Interview: Zalmay Khalilzad

If the Karzai government is so corrupt, how can we support it? If, by supporting the Karzai government, we actually push the Afghans into the Taliban camp, then what is the point? The national Afghan army appears to be going no where -- so why are we even trying? What we likely need to do is find responsible local actors at all levels in Afghanistan and support them. If at some local level, the Afghan people see that we are serious about improving there lot, then maybe there is a small chance of success. Bur even this is fraught with difficult as even local actors need some element of security in order to operate. So how is that to be accomplished? Bribe local militias, as we attempted to do in Iraq? Do local militias exist in sufficient strength to oppose the Taliban? Of course, local militias will likely be backed by local warlords, so we end up supporting another despised element of Afghan society. I'm not confident that there is any good way forward. Show us how it will succeed, Mr. Khalilzad.

Karzai may only serve as a way for Obama to get himself out of this mess. If LBJ was still around he would tell Obama to get out now, or he will never get out.

Obama must know by now that he made a mistake when he made this his war by sending more troops. It was a mistake because he didn't know that the kind of mission he wanted took a minimum of 150,000 troops, and even that wouldn't do the mission in less then ten years.

My guess is that Obama won't send more troops but he can't just get out. Of course he looks bad no matter what he does, but guess what he will look like two years from now and 100,000 more troops. This means that Congress can spend endless hours debating Obama's war. That's not good but at least he makes a decision that his people will like and one that delays the real decision.

This should all coincide with the Taliban doing something horrific, like a kidnapping, and putting the whole mess on the front page. It will just get worse in the short term as the Taliban ramp up their attacks before winter. Winter is not good for our boys or their equipment giving the Taliban a slight advantage in the current type of mission.

Blame it on Karzai and quit talking about more troops. What you have is what you got. Make a mission out of that. That will get Obama to springtime and nothing can be done until then anyway. We need to kill the real bad guys and figure out a way to live with the Taliban. Afghanistan is not a place for foreigners and that is not about to change. Isn't this the "Domino" thing again?

The question for Obama is, do you take the pain now or spread it out over the next four years? There are no good answers, just like there is no good way out.

The ambassador's suggestion that things went wrong when the US government was dealing with the Karzai government is a gallant piece of misdirection. Mr Karzai initially stood for election against a former president of Afghanistan and a former king of the nation. Both mysteriously withdrew from the campaign leaving this man comparatively unknown to the Afghan people an easy winner.

Whether Washington paid his rivals to quit is still open to conjecture. Certainly, Washington supplied him with a 100% American bodyguard after he won office, somewhat reminiscent of what the British used to do with some of its puppet princelings in colonial nations. His main charms even at the time seemed to have been that he spoke English well, and had been a consultant for a US oil firm.

How these things qualified him to be the president of Afghanistan post-9/11 is something that only some US neocons could be expected to explain. How even Washington could ever have expected him to be a worthy president of his nation is also mysterious -- he presented a puppet image which more or less guaranteed that Afghans would see him as the tool of a foreign nation.

In any case, many of the franker reporters covering Afghanistan since 2002 have suggested a more accurate title for his position would be that he's mayor of the city of Kabul, and not necessarily all of that. Under these circumstances, any attempt to nail the misdoings of Mr Karzai and his government on whatever President Obama has done, is doing, will do about Afghanistan is pure nonsense. The rot set in even before Mr Karzai was first elected president, and was on florid display years before President Obama was elected..

Kunino, nice to see someone on the planet is awake. You don't claim to have the answer but you appear to have seen the problem clearly.