Karzai's capers

President Karzai of Afghanistan is a pleasant fellow. He is helpful, courteous, kind, cheerful and clean, as the Boy Scout pledge has it. He is a Boy Scout in a furry hat, really, although some of his family and many of his associates and supporters are crooked to the eyeballs.
But at the moment, alas, he is behaving erratically, and one must ask what is driving him to indulge in such vehement anti-Pakistan rhetoric. After all, he was a guest of Pakistan for many years after he fled his own country during the Soviet occupation. He didn't want to stay to fight the invaders, so he sought and was granted refuge in the place that he now vilifies at every opportunity. In the 1980s the Indian-educated Karzai was among those known as the Gucci Guerrillas, such was their lifestyle, courtesy of amazing amounts of American money. (Biographies of Karzai, such as that on the Wikipedia website, skate very tactfully over this period.)
I met him in Peshawar when he was a liaison official for the failed post-Soviet interim government and still have one of his calling cards, modestly inscribed, as befitted his station. It was beyond the realms of possibility, in those days, that he would become a major figure if ever he could return to his own country. But strange things happen, and he became the American choice to contest the election in 2004, about which Mr George W Bush declared that "The election makes clear that a free Afghanistan is a partner in the War On Terror, a beacon of hope in a troubled region of the world, and an example to other countries working to realise the promise of freedom."
How fantastical of anyone to imagine that the election was an indication that Afghanistan was "a partner in the War On Terror." The absurdity of this amazingly ingenuous statement beggars belief, but Karzai was the Chosen Man and could do no wrong. Bush went on to say that "The large turnout by Afghan women....confirms that there is a vital role for women in the politics of a nation proud of its Islamic heritage," which was rubbish also, because women are, and will always be at the bottom rung of the ladder in Afghanistan's male-dominated society. Human Rights Watch records that a year ago the Kabul parliament "voted to suspend Malalai Joya, a female MP....[because she] was accused of insulting the parliament [allegedly calling it a stable] and suspended until the end of her term in 2009....Malalai [said] her remarks were edited out of context....Malalai has since received numerous death threats by phone and "night letters" (posted threats) and now lives in hiding. She receives no security protection from parliament or the government." Of course the government of Mr Karzai won't do anything about protecting her because almost all its members are died-in-the-wool, feudally-minded, male chauvinists of the deepest dye.