Ex-mayor?

It's looking like in addition to surging escalating the Afghan war with 30,000 more troops, the US is thinking about dumping Kabul mayor Karzai in the near future.

First, there was the head of the NATO forces putting the blame for failure on Karzai's government. Naturally the possibility that some fault might belong to NATO and the US was not even mentioned.

Then Obama met with four rivals to Karzai, before talking to the ostensible leader of the nation in question. The only good thing about this is that the notion of having Khalilzad take over (after performing a Vulcan mind meld with Condaleezza Rice) has been dropped. Let's not get too weird here.

M K Bhadrakumar thinks that dumping Karzai is not going to be as easy as most reporters seem to think (or are told to think). He points out that Karzai is already fighting back:

On Tuesday, Karzai utilized the opening of the Afghan parliament's winter session in Kabul to criticize the United States-led coalition for its conduct of the war, its manner of bypassing his government as if it was inconsequential as a source of Afghan authority, its patronage of "warlords", the corruption and waste in its aid programs and its condoning of drug trafficking.

He also had his UN ambassador raise the issue of Afghan control of the war at the UN Security Council.

Meanwhile, both France and Germany seem reluctant to add more forces to Afghanistan. Thus the war seems to be becoming a US/British affair, like Iraq, with a few toadies like the Dutch hanging on for a while.

Despite his vows of transparency, I've heard no clear delineation of policy by Obama that would justify the current course of greater death and destruction to achieve some illusory victory that has never been defined. Maybe if he tried to do so, it might occur to him that there might be better ways to move forward. We shall see.