I think there is a very big disconnect between what America really is and what the nickel tour perception is.

Try to build a regional mall or a muslin cultural center anywhere in the US,or, as a school staff, propose redistricting school boundaries in an affluent area, and you will rapidly learn how much active local governments, communities and neighborhoods actually exist, along with their diffuse powers and interests.

The US, in itself, is a highly-fragmented and locally-distributed form of governance, gridded by a relatively recent Great Society "carrots-and-sticks" structure that, in certain fields, serves to harmonize specific ranges of activity by minimum standards, enabling compliances, or mandated bodies and procedures.

Wheel back to just the 1950s, and you could not easily drive from Washington to Norfolk without scratching your way past one speed trap town after another. It was safer, cheaper, easier to take the Night Boat down the Potomac. All this village-by-village, tribe-by-tribe value capture stuff only left the stage after the Interstate Highway system came into play, with many federal "harmonizing" rules and structures taking the steam out of localism for Interstate commerce.

Oh, how we Americans forget/ignore basic lessons of our own recent past!

I suspect that the future international landscape will be a uniquely crafted balance of diffuse local controls and federal/international "harmonizing" norms---some places accept some or all of them, and some accept none.

The challenge is how we come to terms with them to assure minimum standards like security, trade and travel in a global landscape.

Our current efforts do not seem to represent a cost-effective, sustainable format for the future, nor a stable path forward for Afghanistan and its many peoples and communities.

To the core of this thread---if what we want is minimum security, trade and travel options in around and through Afghanistan, what difference should it make to us what structure they choose to associate through?

Why is Karzai essential/relevant to our interests? Or theirs?