It turns out that high-stakes great-power diplomacy is a lot like middle school. And Brokeback Mountain too, although possibly that’s just a cheap hook.
Yesterday a bunch of very important people stopped by Hamid Karzai’s place in Kabul, Afghanistan. Among them was Hilary Clinton. The subject of the conference was how to arrive at a point where the outcome of the probably-eventually-15-year-war could be considered a success, if one doesn’t look too closely.
Clinton doesn’t like Karzai. Some of the other attendees don’t like him either, but Clinton’s dislike is untempered by anything other than the knowledge that she’s stuck with him. She doesn’t like that his government is so riddled with corruption that corruption is the only thing holding it together. She doesn’t like that the US wasn’t able to force him out of office before he stole the most recent presidential election. She doesn’t like that he’s going to steal the next election, in which seats in the parliament and local governments are at stake.
And she doesn’t like him because, strangely, he would rather cut a deal with the Taliban rather than get killed by them when everybody who doesn’t live there gets bored with Afghanistan and turns it over to the Taliban and Pakistan’s intelligence services. Clinton doesn’t want to cut a deal with the Taliban, probably because it would make the US look stupid, and certainly because her life isn’t a stake.
Karzai has been pushing for talks with the Taliban for maybe three years now. The Bush administration was totally opposed to the notion. Clinton is too, but she did come around to the idea of “reintegrating” rank and file Taliban soldiers into society, by which is meant paying them to turn in their weapons. It’s a charming notion except most of them probably already are pretty well integrated into society; it’s just that their job is shooting at foreigners and the Afghanis who support them rather than running roadside attractions where there aren’t any roads.
Anyway, at this most recent confabulation, Karzai and the more rational Great Powers of the West finally persuaded Clinton that negotiating with the Taliban is okay, sort of, except the US doesn’t want to talk to them in person; they want to pass notes through third and fourth parties asking if the Taliban like the idea, or like like the idea.
Meanwhile, Clinton has adopted the line about Obama’s 2011 cut’n'run date being only the beginning of a process that will end only when the country is stable and secure, which hasn’t happened in forty years or so and isn’t going to happen now, but neither does teen love last forever, usually.
Karzai was happy to hear about the 2011 thing being just a sort of aspiration rather than a genuine thing, and has proposed 2014 as the date when the US and NATO and whoever else is mucking about over there can turn the country over to him and his miraculously made competent and nationwide security forces. Apparently this is more or less okay with Clinton, but she’s probably aware that there is not the slightest chance that that will actually happen.
This round goes to Karzai. As has every round since 2002, and as will every round until he dies. But Clinton and the US president don’t really mind so much, as they will be calling upon US citizens to make the tough choices and quit eating and going to doctors so that the sociopaths who run the country can continue killing tinted people in far off places to keep Dwight Eisenhower’s nightmare intact.
For whatever reason, the press continue to treat this whole thing seriously at face value. The sociopaths love that; they suffer the occasional embarrassment, or are perceived to, and still get to do whatever they’re doing without any serious opposition. Which is what everybody agreed to do yesterday in Kabul. So check in again in about four years, when we will be no more than three years from turning the country over to the Afghanis or their heirs or designates.
