These are troubled times in Afghanistan, and when Hamid Karzai talks to America his turbaned head must spin like the blazes, for he confronts a cast of interlocutors that is daunting in its numbers and inquisitorial in its temper.
Who are President Karzai’s inquisitors? Well, there’s Barack Obama for starters, who owns the Good War, and Joe Biden, who dabbles in it; there’s Robert Gates, the Defense secretary, whose department oversees the theater; Jim Jones, the national security adviser; Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s Mr. Fix-It for AfPak, who sees himself as Gulliver in Lilliput; Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, a man not without a viceregal itch; and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commands U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
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