Iraq and Afghanistan

Karzai and the "Militias"?

There is a curious front page story in today's paper that reports President Karzai's assertion that the main enemy in Afghanistan is no longer the Taliban, but rather the "militias", which one might translate as the warlords, but this time maybe not. Attacks on workers attempting to register the population for a parliamentary vote have been so frequent lately that the parliamentary vote has had to be postponed to next year. This experience may have led to this reappraisal. However, many of these attacks have been on women, and therefore presumeably related to Taliban-like activity. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (a religious-warrior leader active in the anti-Soviet war) has often been cited as the leader of such efforts. On the other hand, the warlord leaders of at least the old Northern Alliance are thought to be major supporters of Karzai's campaign for another term as President, an election he is expected to win easily this fall.

The question that bothers me is why he would have downgraded the importance of the Taliban in this situation. He is surely not about to seriously take on the major warlords that are his backers. Or is he?