President Hamid Karzai, third left, inspects honor guards with Mohammad Yunus Qanuni, second left, lower house speaker of parliament, before the opening session of Afghan Parliament in Kabul, Afghanistan, Feb. 20, 2010.
AP Photo

"The Tumor at the Heart of Our Afghan Campaign"

Op-Ed, The Huffington Post

March 13, 2010

Author: Azeem Ibrahim, Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 2008–2010

Belfer Center Programs or Projects: International Security

NOTE

This op-ed was reprinted in The Daily Star (Bangladesh) on March 16, 2010.

"There is a real danger that with each day that our brave troops spend fighting in the sands of Afghanistan, victory there becomes less and less worth winning.

That is a very serious charge, and I do not make it lightly. Like most people, I want to see a stable Afghanistan with strong institutions and real progress — however slow — toward the kind of democracy in which votes are chosen and not bought, and power changes hands according to preference not patronage.

But I just do not see that progress.

Worse, the Afghan government is moving in the opposite direction. The actions of President Hamid Karzai are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from a man set on undermining Afghanistan's democracy and institutions, and concentrating power in his own hands...."

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