loya jirga: then and now

When the Taliban assembled a loya jirga, all Western media mocked it and ridiculed it.  But when Hamid Karzai assembled his loya jirga purely to accord a fake political legitimacy on his security agreement with the US, Western media treated the event with utmost respect and even pretended that the unelected cronies of Karzai are somehow representatives of the Afghan people. In fact, I would argue that Karzai is more anti-democratic than the Taliban.