Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
Is this one of those times where the insurgent is right and the government wrong?
Carl,

We can agree that neither of us want to live in a Taliban-governed Afghanistan; but if I were a Pashtun I sure as hell would not want to live in a Northern Alliance-governed Afghanistan either.

We have, by our very presence and nature of our engagement, enabled Karzai and the Northern Alliance guys to be much more self-serving than if we had let them sort it out for themselves. There is no way they could have produced the current constitution with it's codified exclusion of anyone seen as contrary by Karzai is a deathknell for there ever being any kind of stability, as half of the populace not represented by the Northern Alliance has absolutely no alternative but to conduct illegal challenges to the current regime or live in powerless poverty.

Karzai has made his bed though, and once we jump out of it to run home I suspect he will find it hard to get a good night's sleep in it. My concern is not for Karzai and his cronies though, it is for those much lower who we have convinced to put their faith in us. The big guys will take the money and run, but the little guys will suffer hard.

Unless.

The big unless is unless we stop backing one side to the exclusion of the other and instead take a more neutral role to oversee a negotiated settlement that leads to shared governance under a new constitution. What happens after that? Who knows, but at least we will have give those who trusted us at the local level a fighting chance to avoid a vengeful backlash.

Sadly, collaborators rarely fare well from any history of any conflict I have ever read.