News Journal:Enough of Karzai and his pre-election political maneuvering

Over the years, I’ve been in my share of private meetings that didn’t go well, but the one I had with Afghan President Hamid Karzai back before his country’s 2009 elections stands out. I was hoping for a serious conversation about the importance of an open, fair election process, but that didn’t happen. Instead, I sat through a rambling, often incoherent campaign speech about all the terrible things U.S. troops were doing to his country.

Never mind the indisputable fact that there would have been no Afghan government, no elections and certainly no President Karzai without those troops. As for fair elections, he won weeks later amid widespread and credible reports of election fraud by his supporters.

I knew then this was a guy who gave real meaning to phrases like “biting the hand that feeds you” and “with friends like this, who needs enemies.” And he’s been spouting variations on the same speech, off and on as it politically suits him, ever since. Last week, the Obama administration finally decided it had had enough of his blatant demagoguery and infuriating delaying tactics. Unless Karzai promptly signs a new long-term bilateral security agreement, the U.S. will withdraw all of its troops in Afghanistan next year.

The agreement has been in the works for more than a year. It ends combat operations by the end of 2014, leaves some 15,000 U.S. troops behind after that to help train Afghan security forces, and gives the country $4 billion a year in military aid. It was approved two weeks ago by the Loya Jirga, a formal conclave of 2,500 elders from every part of Afghanistan. It actually gives Karzai just about everything he said he wanted last year, but since then he has continued to bring up new concerns and conditions whenever it looked like agreement had been reached. He now says he won’t sign until our troops immediately desist from attacking any Afghan homes.

What’s really going on is pre-election political maneuvering. Karzai can’t be a candidate in the elections next April, but he wants to delay signing the agreement to give himself a better chance of picking his successor and maintaining his power.

Enough is enough. More than 2,000 U.S. troops have been killed and close to 20,000 thousand wounded. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent propping up Karzai’s corrupt government. Afghanistan is rated behind only Somalia and North Korea in Transparency International’s 2012 Corruption Index. A joint study, by the Afghan High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, reported recently that 50 percent of Afghans have had to pay a bribe to obtain public services. Karzai is unquestionably complicit in this, despite our constant warnings that endemic corruption endangered his government and our support of it.

Sadly, it looks like we will be seeing a scenario much like what has happened in Iraq. Like Karzai, Iraq Prime Minster Maliki played to his political base by criticizing U.S. troops and demanding they leave. U.S. officials warned him repeatedly that unless he included Sunni and Kurdish minorities in his majority Shiite government, he would face a resurgence of terrorist activity. He failed to do that, and terrorist attacks are once again a constant reality in Iraq. Maliki was disappointed when he came to Washington hat in hand last month and failed to get U.S. military aid he had rejected is 2011.

We might regret that leaders like Maliki and Karzai are in charge when we leave, but the alternatives are even worse. We are not a colonial power. Our intention was always to leave Afghanistan when it was no longer an important base for terrorist attacks on us and our allies. We have accomplished that. Our troops have eliminated Osama Bin Laden and decimated the Afghan leadership of al-Qaida and the Taliban, completely disrupting their planning and communication networks.

Last week, the chairs of both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees said they believe the threat of terrorist attacks in the U.S. has increased, but the threat now comes from al-Qaida affiliates in many different parts of the world.

Afghanistan is no longer a central concern, and we need to redeploy intelligence and other assets to wherever threats come from.

It is time to leave Karzai to the fate he richly deserves and bring our troops home from Afghanistan –all of them.

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. senator from Delaware.