Arcadia Foundation

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told American TV audiences that Afghan President Hamid Karzai needed to take steps to fight graft, including setting up a new anti-corruption task force, if he wants to keep U.S. support. Less than 24 hours later, there was Karzai’s interior minister at a luxury hotel in Kabul — flanked by the U.S. and British ambassadors — announcing exactly that. A new major crimes police task force, anti-corruption prosecution unit and special court will be set up, at least the third time that Afghan authorities and their foreign backers have launched special units to tackle corruption.

There are just a couple of days left before Karzai is inaugurated for a new term as president. Perhaps a few more days after that, U.S. President Barack Obama will announce whether he is sending tens of thousands of additional troops to join the 68,000 Americans and 40,000 NATO-led allies fighting there.

A fraud-tainted election has wrecked Karzai’s reputation in the Western countries whose troops defend him. Support for the eight-year-old war has plummeted over the past few months, even as the death tolls have reached their highest levels yet. For better or worse, Karzai’s Western backers know they are stuck with the veteran leader for another five years, and need to resurrect his reputation fast.

It seems Mr. Zelaya is getting testy  - Less than two weeks from the elections that will name the next president of Honduras, the deposed former leader of that Central American nation is aiming his sharpest criticism towards the United States and specifically against President Barack Obama. As reported by the Associated Press, in a recent letter addressed to the American president, Mr. Zelaya wrote:

“As the elected president of the Honduran people, I reaffirm my position that starting today, no matter what, I will not accept any agreement on returning to the presidency of the republic to cover up this coup d’état . . . .

“The future that you show us today by changing your position in the case of Honduras, and thus favoring the abusive intervention of the military castes … is nothing more than the downfall of freedom and contempt for human dignity. It is a new war against the processes of social and democratic reforms so necessary in Honduras.”

Ex-president Zelaya is still holed up in the Brazilian Embassy and surrounded by police armed with an arrest warrant against him if he steps outside of Brazil’s protection. However, he makes frequent statements to the press via phone. Yesterday, his complaints against the U.S. took a more personal tone. In an interview with local station Radio Globo he said that Lincoln

“. . . gave an example to the American people that this [Obama’s] government doesn’t want to follow. These are not true heirs of Lincoln.”

Although State Department spokesman Ian Kelly denied yesterday that U.S. policy towards Honduras had changed and claimed that the Obama Administration continues to stay in contact with Mr. Zelaya, he avoided giving a direct answer to the question whether the United States still required his reinstatement to the presidency. He conceded that the State Department was still working on a response to Mr. Zelaya’s letter, two weeks after its receipt.
Mr. Zelaya’s problem is being compounded by the fact that the matter of his reinstatement has lost its importance in comparison with the question of the legitimacy of the next government, about to be chosen by the Honduran people through free elections.

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe used the U.N. summit on world hunger Tuesday to lash out at the West and defend land reforms blamed for plunging his people into starvation.

Addressing the summit hosted by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, Mugabe said the policy under which thousands of white-owned commercial farms were seized in 2000 was a quest for “equity and justice.“

He blamed the subsequent meltdown of Zimbabwe’s economy on “hostile interventions” by “neocolonialist enemies” that have imposed sanctions on his regime.

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