Karzai's Assassin - The Afghan Conundrum in a Nutshell

The guy who gunned down the brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai is almost a metaphor for what's never going to let us 'fix' Afghanistan.

Two days ago, Ahmed Karzai was assassinated in his home by a trusted guard, Sardar Mohammad.  So who was Sardar Mohammad, how did he get close to Karzai and why did he turn Talib assassin?

The man who assassinated the half-brother of the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, spent years as an ally of the US in the war against the Taliban.


The killer, Sardar Mohammad, a police commander, met US and British military officials several times, shared intelligence with Americans and played a role in Afghan arrests of scores of Taliban fighters, say three relatives interviewed in his home near Kandahar.

The reasons behind the 35-year-old officer's dramatic switch against Ahmed Wali Karzai, perhaps the most powerful figure in southern Afghanistan, are still not known.

 

The fact is that Afghanistan has a rich history of this sort of treachery.   People switch sides as the winds change.  It's said that there isn't a single Afghan warlord who hasn't, at various times, been allied and fought with every other warlord.   Yet, despite this, we tried to create a viable Afghan government without dismembering the warlord power structure.   We did this knowing full well that there has never been a successful, modern Muslim state that didn't first overcome the fatal scourges of tribalism and warlordism.

Madness, bloody madness.