Afghan President Hamid Karzai denounced his presumed NATO allies as polluters of his country and countries who did not have Afghan interests at heart: " They have not built the roads for us but for themselves, with their big trucks, with big heavy tyres and chains, so as much as they help our country, they get it back more than a hundred times,"
This was too much for American ambassador Karl Eikenberry who termed the remarks "hurtful and inappropriate". He also warned the Afghan government that such statements sapped American willingness to fight on in Afghanistan. If American citizens believed that American aid programs were totally ineffective and a source of corruption "the American people will ask for our forces to come home."
However, Hamid Karzai had another announcement that was confirmed by outgoing US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, namely that the United States is talking with the Taliban.
Karzai may be cranky at times but is nobody's fool. He does not need the American ambassador to tell him that the war is becoming too costly for the Americans and economics may soon trump strategy.
The administration is increasingly tending to use the recent successes against Al Qaeda, notably the killing of Osama bin Laden, in an attempt to argue about the war in Afghanistan. This is been the policy advocated within administration circles by Vice President Joseph Biden. The distinction would be made between Taliban and Al Qaeda; the US will abandon its hopes for nation building and women's rights in Afghanistan and suffice with a pledge that things would not go back to before 9/11 when Al Qaeda used Afghanistan as a safe haven. As a signal, the UN removed the Taliban from the same sanctions list as Al Qaeda.
There are problems with this approach.
For one, it was the Taliban that provided Al Qaeda with safe haven in the first place.
Secondly, elements in Afghanistan who believed that the United States was there for the duration and had cast their lot with the United States, are to be abandoned as long as Taliban guarantees that Afghanistan will not be a training and logistics sites for Al Qaeda.
Third, countries such as Pakistan who have been beseeched to fight the Taliban on their territory can and will reasonably ask why they must disrupt national unity by fighting the Taliban when the Americans themselves are making overt gestures towards Taliban?
Obviously questions about the future are also preoccupying President Karzai. As he senses that the Americans are on their way out, Karzai needs new allies. At last week's Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit that he attended as an observer, Karzai hobnobbed with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Iran does not want the Taliban as a neighbor and if the United States exits Afghanistan then Taliban's usefulness to the Iranian regime in tying down American troops is at an end.
It is also worthwhile recalling that high Afghani officials have been visiting Russia who recently wiped off $12 billion of debt that Afghanistan owes Russia.
Russia has launched a series of infrastructure projects in Afghanistan and is prepared to provide affordable housing. Russia does not want a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan because it fears the penetration of Islamic ideas and Afghani heroin into Russia. Additionally, Afghanistan can help connect India to Russian energy supplies.