Karzai cabinet splits over BSA deadlock

The atmosphere at Sunday’s National Security Council meetings in the Presidential Palace in Kabul has increasingly turned dull and divisive over the past two months, according to three cabinet members.

As soon as the meetings, which are normally chaired by President Hamid Karzai, conclude several participants rush to their BlackBerries and iPhones to email or text main points to their external contacts.

“The Americans can hear every word spoken in the Arg but others like Iranians, Indian and Russians have sources in the Afghan Government that feed them internal classified  information,” says one cabinet member who cannot be named due to the sensitive nature of this article.

The split between Karzai and his cabinet is growing wide

The split between Karzai and his cabinet is growing wide

In at least two meetings in December 2013, some ministers tacitly tried to advise President Karzai to sign a Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) with President Barack Obama. However during lengthy meetings President Karzai lectured participants about his “conditions” to ink the agreement.

At one point in a meeting, President Karzai got so emotional that he wept, according to a participant.

The source said over half of the cabinet and others that attend Sunday’s meetings are opposed to President Karzai’s conditions to sign the BSA.

“He [Karzai] knows he’s isolated but he’s stubborn,” the source said.

Despite strong opposition to their boss’s rigid stance, no cabinet member dares to tell Karzai to end the bizarre show-off and sign the agreement because doing so could expose him as an “American puppet”.

Ever since President Karzai got suspicious on several senior Afghan officials attending private meetings at the US and other embassies in Kabul, he warned he would not let American and British informants in his office. Nowadays, few if any senior Afghan official shows up at parties in the embassies. In the President’s office, invitations from the US Embassy are trashed spontaneously.

Privately, however, many Afghan ministers and other senior officials send messages of patience and solidarity to their American and NATO contacts.

The three senior officials quoted in this piece all said that the BSA stalemate had damaged trust in the top echelons of the Afghan Government.

“Many of us find it too difficult to walk with him [Karzai] the road he’s chosen. He personally feels hurt and humiliated by the Obama Administration, and that’s not the way most of us feel,” a minister told this writer.

“It’s misleading to throw all the blame at Khoram [Karim Khoram, Chief of Staff] because I’ve personally seen Raies sahib [Karzai] scolding Khoram on several occasions,” he added.

Exactly where President Karzai receives his counsellings which inhibit him from signing the BSA is unclear but he has certainly split his cabinet over this and has pushed many to the verge of psychological breakdown.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s