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Karzai Showered With Sycophancy |
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Today, we again linked up with Kabul University live for a meeting with Hamid Karzai. This time however, the Afghans had learned their lesson after yesterday when the students of Kabul University were allowed to speak their minds.
The speech by Karzai was largely unremarkable. He highlighted the huge progress being made in Afghanistan, particularly in the area of health care. He thanked the international community for helping Afghanistan. What more could we expect from a leader who owes his position entirely to foreign intervention.
However the most interesting part of the event was when Kabul University was allowed to ask questions of their president. As I reported yesterday, when given the same opportunity with the Secretary General of NATO the students fired pointed questions.
However with Karzi, not one student asked a question, but rather two students made statements thanking both President Karzi and the international community for all that they had done for Afghanistan and a third made a plea to the world's media to show the great things happening in Afghanistan.
Both yesterday and today the students who spoke were hand picked by the university, and todays display of sycophancy only served to put yesterday's exchange into starker contrast.
Any idea what Afghanistan's university populations are like in general? Under the Taliban, all of education was highly controlled and those who disagreed with the regime were expelled from the universities. How are things now?