Bad news from Afghanistan

On several fronts, but it all comes back to Karzai. Jackson Diehl writes that in Kandahar, the US military:

…has stepped back from an initial push to challenge the entrenched and corrupt local power structure headed by Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. It has decided not to deploy U.S. troops in the city itself, other than military police working with Afghans. It has not moved to disarm, or even to cut off the Western funding of local militias — some of them controlled by the Karzai family. The result is that U.S. forces are seen by many Afghans as merely reinforcing what amounts to a local mafia that is not necessarily preferable to the Taliban.

Hanging over all these complexities, and driving some of them, is Obama’s imposition of a timeline on the Afghan surge: first a review of its progress this December, followed by the beginning of troop withdrawals in July 2011. The perception that the clock is ticking on the U.S. mission pushes Karzai toward building and defending his own family network, and favoring aides who can talk to Pakistan — and maybe the Taliban — over those close to the United States. It forces McChrystal to focus on producing easier and positive-looking results in the next few months, rather than committing to harder and longer-term solutions. It fuels continuing acrimony among military commanders, who believe the timetable is folly, and State Department and White House civilians, who regard it as the key to Obama’s policy.

None of this means the war is lost. Thanks to Obama’s commitment of 30,000 more troops and billions in economic aid, success remains entirely possible. But as the summer comes on, and Washington occupies itself with other issues, the trend lines in Afghanistan do not look good.