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Patching things up

A summit on Afghanistan sets the stage for President Hamid Karzai to take charge

Jan 28th 2010 | From The Economist online

AP

THE first battalions of President Barack Obama’s military surge in Afghanistan are deployed and preparing to sweep the Taliban from a swathe of central Helmand province in the coming weeks. With commanders under pressure to achieve quick results before American troop levels begin to ebb next year, this could be the bloodiest year yet of America’s Afghan war.

Yet several thousand miles away in London, where an international conference on Afghanistan was held on Thursday January 28th, diplomatic talk was all about peace gatherings and reconciliation with the Taliban. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, said he would convene a “grand peace jirga (council of elders)”, and urged Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah “to guide and assist the peace process”. Mr Karzai’s officials said that the Taliban would be invited to attend the gathering, to be held in the coming months. “We must reach out to all of our countrymen, especially our disenchanted brothers, who are not part of al-Qaeda, or other terrorist networks, who accept the Afghan constitution,” said the Afghan president before delegates from 60-odd countries (Iran's seat was empty).

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