Pressure grows on Karzai to sign deal with U.S.
Many Afghans say Karzai is jeopardizing
Afghanistan’s security by making new demands of Washington before
agreeing to allow U.S. troops there beyond 2014.
Karzai had appeared to reach an agreement last week that would permit up to 15,000 foreign troops to remain in Afghanistan after the formal end of U.S. combat operations in 2014. But Karzai has since refused to sign the accord until the U.S. government agrees to a series of escalating demands.
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Kensington Palace charity dinner, Dame Edna, Central African Republic, a “horse whisperer” and more.Pressure grows on Karzai to sign deal on U.S. troops
Many Afghans say the leader is jeopardizing nation’s security by making new demands of Washington.
In murderous Benghazi, a glimpse of Libya’s struggles
The killing continues in Libya’s second-largest city, and the government appears unable to stop it.
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“If he doesn’t sign, Afghanistan will go to civil war and Karzai will be responsible,” said Moeen Marastial, a former member of parliament who previously served in Karzai’s government. “Not only military commanders but ordinary people know, if this agreement is not signed, and there is no support and training for the military, the soldiers won’t be able to feed their families.”
Few Afghan leaders and analysts had expected Karzai to dig in so strongly over the accord, especially after an influential council of tribal leaders and civic activists urged him this week to sign it.
Now that he has laid out additional demands — including that the U.S. government release all 17 Afghans being held at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba — Karzai is facing criticism that his actions are being driven by personal grudges and paranoia.
The Americans should know that “the Afghans are not with President Karzai anymore,” said Ahmad Saedi, a Kabul-based political analyst.
Political leaders and analysts in Kabul have various theories about why Karzai is holding out, including that he is facing pressure from Iran or wants to win U.S. support for his favored candidate in the presidential election next spring.
Many analysts and political leaders believe that Karzai is overestimating the will of the Obama administration to continue the negotiations.
“There are high and growing levels of concern in Afghan society over the durability of the international commitment, and there are high and growing levels of concern in the international community, to include the American public, about whether we’re really wanted,” James Dobbins, Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said in an interview.
During a meeting with U.S. national security adviser Susan E. Rice on Monday night, Karzai said he would sign the agreement only after he’s convinced that no more U.S. soldiers would enter Afghan homes uninvited — a reference to nighttime anti-terrorism raids — and that the Obama administration would help launch peace talks between his government and Taliban insurgents.
To help start that peace process, Karzai requested the release of the Afghan prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
By Wednesday, there were signs Karzai might be softening his demands. In an interview with Radio Free Europe, he reiterated his call for an end to U.S. troop raids on Afghan homes and the start of peace talks, but didn’t mention the prisoner issue.
“Whenever the Americans meet these two demands of mine, I am ready to sign the agreement,” Karzai said.
On Wednesday night, Karzai spokesman Aimal Faizi insisted that the president wasn’t giving up on the prisoner issue, saying it was part of his call for an American-led peace process.
Obama officials have said they are not willing to reopen negotiations with Karzai, noting that the agreement was finalized after a year of discussions. And they say they need a completed accord soon to be able to plan a post-2014 presence, focused on anti-terrorism operations and training the Afghan military. But some U.S. officials say they are willing to give Karzai more time and remain hopeful he will buckle under domestic political pressure.
“Militaries have to plan, and you can’t just have a last-minute deal, but I think there is a bit more flexibility than these arbitrary dates that have been set” by the U.S. side, said Linda Robinson, a Rand Corp. senior international affairs specialist who recently wrote a book on U.S. Special Operations missions in Afghanistan.
But Ali Ahmad Jalali, an Afghan American who served under Karzai during the early years of his administration, said the pressure on Karzai is “building within the government, within the society and within the elites of Afghanistan.”
“People are confused, and are calling on the international community not to sacrifice the future of Afghanistan for one man,” he said.
Karen DeYoung in Washington and Sayed Salahuddin in Kabul contributed to this report.
In ‘bleeding’ Benghazi, a glimpse into Libya’s struggles
The fragile government appears unable to stop the killing and intimidation plaguing Libya’s second-largest city.- Wemple: ‘60 Minutes’ and Benghazi
BENGHAZI, Libya — It is exceedingly easy to get away with murder here.
Just ask any Libyan: Who killed more than 50 police officers, soldiers and judges here and in the eastern city of Darna this year?Who lit the fire that claimed the lives of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and another American at the U.S. diplomatic mission here just over a year ago? Who launched the mortar rounds that killed two CIA contractors that same night?
Or, for that matter, who bears responsibility for the 2011 torture and killing of Abdul Fattah Younis, the Gaddafi-era military commander who defected to lead the rebels?
“Do you live on Mars?” asked Hashem Bishr, the hard-line Salafist leader of a powerful Tripoli militia.
To understand Libya’s unsolved murder mysteries, understand this, Bishr said: “It’s just not a good time.”
What he meant is that there are people who know the answers — they’re just not willing to share.
Nor is the fragile, post-revolution government prepared to mete out justice, many Libyans and rights groups say.
Tripoli’s weak authorities have promised to investigate the killings. “But until now, there is nobody in detention. Nobody has been charged. And according to our knowledge, no one is being investigated,” said Hanan Salah, a Libya researcher for Human Rights Watch. The government, she said, lacks the technical capacity to do so.
But there is also a powerful element of fear.
More than a year after the deadly attack on the U.S. mission here, the dilapidated port city that was the birthplace of Libya’s 2011 revolution has become the epicenter of a shadowy campaign of assassinations and bombings. Most of the killings have targeted police and army personnel, along with a handful of judges and a political activist.
“The pale truth is that this is a bleeding city — a city that has a lot of losses every day,” said Fathallah Bin Ali, a Benghazi businessman who allies himself with the federalists, a faction in eastern Libya that is holding the region’s oil infrastructure hostage to extract more control from the government.
In recent months, mysterious early morning bombings have targeted two courts, a wedding hall and a popular cafe. No one was killed. But the intent, residents say, was intimidation.
Mohamed al-Bargathi said he has no desire to mend the facade of his once-bustling cafe, the Rotana, which was shattered last month by a homemade bomb in a bag left on the front steps.
“I’m afraid they’ll just bomb it again,” he said, smoking a cigarette outside the shuttered business. “If we knew who did it, we would kill him and reopen. But we don’t know who did it.”
Many here say that Benghazi is a microcosm of Libya’s larger struggles.
On a normal afternoon, political opponents and rival militia leaders can be seen warily eyeing one another over espressos from across hotel lobbies. The Libyan special forces, resurrected from a force that existed before the revolution, man camouflaged gun-trucks at intersections in the center of town and participate in a “joint-security operations room” to manage the city’s security. But their Islamist militia rivals have their own security operations room — their own bases and, sometimes, their own checkpoints.
This week, the special forces clashed with Ansar al-Sharia, the hard-line militia that remains the prime but unprosecuted suspect in the U.S. mission attack. Ansar was operating a roadside checkpoint at the city’s western edge. Two weeks earlier, someone had fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the car of the Libyan operations room chief, killing his driver.
Depending on whom you ask, just about every armed group around here is guilty of killings, theft and human rights abuses.
Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes. How did this crisis start, and is it a genocide in the making?
Since Stevens’s death, U.S. officials, along with many other Western diplomats and civil society groups, no longer venture to Benghazi because the risks are simply too high. Even the FBI officials charged with investigating the Sept. 11, 2012, attack have conducted the bulk of their research from the safer confines of Tripoli, 400 miles away.
But Benghazi is wasting away, abandoned by its friends and investors at a time when it is most desperately in need of help — with justice, policing, reconstruction and employment opportunities — said Amina Megheirbi, a member of Libya’s elected congress who represents the city.
“It’s suffering from the evacuation — of our own government and all international missions,” Megheirbi said. “It left Benghazi open to extremists, criminals and Gaddafi supporters.”
The result, she said, is even more unemployed youths, more fuel for the fire. “One thing leads to another,” she said. “It worsens the situation.”
And so there are some Benghazi residents who take a different approach, looking a visitor in the eye and pleading: It’s not so bad. Tell the foreigners to come back.
“Benghazi is safe,” said Abdel Hafidh Sallak, a longtime political activist, sitting in his living room.
Sallak and others point to Venezia Street — a crowded boulevard just a few blocks from the charred wreckage of the U.S. mission where locals browse an array of gleaming, new clothes and furniture shops late into the night.
The U.S. ambassador’s death was an accident, Sallak insisted, adding that ordinary people
haven’t been affected by the killings. In Libya, he said, “they never put the bombs in places where there are people.’’
COPY http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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