Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been acting certifiably crazy. At first, everyone attributed it to hurt feelings (an invitation to the White House had been abruptly rescinded).
But it has got worse, with Karzai accusing Americans of engineering Afghan election fraud and hinting that he could join the Taliban. Now Peter Galbraith, the American who was once a top UN official in Afghanistan, has told MSNBC that the erratic behavior may be about a lot more than diplomatic snubbings. Galbraith said he questions Karzai's "mental stability" and dropped a not-so-subtle hint that the Afghan president is a herion addict.
"He's prone to tirades," Galbraith said. "He can be very emotional, act impulsively. In fact, some of the palace insiders say that he has a certain fondness for some of Afghanistan's most profitable exports." Galbraith is not the world's most neutral source on Karzai (he was removed from his UN job after accusing Karzai of election fraud), and other diplomatic types say Karzai is paranoid or depressed, not on drugs.
Either way, his behaviour is bad news for the United States, which needs a strong ally in Kabul if it is to bring most of its troops home from Afghanistan by next year. The White House is evasive on Karzai; press secretary Robert Gibbs danced around the question of whether Karzai is a US ally Tuesday, saying, "He is the democratically elected leader of Afghanistan."
Many foreign policy analysts say it is time for the United States to effectively ditch the president; writing in the New York Times on Wednesday, one former Defence official argues that if the United States wants to get out of Afghanistan, it is going to have to ignore Kabul (and Karzai) and deal directly with local leaders who will actually cooperate.
"Karzai should be treated as a symbolic president and given the organisational 'mushroom treatment,' " he says. "That is, we should shut off the flows of information and resources directly to the national government."
Thomas L. Blair is a sociologist and political blogger on the Chronicleworld 'for creative renewal in Black Britain and Afro-Europe'. His work is honoured in the British Library's archive of "social, historic and culturally significant web-based material from the UK domain". He won top prize in the blogging competition on The-Latest.
Sumantra Maitra is a freelance journalist from Mumbai, India. He is a correspondent for All Sports magazine, and a foreign affairs blogger for the Washington Examiner. He has written articles for news website Merinews.com and other regional publications. Sumantra runs a blog at DailyWorldWatch.wordpress.com. He provided exclusive eyewitness reports for The-Latest on the Mumbai bombings of 2008.
Brian Usher is photography consultant for The-Latest.Com. He is a highly experienced editorial and commercial photographer whose work has been published throughout the world, appearing in many well known magazines and newspapers. Brian has featured in several books and has been a writer for the Royal Photographic Society magazine.
Heidi Kingstone has spent time in Afghanistan reporting for a number of publications. Her work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Spectator, The Sunday Times and other international journals. She has also reported from places like Iraq, Rwanda, Lebanon, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kenya. Heidi is The-Latest's Editor at large.
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