Mike,

I doubt very much that GIRoA as we have helped create and sustain over the past 11 years will last long after we leave. It was never a sustainable model to begin with, but then the Northern Alliance core of GIRoA has always known that, even if we have deluded ourselves by the trappings of modern governance that we have draped over it.

The Northern Alliance is dedicated to the exclusion of Taliban influence, or more accurately, the Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek minorities will make any compromise - to include allowing US-led NATO forces occupy their land in pursuit of defeat, deny, disruption of AQ - to the end of not being second to the Pashtun majority. Similarly those Pashtun tribes out of patronage under the Taliban were quick to sign up with the Northern Alliance to turn those tables as well.

After all in a patronage society such as Afghanistan, there is no second place. Particularly under the clever constitution we help Mr Karzai and his inner circle put in place. The constitution takes traditional patronage and centralizes and elevates it as never seen before in Afghanistan. The Loya Jirga members reacted with outrage to this concept, but deals were made and the document was ratified. Western analysts by and large lauded it as a great advance toward modernity and democracy. In reality it was a grand scheme to control the country and exclude the return of any influence of those so recently excluded.

For the Taliban government in exile this was the throwing down of the proverbial gauntlet. The revolutionary insurgency began to grow as soon as the Constitution became a reality. No longer could they just bide their time for the foreigners to leave and regain power through traditional means. The rest is history, we countered the revolution, and those actions began to grow a resistance among average, apolitical Afghans increasingly affected by our COIN efforts. The Revolutionaries provided support to the resistance, we conflated both as one in our mind, and continued to pile in more and more effort to "defeat" what we had in many ways created.

Better we just pull the plug. Not pull the plug as in leaving, but pull the plug on that damn constitution. We should tell Mr. Karzai that we will agree to all of his demands regarding his sovereignty immediately if does one simple thing: Follow through on his promise to hold a true reconciliation and constitutional loya jirga. The new constitution can take many forms, but it needs to ensure fundamental rights in the context of this culture, it needs to guarantee quotas of power across the major groups, it probably also needs to disempower the central government with a central army and put the majority of power down to the province level to governors with regionally recruited and operating national guard forces. IE, something sustainable and closer to the context of the place.

The constitution is the key, and yet we not only don't see that, we do the opposite. We continue to protect and laud that document.