Now it's a fact that Afghan leader Hamid Karzai doesn't have a whole lot of credibility with Americans. His flakiness is legendary, and the fact that we have our men and women losing their lives for his government is a bitter pill to swallow for many who feel the U.S. effort will never pay off in the end.
Karzai's erratic behavior, manifested last summer when he said he might join the Taliban (and which prompted former United Nations diplomat Peter Galbraith a year ago to suggest the president might be on drugs) is reason enough to believe that he is not the leader that the U.S. and their allies in Afghanistan can have any confidence in.
But his supporters would say he is in an incredibly tenuous situation, trying to appease the Americans and his own people, who in some cases very much resent a foreign power having 100,000 military troops in their presence.
This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2011.