The Obama-Karzai Meeting: But Who Really Gets to Decide Afghanistan’s Future?
Presidents Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai meet at the White House on Jan. 11 to discuss the future of Afghanistan beyond the 2014 U.S. troop withdrawal. But neither man will have the last word over the fate of that beleaguered country beyond next year.
Karzai, for his part, is constitutionally forbidden to seek re-election when his term expires in 2014. And even if he were to manipulate the political system in order to elevate a proxy figure to rule on his behalf — which his critics suspect he plans to do — his power, limited as it is, has always depended on the presence of tens of thousands of Western troops to fight off his Taliban foes. Those troops are leaving too; the U.S. and its NATO allies have set a hard deadline for ending what had threatened to become an open-ended commitment if withdrawal remained tied to security conditions on the ground. Still, the prospect of their departure is prompting fears that the entire edifice created by the Western alliance over 11 years could collapse — and it obviously further diminishes Washington’s leverage over Afghan political choices.
Presidents Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai meet at the White House on Jan. 11 to discuss the future of Afghanistan beyond the 2014 U.S. troop withdrawal. But neither man will have the last word over the fate of that beleaguered country beyond next year.
Karzai, for his part, is constitutionally forbidden to seek re-election when his term expires in 2014. And even if he were to manipulate the political system in order to elevate a proxy figure to rule on his behalf — which his critics suspect he plans to do — his power, limited as it is, has always depended on the presence of tens of thousands of Western troops to fight off his Taliban foes. Those troops are leaving too; the U.S. and its NATO allies have set a hard deadline for ending what had threatened to become an open-ended commitment if withdrawal remained tied to security conditions on the ground. Still, the prospect of their departure is prompting fears that the entire edifice created by the Western alliance over 11 years could collapse — and it obviously further diminishes Washington’s leverage over Afghan political choices.
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