Karzai and the Scent of American Irresolution

[Eupher]

From the Wall Street Journal:

By FOUAD AJAMI
'They do give us bags of money—yes, yes, it is done, we are grateful to the Iranians for this." This is the East, and baksheesh is the way of the world, Hamid Karzai brazenly let it be known this week. The big aid that maintains his regime, and keeps his country together, comes from the democracies. It is much cheaper for the Iranians. They are of the neighborhood, they know the ways of the bazaar.

The remarkable thing about Mr. Karzai has been his perverse honesty. This is not a Third World client who has given us sweet talk about democracy coming to the Hindu Kush. He has been brazen to the point of vulgarity. We are there, but on his and his family's terms. Bags of cash, the reports tell us, are hauled out of Kabul to Dubai; there are eight flights a day. We distrust the man. He reciprocates that distrust, and then some. Our deliberations leak, we threaten and bully him, only to give in to him. And this only increases his lack of regard for American tutelage. We are now there to cut a deal—the terms of our own departure from Afghanistan.

The idealism has drained out of this project. Say what you will about the Iraq war—and there was disappointment and heartbreak aplenty—there always ran through that war the promise of a decent outcome: deliverance for the Kurds, an Iraqi democratic example in the heart of a despotic Arab world, the promise of a decent Shiite alternative in the holy city of Najaf that would compete with the influence of Qom. No such nobility, no such illusions now attend our war in Afghanistan. By latest cruel count, more than 1,300 American service members have fallen in Afghanistan. For these sacrifices, Mr. Karzai shows little, if any, regard.

In his latest outburst, Mr. Karzai said the private security companies that guard the embassies and the development and aid organizations are killer squads, on a par with the Taliban. "The money dealing with the private security companies starts in the hallways of the U.S. government. Then they send the money for killing here," Mr Karzai said. It is fully understood that Mr. Karzai and his clan want the business of the contractors for themselves.

Balance at link.

I'm not sure if this link will work, since I'm a paid subscriber. But I'll try:

WSJ

Karzai has always played both ends against the middle, but it would appear he's leaning more toward the "other" end.

This kind of shit lends one to think that trying to play nice with guys like this invariably result in the U.S. getting the short end of the stick.

[DumbAss Tanker]

"Guys like this" are the only kind of guys you can deal with in Afghanistan if you want to get anything done. 

The idea that we can deal only with stalwart clean-fingered defenders of democracy, given the force of law by Congress in the intelligence realm, is exactly why we have no surviving credible HUMINT operation in the entire Middle East.

With Obummer's vague-but-extraction-ASAP-oriented war policy, he'd be an idiot to even pretend to play the role of a democratic idealist...an idiot with a very short life expectancy.

[Eupher]

Karzai is the only available option right now, but just how do you reconcile a guy who hands you the short end of the stick all the time? Just suck it up and drive on? The end game is more important, even though you're swimming upstream against a 40 mph current?

What's he bringing to the party that's so important? The fact he speaks English?

Is corruption such a staple throughout the world that we have no choice but to dance with the devil?

Shit reminds me of 1963 and dealing with Diem, another corrupt leech that played both ends against the middle.

[DumbAss Tanker]

Karzai is the only available option right now, but just how do you reconcile a guy who hands you the short end of the stick all the time? Just suck it up and drive on? The end game is more important, even though you're swimming upstream against a 40 mph current?

Well, what is the end game?  Bush wanted to turn Afghanistan into a somewhat-modern state that wouldn't execute schoolgirls for showing their faces, which paradoxically is exactly why the Russians went in there in the first place.  Stupid idea, really; the only thing that would actually work is to just get a Stone Age government in power that is hostile to AQ and less oppressive than the Taliban, and then keep it in power to prevent the place reverting to a jihadist sanctuary.  Obama's endgame seems to be full of just as much starry-eyed half-witted ideological rhetoric, but militarily and diplomatically structured for guaranteed failure, probably before he's even out of office.

What's he bringing to the party that's so important? The fact he speaks English?

Nothing, really.  But crooked or not, he won the election, and we put him in the position to do it in the first place.  So conversely, what are we bringing to the party that's so important to him or the Afghan warlords he has to deal with?  They all know we're tucking tail and running out on them as soon as we can pretend it's semi-graceful, and also that the NATO commitment without us is a tame kitten that will go home when it gets hungry.

Is corruption such a staple throughout the world that we have no choice but to dance with the devil?

Yes, but we can at least pick our devils.  The naive belief that the pre-industrial armpits of the world are frothing at the mouth to become democracies was Bush's big mistake.  Sure, they want to have the benefits of being a wealthy Western democracy, but that's not the same thing as actually being one.

Shit reminds me of 1963 and dealing with Diem, another corrupt leech that played both ends against the middle.

Yeah, our decision to stab Diem in the back worked out really well, didn't it?  Now South Viet Nam is the stable, established democracy and bastion against Communism we always dreamed of, right?

[Eupher]

Dunno about Bush's wanting to turn A-stan into anything but a launching pad to go after bin Laden. That's the pretense under which we went in to begin with so soon after 9/11. A sidebar attraction was getting rid of the Taliban, which has proved a difficult nut to crack.

I'd say the end game, from Zero's dithering perspective, is to hang on long enough to pretend that something got accomplished, then exit declaring "victory". Puts Petraeus in a very awkward position, not that he isn't accustomed to that. In fact, Petraeus is the element that keeps the whole shooting match from becoming another Vietnam - as a student of history, he knows all too well what happened with Westmoreland.

No question that Diem's assassination mired us deeper into 'Nam, but it's debatable as to how much. Since he got offed shortly before JFK himself was offed, it could be argued that LBJ's irascible nature was the real catalyst - after he won the 1964 elections, of course, which most definitely was a priority.

There's a lot of backchannel shit we're not privy to, natcherly, and while Zero is already on record with wagging his mocha-flavored finger at Karzai for corruption during the latest "election" (kinda hard to really use that word, since it denotes that the people did the talking, but anyway), it's pointless to continue that practice.

In essence, Zero's waltzing with Karzai and if Zero had some balls (which he does not), he'd find a way to ratchet up the diplomatic pressure -- not that that would do any good whatsoever.

The diplomats are accustomed to dirty dealing, backstabbing, and other methods of "working with your coalition partners".

I guess the part that sticks in my craw is that he's so blatant about sucking I'manutjob's crank, in addition to Zero's. Tell you the truth, I'm kinda surprised to see that Karzai's still alive. He's pissed off a lot of people on both sides of the fence and, like Pusharraf in P-stan, he's been in the center of crosshairs for a very long time.

[DumbAss Tanker]

The sucker is a grand old-timer by Afghan standards, way beyond the life expectancy of your normal Afghan leader.  It's looking a lot like he knows a Hell of a lot more about how to survive and prosper there than anyone in our Department of State wants to give him credit for...probably a Hell of a lot more than any of them actually understand about how to make things happen there, for that matter.