Karzai doubts if US forces can defeat Taliban

Two senior Afghan officials were showing Afghan President Hamid Karzai the evidence of the rocket attack on a peace conference earlier this month when Karzai told them that he believed the Taliban were not responsible....

Two senior Afghan officials were showing Afghan President Hamid Karzai the evidence of the rocket attack on a peace conference earlier this month when Karzai told them that he believed the Taliban were not responsible.

The President did not show any interest in the evidence… he treated it like a piece of dirt, said Amrullah Saleh,then the director of the Afghan intelligence service.

An Afghan official with knowledge of the meeting said that Karzai suggested in the meeting that it might have been the Americans who carried it out.

Minutes after the exchange,Saleh and Interior Minister Hanif Atmar resigned the most dramatic defection from Karzais government since he came to power. They said they quit because Karzai made clear that he no longer considered them loyal.

But underlying the tensions,according to Saleh and Afghan and Western officials,was something more profound: That Karzai had lost faith in the Americans and NATO to prevail in Afghanistan. For that reason,Saleh and other officials said,Karzai has been pressing to strike his own deal with the Taliban and Pakistan.

The President has lost his confidence in the capability of either the coalition or his own government to protect this country, Saleh said. President Karzai has never announced that NATO will lose,but the way that he does not proudly own the campaign shows that he doesnt trust it is working.

People close to the President say he began to lose confidence in the Americans last summer,after national elections in which independent monitors determined that ballots had been stolen on Karzais behalf. The rift worsened in December,when Obama announced that he intended to begin reducing the number of American troops by the summer of 2011.

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At a news conference this week,Karzai was asked about the Taliban role in the June 4 attack and his faith in NATO. He declined to address either. Its a question that our security organisation can bring and prepare the answer, he said.