US makes mistake in dealing with Karzai: Khalilzad

WASHINGTON (SANA): The former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad has said that the Obama and Bush administrations had made “mistakes” in dealing with incumbent Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who is now facing widespread allegations of electoral fraud.

In a talk at the Foreign Policy Initiative’s 2009 Forum on democracy, Khalilzad said he supported Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s call for more U.S. troops in Afghanistan and said that “leaving and cutting our losses would be a huge victory for al Qaeda and the Taliban.” Afghanistan, he said, would go back to the way it was before the September 11 attacks. He called instead for a counterinsurgency approach focused on protecting the Afghan people.

In a follow-up interview, I asked him if he thought, given how Karzai seems to have tilted away from the United States in recent years and allied himself with a number of unsavory characters such as Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, that the U.S. had made mistake in moving away from the Afghan leader, and whether the Obama administration had compounded that mistake.

“Karzai understands, I am sure, that he needs the United States,” Khalilzad responded. “Afghanistan cannot succeed without the United States. I think that he would be making a mistake if he believed no matter what, the United States will be there forever.”

But “we have made mistakes in dealing with him,” he admitted. “So much so that now it looks like we have very limited ability to do even the things we think are right for his own country.”

“I don’t want to say anything I am saying as a partisan comment,” he stressed. “We have one government at one time. But I believe that there was a mistake in terms of dealing with Karzai. Clear indications were given as least as Karzai saw it that the administration, some key members of the administration, did not like him and wanted to get rid of him and was encouraging others to run against him. And the meetings with him were quite contentious.”

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