Oy Vey, Real Poison! Here are some high points of Obama's dealings with the Afghan leader:
- [Obama] made his first visit to Kabul as president last week, flying for 26 hours to give Karzai a 25-minute lecture on corruption.
- Karzai family has now hit back, accusing US officials of launching a smear campaign as a prelude to abandoning the country again.
- “They want to discredit the Afghan government in the eyes of the US public. I hope it’s not the beginning of an exit strategy. If it is, God help us, it will be very bad — don’t they remember what happened when they did this before in the Eighties?”
- Like the British, Karzai thinks negotiations should start now. The Americans want a military victory first. This will be the main topic of discussion when Karzai visits Washington next month.
The Afghans have a very long cultural memory. From the first paragraph in the London Times,
"When Hamid Karzai started presenting the victims of British bombings in Helmand with medals commemorating Wazir Akbar Khan, one of the victors of the first Anglo-Afghan war, someone should, perhaps, have wondered which side Afghanistan’s president was really on."
England's Indian Army occupied Kabul in 1839, but were under siege most of the time and were forced into a desperate retreat in 1842 over the Khyber Pass, back into India (Pakistan was part of India then).
Also-
Unlike most other Nato troops, the Germans are flying large quantities of alcohol to their Afghan bases. Annual shipments have reached 1.8m pints of beer and 70,000 litres of wine, according to defence ministry figures.
The Germans need to read their not too distant history of how they mishandled their overtures to have Afghanistan become allied with Germany in WWI. Afghanistan remained neutral (although under British Influence) during World War I, despite German encouragement of anti-British feelings and Afghan rebellion along the borders of British Colonial India. The Afghan King's policy of neutrality was not universally popular within the country, but the Germans disregarded the Muslim ban on drinking alcohol and were drunk in public. This may have been the first time many Afghans had seen anyone drunk and these Germans only offended the then isolated Afghans.
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