Afghan Journal

Why Karzai decided to attack the West

It was a strange or at least unusual event. Reuters, other news wires and mostly Afghan journalists were summoned to the presidential palace early in the morning. A frequent and very familiar routine of standing around, waiting and multiple security checks then started .

On this occasion, we were packed onto mini buses with blacked-out windows and told only that we would be leaving the palace and going “some place outside”. The guessing game ended when the buses, flanked by armored Land Cruisers and charging down a busy city highway, honking other vehicles out of the way,  turned into another building very familiar to reporters in Kabul: the Independent Election Commission (IEC).

It is not unusual for President Hamid Karzai to give press conferences elsewhere in Afghanistan (in other cities for instance) but I cannot recall a time when he addressed reporters in Kabul anywhere but the press room of his palace. Not knowing what was in store, I reminded myself it was also April Fool’s day.

We all agreed that we might get a response out of Karzai about the rejection of a presidential decree by the lower house of parliament and possibly something about the reforms that the U.N. has wanted of the IEC.

What we got instead was some of Karzai’s strongest words against the West and the international community. The defiant tone was set by Azizullah Ludin, the Chairman of the IEC, who gave an impassioned and rather rambling speech about how hard he had tried to serve the Afghan people, about how difficult the presidential election in August had been to monitor and how sad he was that the foreigners were interfering so much and manipulating the efforts of the IEC.

Ludin’s deputy, the Chief Electoral Officer, Daoud Ali Najafi, then followed with a much shorter but equally defensive testimony of what he had gone through and the pressures he faced. IEC colleagues and Karzai nodded in support. The whole thing (was it a press conference? An extraordinary meeting? An open exchange of feelings about how last August’s elections went?) started to feel a bit like a rather grandiose cognitive therapy session, in which people who have been scarred by something in their life, in this case an experiment with democracy, “share their pain” with like-minded sufferers as a catharsis.

Ludin and Najafi were heavily criticized by Karzai’s main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah,  the sacked U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith, and the media, during and after the elections.