Foreign Correspondence

[Ace Hanlon]

Afghanistan -- 21st Century Democracy in Action
Hamid Karzai was in Washington this week. He had the obligatory orchestrated lovefest with Bush at a White House press conference, with as much freedom of speech as he would have had if Bush had an actual gun pointed to his head.
It included this paean to Afghan independence:

PRESIDENT KARZAI: Mr. President, I'm here today to thank you for all that you have done for Afghanistan. And we are very, very happy. We are grateful. You sent the Vice President of the United States to come and attend the inauguration in Afghanistan. It was a tremendous honor for us to receive him there, to have him there. It was the manifestation of the commitment of the United States and yourself to the Afghan people to have that day attended by the Vice President. And we are very, very happy more importantly to have had the First Lady to visit us in Afghanistan. We were thrilled. The Afghan women were thrilled. The Afghan site were thrilled. And now you guess whose turn it is now to come to Afghanistan. (Laughter.) So we'll be hoping to receive you there very soon.] ...
The country is much greener than it was in the past few years. I thank you once again for receiving us here and for the support you've given to us all along, and will continue to do so. Thank you.
But, even though it got far less press attention, Karzai expressed a long list of concerns to Bush in the Oval Office.
Shocked by the front-page story in the Times about U.S. forces slowly, brutally torturing two Afghan detainees to death, Karzai called for all Afghan detainees to be transferred to the custody of the government of Afghanistan.
He also called for more control over U.S. forces' operations in Afghanistan to be handed over to his government.
He also blamed the "international community" and, in particular, the United States lack of sufficient support for his government's opium-eradication efforts.
If Afghanistan was truly a sovereign country, then, of course, the least one could expect is that it would have the right to control of detainees on its own soil and to restriction of military operations on its own soil. Bush's response was to completely ignore Karzai's requests, saying only that U.S. operations in Afghanistan were on a "cooperate and consult" basis with the Afghan government.
Bush displays Karzai at the White House to trumpet the great democracy created in Afghanistan, introducing him as the first elected leader in Afghanistan in 5000 years (who was elected in 3000 BC?); at the same time, he makes it very clear that Afghanistan's sovereignty is a mockery and that it is no more than a colonial protectorate of the United States. And nobody wants to see a contradiction. Welcome to democracy in the 21st century.

Rahul Mahajan