Karzai grip on power weakens as Afghans tired of corruption

KABUL—Burhanuddin Rabbani turned over the presidency of Afghanistan to Hamid Karzai with a hug and his blessing seven years ago. Now, like many Afghans, Rabbani says he’s counting the days until Karzai is turned out of office.
“We thought he was a young man who should be given the opportunity to work as president in a period of transition,” Rabbani, 66, said in an interview at his Kabul home. “Unfortunately, he failed. It is a great tragedy.”
Rabbani, who was president from 1992 to 1996 and for a month after the Taliban regime fell in 2001, shares a growing concern that sending more U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan won’t improve security unless the central government fights corruption, slashes opium production and stops squandering reconstruction aid.
``There is a lot of anger and frustration,’’ said Paul Fishstein, director of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit. ``People want decisive action taken against corruption. They are looking for strong leadership. Instead they see impunity for people involved in the biggest crimes.’’ Voter registration is set to begin within weeks for a presidential election in the second half of 2009. In a national opinion poll conducted by the San Francisco- based Asia Foundation in October, the most recent data available, 64 percent of Afghans said Karzai’s government is doing a poor job of controlling corruption. Of the more than 6,000 Afghans questioned, 53 percent said Karzai hadn’t done enough to rebuild the country.
Afghans who gave 55 percent of their votes to Karzai in 2004 saw him as a consensus candidate who could unite ethnic factions after 15 years of strife. He’s a 50-year-old Pashtun, the group that represents 40 percent of Afghanistan’s 30 million people.
Karzai initially made a positive impression on the world stage, where he was greeted as a charismatic leader whose colorful capes and peaked karakul cap landed him on Esquire magazine’s list of best-dressed men. His stature helped attract pledges of more than $25 billion in reconstruction aid. Afghan confidence in Karzai has faded amid the Taliban’s resurgence, and he is increasingly at odds with the U.S. and its European allies. Karzai vetoed the appointment in January of Britain’s Paddy Ashdown as the United Nations’ top envoy to Afghanistan, saying he would be too intrusive, criticized allied forces for air strikes that killed civilians, and said Taliban and al-Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan should be attacked.
Both U.S. presidential candidates fault Karzai’s leadership while pledging to send more troops to Afghanistan. The U.S. contributes about 17,500 of the 53,000 troops under North Atlantic Treaty Organization command and has 18,500 other troops in an American-led counterterrorism force. Democrat Barack Obama, an Illinois senator, said on July 10 that Karzai has not “gotten out of the bunker” to rebuild the country. Republican John McCain, an Arizona senator, said on July 14 that Karzai “has not been effective.”
The loss of confidence in Karzai is compounded by a lack of candidates with the background and national standing to defeat him, according to Haroun Mir, founder of the Afghanistan Center for Research and Policy Studies. Possible contenders such as Afghan native Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the UN and former envoy to Afghanistan, have been out of the country too long to understand the current challenges, Mir said. Others are tainted by human-rights abuses during the civil war, he said.

—Agencies