Treating Karzai Like a Bad Smell

Here’s a rigorously reported piece on the history of the relationship between the United States and Afghan President Hamid Karzai — as you’ll see from the piece, we only have a U.S.-Afghan relationship as a derivative effect — from Rajiv Chandrasekaran. It suggests this must be a perplexing time for Karzai: he spent the last seven years being alternatively cultivated by the Bush administration and providing it with a fig leaf, so to see the Obama administration being unimpressed with him and seemingly unwilling to change its perspective on him has to be difficult to understand. According to Chandrasekaran, now that it appears unlikely that anyone will successfully dislodge Karzai from office in the summer’s elections, the Obama administration’s approach will be to treat him as irrelevant:

Obama intends to maintain an arm’s-length relationship with Karzai in the hope that it will lead him to address issues of concern to the United States, according to senior U.S. government officials. The administration will also seek to bypass Karzai by working more closely with other members of his cabinet and by funneling more money to local governors.

Time will tell whether this amounts to irresponsibility. But it seems egregious to write off the probably reelected president of a major ally while fighting a war in his country, even if he’s failed to demonstrate his capability to govern responsibly. It would be nice to think that the administration’s approach is to broaden the U.S.-Karzai relationship into a U.S.-Afghan relationship. But it’s not like the governors of Afghanistan are a bunch of enlightened technocrats and statesmen. They’re people like Gul Agha Shirzai — warlords-turned-governors. In a country with a weak central government and limited history of competent central governance, efforts to rebalance the relationship between the capitol and the provinces by well-intentioned foreign actors can easily end up as destabilizing vectors.

I defer to Joshua Foust, but it doesn’t take a Karzai apologist (or Bush apologist) to start wondering if the administration’s approach to Karzai isn’t beginning to seem like anything-but-Bush-ism.