KABUL — Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday that he
would work to curb corruption in his next five years in office, but he gave no
specifics about how that would be accomplished or which Cabinet members might
be fired to clean up his administration.
“We have been tarnished with corruption, and we will
continue to make every possible effort to wipe off this stain,” Karzai
said at his first news conference since he was certified Monday as the winner
of the 2009 presidential election.
The Obama administration has identified corruption in the
Karzai administration as a key issue that’s weakening the eight-year-old war
effort against the Taliban. Karzai has had uneasy relations with the Obama
administration, however, particularly as the Afghan president’s campaign was
accused of being involved in widespread voter fraud in recent months.
There are still plenty of doubts among Afghans and Western
diplomats about Karzai’s willingness to remove key political allies who may
have been involved in graft or other misconduct.
“I think the corruption and the failures in the system
and the government cannot only be fixed through removal,” Karzai said
Tuesday. “There are rules and there are regulations and there are laws
that need to be reformed.”
One of the most controversial members of the Karzai
government, Marshal Mohammad Fahim, was standing next to the president at the
news conference. Fahim, the vice president, has been accused of war crimes and
dogged by allegations that he’s tied to the drug trade.
Karzai claimed a new term after his challenger, former
Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, dropped out of a runoff election over the
weekend, citing concerns that voter fraud also would mar the second round.
Karzai has never admitted that his campaign was involved in
fraudulent activities during the first round Aug. 20, and he referred to those
allegations again Tuesday as “defamation and disrespect.”
He praised Abdullah as a strong candidate “whose
campaigning was much better than mine,” and said he wanted to form “a
government of unity, a government for all Afghan people.” However, he gave
no specifics as to whom he might include or whether he’d back any of the
reforms Abdullah sought, such as electing, rather than appointing, provincial
governors.
Karzai also said he’d reach out to the Taliban and try to
get them to renounce violence, but again he offered no specifics on how that
might be done.
The Taliban-led insurgency has rebounded strongly in recent
years and has made disrupting the elections a key element of its recent
violence. Last Wednesday, the Taliban attacked a private guesthouse where
United Nations elections workers were staying, killing five U.N. workers and
wounding nine.
The Taliban sought this week to generate a propaganda
victory from the decision to scuttle the runoff and declare Karzai the winner.
“The cancellation of the runoff election shows that all
decisions are made in Washington and London but announced in Afghanistan,”
said a statement released by the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
The statement chided the “air and ground forces”
that couldn’t stop the attack at the guesthouse.
The U.N. is reassessing security at some 90 private
guesthouses that it had certified as safe enough for its workers. One option
under consideration is concentrating workers in fewer, more fortified
compounds.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who visited Kabul on
Monday, has asked the General Assembly for an additional $75 million to help
improve security for workers in Afghanistan, and also has requested more assistance
from the Afghan government.
