President Hamid Karzai attends funeral for his half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai

President Hamid Karzai attends funeral for his half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai

 

KARZ, Afghanistan —

 President Hamid Karzai’s helicopter touched down at the family cemetery in a plume of dust Wednesday morning after the rest of the mourners had assembled, arriving by foot and in fleets of armored cars.

Under the white dome of the open-air mausoleum, the president stood for a moment and looked into the open grave that had been cut from a marble floor. The body of Ahmed Wali Karzai — his slain half-brother, the most influential power broker in southern Afghanistan — lay beneath a white sheet.

....

At the cemetery in Karz, the president bowed his head and appeared to be crying. The crowd surged in all around. Frantic bodyguards shouted and pushed against the mourners in vain.

“Go away, go away — you’ll bring him more sin,” one person shouted. Men in turbans wailed their misery. Cabinet ministers and army generals craned their necks for a view.

The president did not make a sound. Carefully, he stepped down into the grave and knelt over his brother’s body; it is customary here to see the faces of close relatives before they are buried. A web of men closed over the president, interlocking limbs in a hot press of bodies sweating through their clothes.

After a few seconds, Hamid Karzai climbed out of the grave, walking past the burial site of his father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, whose murder in 1999 galvanized his own political ambitions. The president slipped into a waiting car and departed. The gravediggers went back to work.

[I think a more accurate account is that Hamid Karzai  wept for some time in the grave and had to be  pulled out of it by others]

...

U.S. and Afghan officials say it is possible that the Taliban may have influenced Mohammad’s decision to kill Karzai. But they also note that Karzai, who wielded enormous power in southern Afghanistan, had many political enemies.

Elsewhere in Kandahar province, officials said, the governor of Helmand province and his intelligence chief were the targets of a remote-controlled bomb attack as they traveled to the funeral Wednesday morning. Both men escaped without injury, but two soldiers were hurt by the blast.

 

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(Joshua Partlow) The Washington Post

Comment       

 There is much comment about the  loss of  Hamid Kharzai's  half-brother  being a blow to the US and NATO  hope to arrange an exit through  talks with the Taliban. He was their main man in the south, where the Obama  "surge"  strategy had been focused . It was  intended to bring the Taliban to the table  to deal.  This strategy, which General David Petraeus  persuaded President Obama to adopt was wrong-headed  from  the start and based on a fundamental ignorance of  Afghanistan that has persisted since 2001.

 The  US military  (and the  many uncontrolled and monitored  private contractors and NGOs)  didn't listen to, understand or work with President Hamid Karzai . As a tribal leader ( whose father was a powerful leader, murdered  by fundamentalist Taliban after being promised security as a condition for  his attending peace talks with them)   understood Afghanistan and  how to work with the situation when  he became President. 

  An ongoing  civil war, following the Soviet exit in 1989,  whose occupation  destroyed what had been a peaceful and economically- developing  Afghanistan  which had already benefited  the poor, helped by both American and Soviet aid projects over some years.  (I  saw this in the 60's and 70's  personally).  The civil war has persisted, and the young Taliban fighthers from Pakistan had succeeded in controling  most of the country by the late 90's and establishing more security and reliable courts and justice  than the nation had known yor many years.  

After the fall of the Taliban government in 2001 , the problem was working with the many tribes while there was - and still  is -  divided  provinces and warlords.

We often attacked tribes that were opposed to Kharzai's tribes,  and  yet also at the same time supported warlords that were opposed to any government development. We contributed much to  making things worse and us hated.  We brought much  corruption which Kharzai had nothing to do with creating. The government  couldn't pay $200,000 per annum to an Afghan with a high school or less education but an ordinary NGO  could and did.  

We are now targeting and  killing  younger Taliban leaders who are more amenable to truce than the   older Taliban leaders we are hoping to force to the table to make a deal .  Pakistan will make sure that  their Taliban tribes will supply an  unlimited number of fighters.  Overall,  a wrong-headed and ignorant policy  by the American  strategists. We consistently  have dictated to Kharzai and undermined his position  and  often blamed him  out of our own ignorance what has gone wrong.  He has the goodwill of many Afghans although  the government doesn't . He needs and wants  support  long-term from other nations and good relations and economic cooperation with Afghanistan's neighbors, evpecially  Iran, Russia, China, India and Pakistan.  And to deal with the ongoing civil war and the export of narcotics worldwide, Afghanistan's neighbors have strong interests in stabilizing and controlling. The US has concentrated on completing 40 military bases and a 500 million dollar upgrade of its embassy in Kabul, being done by   American companies. The main effort has been military, now more focused on a long term counter-insurgency strategy. It is not unfair to suggest this policy had a possibility of success back in 2001. As our late representive Richard Holbrooke noted last December, 'The war in Afghanistan is a sideshow. The real war is in Pakistan.' The US needs to engage with all the nations in the region about Afghanistan if  there is to a stabilization of the nation.