It Is Not Easy Being Afghan President: Hamid Karzai

The Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, is presently visiting Washington and being toasted with state dinners and the like to impress, or moreover, to compel him to continue to assist us in our ongoing prosecution of “The War On Terror”. This is the proven diplomatic strategy of applying the “carrot and stick” approach to influence the Afghan leader to buy into our resolve…concerning our war on terror; in essence, we are quietly conceding the fact that the “stick” option has, obviously, failed.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="377" caption="Photo Credit: Harald Dettenborn"][/caption]

In all honesty, it is not easy being the Afghan president and this is not because Karzai still has to deal with those pesky Taliban fighters…who still want to keep Afghanistan in the Stone Age or the fact that the central front of our war on terror” is mostly in the Afghan theatre. No, it is not easy for President Karzai because politicians of all stripes, including Secretary of State, Clinton, are loudly calling for him to be more pro-active in fighting corruption and the lucrative heroin drug trafficking trade, ironically being perpetrated by his very own blood brother-What is a President to do?

The Biblical David wept for the death of his son, Absalom, even though Absalom tried to overthrow his father; let’s not even mention the blood letting, which rivaled the waters of Niagara Falls, done by many of the Caesars to secure the crown. Circa, modern Afghanistan, imagine a family dinner of lentil and lamb for the Karzai family…around a table with mother, father, and all the extended family sitting down, as is the wont in Afghan culture, but with President Karzai’s, drug smuggling brother conspicuously absent because he was jailed or worst, killed. Also imagine the countenance of each member of the Karzai family, especially the matriarch and patriarch of the Karzai clan, saying to President Karzai, you were responsible for your brother’s demise by being a puppet of the “Yankee Imperialists” or an agent of the “Great Satan.”

Which one of us would be secure in our resolve to do what the American politicians and Secretary of State Clinton is asking of President Karzai…concerning his prodigal brother? Which one of us could sit around the dinner table and face a mother in a similar situation like that of President Karzai?

Anyone familiar with the Biblical story of David and his son, Absalom, mentioned above, knows that it was one of David’s generals who carried out the execution of Absalom…resulting in David weeping profusely-this underscores the difficulty President Karzai wrestles with. Perhaps, President Karzai can gently remind the American politicians and Secretary of State Clinton that prodigal brothers have also been a problem for America too, maybe not to the extent of Karzai’s brother-but lest we forget, President Carter’s brother, Billy, and President Clinton’s brother, Roger…no need to rehash their respective problems with the law.

From the confines of cold objectivity, absent the warmth of filial emotions, it is easy for one to say to President Karzai, do what is right and arrest your brother or talk him out of partaking in trafficking heroin. One may even remind and show President Karzai the incentives of doing what is right-the fact that Afghan girls can attend school in relative safety; that women now enjoy relatively more rights than they were afforded under the brutal Taliban regime; and that Democracy, though a  sapling in unfamiliar soil, has taken root, of all places, in Afghanistan…with the hope for all of its potential, positive attributes….