The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The Good: Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai has agreed to a run-off election now that an examination of contested ballots has produced so many rejects he no longer has the 50.1% he needed to win re-election on the first round.  The whole world knows he didn’t want all those bad ballots invalidated, but evidently Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts was able to talk convincingly, politician-to-politician, about the necessity, sometimes, of putting national welfare above personal ambition. The key here is credibility.  The odds on ending up with a credible government in Kabul increased dramatically at the press conference Tuesday evening.  Which isn’t to say that running  a re-vote is going to be easy.

The Bad: As usual when heads of state hold forth to reporters there were flags in evidence during Karzai’s press conference.  However, there were at least two flags visible and only one president.  One of the flags was the Afghan flag.  The other was the American flag.  Now arcane protocol rules may have permitted an American flag on stage,  in honor of an American senator, but that doesn't mean it was a good idea.  It gave the impression that the elections would be held under U.S. auspices and, worse, that the Afghan president is an American puppet.  This is something that Karzai’s enemies say all the time.  Why reinforce that impression?

The Ugly:   Now the Taliban are planting bombs in universities in Pakistan, in this case not the secular University of Karachi or the secular Punjab University, but a Muslim university in Islamabad.  So far five people are dead.  Clearly the Pakistani Taliban are making a statement: we can hit anyone anywhere anytime—at least for now.  But this performance wasn’t a friend-maker.  Until recently religiously conservative Pakistanis found it hard to criticize the holy warriers.  No longer.