I think letting this thinking get out is incredibly stupid:
U.S. President Barack Obama will get tough with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in a bid to focus on the U.S. combat mission there, administration sources say.
In a break with the Bush administration, Obama views Karzai's government as corrupt and believes its failures are contributing to a resurgence of Afghanistan's drug trade and the comeback of the Taliban insurgency, unnamed senior administration officials told Wednesday's New York Times.
If rivals of Karzai think this is a green light to abandon elections as a means to power, whoever takes over will be viewed as "our man" and we will own Afghanistan. Remember the "Pottery Barn rule" that liberals once said about Iraq in the summer of 2003? You break it, you own it?
This is just idiotic. Does anybody remember Diem? For a group of people enthralled with reliving the Vietnam War protest era, they sure do seem committed to recreating it somewhere. They failed to lose the war in Iraq. Is Afghanistan their Vietnam Experience Tour now? Do we really want to own Afghanistan and push the Afghans aside to fight the Taliban?
The proper response to an ineffective central government is not to put somebody else in charge at the center, expecting a miracle worker. Given Afghanistan's history, the correct response is to minimize the role of the corrupt central government to focus on the (admittedly corrupt) provincial and local leaders. At least the latter approach means stolen money is dispersed throughout the country rather than staying in Kabul and making the place a coup magnet. Even if we could find an "Afghan Thomas Jefferson," the central government is not the place for such a man. And keeping Afghans in the fight is the key. We can't alienate them or make them passive viewers of a war they care nothing about.
Don't own Afghanistan. We won't like what we buy. And nobody in their right mind can think this administration or its supporters will pay the price.
