Afghan Leader Hamid Karzai Feels Betrayed by His U.S. Allies --- Beware an ally betrayed. Unlike an enemy, you can’t fight them openly or cast them off as they wait, planning from up close, to settle the score. A little-noticed passage in former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s new memoir about “a clumsy and failed putsch” sheds new light on how Afghan President Hamid Karzai has become just such a scorned partner, backing his longstanding claims that the United States actively tried to manipulate his country’s 2009 election to remove him from power. -- Gates’s book, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, provides rare insights into the war cabinet and decision-making process of a sitting president. While passages where he questions Obama’s commitment to the war in Afghanistan and harshly criticizes Vice President Biden’s foreign policy judgment have drawn headlines here, in Kabul the news has been his frank admission that high-ranking administration members, including Richard Holbrooke—the famed formed ambassador who was appointed special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009—colluded to oust Karzai. -- Describing President Obama’s directive to Holbrooke to persuade President Karzai to delay the 2009 Afghan elections, Gates writes, “For Holbrooke and others at the table, it provided the time necessary to identify a viable alternative to Karzai, who they thought had to go. If the Afghan constitution was an impediment to achieving this goal, the hell with it.” --- The bid to find and presumably then boost a contender who could block Karzai from getting a majority of votes, forcing him into a runoff where he could be defeated, sprang from American leaders’ deep distrust of him. Senior officials, including President Obama, who Gates writes, “can’t stand Karzai,” regarded him as a weak leader, tainted by his nation’s corruption (the NGO Transparency International ranks it the world’s most corrupt country, along with North Korea and Somalia) and his own family’s, and incapable of executing the ambitious state-building plans that were a cornerstone of U.S. policy. - More, Jacob Siegel , Daily Beast, at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/15/afghan-leader-hamid-karzai-feels-betrayed-by-his-u-s-allies.html