New York Times (via International Herald Tribune)
May 28, 2005
Editorial

It requires breathtaking audacity for U.S. officials to complain that efforts to curb opium poppy production in Afghanistan have been lagging because President Hamid Karzai "has been unwilling to assert strong leadership." Washington waited almost two and a half years to heed Karzai's calls for help on this problem.

Even now, the Bush administration is disproportionately concentrating on the most visible, but least effective approach, forcible crop eradication, which merely moves the problem around and enriches traffickers by raising prices. It is also creating turmoil in rural areas during the run-up to this year's crucial parliamentary elections.

Karzai was right to use his U.S. visit to press for coordinating eradication with the crop substitution, agricultural credit and alternative development programs that would provide the rural population with better ways to feed their families. The money that Washington has promised for those broader efforts has been lagging, and the planning that will be required to spend that money wisely has barely begun.

Blaming Karzai may look smart in Washington, where forcible eradication has always been more popular than long-term alternative development. But it is costly folly in Afghanistan, where the politically nimble Karzai has slowly begun to turn around an almost impossible situation, gradually extending the writ of the central government and nurturing a fragile electoral process. Instead of using Karzai as a scapegoat for its failures, Washington should now be doing all it can to help him create favorable conditions for those parliamentary elections, which have had to be repeatedly postponed.

Bush should also have come up with a more thoughtful answer to the urgent request Karzai made on Monday to transfer Afghan prisoners now under U.S. military custody to Kabul's control.

Karzai's anguish over this issue is understandable. Two New York Times articles in recent days have documented the inexcusable breakdowns at the Bagram detention center that let American soldiers almost casually torture an innocent Afghan prisoner to death in 2002 and then saw Army investigators in Afghanistan try to close the case without any charges. Seven of those suspected of involvement in the abuse have finally been charged after a nearly two-year delay that even the Pentagon acknowledges seems "excessively long."

As Afghanistan's democratically elected president and a proven American ally, Karzai would have been remiss not to call for turning over the remaining Afghan prisoners. Washington should work with his government to build and staff secure Afghan-run detention centers so that those transfers can take place at an early date.

Regrettably, Karzai came away from the White House on Monday without any visible progress on either of these issues.

Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune

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