Karzai Choices for Afghan Cabinet Mostly Rejected

[discocrisco01]

From the article

"KABUL (AP) -- Afghanistan's parliament dealt a stinging rebuke to President Hamid Karzai on Saturday by rejecting 70 percent of his nominees for a new cabinet, including a regionally powerful warlord and the country's only female minister.

The laborious voting that took much of Saturday ended with the rejection of 17 of 24 nominees. The nominations, announced in mid-December, aimed to keep 12 current ministers in their posts for a second term. In part, that appeared aimed at satisfying U.S. and Western desires to keep trusted hands in place.

Among those Karzai wanted to keep was Water and Power Minister Ismail Khan. But that raised many hackles because Khan was a warlord in Herat province during the civil war of the 1990s and retains considerable local power; critics said keeping Khan indicated the extent to which Karzai appears to be beholden to regional power-brokers at the expense of the whole country's interests.

Many of his new nominees were also criticized as having been picked for reasons other than their competency.

''I think, unfortunately, that the criteria were either ethnicity or bribery or money,'' lawmaker Fawzia Kufi said before the voting"

Source: New York Times
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I guess everybody thinks that Karazai is a fraud

[Robb]

1. Heh. Had a sad laugh at the line

"...The criteria were either ethnicity or bribery or money."

This is Afghanistan. Kufi meant to say, "He bribes the wrong people."