Afghan blues in Washington, D.C.

Everyone needs a break from Afghanistan every now and again, and I was greatly enjoying my own. But no sooner did I wash up in our nation’s capital than Afghan President Hamed Karzai appeared here, too. Top news of the day in D.C. is the complicated relationship between Karzai and the U.S. president.

It is now all but universally acknowledged that Karzai will win the elections in August. This is certainly curious — just a few months ago he was on political life support, as unpopular in his own country as he was in the American corridors of power. Now it seems he can’t be beat.

That is largely the fault of a disorganized, hopelessly divided opposition, who prefer to squabble among themselves rather than mount a spirited challenge to the disgraced Afghan incumbent. The United States, as well, seems to have decided that there is no alternative, and cannot risk instability as the Obama “strategy” kicks into high gear this summer.

So the new thinking appears to be “if you cannot take the president out of the country, take the country away from the president.”

There are persistent rumors that the United States is going to carve Afghanistan up into more manageable chunks, dealing with local strongmen rather than a central government.

This will go under the rubric “local empowerment,” but make no mistake — it is a last-ditch, desperate attempt to thwart the insurgency by bringing back the leaders of Afghanistan’s brutal and bloody civil war, the men we know as “the Northern Alliance” and the Afghans, with a shudder, just call “the warlords.”

Some leaders have already been identified. None of this is official, of course, but names such as Ismail Khan, Gul Agha Sherzai, and Atta Mohammad Noor have been bandied about. They will have their own budgets, their own relationship with Washington, their own power and influence. Karzai will be the president, but it is by no means clear what his constituency will look like. He used to be called “the Mayor of Kabul.” That may now become fact as well as perception.

It may work, after a fashion; the local “emirs” have an effective, if somewhat heavy-handed, way of dealing with dissent, and they just may be able to create something that passes for stability in discrete areas.

Afghanistan, per se, will all but cease to exist. Just as well we have abandoned the idea of “nation-building” as a justification for our presence.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/general/090506/afghan-blues-washington-dc