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Karzai doubles down on anti-American
propaganda (+video)
Could it be time to take Karzai's words and actions at face value, and give him what he appears
to want?
By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / January 27, 2014
Hamid Karzai, the man the United States installed as leader of Afghanistan and who
retained his post in a fraud-riddled 2009 election, inches closer to overplaying his hand
every day.
Perhaps he had already with his frequent
allegations of war crimes against US soldiers
and hints that the country would be better off with
the Taliban integrated into the government than
with US soldiers remaining. But his government's
performance in the past few days has
demonstrated a monumental level of contempt
and perhaps even hatred for his chief foreign
backer, whose soldiers have maintained
Karzai's control of the capital and whose funding
keeps his government, such as it is, flush enough
to pay its bills.
On Saturday, Karzai's government distributed a
dossier of pictures and videos purporting to
demonstrate a US war crime, the sort of
decontextualized pictures and videos of broken
bodies and wailing mourners at funerals that are
often offered up by the Taliban as evidence of
American evil. In fact, as The New York Times
reported, most of the pictures and videos appear

Enlarge
Af ghan President Hamid Karzai leaves
a press conf erence at the presidential
palace in Kabul, Jan. 25, 2014. Karzai
said he will not sign a security pact
with the United States unless
Washington and Pakistan launch a
peace process with Taliban
insurgents.
Massoud Hossaini
Dan Murphy
Staff writer
Dan Murphy is a staf f
writer f or the Monitor's
international desk,
f ocused on the Middle
East. Murphy, who has
reported f rom Iraq,
Af ghanistan, Egypt, and more than a dozen
other countries, writes and edits Backchannels.
The f ocus? War and international relations,
leaning toward things Middle East.
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2/24/2014 Karzai doubles down on anti-American propaganda (+video) - CSMonitor.com
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By contrast, the Afghan commission appointed by Mr. Karzai to investigate the raid
described the action as primarily American, with roughly eight hours of
indiscriminate and unprovoked bombing followed by a house-to-house rampage by
American soldiers. The commission has said that it can prove that 12 civilians
were killed, and that there were indications of two to five additional civilian deaths.
Villagers on the streets and even inside their houses were shot, said Abdul Satar
Khawasi, a member of Parliament from the area who led the investigation. Ten
houses were destroyed.
... But at least two of the images distributed in the dossier could not have shown
casualties from the Wazghar strikes, because the photos are more than three
years old.
One was taken at the funeral of victims of a NATO airstrike in northern Afghanistan
in 2009, which killed at least 70 civilians. It was distributed by Agence France-
Presse and Getty Images and published in The Times on Sept. 5, 2009, along with
an article about the airstrike. The origins of the second misrepresented photograph
are murkier. It shows the bodies of two boys wrapped in burial shrouds, and has
been used for years on websites assailing civilian deaths in American drone
President Hamid Karzai appeared to stiffen his resolve on Saturday not to
sign a security pact with Washington, saying the United States should
leave Afghanistan unless it could restart peace talks with the Taliban. 'In
exchange for this agreement, we want peace for the people of
Afghanistan. Otherwise, it's better for them to leave and our country will
find its own way,' Karzai told a news conference. The president said
pressing ahead with talks with the Taliban, in power from 1996-2001, was
critical to ensure that Afghanistan was not left with a weak central
government.
to have been gleaned from Taliban websites.
And it gets worse from there.
The allegations and supposed evidence for the aftermath of a NATO airstrike on a village
in Parwan Province, an area filled with Taliban fighters, on Jan. 15. The US military has
insisted that the strike was at the behest of the Afghan Army, who had soldiers under
heavy fire from Taliban positions in two village compounds. The US acknowledges that
civilians, including two children, died in the strike, but insists the action was necessary
with the lives of dozens of Afghan soldiers and a handful of American advisers at stake.
One American and one Afghan soldier were killed in the action.
But that's not how Karzai's people see it. The Times reports:
2/24/2014 Karzai doubles down on anti-American propaganda (+video) - CSMonitor.com
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strikes in Pakistan.
On Sunday, the Afghan government organized a news conference with men who
said they were from the area north of Kabul where the clash took place. One man,
Alif Shah Ahmadzai, said that he did not witness the fighting itself but that his
cousins had been killed. He accused the Times of spreading lies.
When confronted with the photo that was demonstrably published in 2009 , the men
heatedly insisted that they knew the people at the funeral depicted in the picture. I
can take the dead bodies out of their graves, and if I was wrong I should be
hanged, Ahmadzai told reporters assembled at a government press center.
Could we be reading Karzai incorrectly? Is it possible that rather than trying to call
Washington's bluff in a high stakes game, he is prepared for and even eager to
have no American military presence in Afghanistan? What if Karzai is in fact
persuaded that the United States seeks to perpetuate the Afghan conflict and is
conniving with Pakistan to divide the country? Could it be that Karzai has come to
believe that Afghanistan has alternatives to its American military dependence that
offer greater promise of weakening or possibly ending the insurgency? Has he
concluded that with foreign troops gone, he can count on Iran, India, China, and
Yet on Saturday, the Karzai government doubled down with a press conference that
included some of the villagers whose innocent friends and relatives were allegedly killed. It
was an "oops" moment for the prosecution, as Stars and Stripes reports.
What's going on here? Karzai and his allies have been refusing to sign a security
agreement that would allow US and other NATO combat soldiers to remain in the country
beyond the end of this year, when their current mandate runs out. While Karzai constantly
expresses skepticism that foreign troops are of any value in accomplishing much but
killing civilians, his aid-dependent government is also well aware that without foreign
troops, much of the promised civilian aid to Afghanistan will also dry up. Without them, it
will be too dangerous to administer, and already rampant pilfering and central government
corruption will also grow.
On Facebook and email, I've been chatting with friends soldiers and civilians both who
served in the war effort in Afghanistan who constantly feel slapped in the face by Karzai's
behavior. That anger has finally filtered out to the US Congress, which last week slashed
civilian aid for Afghanistan in the current fiscal year to $1.1 billion, down from an initial
Obama administration request of $2.1 billion. They also banned any more Pentagon
spending on big new infrastructure projects.
The bill also prohibits any US funds being for "the direct personal benefit of the President
of Afghanistan," the Washington Post reported, a clear slap at Karzai.
Afghan presidential elections are in April, and Karzai is term-limited out, though he
appears to be maneuvering, thanks to the vast political war chest and favors he's
accumulated in the past decade, to remain the power behind the scenes. The conventional
wisdom is that he's been running a game of chicken with the US - betting that he can
extract vast concessions from the US in terms of more cash or weapons for his army by
delaying signing of the Bilateral Security Agreement. But the so-called "zero option" for
Afghanistan looms ever larger and more attractive for a US, which is slated to spend a
further $85 billion there this year.
An interesting contrary take on the "Karzai doesn't really mean it" theory was provided by
Marvin Weinbaum earlier this month. He suggests Karzai may honestly believe that the US
is a source of instability in the country. And why not?
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Saudi Arabia for support, and that the chances for a negotiated peace will
improve? And might Karzai also be convinced that Afghans are more likely to
resolve their internal political differences if freed from U.S. interference?
Interestingly, Karzai's views on the BSA and other issues happen to mirror the
thinking of the political and military wings of Afghanistan's Hezb-i-Islami. Arguably,
Karzai has wittingly or unwittingly aligned himself with this radical Islamic party.
Hezb-i-Islami is the party and militia of notorious warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. His group
has been a major force in the insurgency since 2001, and often aligned itself with the
Taliban. But it has also shown a willingness to reach agreements with the Afghan
government on one condition: the full withdrawal of foreign troops from the country.
Perhaps Hekmatyar is even sincere. Either way, after a decade of war, the US seems to
have no more understanding of Afghan politics than it did when the war started. It's not
even clear if the marginal returns of the war effort are "diminishing" anymore.
So why not take Karzai's words and actions at face value, and give him what he appears
to want?
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