If you want to believe that Karzai is the reason (not "a" reason, but THE reason) why we're not going to be able to leave Afghanistan, OK, believe

Afghanistan's President Karzai -- so he's the problem?

"We are committed in Afghanistan. We are not ready to leave Iraq. In both countries our friends are in trouble. The pride of American arms is at stake. The world is watching. To me the logic of events seems inescapable. To me the logic of events seems inescapable. Unless something quite unexpected happens, four years from now the presidential candidates will be arguing about two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one going into its ninth year, the other into its eleventh. The choice will be the one Americans hate most -- get out or fight on."

--Thomas Powers, in the May 29 New York Review of Books

So there I was, perusing the NYT home page, and there it was. The kind of story you expect to see on a news-dump Saturday. The editors get credit for running it ("See, see," they will be able to say, "we didn't let the ball drop"), nobody will pay much attention ("But how could we have known?" we'll all say), and everyone is happy. Happy that it's Saturday, anyway.

No, not "Job Losses and Surge in Oil Spread Gloom on Economy." We could all have seen that one coming, right? No, what caught my eye, to the sound of the Dragnet theme (DUM da-DUM dum), was:

As Ills Persist, Afghan Leader Is Losing Luster
By HELENE COOPER
Concern is growing that Hamid Karzai, long a darling of the U.S., is not up to addressing his country’s troubles.

It was just a matter of time, right? So let's take a peek:

June 7, 2008

As Ills Persist, Afghan Leader Is Losing Luster
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON -- After six years in which Hamid Karzai has been the darling of the United States and its allies, his luster may be fading.

Next week, Mr. Karzai, the Afghan president, is to arrive in Paris for a donors conference with attendees from 80 countries and organizations. He will ask for $50 billion to finance a five-year development plan intended to revive Afghanistan's decrepit farming sector, promote economic development and diversify the economy away from its heavy reliance on opium.

But there is a growing concern in Europe, the United Nations and even the Bush administration that Mr. Karzai, while well-spoken, colorful and often larger than life, is not up to addressing Afghanistan's many troubles.

A senior State Department official questioned whether Mr. Karzai had the "trust and the backbone" for the job.

"Of course he's a good guy, and therefore as long as he's president we'll support him," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue. "But there's a lot of talk inside the administration saying maybe there's a need for some tough love to push him to do the right thing."

By all means, read on. Me, I'll come to back to it later. Maybe. After all, it's Saturday.

Back on Memorial Day -- another news-dump day if there ever was one -- I dumped some alarming quotes by Thomas Powers, from the New York Review of Books piece referenced at the top, into a post I'm afraid may have been sidestepped as another piece of Bush-bashing. So I've dusted off Powers' gloomy conclusion up top.

Now, if you're reading DWT, chances are you're well aware -- unlike, say, Chimpy the Prez -- that the situation in Afghanistan has been deteriorating rapidly since the Bush regime foreign-policy geniuses began diverting their attention, and our resources, to the war they were really itching to fight, in Iraq. That one's gone pretty well too, right?

The thing is, most of us learned as children this fundamental lesson:

It is way easier to make a mess than to clean one up.

Alas, this is one of the infinite number of basic human lessons that Tiny George Bush somehow never managed to learn. Nor, apparently, did the fake-intellectual geniuses who fester in the neocon think tanks.

Because Thomas Powers is familiar with history -- unlike the big neocon babies, to whom there is no past and virtually no present, just a cockamamie distopic future that exists only in their demented adolescent brains -- he is especially disdainful of the blundering in Afghanistan. Oh, there's plenty of history in Iraq too, history that anybody with a working brain would have taken account of before laying waste to the place without an inkling of an idea how to fix it or how to get the hell out of it. But Afghanistan?

As Powers points out, every outside power that has cockily blundered into Afghanistan, taken over Kabul, and thought, "Y'know, that wasn't so difficult," has learned soon enough that in fact it's quite difficult. The British managed to learn the lesson twice, and how long ago was it that the Soviets learned it even more spectacularly?

In making his gloomy forecast that four years from now we're likely to be still trying to figure out how to extract ourselves from our Middle East entanglements, Powers wrote a paragraph that still haunts me. He's talking here specifically about Iraq, and how a situation that seems still somehow manageable can go wrong:

At first, perhaps, all runs smoothly. Then things begin to happen. The situation on the first day has altered by the tenth. Some faction of Iraqis joins or drops out of the fight. A troublesome law is passed, or left standing. A helicopter goes down with casualties in two digits. The Green Zone is hit by a new wave of rockets or mortars from Sadr City in Baghdad. The US Army protests that the rockets or mortars were provided by Iran. The new president warns Iran to stay out of the fight. The government in Tehran dismisses the warning. This is already a long-established pattern. Why should we expect it to change? So it goes. At an unmarked moment between the third and the sixth month a sea change occurs: Bush's war becomes the new president's war, and getting out means failure, means defeat, means rising opposition at home, means no second term. It's not hard to see where this is going.

And with that ringing in my ears, I read stuff like this in the paper (yes, I admit, I did read Ms. Cooper's piece to the end):

A senior United States military officer in Afghanistan said that the disillusionment with Mr. Karzai was palpable among the wide swath of people he dealt with, including allied military and civilian officials. "Their message is consistent," the officer said in an e-mail message, speaking on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivity. "He's a weak leader."

Frustration over corruption and ineffectiveness in Mr. Karzai's government has grown within Afghanistan as well in recent years. In 2006, for instance, members of the Afghan Parliament signed a measure of protest over the government's poor performance and the low quality of some of Mr. Karzai's appointments.

Western diplomats said that Afghan drug lords and warlords had bought the freedom they exercise throughout the country by bribing members of Mr. Karzai's government.

Gen. James L. Jones, a former NATO commander in Afghanistan who now works as one of Mr. Bush's Middle East envoys, said that while the NATO forces military had been making some strides against insurgents, no amount of additional troops would counter the Afghan government's inability to rein in corruption and the country's exploding opium cultivation.

"The Karzai government, which is benefiting so much from the sacrifice, in both treasure and lives, by so many countries, needs to show more willingness to meet the expectations of the international community," General Jones said in an interview. "This is particularly true with regard to reversing the nation's economic dependency on narcotics, battling corruption within the government and championing judicial reform as a matter of national security."

Oh, I don't doubt that Karzai is a problem, but is he the problem in Afghanistan?

DUM da-DUM dum.

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