After winning another term, mired by serious accusations of fraud, Karzai has suffered another setback. As many as 17 out of 24 of his nominees for the proposed Afghan cabinet were rejected by country's parliament, signalling difficulties ahead between the president and the majority of the elected deputies.
Media reports said national assembly members said they were receiving 'non-stop' phone calls of congratulations for their decision to reject more than two-thirds of the ministers Karzai had proposed. Those who failed to get the endorsement were widely viewed as Karzai's political cronies, who were incompetent or corrupt, or both. Afghan parliament's decision shows the extent to which President Karzai's fraud-tainted election victory had left him severely weakened.
There was a widespread perception that the criteria for the selection of ministers were ethnicity, bribery or political and financial support rendered during Karzai's election. Among those rejected was Ismail Khan, a former guerrilla leader from the western province of Herat, who Karzai had picked as minister for water and energy.
Had his nomination been approved, he would not have been the only warlord in the cabinet as the two vice presidents, Mohammad Qasim Fahim and Karim Khalili, fell in the same category, besides being widely known to have looted Afghanistan for years. Of the 12 incumbent ministers Karzai sought to retain, the parliament approved only five.
The parliament's rejection of Husn Bano Ghazanfar, the only woman in Karzai's current cabinet, was a blow to the president who has pledged to place more women in high government posts in Afghanistan's traditionally male-dominated society. Only recently Karzai had promised to appoint women to key slots and hinted he had a woman in mind as head of the new ministry of literacy, one of the two new ministries he has asked the parliament to create.
It remains to be seen if he will be able to do so after the present setback. Ethnic politics in the shape of an ethnic bloc also played a profound role, leading people to ask if lawmakers were primarily interested in being the defenders of their own ethnic constituencies. Most of those elected got through by the skin of their teeth. Of the 246 Parliament members, 232 were present at the time of voting, which meant that each minister had to get at least 117 votes to win approval.
It was noted that none of them received enthusiastic endorsement. Not one could secure two-thirds of the votes and some were confirmed by barely a handful of votes. In all, seven ministers, who were nominated for a second term were rejected. They included the ministers of public health, telecommunications and counter-narcotics. There was a general complaint among the deputies that they were not consulted during the nomination process and that many cabinet nominees lacked the required professional backgrounds.
Karzai has defended his choices, maintaining that his proposed cabinet represented a balance of the nation's ethnic factions. But parliamentarians complained that the list looked too much like the existing cabinet and spelled another five years of business, as usual characterised by corruption and woefully poor governance. The rift between Karzai and Parliament could create problems in the working of the administration.
Among other things, it could leave a number of ministries at the disposal of deputy ministers who lack political clout. Will Karzai learn a lesson from the debacle? He could alternately bring in his cronies through the backdoor by recess appointments once Parliament leaves for its winter break.
After having been declared the winner of a fraud-tainted election, Karzai has been under pressure from Western leaders and Afghan opposition figures to help set things right by choosing honest and competent cabinet ministers. The Parliament's action on Saturday made it clear that the MPs felt he was not willing to do so. While the rejection underlines Karzai's vulnerability, some hope it would help strike a delicate balance between the powers of the president and the parliament.
But Karzai's strength could soon be put to another test. On Saturday, his appointed Independent Election Commission announced it would stage parliamentary elections in May. However, a serious lack of security could make it impossible for the highly controversial election commission to hold a vote in large swaths of southern, eastern and western Afghanistan.
So far Karzai administration's corruption and inefficiency bedevilled Karzai's foreign sponsors. The man they have been betting on was widely seen to be leading a corrupt administration. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Gordon Brown, and Nato Secretary General Anders Gogh Rasmussen had all called on Karzai to fight corruption and improve governance.
Clinton had even gone to the extreme of threatening that Washington would not provide any civilian aid to Afghanistan, "unless we have certification that if it goes into the Afghan government in any form, that we are going to have ministries that we can hold accountable," Nato, meanwhile, had been mediating the setting up of a task force, consisting of a small team of anti-corruption officers, as well as a criminal investigator and prosecutor with the hope that foreign generals will be able to stop cases of blatant corruption.
Now the US and its allies face another problem in Afghanistan: a government that they hoped would help them achieve victory, has an uncertain hold on parliament, which might not blindly endorse the policies dictated by Karzai's foreign patrons. It looks that Karzai's post-election expression has grown more sardonic. Media reports said that far from acknowledging he was in a political crisis, he portrayed his defeat as "a triumph of democracy".