They discuss Hamid Karzai’s second term, international calls to clean up corruption and the worsening security situation.

They also look at the fallout from a landmark case in Italy involving the alleged CIA abduction and so-called rendition of a Muslim cleric. An Italian judge convicted and sentenced 23 CIA agents, in their absence, of abducting the  cleric in Italy and taking him to Egypt where he says he was tortured.

In a country where a woman is confined to her home, Joya is breaking all kinds of cultural, social and religious stereotypes. In May 2007, she was suspended after referring to the parliament as a stable, she said at least in “in a stable we have animals like a cow which is useful in that it provides milk and a donkey that carry a load.”

She speaks candidly about the challenges facing Afghanistan. She says that the low turnout in the presidential election is proof that the Afghan people are dissatisfied with the current government. She attributes the rise of Taliban to the failed policy of the U.S. in Afghanistan. She is also a staunch opponent of increasing U.S. troop levels in her country. Joya wants the U.S. and NATO to keep in mind that no foreign military has ever succeeded in controlling Afghanistan.

For her, the status of women now is no different than under the Taliban. She says that it may even be worse because the rate of suicide and abduction is high, and many rapists go untouched.

Because she is unabashedly outspoken, her life is under constant threat and she must be accompanied by bodyguards. But nothing so far seems to succeed in slowing her down. For sure not the many failed assassination attempts on her life, or the awful treatment she gets from her male colleagues in parliament.

Joya spent her childhood at a refugee camp in Iran and Pakistan, and returned to the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in the late 1990s and worked for an underground organization helping women. She is now on a book tour in the U.S.  promoting her memoir, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Woman Who Dared to Speak Out, co-written by Derrick O’Keefe.

- Mohammad Al Kassim

Hassan Abbas, a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society and former Pakistani government official, joins Daljit Dhaliwal to discuss what Karzai’s second term means for the U.S. and the international community.

Jonah Hull of Al Jazeera English reports from Kabul on delays, violence and voter fraud.

Children with U.S. soldier in Afghanista. Photo: Flickr user theUSarmy

U.S. President Barack Obama continues to grapple with the complex situation in Afghanistan.

The American leader has recently been accused of taking too long to make a decision about whether to send more troops.

With allegations of election fraud surrounding Afghan president Hamid Karzai and new allegations against his brother, should the U.S. cut ties with the controversial president?

Tell us what you think in the comments section below. Please remember to be respectful and on-point in your comments. Malicious or offensive comments will be deleted and repeat offenders will be banned.

Commentators continue to debate whether the Karzai administration was complicit in the fraud and whether Hamid Karzai could ever be considered the legitimate Afghan leader. Some are even contemplating the prospect of a power-sharing arrangement between Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah.

Jamie Metzl, the executive vice president of the Asia Society and project director for its Afghanistan-Pakistan task force, speaks with Daljit Dhaliwal.

Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai defended the integrity of the country’s presidential election on Thursday. He also admitted for the first time that there was fraud by government officials who support him, but said there was fraud as well by those supporting his main opponent.

The final but uncertified count gives Karzai more than 54 percent, but European election observers say about one-third of the votes were suspicious and should be examined for fraud. Karzai called on them to respect the votes of the Afghan people.

Should the U.S. demand a recount or accept the results?

Tell what you think in the comments section below. Please remember to be respectful and on-point in your comments. Malicious or offensive comments will be deleted and repeat offenders will be banned.

Karin von Hippel, a senior fellow for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., just returned from monitoring the elections in Afghanistan. She speaks with Daljit Dhaliwal about how the security situation affected the vote.

Also in Afghanistan today, General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, delivered an assessment of the war there. In a statement, McChrystal said “The situation in Afghanistan is serious, but success is achievable and demands a revised implementation strategy, commitment, and resolve, and increased unity of effort.”

Can U.S. and NATO forces win the war in Afghanistan?

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

James Bays of Worldfocus partner Al Jazeera English takes a look at what some Afghans faced.

Photo: Scott Bohlinger

Scott Bohlinger is a political analyst and writer who has lived in Afghanistan since 2006. He works for a non-governmental organization in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan and has traveled extensively in the Middle East.

One of my favorite pastimes of late has been talking to people about who they’re voting for and why. Politics is universal, but political thoughts are heavily shaped and molded by cultural contexts. Whatever people’s education levels, they get the concept of political participation and voting, and I’ve found that they reject voting only insofar as they don’t think the vote will be respected.

The big difference I encounter here in Afghanistan is in how people talk about politics and their candidates, which seems surprising to somebody from the U.S., France or Iran.

In Afghanistan, with its multiplicity of figures in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of alliances and betrayals, the political landscape often appears inscrutable to the uninitiated. The reasons for these shifting currents are there, although outsiders don’t always properly appreciate them.

People who told me they would vote against Karzai because he was supported by former warlord Abdurrashid Dostum all of a sudden appeared teary-eyed alongside the road to watch his convoy a few days later when he returned from Turkey. The cause was simple: Their rational analysis of the pros and cons of his rule had been replaced by their emotional attachment to a man who had brought relative stability to this party of the country, when the rest was in chaos.

Photo: Scott Bohlinger

One day, while driving to the gym, my driver and I were looking at all the campaign posters and related activity in town, poking fun and sharing opinions. He didn’t have much definitive to say about any of the current contenders, but instead went on at length about some strongman whom he particularly liked during the Soviet occupation. The next day, he had a completely different story. Evidently, my driver had decided to throw his weight behind Karzai. Suddenly, it was Karzai who could do no wrong. “Karzai built everything in this country after the war — he’s honest, clean and has personality integrity.”

The argument against Karzai is that he hasn’t done enough and doesn’t possess any of those qualities, but I didn’t see the point in arguing that. So I asked my driver how he had been convinced of this. He must have had a conversation with his friends over qalyan (sheesha or water pipes) or heard the argument from an akhund (priest), I thought. His response was “No, that’s just the way things are.”

This is one story, but it typifies many others encounters that I’ve had. During a fast food break in Samangan, a man sat across from me while I was eating my kebab and extolled the virtues of a previous regime that he particularly liked for three reasons: 1) you could leave your door unlocked, 2) there was no theft and 3) so-and-so distributed swift and equitable justice.

It annoys me as a Westerner because I feel it sets up unrealistic expectations of leaders and therefore just perpetuates the cycle of violence. But these narratives help people structure the world around them to create meaning — even if they are myths. In Afghanistan, political power is often understood and explained through myths about individuals rather than through the specific issues they stand for.

- Scott Bohlinger

A woman at a polling centre in Kandahar City.

Afghanistan is heading to the polls for national elections — but out of 41 presidential candidates, only two are women. Progress has been slow since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.

Perhaps to appease conservatives ahead of the election, President Hamid Karzai recently enacted a law allowing men to deny their wives food if the women refuse to comply with sexual demands.

Masha Hamilton is a novelist who founded the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, aimed at allowing Afghan women to have a direct voice. She describes women’s concerns as Afghanistan’s future takes shape.

One autumn morning not long after dawn, Shaista Hakim stood outside on her Kabul balcony, her head bare, sleep still in her eyes as she hung laundry. She quietly hummed to herself. Her husband and two young children lay peacefully asleep inside. Suddenly, on the street below, a gray car shrieked to a halt. The driver, wearing a turban, glared up at her with an expression so venomous it frightened her back inside.

Peeking through the window, she watched him push himself from his car. A moment later, she heard him pounding at her door. “I took off my glasses, put on a scarf and opened the door,” she recalled. “I was very scared.”

“Don’t ever go outside again without a burqa, or you will be arrested,” the man warned, his voice shaking with anger. He turned on heel and strode away.

The date: September 27, 1996, nearly thirteen years ago. Overnight, the Taliban had taken charge of Kabul, and the shift in the capital city was dramatic. To Mrs. Hakim, it felt as abrupt — and within a week, she and her young family abandoned their jobs and their apartment, fleeing the Taliban shadow and heading to Pakistan.

Mrs. Hakim returned to Kabul only after the post-9/11 fall of the Taliban, and I met her during a visit to Afghanistan last November. She now works as the director of a center that treats female drug addicts. Her job is not easy, nor is it often cheerful — she and her team brave Kabul’s most desperate and crime-ridden neighborhoods daily to reach out to women hooked on opium or heroin. Nevertheless, she considers it a gift that, for the moment at least, her government permits her to do the work she loves.

But Mrs. Hakim has become wary as Afghanistan goes again to the polls and calls have intensified in the last few months — from the U.S. to Europe to Afghanistan itself –- for the Afghan government to engage in dialogue with once-shunned moderate Taliban factions. She fears the change to a more conservative regime could happen overnight again –- that one morning on her balcony, she might look around to find her world unrecognizable.

President Hamid Karzai, long considered to hold geographically limited power (more like the “mayor of Kabul” than head of the country) has at times in recent months appeared to lose control even of Kabul. Observers, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have suggested his government’s survival may depend on opening talks with the Taliban.

Kathleen Rafiq, an American who began visiting Kabul after the fall of the Taliban and has lived there for the last four years doing humanitarian work, agrees. The Karzai government has repeatedly faced charges of ineffectiveness and corruption, and additionally, the Taliban has effectively taken control of much of the south of the country. “There is no way to solve the current political problems without bringing in the Taliban somehow,” Ms. Rafiq says, echoing a view widely held in Afghanistan itself.

Afghan women register to vote before an election in 2004.

But many Afghan women fear even the most moderate Taliban representatives will find it difficult to agree to a partnership with the Afghan government unless they win agreement for the country to follow a conservative interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law. This will by definition lead to renewed repression of women. Political expediency, these women say, may cost them their tenuous rights to walk outside without a burqa and male accompaniment, to attend school, to hold a job, even to hum as they hang laundry at dawn.

It is these fears that led me to develop an idea that had been percolating in the back of my mind for some time –- some kind of online link to Afghan women so that their voices would not be silenced, as they were during the previous Taliban rule. So that they would not again become invisible. So that we could hear directly from them, without having their words filtered through the voices of their men or the media.

From this sprang the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, an organization that has drawn generous volunteers from across the U.S. to reach out to women in Afghanistan. The project pairs Afghan women with authors and teachers here on a rotating basis and presents their work on a blog. And because it has become uncomfortable if not impossible for women to go into Internet cafes –- particularly in the south of the country but even in Kabul -– the AWWP is fundraising to open Afghanistan’s first-ever women’s-only Internet café.

Roya, one of the AWWP writers, wrote in a poem entitled Afghan Woman: “Who asks about my identity? I am lost on the pages of history books.” As the U.S. encourages the Afghan government to negotiate with the Taliban, we must make sure Afghan women do not become overlooked again.

- Masha Hamilton

For more on women in Afghanistan, view PBS Wide Angle’s “A Woman Among Warlords.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr users The Advocacy Project under a Creative Commons license.

On Tuesday, with the election two days away and the campaign winding down, the Taliban launched a series of attacks on the capital city of Kabul. A suicide car bomber attacked a NATO convoy on the outskirts of the city, killing at least seven people and wounding another 50. Two mortar rounds also landed near the presidential palace.

U.S. President Barack Obama insists winning the war in Afghanistan is vital to America’s security interests, and a free and fair election no doubt would help that cause. But security concerns remain front and center.

Kimberly Marten, a professor of political science at Columbia University’s Barnard College, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the impending vote, U.S. strategy ahead of the election and the role of warlords.

Read what a U.S. Marine embedded trainer with the Afghan National Army had to say about the atmosphere ahead of elections: Securing the vote in volatile northeastern Afghanistan

The United States believes the elections will legitimize the government, now led by a staunch U.S. ally, Hamid Karzai, who is widely expected to be re-elected to another term. But the Taliban is doing all it can to disrupt the vote — making threats of violence to any Afghan that goes to the polls on August 20.

Alex Their, the director of the Future of Afghanistan Project at the United States Institute of Peace, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the security situation during the election and how the results might impact the American mission in the country.

Afghanistan is actually a collection of many ethnic groups — the two biggest being the Pashtuns and the Tajiks. Many people are expected to vote along ethnic lines. Zeina Khodr of Worldfocus partner Al Jazeera English reports on what leading candidates are doing to bring out the vote, with the help of tribal elders.

The three share common borders and a long list of common problems, from drug trafficking to militant insurgencies.

Marvin Weinbaum, a scholar in residence at the Middle East Institute and a former State Department analyst specializing on Afghanistan and Pakistan, joins Martin Savidge to discuss Iran’s economic interests and what role the country could play in helping the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan fight the Taliban.

President Barack Obama meets with his senior advisors in the Oval Office. Photo: Pete Souza/White House

About two weeks before President Obama took office, I received a call from a friend of mine who said in an ominous tone, “Well, 17 days to do what we have to do.”

“What would that be?” I asked.

“Bombing Iran, while we still can,” replied my friend, a pilot recently retired from government service. He assumed that an Obama administration would never do so.

“Regime change” in Iran has been a fixation in some quarters for years, notably among neo-conservatives who saw “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq as a stepping stone toward toppling the Iranian government and being greeted as liberators.

Their ranks include former Defense Department officials, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perl and many others who filtered into top civilian jobs at the Pentagon during the tenure of former Defense Secretary Donald P. Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld, in turn, is the mentor of former Vice President Richard B. Cheney, who is of a like mind, and boisterous these days on criticizing Obama.

While still vice president, Cheney said:

The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences…We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

The New York Times reported Cheney’s remarks on Oct. 21, 2007 at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank that is home for a number of neo-conservatives. The story included a comment by Dennis Ross, a scholar at the Institute, a former aide to Wolfowitz, and now President Obama’s envoy to Iran and its environs:

Cheney’s “language on Iran is quite significant,” Ross said. It “does have implications.”

Two years later, how different is Bush-Cheney policy from that of President Obama? We don’t know yet, but there are hints.

Two prominent Middle East analysts, Flint Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, former staffers at the National Security Council, question Ross’ role in the Obama administration. In a New York Times opinion piece on May 24, 2009, they warn that President Obama may be going down the wrong road; public declarations to the contrary, they say Obama is neglecting important diplomatic opportunities to engage with Iran and truly work on better relations, including negotiations about nuclear issues.

The Leveretts criticize Obama’s choice of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, and the designation of Ross to such a key role. They note that Clinton once said she would “‘totally obliterate’ Iran if it attacked Israel.” They describe a conversation they had with Ross, in which he, like Clinton, said he doubted talks with Iran would be fruitful.

…he told us, if Iran continued to expand its nuclear fuel program, at some point in the next couple of years President Bush’s successor would need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets. Citing past ‘diplomacy’ would be necessary for that president to claim any military action was legitimate.

If we take this point of view at face value, my friend who had been worried about NOT bombing Iran may be feeling appeased.

- Peter Eisner

President Barack Obama with Afghan President Karzai and Pakistani President Zardari during a trilateral meeting at the White House.

U.S. President Barack Obama met with leaders from Afghanistan and Pakistan on Wednesday to discuss the growing threat of the Taliban.

Worldfocus editorial consultant Peter Eisner considers the signficance of the three-way meeting and the challenges facing President Obama going forward. 

The Obama administration held a mini-summit yesterday with the civilian leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. An Associated Press report quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said it was a “breakthrough meeting,” telling reporters the sessions covered trade, water sharing, military training and anti-corruption drives, among other issues.

It is unlikely that this was a breakthrough meeting.

The visits by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari had only limited significance, and anything those two leaders could say would have little impact on the larger problems at hand.

Certainly, there would be no reason to speak negatively or disparagingly of either leader — that would do no more good than to assume that the meetings with President Obama and administration officials accomplished much. But a breakthrough would mean that all three had figured out how to solve their problems.

Zardari is an elected civilian president, the first civilian since the military under Parvez Musharraf ceded power under mighty criticism. Zardari is in the presidential chair as a result of the assassination of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, who was killed on Dec. 27, 2007 after being encouraged to return to Pakistan from exile. Neither the United States nor the Pakistani military or police were able to cushion her from the bomb attack.

Zardari is said to have little, if any, sway with the Pakistani military, which for the time has responded to U.S. pressure and is fighting Taliban militants. There are predictions that perhaps half a million refugees will flee the areas of those battles. And there are well-placed military analysts in the United States and elsewhere who think that even if the Pakistani military has the stomach to fight and keep fighting extremists, the resulting battles would harden support for the Taliban in the poorest parts of the country.

Karzai faces his own problems. Warlords govern large fiefdoms in his country, and his power is limited, at best, to Kabul, the Afghan capital. The Taliban, chased from power in 2003, are extending their reach throughout the country; Karzai faces challenges in upcoming elections and he has clearly heard President Obama question his ability to fight corruption, or even leave the grounds of the presidential palace to govern his country. No assurance he might give Obama, and no pledge of U.S. military aid —  which will arrive with or without Karzai — is particularly germane to the larger issues of stability in that part of the world.

President Obama needs to do something convincing and new in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is the commander-in-chief, and when the U.S. military accidentally kills Afghan civilians as it did this week, he will have trouble in protecting his reputation as the anti-Bush in international relations. His secretary of state, besides saying the meetings with the Karzai and Zardari were “breakthrough,” made references to civil action measures — a hint of the military doctrine of winning over “hearts and minds” in the midst of low intensity warfare. That theory is coherent, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to gains and breakthroughs that can be measured in weeks and months.

There comes a point after you’ve bought a new spread with broke-down fences, after you’ve repaired the place and patched the holes, you’ll call it your own. The Obama administration hasn’t gotten there yet, but let’s describe the damage for what it is.

- Peter Eisner

Photo courtesy of Flickr user The Official White House Photostream under a Creative Commons license.

Each foreign leader is confronting a crisis back home. Pakistani troops are battling Taliban militants less than 100 miles from the capital city, while Afghan President Hamid Karzai is dealing with the repercussions of a U.S. bombing attack that killed dozens of civilians in Afghanistan.

Daniel Markey, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a specialist on South Asia, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the effectiveness of these meetings, anti-American sentiment in Pakistan and the possibility of involving Iran in a regional peace conference.

Read more from Worldfocus editorial consultant Peter Eisner: For Afghanistan’s Karzai, era of U.S. hand-holding is over. 

Afghan President Hamid Karzai was meeting Wednesday with President Obama.

The leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan were set for a three-way meeting with President Obama on Wednesday, to discuss how to combat the growing threat of the Taliban. 

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is also dealing with the repercussions of an errant U.S. bombing attack that killed dozens of civilians in Afghanistan.

Worldfocus editorial consultant Peter Eisner writes about Karzai’s changing relationship with the U.S. under the Obama administration. 

For an informative, disturbing look at the problems of American diplomacy in Afghanistan, a Washington Post profile of Afghan President Hamid Karzai written by Rajiv Chandrasekaran is required reading.

Rajiv, a colleague at the Post when he was Baghdad bureau chief and I was on the foreign desk, wrote the best-selling book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.” He breaks down the dysfunctional elements of American operations in Afghanistan the same way he did in Iraq.

Not surprisingly, we see Karzai, who was meeting Wednesday with President Obama, as an indecisive man with little franchise, often under the thumb of the Bush administration. President Bush dealt with Afghanistan by starting a war in Iraq instead. He dealt with Karzai, in part, by sending Zalmay Mamozy Khalilzad, an Afghan-born diplomat, as the U.S. ambassador after having been ambassador to Iraq.

Khalilzad and top American officials used strong-arm tactics, often falling short in controlling the axes of meaningful change.

Rajiv writes:

“Khalilzad was far more than an ambassador. U.S. diplomats described his role as the country’s chief executive — with Karzai as the figurehead chairman — for the 19 months of his ambassadorship.”

“By his own account, Khalilzad ate dinner six nights a week at the presidential palace, where he met with Karzai and his advisers into the evening. No significant decision was made by Karzai in that time without Khalilzad’s involvement, and sometimes his cajoling and prodding, the diplomats said.”

We also learn that Karzai and Bush had biweekly video chats, with Bush apparently thinking the personal touch would help deal with the militias and drug lords rampaging outside Karzai’s palace gates.

None of the hobnobbing brought success in stabilizing Afghanistan or catching Osama bin Laden, or stopping the corrupt system that allows Afghanistan to corner the market on the opium poppy industry. 

Just after President Obama came to office, Vice President Joseph Biden informed Karzai in person that the era of presidential hand-holding is over.

Rajiv reports that President Obama has little patience for Karzai. Obama, we are told, thinks Karzai “has been inside the bunker” too long.

“Obama advisers believe the relationship that Bush developed with Karzai masked the Afghan leader’s flaws and made it difficult to demand accountability.”

“The classified version of the recent White House review of Afghanistan strategy, according to two officials who have read it, criticizes Karzai. “It takes him to task for not meeting even the most basic Afghan expectations,” one of the officials said. “The implication is clear: Karzai is not our man in this upcoming election.”

Rather than one-on-one video conferences, Karzai gets a 20-minute meeting and a three-way meeting with President Obama and the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari.

Beyond the body language, Karzai will supposedly have at least a minute to mention U.S. air strikes on Tuesday in which more than 100 people died. The International Red Cross reported that women and children were among the dead.

A cold dose of reality reminds us that war and peace go beyond personalities. We haven’t seen yet how the United States will come up with a viable plan to make things better.

- Peter Eisner