In what is increasingly looking like 'South Vietnam revisited' or '40 years of learning nothing', U.S. President Barack Obama’s newly confirmed defense secretary, Chuck Hagel,
confronted suicide bombings, an "insider" attack and vitriolic criticism from
the US-backed puppet, President Hamid Karzai, during his weekend visit to
Afghanistan.
The planned centerpiece of the trip, a joint press
conference with Karzai at the presidential palace, was called off on Sunday with
US officials claiming it was because of a security threat. Their Afghan
counterparts denied that there was any such danger.
Whether the US
defense secretary was considered unsafe in the most heavily guarded building in
Kabul, or Washington felt it was impossible to share a platform with a man it
has kept in power for nearly a dozen years, the cancellation of the event
clearly points to a deep-going crisis in the Obama administration’s transition
toward a smaller, permanent military presence in Afghanistan.
Within
hours of Hagel’s landing in Afghanistan two suicide bombings killed nearly 20
Afghans. One was just outside the Ministry of Defense in Kabul, where 10 people
died.
In a response that blindsided Washington, Karzai used a televised
speech ostensibly called to mark Women’s Day to lash out at the US and suggest
that the bombings were part of a broader conspiracy to cast his own government
as powerless in the face of a Taliban offensive without the continued presence
of US-led occupation troops.
"In reality, the bombs that went off
yesterday under the name of the Taliban were a service to the foreigners,"
Karzai said.
"Those bombs that went off in Kabul and Khost were not a
show of force to America," he continued. "They were in service of America. It
was in the service of the 2014 slogan to warn us if they [US troops] are not
here, then Taliban will come. In fact those bombs, set off yesterday in the name
of the Taliban, were in the service of Americans to keep foreigners longer in
Afghanistan."
The Afghan president, who was installed by the US
occupation in 2001, went on to charge that US officials are meeting with Taliban
representatives "every day" in Qatar.
Hagel was diplomatic. "I told the president that it
was not true," the new Pentagon chief told the media. "The fact is any prospect
for peace or political settlements—that has to be led by the Afghans."
Suggesting that Karzai’s remarks were aimed at constituencies within
Afghanistan, Hagel added, "I was a politician once, so I can understand the kind
of pressures" he faces.
The "pressures" Karzai is facing are indeed
intense. Both he and the corrupt clique around him are growing increasingly
anxious about their ability to survive, both politically and physically, the
drawdown of US troops, whose number has fallen from over 100,000 to
66,000. And he has no guarantees that he and his family will be helicoptered out should Kabul fall like Saigon.
This force is supposed to be cut in half by next year and reduced
further by the end of 2014 to a residual force that the US wants to keep
permanently deployed in Afghanistan. Last week, Gen. James Mattis, the chief of
the Pentagon’s Central Command, told a hearing of the Senate Armed Services
Committee that this force should include 20,000 troops, 13,600 of them Americans
and the rest from other NATO countries.
