Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) said Wednesday that he thought Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "should have stood up" to Afghan President Hamid Karzai when he denied the congressman entry to the country because of critical comments he made about the country's government.
"I think that she should have stood up for that, but however, she asked me to do that and I complied with her wishes," Rohrabacher told CNN. "I thought she was asking me in a respectful way, but she was having to deal with this corrupt prima donna who heads that country and realizing that, look, members of Congress should be over there to see if the dynamics are such that we're not just wasting people's lives and money, and there are changes that need to happen for us to be able to succeed."
Rohrabacher, a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was a last-minute addition to a trip led by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas). But apparently when Karzai found out he would be part of the congressional delegation, the Afghan president threatened to block the entire trip.
Rohrabacher said Clinton told the congressman that she wanted to avoid an international incident in light of recent controversies in the region.
"He basically said that she'd been through many — a lot of mini-crises there in Afghanistan with the burning of the Qurans and our soldiers urinating on these dead bodies and then one of them going crazy and killing civilians and she just felt that another mini-crisis which might erupt because Karzai hated me so much that he would create a crisis and she just thought it would be disruptive to our ability to get her job done," Rohrabacher said.
Afghans have been critical of the American presence in the country after a shooting rampage by an American soldier last month that left more than a dozen civilians dead. Other high-profile incidents, including revelations that troops burned copies of the Quran and urinated on the bodies of slain enemy combatants, have further eroded relations with the Afghans.
Earlier this week, Rohrabacher told Foreign Policy his feud with Karzai went back decades and was rooted in the congressman's call for a decentralized government in the country and skepticism about corruption in Karzai's administration.
"Mr. Karzai is a very wealthy man, and the tooth fairy didn't leave it under his pillow. If we don't do anything, the Taliban will take over that country and Karzai will disappear and emerge in Costa Rica with suitcases filled with money," Karzai told the magazine. "Or even worse, our current government may push Karzai into a coalition government with the Taliban, and that would be a catastrophe and a horrible waste of American lives and resources over the last 10 years."
