Dispute With Parliament Leaves Afghan Leader Isolated

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Newly elected members of parliament waited for President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to open the new session.

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

KABUL, Afghanistan — As the long luncheon for newly elected Afghan members of Parliament wound to a close over tea and fruit last weekend, it became clear that President Hamid Karzai was outnumbered and outmaneuvered.

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Musadeq Sadeq/Associated Press

President Karzai inspected the honor guard outside Parliament on Wednesday. He was forced to back down in his standoff with the new lawmakers.

When he stood to speak, the lawmakers listened politely, but did not budge. They wanted him to inaugurate the Parliament the very next day. Not even the usually loyal Pashtuns at the gathering, who are from the president’s own ethnic group, agreed with his decision, announced days earlier, to delay the body’s opening for a month.
By the day’s end, Mr. Karzai had backed down, agreeing to inaugurate the newly elected lawmakers, which finally took place Wednesday after months of heated wrangling over the fairness of last fall’s elections.
The turnabout and the string of political miscalculations that led to it have left Mr. Karzai a diminished and more isolated leader, members of Parliament, Western diplomats and analysts say. At the very least, they say, the outcome seems certain to signal the beginning of a potentially more precarious period in Mr. Karzai’s relations with Afghanistan’s power brokers.
He has angered losing parliamentary candidates whom he encouraged to pursue claims of fraud and whom he has now effectively deserted. He has angered those who won by appearing to be willing to delay and possibly even annul their election. And he again alienated his Western backers, who already see him as an unpredictable and difficult partner.
“Nobody is left for President Karzai, nobody is left supporting him,” said Mir Wali, a candidate from Helmand Province who was disqualified at the last minute and is a prominent figure in the province. “And, I doubt the new Parliament will support him.”
Mr. Wali’s pronouncement may be too categorical, but it corroborates the view of many that Mr. Karzai has become increasingly isolated over the past 16 months since the 2009 presidential election in which he was forced into a runoff by Western diplomats as well as his Afghan supporters.
Once seen as a superb tactician, who could almost always find a way to juggle competing interests and slip through each crisis, he increasingly turns to a small group of advisers and on several occasions has begun to miscalculate.
He was convinced, along with Westerners and his Afghan opponents, that his support of candidates during the elections would propel a number of his backers into Parliament. The voters did not agree, and his supporters — among them more than a score of friendly, mostly Pashtun candidates — lost their seats or were disqualified.
There are 16 fewer Pashtuns in this Parliament than the last and 15 more Hazaras, according to an analysis by Western officials in Kabul. The result is a Parliament that is less reliably supportive of the president.
His efforts to make changes in the ranks of the winners during the appeals process failed. His attempt to use the attorney general’s office and a special court to review cases of allegations of fraud appears likely to yield little as well. Although the court is still working, once the lawmakers are sworn in, it is widely thought that it will be hard to unseat more than two or three.
Mr. Karzai’s miscalculation may be the fault of advisers, said several diplomats and analysts who also said he remained an extremely canny politician.
For instance, he is being told by those closest to him that the Northern Alliance, the old anti-Taliban coalition, has become too strong and that this threatens his position. However, if he faces off with them he may be in jeopardy because they have gained many important posts, and they are mostly not from his Pashtun base.
“He’s really in a bind,” said Martine van Bijlert, a co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network and a longtime observer of Afghan politics.
Afghan power brokers and diplomats both blame the narrowness of his consultations. “Karzai started having more people in opposition when he started to make decisions on his own,” said Qazi Nasir Ahmad, a member of Parliament from Herat Province, who was a longtime leader in the fight against the Russians. “He has not consulted very many people when making these election decisions.”
A Western diplomat in Kabul who has watched the election process agreed. “It used to be that before making any move, the president would consult himself to death,” the diplomat said. “Now he’s relying increasingly on a smaller group of advisers and it might be different if they represented more different groups, but they don’t.”