds are that Petraeus, Obama and the US Congress will no longer be able to hide the disastrous demise of the almost decade-long campaign in Afghanistan.

[ghundal]

Reality

Parallels With Past: How Soviets Lost In Afghanistan, How US Is Losing – Analysis

Written by: FPRI
April 26, 2011

By Larry Goodson and Thomas H. Johnson


Parallels With Past: How Soviets Lost In Afghanistan, How US Is Losing – Analysis « « Eurasia Review Eurasia Review

On May 20, 2010, General Stanley McChrystal, then the American commander in Afghanistan, referred to the operation in Marjah, Helmand—an operation earlier touted as a potential turning point for U.S. Afghan counterinsurgency (COIN)—as a “bleeding ulcer.” [1] Immediately, we were reminded of a similar expression from an earlier Afghan War. On February 1986, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev speaking to the 27th General Congress of the Communist Party posited that the Soviet war in Afghanistan had become a “bleeding wound.” Was McChrystal’s comment just an unfortunate choice of words or a harbinger that the United States faced a Soviet-style disaster in Afghanistan?
This article assesses the startling and unsettling similarities between Soviet strategies and tactics in Afghanistan during their Afghan war of 1979-1989 and American coalition strategies and tactics in Afghanistan since October 2001. It concludes with the implications of this dynamic. [2] These similarities are extremely disturbing and, we believe, should be the focus of national attention and debate. While numerous significant similarities exist, this article will center on just three of the most important.
SOVIET AFGHAN INVASION
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day of 1979 ostensibly to rescue a failing Communist government. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had overthrown the Mohammad Daoud government in April 1978 and then engaged in bloody infighting and ambitious reforms that shocked Afghanistan’s largely rural and conservative population into rebellion. The Soviets brought with them, in December 1979, a new president for Afghanistan, Babrak Karmal, who they installed in the Presidential Palace as soon as they had killed Hafizullah Amin, the existing president. The rebellion quickly turned into a national resistance movement and the Soviets responded with sweep and clear tactics aimed at depopulating the countryside that was supporting and aiding the Afghan mujahedeen. By 1981, Afghanistan had the dubious distinction of producing the world’s largest single refugee population, most of whom fled to Pakistan or Iran. Pakistan also became the base for most of the fledgling mujahedeen, who were eventually aided by the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other countries aligned against the Soviet Union in the last great battle of the Cold War.
By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was bogged down in Afghanistan even as a new generation of leadership was emerging in Moscow. The new Soviet leadership realized that time was running out on their Afghan adventure, and they made significant strategic adjustments to try to rescue what they could from what was shaping up to be a failure of epic proportions. First, they shifted their military strategy away from combating a rural insurgency to controlling the population centers and the road corridor that connected them. Second, they tried to change the unpopular puppet government they had installed and took measures to boost its popularity, primarily through a reconciliation program. Third, the Soviets concentrated on building a competent Afghan army and security forces to which they could hand off the job of Afghan security. It appears that the United States is trying to do all of these things again today, as if the Soviet experience never happened.
Below we address the similarities in the Soviet and U.S. approaches to Afghanistan; the three similarities addressed are central to current U.S. and NATO Afghan strategies: the focus on key population centers, reconciliation, and the development of “Afghan” solutions to a variety of security concerns.
POPULATION-CENTRIC STRATEGY?
Afghanistan

The vast majority of the Afghan population (75-80 percent) lives scattered across the countryside, from which all previous Afghan rebellions have originated. Soviet strategies initially focused on controlling the cities and key transportation routes, while launching search and destroy missions into the countryside in an effort to destroy insurgent sanctuaries and depopulate rural Afghanistan. The Geneva Accords of April 1988 that established a timetable for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan prompted a switch to a strategy that kept most Soviet troops on relatively secure bases and/or in concentric circles around the larger towns and cities. In addition to garrisoned soldiers, some Soviet troops, as well as Afghan government forces, were used to hold the main “Ring Road” that connects Afghan urban areas. This urban population-centric strategy, in conjunction with a massive aid program, helped facilitate the Soviet withdrawal and also the continued (albeit temporary) maintenance of the Afghan Communists in power through control of the towns, cities, and main roads, while the mujahedeen operated relatively freely in the remaining 80 percent of Afghanistan – the Afghan rural hinterland. By fall 1991, nearly two and a half years after the completion of the Soviet withdrawal, Russian President Boris Yeltsin cut off supplies to Afghanistan. The Afghan Communist government fell apart almost immediately, although the mujahedeen did not take Kabul until April 1992.
Shortly after being named the new commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2009, General Stanley McChrystal asserted that the situation in Afghanistan required a new strategy that focused on the Afghan population. In practical terms, this new strategy would mean that U.S., NATO, and allied forces would concentrate their efforts on “key districts” that included a “meaningful proportion of the Afghan population” (that is, larger towns and cities), as well as the road network that connects them. The old “enemy-centric” strategy that produced multiple operations—multiple maneuver element search and destroy missions every year, often conducted in remote mountainous or rural areas by an individual country’s contingent of forces, would apparently be relegated to the past.
McChrystal’s focus on the key population centers, which for the most part has been continued by General David Petraeus who took over the command of U.S. and ISAF Forces from McChrystal in June 2010, is very similar to the ineffective city-centric strategy followed 25 years earlier by the Soviets. Like the mujahedeen a generation earlier, this is not where the Taliban primarily operate and when they do they are extremely difficult to identify or separate from the population. It is a military dictum that it is virtually impossible to defeat a rural insurgency in a largely agrarian country by securing the urban areas. The Soviets eventually learned this; apparently the United States has yet to do so.
UNPOPULAR GOVERNMENT ATTEMPTS RECONCILIATION PROGRAM
Despite the brutality of a Soviet war that cost the Afghans more than one million killed to about 15,000 Soviet dead, the Soviets and PDPA government pursued reconciliation programs during the 1980s, especially in northern Afghanistan where they attempted to promote common traditions and practices as a way to pacify various ethno-linguistic groups along the Afghan-Soviet Central Asian border. Cultural delegations to promote understanding between the Soviet occupiers and a variety of northern Afghan ethno-linguistic groups appeared frequently in the northern provinces, and the Soviets even tried to reconcile with local religious leaders through a restored “Society of Ulema” (Muslim legal scholars). In addition, the Soviets pursued programs that allowed traditional Afghan leaders (tribal elders and religious figures) to have some influence in government in exchange for loyalty to it via reconciliation. [3] Finally, Soviet resources were used in an attempt to co-opt entire communities into the service of the government. The Soviets often enticed through the traditional system of patronage by providing a group with money and armaments in exchange for its support, either in the form of active operations against the resistance or simply keeping the area free of mujahedeen. [4]
After the Soviets replaced Babrak Karmal with Najibullah in 1986, Najibullah made significant reconciliation overtures to the mujahedeen until the early 1990s in an attempt to end the conflict. An Afghan National Reconciliation program was initiated that was based partly on a new constitution that provided for legislative institutions of government and did away with the single-party Revolutionary Council that had previously helped rule the country. The mujahedeen were even offered seats in the government, including control over key ministries, but only if they would reconcile and end the fighting; such offers were consistently rejected by the mujahedeen.
Similiarly, since early 2003, President Hamid Karzai has called for national reconciliation with the Taliban with the express purpose to reconcile warring parties in an attempt to bring peace to Afghanistan. Program Takhim-e Sohl (PTS) [5] was established in 2005 and has been a keystone of Karzai’s strategy, although at times some of his support for these programs appears to be little more than self-promoting propaganda, or even disinformation. Despite the reconciliation of a very few highly-placed Taliban and insurgent leaders early on in the program, meaningful reconciliation of influential Taliban has been minimal. And few Taliban foot soldiers have laid down their arms. Moreover, the highly touted peace assembly, or “Peace Jirga,” of tribal elders and powerbrokers was held in May 2010 to systematically address reconciliation, but its success thus far has been more publicity than substance. Even Ambassador Karl Eikenberry has “warned that the money associated with reintegration risked ‘creating perverse incentives, short-changing individuals and communities that have not fed the insurgency.’” [6]
Much of the failure of the reconciliation (as well as negotiation) policies are because the Taliban insurgency is best defined as an insurgency wrapped in the narrative of jihad. History would suggest that secular insurgents negotiate, jihadists do not. Rather, the Taliban that matter most within the movement are jihadists with perceived intense religious obligations (for instance, Mullah Omar, the Amir ul-Momineen, or Leader of the Faithful). “Peeling” such individuals away from the Taliban is virtually impossible because they believe they are following the mandates of a higher calling. Indeed, history suggests that no jihad has ever ended with a negotiated settlement or via reconciliation. Additionally, negotiation is not a tactic of the strong in Afghanistan, so when a government struggling with a resilient insurgency announces reconciliation and negotiation efforts as a centerpiece of its strategy, most Afghans figure the government is losing. Why would the Taliban, emboldened in the belief they are on the verge of victory (after all, the United States announced that it would begin to withdraw in July 2011), want to negotiate or reconcile? Nevertheless, the notion of political settlements and diplomatic negotiations is difficult for Washington to dismiss even when political and cultural realities make them unrealistic because such strategies are so ingrained in the American diplomatic psyche. [7]
“AFGHANIZATION”
By 1988 the central strategy of the Soviet Union was to withdraw its forces and turn the war over to the Afghan government. The success of this strategy depended on the strength and effectiveness of the Afghan security forces and their ability to maintain regime continuity and stability against the increasingly robust mujahedeen.
The Afghan security forces had been trained by Soviets and organized on the Soviet model since the 1950s. Thousands of Afghan military officers were trained by the Soviets. But after the Soviet invasion desertion rates soared, with as many as 55 percent of Afghan soldiers just melting away, leaving only 50,000 regular army troops to complement the Soviet force. Although the Soviets and PDPA waged an aggressive recruitment campaign to refill the ranks, mostly from peasant communities near large urban centers such as Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-i Sharif, [8] recruitment was only able to meet between 40 to 60 percent of its goals during the first five years of the Soviet occupation. [9] Conscription never really achieved the levels the Soviets desired, although the Ministry of Defense (MoD) did reach a high of 160,000 in 1987. One way the Soviets bolstered the numbers of the regular army and Ministry of Defense was through recruitment into the Sarandoy, the heavily-armed special police of the Ministry of the Interior, which supplemented the KhAD (Afghan Secret Police). Later, after the Soviets withdrew, Najibullah “rented” various ethnic and local militias to augment the weak Afghan security forces. Nevertheless, none of these attempts were successful in creating an indigenous Afghan force that could realistically be expected to defeat the mujahedeen insurgents.
Like the Soviets, the United States and NATO have also found that building effective Afghan national security forces is fraught with problems. After the defeat of the Taliban regime in late 2001, and as part of the Bonn Accords, a Security Sector Reform program was planned, with a variety of countries taking the lead for different sectors of Afghanistan’s security architecture. A Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration Program (or DDR, led by Japan) was to rid the country of private militias, while building the Afghan National Army (ANA, United States lead) and Afghan National Police (ANP, initially Germany had the lead) were key to transforming Afghanistan’s security provision back to the government. Initial plans were for the ANA to reach 70,000 by 2009, a goal that many thought too ambitious when by early 2003 the ANA numbered just over 1,700. By 2010, the Ministry of Defense was claiming to have more than 100,000 troops and had revised its planned total upwards to over 170,000. These numbers were critical because by late 2009, the United States had embraced a McChrystal (and later Petraeus) plan to “Afghanize” the war by increasing the size of Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), primarily the ANA and ANP, to over 400,000 within five years, including 240,000 ANA and 160,000 ANP (171,600 ANA and 104,000 ANP by October 2011). [10] Many of these numbers have become a bone of contention. Parodoxically, at the same time we are trying to expand the quantity and quality of the ANA we are also attempting to use informal and static militias and various community defense forces much like the Soviets did with the Sarandoy and their “favorite” tribes and associated militias.
With the Afghan government’s total annual revenue hovering around $4 billion and the Obama administration’s budget request for fiscal year 2012 of $12.8 billion to train and equip Afghanistan’s expanding army and national police force, it will be extremely difficult for Afghanistan to manage and sustain a force of that size and expense over the long term without protracted external financial and material support. [11] Although the United States has spent roughly $18 billion since 2002 on the ANA, it is difficult to get accurate numbers on the actual size of the force “present for duty.” [12] The U.S. Defense Department when referring to ANA troop strength often uses the vague phrase of “trained and equipped” when reporting ANA numbers in press releases. This number does not equate to the number of ANA troops present for duty. It is estimated that one third of the ANA is now evaporating every year through desertions (18 percent) and non-reenlistment (60 percent). Interestingly, the Army’s Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, had a statistician analyze ANA growth and attrition rates in 2005 and concluded that the ANA could never grow larger than 100,000 men, because at that point the annual attrition losses would equal the maximum number of new recruits entering the force each year. [13] Moreover, as a recent study of the Afghan National Army (ANA) suggests, “[t]he push to build a unified national military in service of a civilian government has frequently clashed with the tendency to create militias in a bid to insulate the state from internal and external threats. The tension between these polar conceptions has had far reaching implications not only for internal security but also for Afghanistan’s relationships with external actors.” [14] The officer corps of the ANA that was developed after the Taliban’s ouster, as suggested above, was largely composed of commanders from the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance (Shura-e Nazar-e Shamali). [15] Mohammed Fahim, Karzai’s initial Defense Minister, who led the Northern Alliance after the assassination of famous resistance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud (by al Qaeda agents on September 9, 2001), promoted his Panjshiri Tajik allies into officer positions in the ANA. For example, “Ninety of the first 100 generals appointed to the new army were from the Tajik dominated Panjshir Valley, reigniting ethnic, regional and political factionalism within the armed forces.” [16] This same promotion dynamic was also recognized during the UN-backed Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) program and led to “uneven disarmament… [with] units affiliated with the Northern Alliance often…the last to be demobilized,” which resulted in the targeting of non-Panjshiri units not allied with the Northern Alliance. [17] While more Pashtuns have joined the officer corps since Rahim Wardak, an ethnic Pashtun, became Defense Minister in December 2004, the Tajiks still have officer numbers that do not reflect national population demographics. Similarly, the Afghan military during the Soviet occupation also reflected an out-of-proportion Tajik officer corps. The PDPA tended to select officers from their leftist allies that were highly concentrated in Tajik urban populations. Because of these dynamics and others, the probability of the successful “Afghanization” of the war effort must be questioned. This has been painfully evident recently with reports coming of sub-par performance by the ANSF units during the February 2010 Operation Moshtarak in Marjah. For example, USMC Officers embedded with the ANA during this operation have reported to us that 20-40 percent of ANA personnel in some field units failed urinalyses indicating the use of drugs, especially hashish. And this was only one of the soldiering problems evidenced by the deployed ANA.
OTHER SIMILARITIES
While these three similarities are most troubling because they involved dynamics that are central to current U.S. and NATO Afghan strategies, we have noted at least seven additional, important similarities that cannot be discussed in depth in this short article. [18] Both interventions have:
1. Seen meddling powers with other interests than those of the occupying power.
2. Installed and backed a puppet government as part of the intervention.
3. Attempted, through puppet governments, to significantly change Afghan society from the top down.
4. Used military tactics that emphasized kill/capture missions as well as battalion-size (or larger) operations to seek symmetrical fights with elusive guerrillas.
5. Featured different strategies for the north and south of Afghanistan, exacerbating the ethnic divisions from each region of the country.
6. Struggled to defeat the insurgents who have access to cross-border sanctuaries (or safe havens) in Pakistan.
7. Found the length, cost, and difficulty of their Afghan war corrosive to popular support, causing the war to become increasingly unpopular back home.
CONCLUSIONS
In its present form, current U.S. Afghan strategy holds little promise for success, especially if our assessment of the parallels with the past is accurate. As with all strategies, U.S. leaders must consider carefully the intensity and depth of American interests—that is, consideration of the ends must precede the ways and means.
Since 9/11, both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama have characterized defeating al Qaeda in Afghanistan as a vital national interest of the United States and have deployed increasing numbers of U.S. forces and spent more and more money to achieve that goal. Prior to 9/11, however, American relations with Afghanistan were lukewarm, at best. The United States did not step in after the post-World War II British disengagement from the Indian subcontinent to counter Soviet influence in Afghanistan. Instead, the United States aligned itself with Pakistan and Iran. In the 1980s, the United States did seize the opportunity presented by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to use the Afghan mujahedeen as a proxy force to bleed and ultimately defeat the Soviets there. However, the United States did not deploy its own forces and was quick to disengage from the region once the Soviets withdrew. Thus, until recently the United States did not appear to have vital interests in Afghanistan. Most of the al Qaeda organization that once existed in Afghanistan has been destroyed or relocated elsewhere, meaning that the stated interest for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is no longer relevant. Different reasons might now exist for the United States to view Afghanistan as a vital interest, especially the involvement of other major actors there in pursuit of often divergent interests.
Ultimately, however, no strategy might be as important as the Afghan societal and cultural factors that undercut it. Any Afghan strategy has five critical and interrelated pillars—security, governance, development, justice, and regional. Success overall requires success on all, and from the beginning of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan the strategy has been deficient in several areas.
First, security is not the key for Afghanistan, although insecurity undermines efforts on the other pillars. Rather, we see the center of gravity as government legitimacy. Historical analyses have suggested that success in a counterinsurgency (COIN) is largely proportional to the extent to which the regime is viewed as legitimate by the population. If the government is legitimate then the insurgency will likely not succeed, but counterinsurgency will fail on behalf of a government that its own people hold to be illegitimate. Indeed, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps says, “Victory cannot be gained until the people accept the legitimacy of the government…”[19] A government that is seen as legitimate by 85 to 90 percent of the population is the sine qua non of successful counterinsurgency. [20] It is extremely problematic that the vast majority of people in Afghanistan (and especially in regions outside of Kabul) today do not view as legitimate the national authority from Kabul, due in part to the allegations of rampant corruption associated with central government authorities. [21] In numerous areas, especially in the rural Southern Pashtun hinterlands, the Taliban are not only doing a better job of governance and providing justice than Kabul, they are also seen as more legitimate than the distant and unpopular leadership in Kabul.
The legitimacy of Afghan governance has traditionally been derived from two sources: dynastic, usually in the form of monarchies and tribal patriarchies, or religious, and sometimes both. [22] This problem of legitimacy is especially acute at the local and village level of rural Pashtun society, for whom dynastic and religious authority has been paramount for millennia. [23] Just as the present Kabul government is having an extremely difficult time establishing legitimacy, so too did the Afghan government during the Soviet occupation struggle. The PDPA was never popular with the vast majority of the Afghan people and obviously could not derive any legitimacy from the sources suggested above.
Security cannot come from a strong foreign force on behalf of rulers that people view as corrupt, inefficient, and ineffective. Nor can it come from a domestic army led by those elites. Historically, the Afghan state could be predatory and extractive, as long as it was not intrusive or engaged in social engineering in the countryside. Even if the government has dynastic or religious sources of legitimacy, historically it still had to enter into a bargain with local elites in the countryside and provincial centers. Such bargains were lubricated with patronage, so that local elites could have power and dispense goods and services to their people, while simultaneously keeping the unpredictable Kabul government at bay. The system of government that was imposed on Afghanistan after 9/11 by the West and those Afghan elites who benefitted from it was highly centralized, although the initial economy of force counterterrorism military strategy meant that local warlords were allowed to persist as augmentation to the inadequate outside and national forces engaged in security provision. Also, while money has poured into the country for a multitude of reasons, there has been little success in connecting the economic largesse to the development of governmental legitimacy. In fact, just the opposite has occurred, whereby the new Afghan political elites at the central levels have enriched themselves so obscenely that the post-9/11 windfall has diminished rather than enhanced governmental legitimacy.
Likewise, there has been almost no meaningful effort to pursue justice, a concept at the core of Islamic notions of good governance, and especially critical in post-conflict societies. When so much blood has been spilled by so many people within a society for such a long period of time, some mechanism for transitional justice is needed to break the cycle of bloodshed, such as the famous “Truth and Reconciliation” approach of post-apartheid South Africa. The 2002 Emergency Loya Jirga (Grand Council) that cemented Karzai’s position as President illustrates this perfectly, and sadly, for Afghanistan. One author served as an International Monitor and Technical Advisor for Elections for that process. Weeks of hard and often dangerous work in the provinces by Afghans and international monitors alike occurred to sideline warlords, war criminals, drug dealers, and many other dangerous characters from playing a role in the leadership of the country. Yet, when the big meeting finally occurred in Kabul, all the dubious characters showed up and got credentials from the Loya Jirga Commission to participate anyway. Once they were inside the big tent they could throw their weight around and ensure a result they wanted. Justice was sacrificed on the altar of expediency, and has been repeatedly thereafter.
Finally, there is an important regional pillar to any successful strategy for Afghanistan. Four of the world’s most important powers (United States, China, India, and Russia) are engaged in Afghanistan now, as are Pakistan and Iran, as well as NATO. Regardless of what diplomats and politicians say, they do not all have similar interests, nor is it as simple as one set of powers against another set, as the alliances are shifting and multidimensional. Yet, Afghanistan’s ethnic groups straddle its borders with neighboring countries, meaning everyone has a proxy militia in Afghanistan if need be. Also, Afghanistan may possess substantial mineral wealth, meaning that it might be a prize for larger powers wanting what it has. And, Afghanistan has long been the “crossroads of Asia,” meaning that it is even a bigger prize because it holds the key to anywhere else in the region. For all of these reasons no strategy can be successful that does not take into account the way regional actors may act.
These are the realities of Afghanistan that shape the environment in which a strategy must be constructed and implemented. There is one additional factor of great consequence, which is that public opinion in the West no longer supports a long, expensive, and frustratingly uncertain war in Afghanistan. For NATO to continue to act out of area and the United States to stay long enough for all of the strategic initiatives to ripen will require a level of success that does not seem likely to occur.
Thus, there are probably three potential strategies left to us. They are:

• Better Nation-Building through COIN – This approach is predicated on a belief that only through nation-building can the root causes of Afghanistan’s problems be resolved. It essentially accepts that a heavy American presence is required to bring about enough good governance and development for success. However, U.S. and allied countries have found their support for a continued, expensive engagement declining, and the manifest corruption and ineffectiveness of the Afghan government does not instill confidence that this approach is working. Moreover, President Obama has already announced a July 2011 timetable for the beginning of an American withdrawal of combat forces.

• Counterterrorism is Enough – A counterterrorism approach does not accept the necessity of nation-building—or at least holds that such a commitment of means is not justified by the ends. Instead, adherents of this approach, increasingly in the ascendance in Washington, believe that the United States and its allies can achieve minimal national security goals through the relatively secretive activities of counterterrorism specialists. While such an approach may not resolve underlying problems and, indeed, might only be a variation of the containment strategy that was employed against the Taliban in the 1990s, this is much more sustainable than the big COIN nation-building approach.

• Declare Victory and Disengage – It may be that the only strategy worth considering is one that abandons Afghanistan to its own fate. After all, the United States has already spent $227 billion on Afghanistan (in direct military spending), [24] a country whose rapid GDP growth rates of the post-9/11 era have allowed it to get its national budget up to $4 billion per year (almost entirely based on foreign aid). Also, the United States has achieved all of its initial objectives in Afghanistan, at least to some extent. If U.S. interests have changed and the ends now justify a greater deployment of forces and more expenditure of money, then such a case must be made with clarity and conviction.

We are reluctant to suggest complete abandonment, in part because other key countries are now engaged in Afghanistan in ways that threaten U.S. interests and partly because the earlier era of U.S. disengagement saw the advent of the Taliban, al Qaeda, and eventually 9/11. Moreover, there is an argument to be made that Afghanistan presents the United States with a remarkable opportunity for international leadership that, despite some difficulties along the way, is still not lost to us. However, we are not convinced that the United States should pursue the expensive and obvious strategy followed by the Soviets when it failed so miserably for them. That leaves us unenthusiastically in favor of using counterterrorism to achieve America’s most pressing security interests in Afghanistan, with regional diplomatic and development efforts as critical enablers.
Afghanistan needs a good government that has legitimacy with its population, dispenses justice, spreads economic benefits, and lives peacefully with its neighbors as a hub of Asian trade. Perhaps it needs a constitutional monarchy with an appropriate role for the Ulema, as in other Islamic countries, and a reconstituted, empowered system of local governance. The projected mineral wealth and geostrategic location might very well provide the foundation for an economic miracle. And with proper investment in infrastructure and human capital, Afghanistan could be built into a functioning twenty-first-century country. But none of this will happen quickly and history suggests that economies built on extractive industries face their own unique problems. Moreover, these otherwise admirable goals cannot be provided by the United States or other outside powers, and the Soviet experience shows that staying too long in Afghanistan carries its own costs. Above all else, the Soviet experience shows us the painful mistakes of the past, and we ignore those mistakes at our peril. Otherwise, as George Santayana once warned us, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Larry Goodson is a Professor of Middle East Studies at the U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania; Thomas H. Johnson is a Research Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey California, and directs the NPS Program for Culture and Conflict Studies. Both authors have had occasion to provide input to senior government officials about U.S. policy toward Afghanistan. This essay is a condensed version of an article that will appear in the Fall issue of Orbis, FPRI’s quarterly journal of world affairs.
Notes
1. Dion Nissenbaum, “McChrystal Lights Fire Under Marjah Commanders,” McClatchey Newspapers, May 25, 2010. Accessed at: McClatchy blog: Checkpoint Kabul on May 27, 2010.
2. One of us has also written on the similarities of the Afghan War with the Vietnam War: Thomas H. Johnson and W. Chris Mason, “Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template,” Military Review, November-December, 2009, pp. 2-14.
3. Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 179–182.
4. Antonio Giustozzi, War, Politics and Society in Afghanistan: 1978-1992 (Georgetown University Press: Washington D.C., 2000), pp. 210–18.
5. This reconciliation program has been variously known as the Peace Through Strength Program, Afghan Truth & Reconciliation Commission, National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), National Commission for Peace in Afghanistan, or simply the Afghan Reconciliation Program.
6. The Diplomat, April 8, 2011, David Axe | The Diplomat.
7. We would like to thank Chris Mason for suggesting this argument.
8. Antonio Giustozzi. War, Politics and Society in Afghanistan, pp., 289. Map 1. “Main Areas of PDPA Recruitment Among Peasants, 1980-89.”
9. Ibid, 264, Table 25. “Fulfillment of Recruitment Plans Nationwide and at the Provincial Level.”
10. Nordland, Rod. “U.S. Approves Training to Expand Afghan Army.” New York Times, 14 January 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/wo...ghan.html?_r=1 (accessed 12 April 2011).
11. Thomas H. Johnson and Matthew DuPee, “Transition to nowhere: The limits of ‘Afghanization’,” Foreign Policy, March 22, 2011, The Limits of "Afghanization" - by Thomas H. Johnson and Matthew DuPee | The AfPak Channel.
12. The number of soldiers present for duty is the key statistic relative to the viability of the “Afghanization” of the war.
13. See Thomas H. Johnson and “Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template,” with W. Chris Mason, Military Review, November-December, 2009, pp. 2-14.
14. International Crisis Group, A Force in Fragments: Reconstructing the Afghan National Army, Asia Report No. 190, May 12, 2010, p. i.
15. Ibid, p. 1.
16. Ibid. p 10.
17. Ibid, p. 8.
18. We provide fuller treatment of these similarities in a longer and more in-depth article.
19. COIN Manual
20. Thomas H. Johnson and W. Chris Mason, “Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template,” Military Review, November-December, 2009, pp. 2-14; Kalev I. Sepp, “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency,” Military Review
21. , May-June 2005, pp. 8–12. [Text] Holt, Ronald L. “Afghan Village Militia: A People Centric Strategy to Win,” Small Wars Journal.com, 2009.
22. For an excellent review of political legitimacy in Afghanistan, see: Thomas Barfield, “Problems of Establishing Legitimacy in Afghanistan, Iranian Studies, Vol. 37, 2004, pp. 263-69, and; Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
23. Louis Dupree, Afghanistan, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
24. Amy Belasco, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terrorism Operations Since 9/11. (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, September 28, 2009), p. 2.

[khushal]

Randolph is right, Karzai is just a politician who is doing his job and he is doing a pretty good job at that.
The US knows ahead of time what Karzai is going to say and it is approved by the US before he even says it. Karzai has to say things publicly to look as though he is a tough guy to the public but behind close doors, its a different issue, he is merely a puppet.
The US is going to get its perm bases, but they have to make it look legit by making it look like the afghan people decided in favor of it. So they are going to somehow make the parliament vote in its favor. All the while Karzai will keep speaking against it making it look like as though he is a hero and an independent thinker and independent player.

Its all just a show.

[ghundal]

Randolph is right, Karzai is just a politician who is doing his job and he is doing a pretty good job at that.
The US knows ahead of time what Karzai is going to say and it is approved by the US before he even says it. Karzai has to say things publicly to look as though he is a tough guy to the public but behind close doors, its a different issue, he is merely a puppet.
The US is going to get its perm bases, but they have to make it look legit by making it look like the afghan people decided in favor of it. So they are going to somehow make the parliament vote in its favor. All the while Karzai will keep speaking against it making it look like as though he is a hero and an independent thinker and independent player.

Its all just a show.

a show for the Afghan people and the Afghan resistance was also put on by Shah Shuja who also turned his back on his foreign backers, much to their contempt. The same here.

Sometimes, we have to go beyond the speculation, and understand the meaning of statements. You have Bismillah alrady saying, they don't need parliaments approval, and there will be no US presence. You have Karzai saying the same thing, and last, and most importantly, you have the Afghan people who have made it quite clear they will not tolerate foreigners.

The reason for their denying the bases is very clear: they want to make peace with the Afghan resistance, but the denial is not enough. The removal of foreign forces from Afghanistan is the only way forward for peace and security. No other alternative exists.

So, the play has come to an end, as Karzai is reaching out to the Afghan resistance in hope of having a place post-nato withdrawal.

Their complete withdrawal is real just as the end of their grip on world affairs is. This is no hype or sensation here.


Sometimes, we have to take words for what they mean.

[afghan]

karzai has adopted the same policy as any other paki leader lately. the more they talk against the US the closer they become. look at pakies every speach starts from bismillah and ends up getting rid of US.

[khushal]

Ghundal,
You have to understand politics. What the US is trying to create in Afghanistan is basically a copy of what they have in Pakistan. Pakistani leaders have been very successful of deflecting the peoples anger from itself to India, what the US is trying to do is try to create a Kabul government that would be clever enough to deflect the people anger from itself(the government) to Pakistan.
So far the Kabul government has not been clever enough. But Afghan is right. Pakistan leaders starts their speaches with bismilah and says anti India and US statements and then allows fuel and material shipments from its ports to Afghanistan so NATO can kill people there. They share intelligence with their CIA godfather.

Words have to backed up by action, other wise their just empty words. KP pashtuns have been slowly figureing out that these words aren't being matched with action hence the instability in Pakistan. NA trust Iran and Russia more than the US because the US abandoned them once. Even the Shias in Iraq trust Iran more than the US because again the US abandoned them in 91.

[graveyardofempires]

for clearity afghan people dont know "politics" and believe Karzai if he says something good to happen and that makes them "hopeful",so when Karzai play "politics" and dont deliver this will backfire on him.
so if he says no to permanent bases than it simply means this issue is beyond him and it is historical incorrect decision and if he agrees with it he will have big problem with Afghan PEOPLE.

i understand the views of randolph etc seeing it from an "informed" angle.
In Afghanistan people just perceive it differently and these "bigger picture story" would be irrelevant for them to form their opinion.