President Obama keeps saying that he intends to win the war in Afghanistan. "There will be difficult days ahead, but I am absolutely confident that we will succeed," he promised in this year's State of the Union address. And yet his administration is undermining its own chances of success by constantly criticizing, weakening, and undercutting America's only credible partner in the country, Hamid Karzai.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the Afghan president is ineffective and corrupt. Even if the allegations are all true, there's an overriding reason to support him: there is no alternative. A foreign power can't hope to run a successful counterinsurgency campaign without a local ally who has at least a modicum of mass appeal. In Afghanistan, that means a major figure from the country's dominant ethnic group, the Pashtuns, and one who's willing to make common cause with the United States.
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