Hamid Karzai is our guy, the head of the government we created in Afghanistan, and the only horse we have any bets on. Our success in the region hangs on this mega-corrupt leader of a dangerous narco-state, the hotbed of radical Islam dedicated to the total destruction of Israel and of course, the United States. After all, it was the launching platform for the devastating 9/11/2001 attacks on the Pentagon and the Twin Towers. The re-election effort that continued Emperor Karzai’s reign was so plagued with mud that almost everyone familiar with the process believes the results to be completely bogus – false balloting, fictitious voters and corrupt election officials; Karzai missed nothing in railroading the results. His pockets, and those of his cronies and relatives, are heavy with siphoned and purloined cash – revenue sharing with those who are hated by the local people, bribes of the worst kind. NATO allies have pushed for a clean-up; Karzai has rejected their entreaties.
Karzai sees the writing on the wall. With NATO forces clearly destined to leave in the not-too-distant future, Karzai has cards to play to fight his way to sustaining his revenue flow before, sooner or later, he and his family will be forced to flee to sanctuary somewhere else… somewhere else with a few very fat Swiss bank accounts. The players: the United States and its NATO allies, China, Iran, Pakistan and the Taliban.
Citing Karzai’s verbal threats against the West (“If you and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban”), the April 5th New York Times summed up the situation: “There are no good options on the horizon, many analysts say, for reining in Mr. Karzai or for penalizing him, without potentially damaging Western interests. The reluctant conclusion of diplomats and Afghan analysts is that for now, they are stuck with him… Many fear the relationship is only likely to become worse, as Mr. Karzai draws closer to allies like Iran and China, whose interests are often at odds with those of the West, and sounds sympathetic enough to the Taliban that he could spur their efforts, helping their recruitment and further destabilizing the country… ‘The political situation is continuing to deteriorate; Karzai is flailing around,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul with long experience in the region. “At the moment we are propping up an unstable political structure, and I haven’t seen any remotely plausible plan for building consensus.’”
For NATO, threats and diplomatic pressures have had no results whatsoever. The attempt to create grassroots democracy as a counter to Taliban and Karzai dictatorial efforts has fallen flat on its face, as local tribal cabals (often under threat of Taliban violence) simply ignore this Western notion of government. The only viable path remaining is the withdrawal of NATO forces, which, of necessity, will surrender the embattled country to a mixture of warlord (and that now has to include Karzai himself) and Taliban control. They win; we lose, but unless we are prepared to multiply both the number of NATO troops in the region by double or triple… and commit to a very, very long presence in Afghanistan, this is not a country that we can realistically expect to control or stabilize.
So what are we actually doing? Continuing to pressure Karzai and threatening to leave? Not exactly. The April 10th New York Times tells us that the new administration policy is to try a “softer approach” with Karzai: “After more than a year of watching America’s ability to influence President Hamid Karzai ebb, Obama administration officials now admit privately that the tough-love approach Mr. Obama adopted when he came to power may have been a big mi stake… ‘There is a realization that public remonstrances and temper tantrums don’t work,’ said Bruce O. Riedel, an Afghanistan expert at the Brookings Institution who has worked with the administration on Afghan policy. ‘It brings out the worst in Karzai, while undermining support for the war effort in Congress, in the media, and in the public. If you disparage Karzai, you’re in effect saying the war cannot be won.’” Yeah, I guess we’re pretty good at catering to corrupt regimes that don’t reflect genuine popular support (just the virtual vote of a stuffed ballot box)… and painting ourselves into a “no-win” corner.
Meanwhile, the United States remains the high-profile target in the entire region. A blast outside the U.S. consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan (a very dangerous town) killed six and wounded 20 on April 5th. The Pakistanis also arrested a high-ranking Afghani Taliban at the behest of the U.S. – a token gesture – and immediately got assailed as hindering the Afghan peace process. And then there is this “other” news: as one Taliban operative is captured, the ISI (the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence directorate), which is notoriously sympathetic to Muslim fundamentalists, releases two other senior Afghan Taliban leaders. “The ISI wants ‘to be able to resort to the hard -power option of supporting groups that can take Kabul,’ the Afghan capital, if the United States suddenly leaves, said a U.S. military adviser briefed on the matter. The ISI’s relationship with the Afghan Taliban was forged under similar circumstances in the 1990s, when the spy service backed the fledgling Islamist movement as a solution to the chaos that followed the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Washington Post, April 10th. Pakistanis hate being in the middle of what they see as an American “war on terror” (despite Mr. Obama’s avoidance of this terminology), even as Taliban operatives threaten the Pakistani government as well.
So it comes down to the concept of throwing good money after bad at a time when domestic needs for money would seem to trump fighting a war backing a super-corrupt and hated government that has no loyalty to us anyway. We are not even putting ourselves into an enhanced bargaining position with the Taliban with our efforts, as some would have hoped. And yes, we know that if we withdraw, whatever chaotic governance remains in Afghanistan will probably be hostile to the United States, but if they believe that they can launch attacks against Americans and American assets without recrimination, they should remember both our capacity for mass retaliation (although nuclear weapons are now officially off the table for nations that comply with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) and our capacity to remove threats with surgical precision; those drone strikes have truly sapped al Qaeda forces in the Tribal District of Pakistan. We just cannot let these dark forces destroy or degrade us by a constant drain on our economy, the lives of our soldiers… and mostly, a drain on our spirit.
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