Is Karzai Trustworthy?

When Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan, sensed that the tides were beginning to turn against him, he resorted to playing the “Ahmadinejad’s -no-to-foreign- occupiers” card against the US. The fact that he has found the ability to condemn the US and its allies as a “foreign presence” in his country goes to show that our problem with the Taliban has now expanded into the political realm: The hardest part of this war, paradoxically, isn't the fighting on the ground, which the U.S. military conducts brilliantly, but the struggle in the Afghan political sphere, where we know precious little, says David Ignatius of the Washington Post.

The mistake we made in Iraq, as in the Philippines a hundred years ago, as in Afghanistan, of transferring power to unready, unenlightened leaderships not habituated in the ways of self-rule will always doom the republican project. If we're more concerned about issues of national sovereignty over self-rule in places like Afghanistan, we will always leave behind a sovereign but a failed state. To succeed, Afghanistan will need leaders educated in the principles of republicanism, with insight into how to shape a local culture and a debilitating ideology into a new tradition that advances individual rights and liberties and the rule of law as the government’s core principles.

But that would be asking too much of a country torn by ethnic and religious strifes and which is ruled by corrupt leaders who rule in the interest of themselves. At best, we can only approximate that ideal by lending support to someone who has a good sense of what is right for his country. Karzai has just revealed his true color. He seems weak, gives in to Iranian pressure, and has yet to prove that he has the Afghans’ interest at heart. Here is a measure of a good Afghan leader: does he rule in the interest of his people or does he rule for himself? If Karzai knew what was best for his country, he would not have picked up a fight with the US.

Far from achieving the republican ideal, the seeming alternatives left for Afghanistan are: a) a return of the Taliban; b) an escalation of ethnic wars to the point where tribes cancel each other out; or c) finding a leader who has a good sense of what is right for his country and is willing to act on it.