So we're evidently going to debate the unknowable: the meaning of the last words of a dying man to his Pakistani doctor, saying that "you" (the doctor? Pakistan? The U.S.? Humanity?) has to stop the war in Afghanistan. Count me among those who think he meant one of the latter pair, but that's debate is largely incidental. The words of the week that matter came from Hamid Karzai.
As reported by Barb here yesterday, those words were:
[Karzai] told them that he now has three "main enemies" - the Taliban, the United States and the international community.
"If I had to choose sides today, I'd choose the Taliban," he fumed.
That's important to know. The other part to know is that, in context, the manic-depressive Karzai isn't crazy.
I went to the original story in the WaPo and found that this was not simply a matter of Karzai being a manic-depressive, as was broadly hinted yesterday on NPR. He was pissed off for a reason.
For more than an hour, Gen. David H. Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry and other top Western officials in Kabul urged Karzai to delay implementing a ban on private security firms. Reconstruction projects worth billions of dollars would have to be shuttered, they maintained, if foreign guards were evicted.
Sitting at the head of a glass-topped, U-shaped table in his conference room, Karzai refused to budge, according to two people with direct knowledge of the late October meeting. He insisted that Afghan police and soldiers could protect the reconstruction workers, and he dismissed pleas for a delay.
As he spoke, he grew agitated, then enraged. He told them that he now has three "main enemies" - the Taliban, the United States and the international community.
"If I had to choose sides today, I'd choose the Taliban," he fumed.
After a few more parting shots, he got up and walked out of the wood-paneled room.
That not wanting American contractors to do in Afghanistan what they did in Iraq doesn't sound so crazy, does it? And yet, it makes our strategy in Afghanistan politically and logistically impossible. Let's face that.
Karzai, in effect, wants us out if we insist on the terms we want to stay in. The Afghan people want us out -- although that's been true for some time.
The military wants us to stay, but as I wrote almost three years ago in my least successful diary ever (updated in the republication with Petraeus set in Afghanistan), the military is like a general contractor for construction: if you tell them to build something and give them an unlimited budget, they aren't going to tell you it's too expensive and it won't work, they're going to build it. That's their livelihood, after all.
So I have an idea.
When the House considers the tax cut monstrosity out of Senate, it can amend it this way:
Defund the war in Afghanistan
This will offset the cost of the tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. It's fiscally responsible. And it puts the choice that we're being asked to make in extremely stark terms: Pay for the war or end it.
Tying together these two issues may be too clever for the Democrats to do. On the other hand, Hamid Karzai, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell have now all declared themselves to be Obama's enemies. Maybe it's time to fire back.
After all, these are austere times, right?