Obama calls Karzai to congratulate and cajole

Obama calls Karzai to congratulate and cajole

Hamid Karzai listened to a mixture of congratulations and straight talking down the telephone from President Obama on Monday just hours after Mr. Karzai was declared the winner of the Afghan elections by default.

Karzai isn’t the man they wanted but Washington realised months ago that he'd almost certainly be the Afghan President they’d have to work with.

So in his call, President Obama made clear what the United States expects.

"I emphasized that this has to be a point in time in which we begin to write a new chapter based on improved governance, a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption, joint efforts to accelerate the training of Afghan security forces so that the Afghan people can provide for their own security," he said.

Earlier, when his spokesman, Robert Gibbs, was asked does the President consider Hamid Karzai to be a legitimate credible partner in Afghanistan ... he didn't answer.

"President Karzai has been declared the winner of the Afghan election and will head the next government of Afghanistan."

Down the road at Foggy Bottom, inside the press briefing room at the State Department, there were similar questions from journalists.

One poor correspondent asked spokesperson Ian Kelly the same question three times and couldn't make him say that in Karzai the administration has a credible partner to move things forward in Afghanistan.

Question 1 to Ian Kelly - Do you think this result gives you with a credible partner?

"I think what we've seen is a process that was very difficult."

Question 2 to Ian Kelly - Does this result leave you with a credible partner ... or are you not prepared to say?

"We are in Afghanistan to support Afghanistan."

Question 3 to Ian Kelly - You are not prepared to say that this result gives you a credible partner?

"What I'll say is we're prepared to work with this partner."

Karzai went into August's vote as "yesterday’s man" in the eyes of many in Washington DC.

He’d fallen out of favour with the Bush administration – he was once THEIR man.

Then, when Obama came to power, Karzai was one of the last world leaders to receive a telephone call from the new president.

When Karzai was finally invited to Washington in May he was forced to share the spotlight with Pakistan’s president and was not granted a bi-lateral meeting with Obama – a courtesy normally extended to world leaders deemed to be significant.

With U.S. generals pushing for more troops in Afghanistan pressure’s mounting on the administration to come up with a new Afghan strategy - maybe as early as next week.

President Obama knows the U.S. can’t succeed in Afghanistan without a credible government in Kabul.

That’s why he’d been pushing for next weekend’s run-off to give at least a “veneer” of legitimacy to the election process.

With that process over, the focus in Washington returns squarely to the question of whether he’ll commit more U.S. troops to Afghanistan - a war that’s increasingly unpopular with the American public.

John Terrett, Washington Nov 2nd 2009