Karzai removes Amrullah Saleh and Hanif Atmar from government

[Mukhtar Niazi]

Pakistan has no influence over Karzai hence its just a lie that Pakistan even has a slight role in their removal.

Karzai is working for consolidating his own position in the long term thats why he has initiated talks with Taliban individually by his own undermining Pakistani and US efforts to talk to Taliban.

Apart from freeing prisoners one of the demands of Pashtun delegation was of removing these men.

Who is Pakistan that would have influence over President Karzai or the Honest and brave people of Afghanistan::::::::::::

 

[Mukhtar Niazi]

Can someone correct me please. Aren't they both corrupt, I think Ive heard one of them was a brutal warlord during Soviet Afghan war, and the other played a role in Drug trade in Afghanistan.

Sorry if am wrong.

No Dear:

They both were not, they were honest and working people.

 

[M8R]

Who is Pakistan that would have influence over President Karzai or the Honest and brave people of Afghanistan::::::::::::

Every country has influence in other countries.For example India has influence in Nepal.Turkey/SA/US/China has influence in Pakistan.Pakistan has influence in Sri Lanka/Afghanistan etc..

 

[M8R]

Afghanistan has became the ground of Intelligence war...
Therefore most of the Intelligence Services have been really became happy Including our neighbors. Iam Sure these two changes will bring good effect, over the other Ministers.

Well by neighbors i guess you mean Pakistan's Intelligence Services.I don't think they would be scared of a individual.Pakistani Intelligence Community has even waged covert wars with KGB *Arguably one of the greatest Intelligence Agency of the cold war era.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Karzai Is Said to Doubt West Can Defeat Taliban​

By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — Two senior Afghan officials were showing President Hamid Karzai the evidence of the spectacular rocket attack on a nationwide peace conference earlier this month when Mr. Karzai told them that he believed the Taliban were not responsible.

“The president did not show any interest in the evidence — none — he treated it like a piece of dirt,” said Amrullah Saleh, then the director of the Afghan intelligence service.

Mr. Saleh declined to discuss Mr. Karzai’s reasoning in more detail. But a prominent Afghan with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Karzai suggested in the meeting that it might have been the Americans who carried it out.

Minutes after the exchange, Mr. Saleh and the interior minister, Hanif Atmar, resigned — the most dramatic defection from Mr. Karzai’s government since he came to power nine years ago. Mr. Saleh and Mr. Atmar said they quit because Mr. Karzai made clear that he no longer considered them loyal.

But underlying the tensions, according to Mr. Saleh and Afghan and Western officials, was something more profound: That Mr. Karzai had lost faith in the Americans and NATO to prevail in Afghanistan.

For that reason, Mr. Saleh and other officials said, Mr. Karzai has been pressing to strike his own deal with the Taliban and the country’s archrival, Pakistan, the Taliban’s longtime supporter. According to a former senior Afghan official, Mr. Karzai’s maneuverings involve secret negotiations with the Taliban outside the purview of American and NATO officials.

“The president has lost his confidence in the capability of either the coalition or his own government to protect this country,” Mr. Saleh said in an interview at his home. “President Karzai has never announced that NATO will lose, but the way that he does not proudly own the campaign shows that he doesn’t trust it is working.”

People close to the president say he began to lose confidence in the Americans last summer, after national elections in which independent monitors determined that nearly one million ballots had been stolen on Mr. Karzai’s behalf. The rift worsened in December, when President Obama announced that he intended to begin reducing the number of American troops by the summer of 2011.

“Karzai told me that he can’t trust the Americans to fix the situation here,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He believes they stole his legitimacy during the elections last year. And then they said publicly that they were going to leave.”

Mr. Karzai could not be reached for comment Friday.

If Mr. Karzai’s resolve to work closely with the United States and use his own army to fight the Taliban is weakening, that could present a problem for Mr. Obama. The American war strategy rests largely on clearing ground held by the Taliban so that Mr. Karzai’s army and government can move in, allowing the Americans to scale back their involvement in an increasingly unpopular and costly war.

Relations with Mr. Karzai have been rocky for some time, and international officials have expressed concern in the past that his decision making can be erratic. Last winter, Mr. Karzai accused NATO in a speech of ferrying Taliban fighters around northern Afghanistan in helicopters. Earlier this year, following criticism by the Obama administration, Mr. Karzai told a group of supporters that he might join the Taliban.

American officials tried to patch up their relationship with Mr. Karzai during his visit to the White House last month. Indeed, on many issues, like initiating contact with some Taliban leaders and persuading its fighters to change sides, Mr. Karzai and the Americans are on the same page.

But their motivations appear to differ starkly. The Americans and their NATO partners are pouring tens of thousands of additional troops into the country to weaken hard-core Taliban and force the group to the bargaining table. Mr. Karzai appears to believe that the American-led offensive cannot work.

At a news conference at the Presidential Palace this week, Mr. Karzai was asked about the Taliban’s role in the June 4 attack on the loya jirga and his faith in NATO. He declined to address either one.

“Who did it?” Mr. Karzai said of the attack. “It’s a question that our security organization can bring and prepare the answer.”

Asked if he had confidence in NATO, Mr. Karzai said he was grateful for the help and said the partnership was “working very, very well.” But he did not answer the question.

“We are continuing to work on improvements all around,” Mr. Karzai said, speaking in English and appearing next to David Cameron, the British prime minister.

A senior NATO official said the resignations of Mr. Atmar and Mr. Saleh, who had strong support from the NATO allies, were “extremely disruptive.”

The official said of Mr. Karzai, “My concern is, is he capable of being a wartime leader?”

The NATO official said that American commanders had given Mr. Karzai a dossier showing overwhelming evidence that the attack on the peace conference had been carried out by fighters loyal to Jalalhuddin Haqqani, one of the main leaders fighting under the Taliban’s umbrella.

“There was no doubt,” the official said.

The resignations of Mr. Saleh and Mr. Atmar revealed a deep fissure among Afghan leaders as to the best way to deal with the Taliban and with their patrons in Pakistan.

Mr. Saleh is a former aide to the late Ahmed Shah Massoud, the legendary commander who fought the Soviet Union and the Taliban. Many of Mr. Massoud’s former lieutenants, mostly ethnic Tajiks and now important leaders in northern Afghanistan, sat out the peace conference. Like Mr. Saleh, they favor a tough approach to negotiating with the Taliban and Pakistan.

Mr. Karzai, like the overwhelming majority of the Taliban, is an ethnic Pashtun. He appears now to favor a more conciliatory approach.

At the end of the loya jirga, Mr. Karzai announced the formation of a commission that would review the case of every Taliban fighter held in custody and release those who were not considered extremely dangerous. The commission, which would be led by several senior members of Mr. Karzai’s government, excluded the National Directorate of Security, the intelligence agency run by Mr. Saleh.

In the interview, Mr. Saleh said he took offense at the exclusion. His primary job is to understand the Taliban, he said; leaving his agency off the commission made him worry that Mr. Karzai might intend to release hardened Taliban fighters.

“His conclusion is — a lot of Taliban have been wrongly detained, they should be released,” Mr. Saleh said. “We are 10 years into the collapse of the Taliban — it means we don’t know who the enemy is. We wrongly detain people.”

Mr. Saleh also criticized the loya jirga. “Here is the meaning of the jirga,” Mr. Saleh said. “I don’t want to fight you. I even open the door to you. It was my mistake to push you into the mountains. The jirga was not a victory for the Afghan state, it was a victory for the Taliban.”

Mr. Karzai has been seeking to build bridges to the Taliban for months. Earlier this year, the president’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, held secret meetings with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s deputy commander, according to a former senior Afghan official.

According to Gen. Hilaluddin Hilal, the deputy interior minister in an earlier Karzai government, Ahmed Wali Karzai and Mr. Baradar met twice in January near Spin Boldak, a town on the border with Pakistan. The meeting was brokered by Mullah Essa Khakrezwal, the Taliban’s shadow governor of Kandahar Province, and Hafez Majid, a senior Taliban intelligence official, General Hilal said.

A Western analyst in Kabul confirmed General Hilal’s account. The senior NATO official said he was unaware of the meeting, as did Mr. Saleh. Ahmed Wali Karzai did not respond to e-mail queries on the meeting.

The resolution of that meeting was not clear, General Hilal said. Mr. Baradar was arrested in late January in a joint Pakistani-American raid in Karachi, Pakistan. But Mr. Karzai’s attempts to negotiate with the Taliban have continued, he said.

“He doesn’t think the Americans can afford to stay,” General Hilal said.

Mr. Saleh said that Mr. Karzai’s strategy also involved a more conciliatory line toward Pakistan. If true, this would amount to a sea change for Mr. Karzai, who has spent his nine years in office regularly accusing the Pakistanis of supporting the Taliban insurgency.

Mr. Saleh says he fears that Afghanistan will be forced into accepting what he called an “undignified deal” with Pakistan that will leave his country in a weakened state.

He said he considered Mr. Karzai a patriot. But he said the president was making a mistake if he planned to rely on Pakistani support. (Pakistani leaders have for years pressed Mr. Karzai to remove Mr. Saleh, whom they see as a hard-liner).

“They are weakening him under the disguise of respecting him. They will embrace a weak Afghan leader, but they will never respect him,” Mr. Saleh said.

Karzai Is Said to Doubt West Can Defeat Taliban - NYTimes.com

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

So, given the perceived 'huge gulf' between the positions of Karzai and the former Northern Alliance remnants+NATO+India, could there be a possibility of a forced removal of Karzai with the overt or covert support of one or more of the parties opposed to his position?

A Karzai assassination by one or more of the NA, US, India ... pinned on the Taliban, and perhaps even Pakistan?

 

[TaimiKhan]

So, given the perceived 'huge gulf' between the positions of Karzai and the former Northern Alliance remnants+NATO+India, could there be a possibility of a forced removal of Karzai with the overt or covert support of one or more of the parties opposed to his position?

A Karzai assassination by one or more of the NA, US, India ... pinned on the Taliban, and perhaps even Pakistan?

Yeah it seems an assassination or some kind of coup would be expected if Karzai did not go along the US instructions.

That is how US plays, once a leader is used up, they throw them out.

 

[M8R]

Like Iranian Shah or Saddam Hussain.Karzai should have been aligned with Pakistan from start instead of becoming America petdog.

 

[kidwaibhai]

Amrullah Saleh was a good spy master by all accounts but as far as i can see he was conducting his own foreign policy when karzia and current GoP were trying to mend fences.
I think his approach of "sticking it to the Pakistanis" hasnt really worked for 9 years. The only way Afghanistan is going to be secure if pakistanis feel that there national interests are not going to be undermined. Anyways i dont think anyone in Pakistan is going to be shedding tears seeing him leave.

 

[T-Faz]

There was some sort of back door talks going on between Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan who are now convinced that US is unable to solve the problem and this alliance of these three was suggested by General Mirza Aslam Beg.

This quote tells you something doesn't it:

Mr. Saleh declined to discuss Mr. Karzai’s reasoning in more detail. But a prominent Afghan with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Karzai suggested in the meeting that it might have been the Americans who carried it out.

Now things will be a bit more dangerous and every one has to play their cards right, one thing that helps this a lot is SCO.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

The Afghan spy chief's resignation​

Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Rahimullah Yusufzai

Such is the level of mistrust of Islamabad and the hatred against it among many Afghans that Amrullah Saleh, until recently Afghanistan's intelligence chief, described Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as his country's "enemy number one."

Saleh is so convinced, on the basis of the intelligence that he and his men have been gathering about the ISI's work in Afghanistan, that he doesn't feel the need to provide proof to back up his claim. He was quoted in a recent interview as saying: "The ISI is part of the landscape of destruction in this country, no doubt. So it will be a waste of time to provide evidence of ISI involvement. They are part of it."

If Saleh hates Pakistan so much and considers the ISI responsible for Afghanistan's destruction, one could safely presume that this is the dominant feeling about Islamabad in his country's intelligence setup, the National Directorate of Security (NDS) that he headed since early 2004. And since Saleh is an ethnic Tajik from the Panjshir Valley, the native place of the late Afghan mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Masood, it would not be wrong to say that all other Masood followers and supporters grouped in his Shura-i-Nazar faction of the Jamiat-i-Islami party of former president Burhanuddin Rabbani share the same feelings of hostility towards Pakistan and the ISI.

This sentiment of mistrust and hatred cannot be one-sided. It is, therefore, natural that the ISI people also don't like Saleh and his men. In fact, a running battle has been going on for years between the ISI and Afghan intelligence, which has functioned with different names, including KHAD and WAD during the rule of Afghan communists, and partnered new allies such as the KGB, the CIA and RAW at various stages of the conflict in Afghanistan. Given the state of their animosity towards each other over the years, it would be impossible for them to cooperate even in facing a common threat.

The Americans would surely want the ISI and Afghanistan's NDS to join forces with the CIA to defeat Al-Qaida and the Taliban, but the mistrust keeps the Afghan and Pakistani spies apart and prevents them from cooperating with each other. Asking them to work together is like wanting ISI and RAW agents to join hands after their having conspired and plotted against each other throughout their existence.

Saleh has spent years doing intelligence work in Afghanistan and abroad. He was based in Peshawar for sometime during the Afghan jihad against the Soviet occupying forces when Masood, Rabbani and the rest of the Afghan mujahideen leaders enjoyed Pakistan's hospitality and received support from the ISI, CIA and other intelligence agencies. Saleh also operated out of Tajikistan's capital Dushanbe to coordinate the Northern Alliance's battle against the Taliban with assistance from countries seeking to oust the regime led by Mulla Mohammad Omar in Afghanistan. Following the Taliban defeat as a result of the US invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, he was made deputy head of the NDS, with Muhammad Arif Sarwari taking over as its director.

In fact, the entire intelligence setup of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance was installed in the NDS, bringing it to all those who hated Pakistan and considered the ISI responsible for Afghanistan's woes. In due course of time, many former Afghan communists and mujahideen who had done intelligence work and were always suspicious of Pakistan's role in Afghanistan were in control of the NDS. As always, the Afghan intelligence agency and the ISI were in rival camps and, in Saleh's words, Pakistan's premier intelligence agency was the foremost enemy of Afghanistan. Afghanistan's fine ethnic balance that is so crucial to the country's stability also wasn't maintained in the NDS, or subsequently in the Afghan National Army, the police and other institutions, as the majority Pakhtuns remained underrepresented. This obviously had its own pitfalls and the Taliban fully exploited it to find recruits from among Pakhtuns dissatisfied with their circumstances.

Saleh's enmity with Pakistan has its origins in the Afghan jihad. His leader, Masood, was critical of Pakistan and the ISI at the time for preferring his rival Gulbadin Hekmatyar over him and providing him greater resources. Gen Ziaul Haq had clear preference for the more fundamentalist Afghan mujahideen groups, such as those led by Hekmatyar, Rabbani, Yunis Khalis and Abdur Rab Rasul Sayyaf, not only because of his own conservative choices but also due to the better battlefield performance of their committed fighters against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

Masood and his party leader Rabbani belonged to fundamentalist Jamiat-i-Islami, but it seems they were less willing to take orders from Islamabad than the others. This became evident in later years when Masood and Rabbani defied Pakistan and built up their own alliances with Iran, Russia and France and, in the post-9/11 period, with the US and its Western allies. Ziaul Haq and the ISI at that point in time felt more comfortable working with Hekmatyar than Masood and Rabbani.

Though Ziaul Haq was wise enough not to say it publicly, it was obvious that Islamabad's policy in Afghanistan was, and always has been, generally pro-Pakhtun. It was felt that befriending Afghanistan's Pakhtuns was in Islamabad's interest because Pakistan has a significant Pakhtun population of its own and the Pakhtuns lived on both sides of the Durand Line. Gen Pervez Musharraf, an fimpulsive man keen to take credit for his forthrightness, on at least two occasions publicly declared that Pakistan's Afghan policy was pro-Pakhtun. It was irresponsible on his part to make this statement as it alienated the Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Turkmen and other non-Pakhtuns in Afghanistan and made them realise that their friendship wasn't a priority for Pakistan. In fact, many Afghan Pakhtuns also found Musharraf's statement offensive. Some of them at the time commented that they didn't need Musharraf's or Pakistan's support as they were themselves capable of winning their rights and maintaining Afghanistan's unity, being the founders of the Afghan state named after them.

Saleh's resignation on June 6, along with that of Interior Minister Muhammad Hanif Atmar, following the audacious attack four days previously in Kabul on the occasion of the landmark Consultative Peace Jirga, not only exposed the strife in President Hamid Karzai's laboriously built and complex ruling coalition but also thrust Pakistofan into the limelight. Though Saleh and Atmar's resignations were linked to the security lapse that enabled the suspected Taliban militants to come close to the venue where about 1,500 jirga members were meeting, despite the presence of 12,000 soldiers and police, there was more to it than meets the eye. Atmar, a former communist official who earned praise from Western governments for his effective style of leadership and honesty, isn't talking after quitting the interior minister's job. But Saleh, who too was praised by Western authorities for his work, is all over the place, granting interviews in which he is blaming Pakistan for Afghanistan's problems and raising questions about Karzai's motives. He is unhappy with Karzai for going soft on Pakistan after criticising it all these years and is opposed to his plans to release Taliban prisoners and reconcile with Mulla Omar and his men.

Saleh's views represent those of many Afghans who are non-Pakhtun and supporters of the erstwhile Northern Alliance. Some Pakhtuns who have stood up to the Afghan Taliban and suffered as a consequences are also against bowing to the militants and giving Pakistan a role in Afghanistan's affairs. Such divergent views have exposed the rift in the Karzai-led ruling coalition with regard to reconciliation with the Taliban, ties to Pakistan and the relationship with the US-headed Nato forces bent upon an elusive military solution of the Afghan conflict. Though Karzai's managed to get support for his policy of reintegrating the Taliban into the political mainstream from the Consultative Peace Jirga, his government would encounter problems and suffer from further splits as he proceeds on the path of peace and national reconciliation.



The writer is resident editor of The News in Peshawar. Email: rahim yusufzai@yahoo.com

The Afghan spy chief's resignation

 

[Abu Zolfiqar]

Who is Pakistan that would have influence over President Karzai or the Honest and brave people of Afghanistan::::::::::::

We took 4-5 million Afghan refugees and they are being cared for in Pakistan, despite our own problems.

Yes who is Pakistan.

 

[SekrutYakhni]

We took 4-5 million Afghan refugees and they are being cared for in Pakistan, despite our own problems.

Yes who is Pakistan.

According to demographic/atlas (published in 2005) which was recommended by the professor, Pakistan was the largest refugee acceptor (should I say)..
Wikipedia just states 4 million but it is far more than that.

 

[H2O3C4Nitrogen]

So, given the perceived 'huge gulf' between the positions of Karzai and the former Northern Alliance remnants+NATO+India, could there be a possibility of a forced removal of Karzai with the overt or covert support of one or more of the parties opposed to his position?

A Karzai assassination by one or more of the NA, US, India ... pinned on the Taliban, and perhaps even Pakistan?

I suspect
That ultimately might happen just to give a little boost to ScapeGoat Campaign.However i really think that US would be critical as this guy is there right hand since Last decade and also the Fact of US relations with India over the Afghan Dynamics. India could negotiate him out and he might enjoy an EXILE in NewDelhi. But that inturn could become troublsome for India to dewel its relations with Taliban and secure all that it has invested in Afghanistan.

Hence to appease Taliban in negotiating a Safe withdrawl of US troops and isolating Alqaida and continueing with the current setup this posibility cannot be ruled out.