The Bush and Karzai show: Contradictions, and more questions than answers
George W. Bush, Jr. and his sidekick, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Team Bush's hand-picked head of its puppet government in Kabul, got together at Camp David earlier this week to catch up, ride a golf cart and offer some contradictory policy pronouncements to reporters.
Golf-cart diplomacy: Bush and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, at Camp David earlier in the week
Afghanistan was, of course, the real breeding ground of the kind of international terrorism Bush had vowed to eradicate when he launched his ill-fated Iraq boondoggle back in early 2003. For Team Bush, though, Afghanistan has always been an after-thought.
Nevertheless, as Bush told reporters at a press conference with Karzai, who sometimes appeared alongside his host during his visit wrapped in an swath of green cloth, like an Afghan taco: "Our enemy is still there, defeated but still hiding in the mountains. And our duty is to complete the job, to get them out of their hide-outs in the mountains...." Bush was referring to Afghanistan-based terrorists like those who have been associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization. Reuters notes: "Bush, who has been on the defensive about the failure to find...bin Laden, said he was confident [that] U.S. and Pakistani forces would track down the militant group's leaders. But he stopped short of saying whether the United States would seek Pakistan's permission before going after those militants. The subject is a sensitive issue in Islamabad."
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