Karzai wants the foreign troops out, too
So it's not just the US-installed government in Baghdad that is now acting uppity and turning on its former master... Afghan President Hamid Karzai told a team of visiting UN Security Council members today that he, too, wants to see a "timeline" for the end of foreign military presence in his country.
That AFP report tells us that,
- Karzai told a delegation from the Council that his country needed to know how long the US-led "war on terror" was going to be fought in Afghanistan or it would have to seek a political solution to a Taliban-led insurgency.
A US-led invasion ousted the extremist Islamic Taliban regime in 2001 and launched its "war on terror", which has brought nearly 70,000 mainly Western troops to Afghanistan, most of them under a UN Security Council mandate.
US President-elect Barack Obama has said that Afghanistan and the "war on terror" would be a priority for his government and campaigned on a pledge to shift US forces from Iraq to Afghanistan.
"The international community should give us a timeline of how long or how far the 'war on terrorism' will go," Karzai's chief spokesman Homayun Hamidzada cited the president as telling the delegation.
"If we don't have a clear idea of how long it will be, the Afghan government has no choice but to seek political solutions," he told AFP, adding this included "starting to talk to Taliban and those opposing the government."
... Also on Afghanistan, JWN readers might be interested in reading this and other recent posts on a new blog, "Afghanistan Shrugged", written by a US National Guard officer who was recently deployed as head of an American "Embedded Training Team" working with Afghan National Army units in Bermel, Paktika, near the border with Pakistan.
The writer calls himself Vampire06. And yes, he is (as the title of his blog suggests) an admirer of Ayn Rand. He gives an interesting, fairly intelligent ground-level view of the work of the ETTs, so a bunch of his recent posts are worth reading.
You might, however, be interested in following the discussion I've had on V06's most recent post with Joshua Foust of Registan, here.
Well, I see that much of the MSM is saying that Robert Gates will be on board as SecDef "for at least the first year" when OBama takes office. Inasmuch as both Obama and Gates have publicly stated that a "troop surge" is on for Afghanistan, any notion that some (strong) movement toward a negotiated end to at least actual military operations in Afghanistan can be put aside. Perhaps the deal here is get Khalilzad "elected" as the replacement for the hapless Karzai, and he then will endorse intensification of the war, including upping the ante on airstrikes. I certainly wouldn't want to be a member of an tribal wedding party anywhere in that country in the next year or so.