The appointment of the hard-charging Richard Holbrooke as Afghan envoy has not been universally welcomed. One person who is particularly concerned about it is Hamid Karzai, the current Afghan president, who will probably win re-election later this year. Their first, secret meeting was apparently quite frosty.
What has really riled Karzai is Holbrooke’s fraternization with Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister and presumed presidential candidate. When I briefly advised Lord Ashdown in the run-up to his non-appointment as the UN’s special envoy in Kabul, Karzai was extremely paranoid that Ashdown and Ghani were somehow colluding or that the former was merely a tool for the latter’s leadership ambitions. Long after Ashdown had withdrawn his candidature for the job, the British ambassador had to reassure Karzai that nothing untoward was afoot. So the rumours that Ghani’s closest associate, the excellent Clare Lockhart—see this piece she wrote for The Spectator recently, may join the Holbrooke team will probably lead to some crockery being hurled around in the Presidential Compound.
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