It seems like everyone involved in Afghanistan policy is pulling a different direction. To name just a few: General McChrystal wants a major troop increase, Robert Gates has flipped positions, Biden is skeptical, and Hamid Karzai is preoccupied with the fate of Hamid Karzai. Click through this TNR slideshow for a catalogue of who wants what in Afghanistan

As is often the case with tales of great discovery, the details of how buried treasure came to be found beneath the rolling countryside of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, have grown a little gauzy over the last 30 years. But here is the story as the prospectors tell it. One day, in March 1979, a man named Byrd Berman, a geologist by training, was driving down a road through cattle pastures when the scintillometer sitting on the dashboard of his Hertz rental car began to beep.

On his way to Kabul, Secretary Gates accused Dr. A’jad and Iran of “playing a double game” in Afghanistan. And surely they are. Nonetheless, the administration which the secretary of defense serves has, if anything, encouraged this behavior. Most especially by not following through on any of its (in any case, namby-pamby) threats as Tehran carries on its relentless march to nuclear possession.

“Let’s talk about why you plan to kill me.” It was March 1987, and Milt Bearden was sitting in a spare interview room at the Islamabad headquarters of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Bearden was then the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, serving as the link between Washington and the U.S.-funded Afghan rebels bleeding the Soviets in Afghanistan. He had come to see the mujahedin’s most lethal warlord, a radical Islamist named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

In The Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan
By Seth G. Jones
(W.W. Norton, 414 pp., $27.95)

I.

With the war in Afghanistan hanging in the balance, it is useful, if a little sad, to recall just how complete the American-led victory was in the autumn of 2001. By December, the Taliban had vanished from Kabul, Kandahar, and much of the countryside. Afghans celebrated by flinging their turbans and dancing in the streets. They dug up TV sets, wrapped in plastic, from hiding places in their gardens. In Mullah Omar’s hometown of Sangesar, the locals broke into his madrassa and tore out the door frames for firewood. Among ordinary Afghans, there was a genuine sense of deliverance. The world, which had abandoned them more than a decade before, was coming back. 

In a New York Times op-ed today largely in support of Obama's Afghanistan plan, Nate Fick of the Center for a New American Security writes:

Progress depends on two political developments: inducing the administration of President Hamid Karzai to govern effectively, and persuading Pakistan that militant groups within its borders pose as great a threat to Islamabad as they do to Kabul.

Listening to Barack Obama explain his new strategy for Afghanistan tonight, you may have been struck by a sense of deja vu. Before a sea of somber West Point cadets, Obama invoked the grim memory of the September 11 attacks. He vowed that the days of “blank check" policymaking are over. He called al Qaeda a “cancer” that threatens the region and said he would not allow the group a safe haven there. He insisted that the U.S. would get tougher about corruption within the Karzai government and would extend a hand to low-level Taliban fighters willing to switch sides. He pledged to accelerate training of Afghan security forces and explained that doing so will allow our troops to return home.

If these points sounded familiar, it’s because Obama has made them all before. Go back and read the president’s March 27 speech explaining his first troop increase for Afghanistan; tonight’s speech often reads like a lightly rewritten version of that one, this time with 30,000 new troops substituted for 17,000, and new specifics about a date for beginning a U.S. withdrawal (namely, June of 2011).

This is not a complaint about self-plagiarism. It’s a compliment for Obama’s consistency and intellectual honesty. Back in March, Obama described his vision as “a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” That vision implied a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan—one which the Pentagon properly understood to require tens of thousands of more troops to implement. For a time this fall, White House officials fretted that General Stanley McChrystal’s troop request had given them a “sticker shock” which required a re-review of their strategy. But no one who understood the war, no one as smart as Obama, should have been surprised by McChrystal’s troop request.

Which is why it made sense for Obama’s speech tonight to reiterate his March vision. Sure, he could have cited declining political support for the war, and the fraud-tainted election of Hamid Karzai, and the still-precarious U.S. economy as reasons for changing his mind. It would have been hard to blame him. But Obama’s reiteration of his main talking points from March indicates that he believed what he was saying at the time and simply hasn’t seen anything dramatic enough in the past six months to change his mind.

The president beamed, the guests applauded. As Hamid Karzai was sworn in for his second term in office amid a throng of 800 international and domestic dignitaries on November 18, one could almost forget that his presidency is under a cloud, his international support hanging by a thread, and his domestic standing lower than ever. It was a stark difference from his first inauguration, in December 2004. Then, the U.S. vice president and defense secretary were both in attendance; the capital throbbed with hope; and, for just a little while, it seemed that Karzai was riding a wave of national and international approbation that nothing could stop. How did a man once hailed as the savior of Afghanistan become its scourge?

WASHINGTON--When there is no good solution to a problem, a president has three options. One is to avoid the problem. The second is to pick the least bad of the available options. The third is to mix and match among the proposed solutions and minimize the long-term damage any decision will cause.

Afghanistan has presented President Obama with exactly this situation, and he is soon likely to settle on something closest to the third approach. This will make no one very happy. Yet it might be the least dangerous choice.

The WaPo's Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports that the Obama administration has decided to try a little tenderness with Hamid Karzai:

I'm not sure how to assess Abdullah Abdullah's exit from the Afghan runoff election, which renders Hamid Karzai the unchallenged Afghan president. A runoff election certainly did promise to be tainted by the same fraud we saw last time around--quite likely more, in fact, given how fast they were slapping the plans together.

But it's a problem that Abdullah is not exiting on a conciliatory note. Today's Washington Post has this:

When John Kerry persuaded Hamid Karzai to agree to a run-off election, the New York Times correctly described this victory as "little more than a catastrophe averted." So how do you describe the situation as it exists now, with the run-off called off due to Abdullah Abdullah's withdrawal? I'd say it's a pretty big victory for Karzai, and not just because he's won himself another term.

This week, the New York Times reported that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, has been receiving payments from the CIA since 2001. It's an awkward situation, since most observers think Karzai is heavily involved in Southern Afghanistan's drug trade. However, it is not without precedent.

Overshadowed by John Kerry's embrace of a typically Kerry-ian middle-way strategy in Afghanistan was his response to a reporter's question about Hamid Karzai's alleged drug lord brother:

Ever since he helped convince Hamid Karzai last week to agree to a run-off election, John Kerry has become a critical player on Afghanistan policy to a degree that's surprising even for a chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Today, Kerry gave a speech on Afghanistan at the Council on Foreign Relations, in which he indicated that, while he thinks General McChrystal's counterinsurgency plan is too ambitious, he would support Obama sending some additional troops. A couple hours after the speech, in an interview with TNR, Kerry talked about how and why he believes Karzai has changed and what he considers his own role to be in working with the Obama administration.

As we now know, the Obama White House is re-examining some first-principle questions about the war in Afghanistan. How connected are al Qaeda and the Taliban? What would be the effect of ceding territory to the Taliban? How effective are drone strikes without a major troop presence to support them.

With the 2008 presidential campaign in full swing two summers ago, Joe Biden, then making his own bid for the White House, ridiculed Barack Obama on a momentous issue: Afghanistan. The occasion was an August 2007 speech by Obama outlining his plans to fight Al Qaeda, which included sending an influx of American troops and aid to the country. Later that day, Biden issued a snarky press release gloating about his own extensive record of pushing similar policies, and which cast Obama as a naïve newcomer. The release noted that the Delaware senator had co-authored the first law authorizing reconstruction aid to the country after the 2001 U.S. invasion and that Biden had recently been pushing both for more money and for more boots on the ground. "Biden Campaign Congratulates Sen. Obama for Johnny Come Lately Position," the release quipped.

This is the sort of thing that's awfully hard to explain to the American people:

It seems like everyone involved in Afghanistan policy is pulling in a different direction. To name just a few: General McChrystal wants a major troop increase, Robert Gates has flipped positions, Biden is skeptical, and Hamid Karzai is preoccupied with the fate of Hamid Karzai. Click through this TNR slideshow for a catalogue of who wants what in Afghanistan.

For the past several months Afghan president Hamid Karzai has been lashing out at NATO forces, complaining bitterly that civilian casualities were the result of Western indifference to Afghan lives and arguing (probably correctly, though unhelpfully) that such "collateral damage" was abetting the terrorists. But in his Kabul press conference yesterday, Karzai sang a different tune when asked about one of the biggest air strike foul-ups of the war:

Shiberghan, Afghanistan (one day before the election)—There was no mistaking the general’s “castle.” Its pastel-colored two-storey walls and lapis cupolas shocking amidst the drabness of the surrounding neighborhood. Somewhere inside the compound was General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the most notorious of Afghanistan’s warlords. In almost three decades as a militia leader, Dostum has earned a reputation for ruthless brutality towards enemies, as well as an opportunist’s disregard for alliances, which have shifted without notice. Days earlier, he had returned from Turkey after a yearlong absence brought on by charges that he had his men beat up a powerful rival. But a last-second deal with President Karzai in exchange for his ethnic Uzbek vote bank (he claimed he’d deliver two million votes) allowed Dostum to come back, offering a vital shot in the arm for the president hours before Afghans went to vote.

With the Afghan elections over, accusations of voter fraud are being made by President Hamid Karzai's top challenger, Abdullah Abdullah. The alleged abuses range from reporting higher turnout, to ballot stuffing, to sympathetic generals using their own houses as polling stations. Of course, such shenanigans are hardly new in the history of voting.

With the Afghan elections over, accusations of voter fraud emanating from the office of President Hamid Karzai's top challenger, Abdullah Abdullah. The alleged abuses range from reporting higher turnout, to ballot stuffing, to sympathetic generals using their own houses as polling stations. Of course, such shenanigans are hardly new in the history of voting. Click through this slideshow for a tour of some notable election frauds.

Yesterday the BBC reported that Obama's Af-Pak point man Richard Holbrooke had an "explosive" and "dramatic" confrontation with Afghan President Hamid Karzai over reports of widespread voter fraud in Afghanistan's August 20 election.